Let me begin by quoting a paragraph from Gyorgy Scrinis, a lecturer in food and nutrition politics and policy at the University of Melbourne. This is from a chapter called ‘Nutritionism and Functional Foods,’ which he contributed to the book The Philosophy of Food. Scrinis went on to publish an entire book on this subject, Nutritionism: The science & politics of dietary advice.
Just prior to the following paragraph, Scrinis has been discussing the dietary advice, from the 1960s to the 1990s, that it was better to eat margarine than butter. (Added emphasis in this and the following quotations is mine.)
The “mistake” of inadvertently promoting transfat-laden margarine is one of several mistakes, revisions, and backflips in scientific knowledge and dietary advice over the past century. Other cases include advice regarding dietary cholesterol, eggs, low-fat diets, and vitamin B. Yet these revisions do not seem to have tempered the sustained and confident discourse of precision and control that continues to pervade nutrition science, nor the willingness to translate limited and partial scientific insights into definitive population-wide dietary advice. I refer to this nutritional hubris as the myth of nutritional precision, as it involves an exaggerated representation of scientists’ understanding of the relationship between nutrients, foods, and the body and a failure to acknowledge the limits of the nutrient-level perspective. At the same time, the disagreements and uncertainties that exist within the scientific community with respect to particular nutritional theories tend to be concealed from, or misrepresented to, the lay public.
. Jacoby sees a new ageism that doesn’t just stigmatize old people for their years, but blames them for physical ills that no lifestyle adjustments or medicine could have prevented.
. Turns out medical guideline on P.S.A. velocity (the rate of change in readings from year to year) is not associated with disease, as previously assumed.
. “Today, … with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing. … Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man.”
, don’t teach us about typical mourning experience. Most older people whose spouse dies from natural causes recover much more quickly than we have come to expect. For many, acute grief subsides less than six months after the loss. By the author of 
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, where she argues that we’re in danger of preferring sociable robots (Paro, Nursebot, My Real Baby) to real human beings. This article is about IBM’s Watson and artificial intelligence vs. intelligence augmentation.
by Elias Aboujaoude and 
by Jane McGonigal. Two opposing views. 
. Dogs are very difficult to clone due to opaque eggs. Requires large canine population, which Korea had, since canines are on the menu there.
. The Internet’s contradictions and confusions are just becoming visible through the fading mist of Internet euphoria.
. At its most basic level, an exploratory kiss offers a reproductive advantage, providing genetic and hormonal information to those who pucker up.
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