Most Medical Doctors Are Terrible Scientists and Nutritionists
Or
Baptizing The Universal Human Diet
Doctors are trained in an industrialized manner to pass through a lot of patients. This is mostly a good thing. Not many people are smart, interested, and conscientious enough to become doctors, and the vast majority of people have common diseases and problems. That’s what “common” means. So the maximal number of people are helped by doctors if they pass through people fast, act like cogs and robots, and tell everyone to do what they were told in med school.
Getting into med school is HARD. I did the university test to get into Uni 3 times, once, with my truly brilliant best friend in 8th grade, once in the second year of 3 of Brazilian high school, and once in the third year, which is when everyone should and does (and one extra time when I switched to philosophy later). Since both of us are truly outstandingly intelligent, like way off the charts, even in 8th grade we would have passed 70% of courses at the best university in the country. In the real last high school year, I did very well, and he passed in first place (his dad said he’d give him a car only if he passed first), we’d enter medicine 1 spot/27people easily. Second year though my score was only good enough to get into every course except Med. Luckily I wanted psychology, so it is safe to say I took the last year of high school VERY lightly, I simply didnt go to any class I didn
t like the teacher ๐ Fast forward 20 years, he’s doing biomedical research on the mathematics of cancer at Harvard, and I’m, well, an analytic Philosopher, Scientist, and Biological Anthropologist, with enough money to just write essays online and not really take a real job.
Analytic philosophy is even harder to get in above undergrad than Harvard Med. Analytic philosophers think with a level of precision literally inconceivable by people with 120 IQ or less. Like Superman can see like an X-ray, we can make distinctions and understand epistemology (the process through which something moves from unknown to known) very well. To be perfectly blunt: I can think.
Because getting into med is HARD, wannabe doctors, are trained at memorizing and going through a lot of material fast, too fast to do any analysis on it. They need to learn a metric ton by the end of high school when 18, and that they do. By then the habit of rote learning and memorizing is fully ingrained. You’re not there to contest, you’re there to learn first and help people later.
Of course some, perhaps 1% or 2% of doctors are almost as smart as my friend and I, so they have the affordance of learning everything every other doctor learns and on top of that still have leftover time and capability to think analytically about biology and medicine. Life can be very frustrating to these doctors, I know three of them, one in Sรฃo Paulo who is also a philosopher, one in Rio who weightlifts and knows philosophy well, and one in Bulgaria who kept sciencing while becoming a med professor. Their creative and in-depth intellect isn’t quite appreciated.
As COVID made abundantly clear, it is very easy to convince the vast majority of doctors of a bunch of things that are false, based on biased methodological studies, and which cause unnecessary deaths by the thousands. Any doctor who followed their political orientation to decide whether to believe the Lancet study (left-coded) or Ivermectin (right-coded) at the time can be summarily dismissed as an authoritative source in medical THINKING – which, once again, is not what doctors are trained to do.
Meta-Analyses: This is very, very sad, but unfortunately, even before big data was a thing, we had already developed enough knowledge of statistics to be able to use a meta-analysis to prove a much wider range of things than is the case. So meta-studies can’t be trusted for most things if done after say 2005. Then Big Data came in and AI data analysis and selection techniques, and it became, to mathematical minds, as easy as taking candy from a child to use a data set to prove whatever you’re being paid to prove. Adding insult to injury, you can hide behind the math to not take responsibility, and to scare off the 98% of people who can’t think mathematically at all. Meta-analyses might do more harm than good today, and a large, large fraction of them, are pure garbage.
If the studies on which a Meta-analysis are methodologically flawed, that makes it garbage even if you know all the statistics, and are not being sponsored by industry to bias the results (and neither is your data analyst or statistician). Garbage in, garbage out.
Peer-Review: In one internet article, Adam Mastroianni single-handedly obliterated nearly half of the science produced in the last 50 years. There was a crisis of replication in psych before that was making the tabloids of smart people. But Adam just went in and said: FBI Open Up! and he killed peer-review in most sciences (not in homogenous physics and chemistry, but in a fraction of biology, a majority of biomedical science, almost the entirety of nutrition science and psychology, and the sum total entirety of my area, anthropology, social psychology, sociology, and the like).
