Advanced Mediterranean Diet

In truth, German character — so admired and feared in some 500 years of European literature and history — led to the present Germanization of Europe. These days we recoil at terms like “national character” that seem tainted by the nightmares of the past. But no other politically correct exegesis offers better reasons why a booming Detroit of 1945 today looks like it was bombed, and a bombed-out Berlin of 1945 now is booming.

                           - Victor Davis Hanson, writing at Townhall.com

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

“It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.”

-Margaret Mead

 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:

“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.

Steve Parker, M.D.

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

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

Science-based surgery (usually)

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

A new scientific truth is not usually presented in a way to convince its opponents.  Rather, they die off, and a rising generation is familiarized with the truth from the start.

                         —Max Planck

“The more books one reads, the stupider one becomes.”

-Mao Tse-Tung, communist dictator with a lifelong hatred of formal education, from “Modern Times” by Paul Johnson

[Here’s one for the paleo diet advocates.]

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?