Man in a box
Pomeroy at RealClearScience discusses a new and fairly obvious 'study' that invalidates most modern research on diet and nutrition. Apparently most modern research relies on self-reporting of caloric intake, and most people underestimate their caloric intake.

No duh, as they say.

A century ago, diet research was more properly scientific because University Ethics Committees hadn't yet been invented. Dietetics was a branch of Home Ec, which was a hard science, relying on carefully measured experiments. Now dietetics is a social "science", running on poorly monitored surveys. Example of the old way from Food and Dietetics, written in 1907 by Alice Peloubet Norton, prof of Home Ec at Chicago:

Wait! What? A female college professor in 1907? No! No! Impossible! Everyone knows that wyymmmyyyns were barefoot and pregnant in 1907!

In fact most profs in Home Ec and related fields, and many profs in biology and geography, were female. When Home Ec was killed by feminists a major employment opportunity for female academics was also killed. Of course that's the sole purpose of feminism: to guarantee that woemooooons can only be placed in situations where they will fail, thus "justifying" the need for government subsidies and Die-Versity Laws.

Here's how calorie requirements were determined in 1907: Atwater's full-body calorimeter. Put a man in a sealed box, leave him there for a few days, have him do exercises on command, and record all inputs and outputs. Food, poop, oxygen, CO2, temperature, physical work, everything.


The Box seen from outside, with part of the extensive lab around it:



And the inside:

And here are some recommended intakes resulting from Atwater's Man In A Box and similar experiments in Britain and Germany. Maybe we should use these recommendations instead of modern ones, since they were derived by real science, and also because 1907 people were lean and trim.



Incidentally, dietaries meant prescribed or recommended diets, and proteid isn't a misprint. The word changed from proteid to protein later, just as hominid more recently changed to hominin. No particular reasod for either change; just keeping the hoi polloi confusen.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Blinded by Stats, Ethics, Metrology

  ¶ 4:26 AM