So if you have a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed nutrition science in your hands, to determine say what should people eat to be healthy, you think you’re looking at science, so you teach your medicine school pupils that is science, and they believe you to ace the test, and repeat it to their patients. But as we just learned, a post-2005 meta-analysis of peer-reviewed nutrition study is a fancy name for a pile of crap in the form of a sequence of letters and graphs. I know it sucks. I know it is unfair. How dare the world require scientific, epistemological, mathematical, and incentive knowledge as the bare minimum combination for someone to even be able to assess whether the newest study or suggestion is true or not in an area that affects us every day? It’s very unfair, and by jolly God I wish the truth was as simple as “the industry you don’t like and the political side you don’t like are lying to you so just ignore them and believe the scientists on your political side”. That would suck, but it would at least be tractable. If you think that, that just means your genes code for a strength of political orientation so strong you can’t think in an unbiased manner, if you’re part of those, say 30% of extremists (15% each side) then you’re fucked even if you’re brilliant, and you knew all of the above.
Do you begin to see the magnitude of the task at hand here? This isn’t acceptable as a demand to an Ape species that just learned to write 10k years ago. We are simply not a match for the task.
And that’s why your doctor doesn’t know how to think, doesn’t know anything about nutrition, and can’t really evaluate information that comes out.
But at least my nutritionist knows about nutrition right? Think of the people you know or heard of who are nutritionists. How many of them were statistically competent in high school, and decided of their own accord to go into a low-prestige area that isn’t associated with the mathematics of deep analytic thinking so they could enlighten nutrition science. Probably not many. Most nutritionists you know are probably women who were bad at math and obese and wanted to stop being obese, or who were interested in having a flexible mobile job and were into fitness and looking top 10% among women. People like YouTuber mega-nerd Physionic are rare enough to warrant a big YouTube channel for nutrition nerds. Most nutritionists, compared to everyone else mentioned so far, are idiots. It’s not that they don’t know nutrition, it is that they are simply incapable of thinking about anything whatsoever, and thus they lack the ability to help all but the best-known known most common simple cases. I don’t make the rules, I just work here.
What a pickle! Your doctor wasn’t trained to think about nutrition, has only studied nutrition for 1 semester in school, and your nutritionist is literally an idiot. You’re probably feeling hopeless now, you are probably thinking “Well, I’m fucked”
That’s the part in a normal essay where I say “Don’t worry fratello, Actually, you can still do this, and this, and that, and these people here will tell you all you need to know”
Here’s what I’ll say in this one: Yep. You’re fucked. You’re totally fucked. You’re like Riley Reid hexa-interracially fucked.
Again, I just work here, don’t at me.
How can you get out of this clusterfuck in which you’ve been thrown? and also importantly, how long have you been fucked for?
You’ve been fucked since the 50s, but more emphatically since the 70s, and gangbanged since 2005 or so. You’re not only less healthy than you could be. You never developed completely to begin with. Your brain is smaller and less competent than it should have been. Girls rejected you because you were not as tall as you were meant to be. Your depression and anxiety were caused by what you eat and you could have been depression-free and anxiety-free your whole life. You make less money than you could, and you could never do as well in school as your mum wished you did because you’ve been a victim of clusterfuck nutritional gang-rape.
Many people who know what I’ve been eating for a few months are at this point eagerly waiting for me to sneak in the carnivore diet, and promise that if you were an analytic philosopher life scientist about humans who could get into university in 8th grade you would understand why, but just trust me, bro. I can do some unfucking, and I can think. But I can’t do hexa-cluster-unfucking in an area totally outside my domain in the span of 3 months. However, I can talk about the area I have a doctorate in the best department in the world in biological evolutionary anthropology, and can unify, through the analytic philosophy thinking skills and epistemological skepticism, mathematical intuition, and game theory knowledge, some part of what I can see from a distance when I look at the direction of the mountain of elephant dung mixed up with science they call nutrition.
It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.
Great-Grandma knew better: We’re getting old, Grandma no longer is the best person to ask for cooking tips, and the last person in the family who ate a decent diet. Now it is great-grandma. Grandma was already under the shackles of Kellogg, the sugar industry, mass-manufactured television, and the innocent belief that doctors on TV know what you should be eating, and are not part of a government program to feed people what the USA wanted to subsidize in the post-war economy. Great grandma ate lard, not margarine. So we can know this one thing: Lard is better than margarine.
When you know the science has been distorted by economic incentives of governments and corporations, ethical agendas of vegans and agriculturalists lobby groups, and even the military, sometimes, good old 100IQ mathematically illiterate, pre-internet great-grandma can be a great source of information.
But if we are going to take this seriously, if we are really doing this like our health depends on it, we need to add about 1000 “Great”s to that grandma. 1000-Great-Grandma lived 22 thousand years ago, and reports say she was a fine lady, a great wife/mate, and a good mother. Her eating algorithm was more or less this:
1) Eat cooked meat and fish in as much quantity as you can find before it smells bad.
2) If you’re lucky in the summer and live in an agricultural region, eat a few berries and fruits, thoroughly cooked, and once every many months, eat honey if you can fight the bees.
