The disillusion with socialism and other forms of collectivism, which became the dominant spirit of the 1980s, was only one aspect of a much wider loss of faith in the state as an agency of benevolence. The state was, up to to the 1980s, the great gainer of the twentieth century; and the central failure.
–Paul Johnson in his book, Modern Times
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“It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.”
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Science-Based Medicine published a recent post on the state of American Psychiatry and mental illness. It’s well worth a look if you’re interested in such things. Here’s a quote:
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The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in 76.”
Do you believe many mental illnesses are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain? It’s such a time-saver for the physician to tell the inquiring patient, “You just have a chemical imbalance. This drug will help straighten it out.” Read the post for counter-arguments.
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White flour is better suited to glue for kindergarten art projects than to nutrition.
—Drs. Westman, Phinney, and Volek in The New Atkins for a New You
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The first flavor we experience in infancy is the sweet taste of milk. We learn to associate it with comfort, security and love. During childhood, we are offered sweet treats to cheer us up when we are sad, to reward us for being brave at a difficult time, or for being good when our parents need us to be. Thus, sugary food becomes a reward, an incentive or a token of love and is inextricably woven into our emotional fabric.
—Conner Middelmann-Whitney in Zest For Life: The Mediterranean Anti-Cancer Diet
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Diet has always generated passion, and passion in science is an infallible marker of lack of evidence.
That sentence is from a wonderful review of diabetic diet cycles over the last 150 years. It’s by L. Sawyer and E.A.M Gale, published in Diabetologia (2009, vol. 52, pages 1-7, DOI: 10.1007/s00125-008-1203-9). Anyone with a serious interest in diabetic diets will appreciate the funny and philosophical style of the authors.
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Science-based surgery (usually)Regarding complementary and alternative medicine:
The sciences give a mostly coherent understanding of the world. Mostly coherent. [They do] give an understanding of the possible, the probable, the improbable and the impossible. Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned. Perpetual motion is not considered seriously by any academic physicist; if perpetual motion were an alternative medicine it would be offered at a Center by a Harvard Professor of Medicine.
—Dr. Mark Crislip, infectious disease specialist, at Science-Based Medicine, April 8, 2011
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Certainly, by the last decade of the [20th] century, some lessons had plainly been learned. But it was not yet clear whether the underlying evils which had made possible its catastrophic failures and tragedies—the rise of moral relativism, the decline of personal responsibility, the repudiation of Judeo-Christian values, not least the arrogant belief that men and women could solve all the mysteries of the universe by their own intellects—were in the process of being eradicated. On that would depend the chances of the twenty-first century becoming, by contrast, an age of hope for mankind.
Paul Johson in Modern Times (revised 1991 edition)
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Here’s one the paleo diet advocates will like.
The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases.
—Edward Jenner (1749-1823), of smallpox vaccination fame
Masai men in Tanzania. Modern hunter-gatherers?
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St. Peter's Square, Vatican City
The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear. For many millions, especially in the advanced nations, religion ceased to play much or any part in their lives, and the ways in which the vacuum thus lost was filled, by fascism, Nazism and Communism, by attempts at humanist utopianism, by eugenics or health politics, by the ideologies of sexual liberation, race politics and environmental politics, form much of the substance of the history of our century. But for many more millions—for the overwhelmimg majority of the human race, in fact—religion continued to be a huge dimension in their lives.
—Paul Johnson, in his book Modern Times, about the history of the 20th Century
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Diabetic Mediterranean Diet 