Dear Smarts:
A reader sent me a picture of a poster that he wrote was appearing
“all over Capitol Hill.” The poster pictures DC Director of Planning
Harriet Tregoning, with the caption, “We call it ‘Smart Development’ so
you know you are stupid for even trying to disagree with us.” The reader
writes that he wants to remain anonymous, but he believes the poster
indicates, “There may be a bit of a backlash.” The backlash is real, and
it results from the arrogance and superciliousness that is so cleverly
captured by the poster. Smart Growth advocates think only one lifestyle
is suitable for living in the city, and that the city should be
planned, designed, and built only for whose who conform to that narrow
pattern. Opponents of that orthodoxy are scorned and disrespected, and.
as much as possible, kept out of positions of power and planning.
There’s no chance of respectful debate when one side doesn’t respect
the other’s viewpoint or lifestyle. In the Cleveland Park controversy
over the four-block service lane on Connecticut Avenue, some debaters
have expressed the wish that “the olds” who want convenient parking for
a shopping strip would just die off, so that younger residents, who
would prefer the cars be banished to make more room for sidewalk seating
for outdoor drinking at restaurants, could champion “progress” without
opposition. Yikes. Smart indeed.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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In his response to Gary’s criticism of food fads, Gabe Goldberg [themail,
November 13] maintains that the present state of nutritional science is
better than trusting one’s gut instincts. There is a reason that
nutritional science and behavioral sciences such as education lag the
physical sciences. It is impossible to test nutritional hypotheses in
human populations conclusively and ethically. To have a reliable test,
there must be a double-blind experiment in which all possible factors
that could affect the outcome are, ideally, controlled or the test
population is sufficiently large and random that certain errors tend to
cancel. Double-blind means that neither the experimenters nor the
subjects have knowledge of the nature of the substance administered, or
of which group is the control group. It is especially difficult to get
human subjects to comply with experimental protocols. Humans are
generally aware of whether or not they are the controls and they often
have an interest in the outcome.
Even in the case of compliant participants, imagine how difficult
(aside from ethics) it would be to conduct “gold standard” nutritional
experiments. Suppose it were desired to test the effect of transfats (or
whatever) in diet on mortality. To perform a conclusive study you would
have to have at least two groups of identical twins raised in identical
circumstances except for the factor you were examining. Ideally, you
would have several groups so that you would not only measure any
differences between the control and the experimental group, but you
would also determine whether there was dosage dependence. Of course, the
study would have to extend over the lifetime of the subjects.
(A famous example of the difficulty [ethics aside] of doing this type
of human experiment is the work supposedly carried out by various
tyrants, starting with the Pharaoh Psamtik I, and later by the Holy
Roman Emperor Frederick II. In these cases, the experimenters wished to
determine whether there was such a thing as a natural language that
humans would speak if deprived of exposure to normal human speech.
Babies were taken from their parents and isolated. Their caregivers were
forbidden to speak in their presence. After a period of years, they were
examined to see what language they “naturally” spoke. Unsurprisingly,
they all spoke the local dialects.)
So, what do nutritionists do to gauge the effect of diet? They simply
correlate the consumption of whatever food they are testing with
whatever outcome they are interested in. For example, the famous
Framingham study that linked heart disease to high levels of blood
cholesterol (no differentiation between LDL and HDL) and smoking, among
other “risk” factors, led nutritionists to conclude that consumption of
cholesterol in food was bad. This led to the conclusion that margarine
was “healthier” than butter. When it became obvious that this was
incorrect (large groups that subsist entirely on dairy products are
known to be free of heart disease), the nutritional hypotheses that
replaced it were also found to be wanting, one by one. The
“Mediterranean” diet is an egregious example of regression or
correlation fallacy. Are nutritionists homing in on a theory of good
diet, much as relativity theory refined Newtonian mechanics? Or, are
they just casting about, jumping from one conclusion to another in the
absence of hard evidence?
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For once I agree with Gary our leader [themail, November 13]. My own
preferred approach to diet is to do what feels right to me — paying
attention to how I feel. I like to think of myself as an animal — with
special attributes to be sure but still an animal like the beasts of the
field, etc. — and I believe in evolution. So I figure out what
seems to be a healthy diet and leave it at that: trust to nature that
I’m built to last. At age 73 it seems to be working so far.
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[To Larry Lesser] He may be your leader; Gary’s sure not mine.
So you both discount research and current best-practices? Because
someday they might change? And rely on seat-of-pants how-you-feel
intuition? Because evolution works over millions of years? OK, whatever
works for you. Good luck figuring out and managing blood pressure,
cholesterol, whatever else is actually researched.
[Cholesterol guidelines changed again last week. Have they changed
back, or are you satisfied that you are up-to-date on what the
conventional wisdom dictates this week? — Gary Imhoff]
###############
My message [themail, November 13] ought to have said, at the bottom,
“Sent to you on my &%@!! iPhone.”
The “We had goats milk . . .“ should have come through as “WF had
goats milk . . . ,“ meaning that Whole Foods had it for a while. Alas no
more.
I am not in the habit of using the royal “we.”
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