3) Beware of and pass on the acquired knowledge of poisonology your healers and shamans passed on to you, namely, learn which plants are more effective at poisoning your disease than poisoning you, and eat those plants so you can better poison your parasites and disease agents.
What do Carnivore dietists get wrong? Ken Berry, Anthony Chaffee, Shawn Baker, are systematizing intelligent male doctors who can spot a bad study. Chaffee and Baker can actually spot a bad meta-analysis. I cannot express how rare that is. It takes a lot of courage to detract a meta-analysis, it helps that both of them are bulky, six-packed medical doctors with surgical experience, world-competing performance in athletics, and more money than humans need. That begets the intellectual confidence necessary to profess that kind of thing.
But they do have one defect of fabrication: unlike 1000-Great-Grandma, they are male.
That’s where Mary Ruddick and Natasha Campbell-McBride come in, the first is a nutritional anthropological traveler who goes to visit the lost tribes of the world, finds out what they eat, and eats with them. The latter is under a completely different incentive regime, the Soviet one, and the creator of the gaps diet. Mary is a diet pluralist, with more than 40 diets under her belt.
Males are great for epistemology, mathematics, deep thinking, yadda, yadda, but females are the masters of nourishing, cooking, individualized care, and of non-aspie plurality and moderation. Females are also the masters of survival.
Chaffee and Baker are like the Triangle of Freedom. They have every bomb in the arsenal, and they will obliterate any opposing country before you can see them coming. Carnivore is the human diet, end of story, don’t like it? I can kill you by flexing my 6 pack.
Mary and Natasha are able to see plurality, how the specifics vary among groups and among humans. Being women makes them do that.
But women will women, as everyone’s favorite incel said: The Woman is an animal, long-haired, and short-sighted.
It is fun to study current uncivilized groups for their diets, but short-sighted. That’s where Evolutionary Anthropologists come in. These groups are the cockroaches, but we want to know the diet of the ants. This is a metaphor. Don’t kill me.
Cockroaches have been around since shortly after Premortals, Jesus, and Tethans made the Earth, long long ago.
Ants however are evolutionarily recent, eusocial ants came out recently and to put it mildly, they dominated the earth until the annoying monkeys started yapping. Cockroaches got cluster gang-banged when that happened. Ants took over the yummy yummy forests and great habitats, and they kicked the cockroaches out to the curb, having to live in less life-affirming, nutrient-dense environments, eating literal garbage and eventually relegated to live among those dirty, disgusting Sapiens Sapiens. Natural selection is unforgiving even to the animals famous for surviving nuclear holocausts (there’s a joke in here but I don’t wanna get banned, again). Civilization is like the ants. Wherever civilized Mankind went, we germed, weaponed, steeled, and frontal lobed the local inhabitants, until they had to chill only at the borders of deserts or in the arctic circles, we, like ants, used massive eusocial scale to outcompete and sumo-push everyone else out of the red circle of nutrient-dense food.
So the study of contemporary diets of those Darwin called savages like Mary does, is of limited use to know what our optimal diet is.
We need all this. We need the frontal lobe, the civilization, the nourishing mindset, the understanding of anthropological plurality and human genetic variability, we need to understand the gaps, we need to know when to bulldoze and nuke the enemy with bombs, and when to admit defeat to the guy who killed peer-reviewed research, we need mathematical intuition and not being motivated by money or sponsored, we need out of the box thinking and contrarianism, we need a middle of the pack political genetics that don’t force you either way, we need the confidence of either mega nerds or six packed surgeons, we need analytic philosophy precision in thinking, and no fear of saying nutritionists are idiots.
To put it mildly, that’s hard to find.
But here the fuck I am.
I kid. I’m close to well-equipped enough but I don’t know anything about the biochemistry of food processing and stuff. I can evaluate the scientists, and the methodological and game theoretic incentives, but I can’t evaluate the ground-level, fine-grained details of the science itself, physionic seems pretty good at that though. Sadly he lacks the overview capacity of an Evolutionary Anthropologist and all the female stuff because he’s a meganerd male of the six-pack variety.
So you can’t really just trust me. But I hope I made the case that among the people to trust, I at least have a place in the pantheon. Not only in nutrition science but also in any other area that has that level of complexity of research and incentives operating above it. That’s where evolutionary anthropologists who are also analytic philosophers can shine. People don’t like that we are arrogantly judging others, but judging people, ideas, and ideologies, is what we are better than the entire world than. Usain Bolt is good at running, Carl Lewis is even better from a theoretical standpoint (just doesn’t have the body for it). We Phil-Evo-Anthro are good at this kind of judging I laid out here. I don’t just work here, in this case, I make the rules.
Human Biodiversity and Nutrition. Mary is right that different human groups adapted to different diets though, even the ants. If we want the optimal diet, we want to find out what did rich ants eat when 1000-great-grandma was around, and what would they eat today that we are all mega-zillionaires globalized, by comparison.
Chaffee strikes me as the strongest carnivore thinker, but he calls the carnivore diet “natural human diet” and “human” is too coarse-grained a level of resolution for that. Speaking is natural to humans, but double eyelids are not, they are present only in East Asians and Norwegians, they are special adaptations. There is no natural human diet. There are diets natural to specific ethnic groups, and some groups, like the Han, are so large they even have the Wheat-Han and the Rice-Han who are adapted to different diets, within the same ethnic group.
If you want to find out your natural human diet, find out what your 1000-Great-grandma would have fed her children if she was the top lobster ant of her tribe. Then add to that a few things Physionic says because he was born 10k years post agriculture, while 1000-G-G was 10k years before, adjust that to your morphology and environment and hope no one made a mistake along the way, eat basically that (which will be mostly meat and some plants depending on your ethnic group). Simple right?
That’s why even when I talked to Chaffee I didn’t berate him for the “natural” thing, just mentioned it. Because I am a realist. There is no universe where more than 20000 people will do what I did, or travel to meet tribes like Mary. If we are going to win the incentive war against Kellogg, the 50s and 70s, and the agricultural revolution, we need a simplified message, something a thousand times shorter than this essay.
So we have to sacrifice plurality (Sorry Mary, love you still, Same Natasha) in the name of simplicity. We are not going to make everyone learn their genetic group and advanced statistics, so we gotta stick not to naturals, but to universals. Natural is what is actually practiced. Universal is what is common amongst all.
The only 2 food universals in humans are water and meat. Humans inhabit the whole earth, every nook and cranny. We make even the ants, a dominant animal if there ever was one, jelly. We are the one. The king, undisputed (shut off the GPU clusters if you wanna live, before GPT gets any ideas). We are not going to be able to devise a function from person ethnic group to 1000-G-G to food anytime soon. Birds are right there with ants and humans, so the quasi-universal third food after water and meat is eggs. Every single other thing that a human has ever eaten (that isn’t a mineral) is simply put, not a Human Universal.
That is why, now that we have gone berserk on globalization, scientific and technological progress, industrialization, and mega-wealth by historical standards, it is time for us to accept the truth, for the vast majority of us, and for 100% of public policy henceforth, we should not adopt a local diet, (your genes are not from your locale), we should not adopt a natural diet (that is extraordinarily rare to ascertain precisely), we should not adopt a fad diet.
We should adopt the Universal Human Diet.
The best diet for humans, not because it is natural, but because it is universal, and because we are wealthy enough we can afford it, is to eat water, meat, and eggs.
MEWU or UWEM?
MEWU sounds cool, right?
Meat Egg Water Universal
The diet that humans should advocate, make public policy for, incentivize governmentally to alleviate stress on the medical system, and eat.
If we want to help humanity eat better, we need to scrap most of nutrition science and teach doctors about MEWU.
MEWU is the universal human diet, it’s in the name.
MEWU will end medical inflation, runaway medical costs, and the obesity crisis, it will alleviate if not solve the great majority of cases of depression and anxiety, and it will bring humanity back to a moment of deep flourishing, decelerating if not verily reversing the decline of western civilization.
MEWU The universal human diet may seem like just a dream to you, but as Bertrand Russell Remaked:
“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
It is time to fire your nutritionist and to teach your doctor. It is time we start eating the Universal Human Diet.
Addendum: Past Water Meat and Eggs, the most common foods that are not universal are cheese, milk, honey, and fruit. So the algorithm for eating should be to feed all children the universal human diet, and later in life allow sophisticated people to tentatively try some of these foods while knowing they cause long-term insulin damage, and can lead to severe addiction, food poisoning, premature aging, cavities, depression and anxiety.
But for now, we need a strong reset as a civilization, and that starts by persuading everyone to voluntarily eat the Universal Human Diet until we better understand the relationship between genomes and food.
Without conflict of interest, with a pluralist primarily utilitarian metaethics, and a hypermasculine mind capable of systematizing but also feminine and compassionate, with training in analytic philosophy, mathematical intuition, and as a doctor in Evolutionary Anthropology with emphasis on incentives for altruism and cooperation, in the interest of reversing, now that we are rich, the curse of the agricultural revolution and the curse of scientific idiocy in peer review and meta-analyses:
I hereby proclaim the establishment of the Universal Human Diet for the betterment of Mankind, Meat, Eggs, and Water.
That’s what your children deserve to eat.
Let’s give them what we were deprived of.