For Good Reason: Harriet Hall - Science-Based Medicine

[Jeff Wagg]

Harriet Hall, MD, The SkepDoc, discusses her column in O, The Oprah Magazine that focuses on debunking medical myths. She contrasts science-based medicine and “complementary and alternative medicine,” and tells why she objects to the latter term. She details why homeopathy elicits more moral outrage from her than other kinds of CAM remedies. Other topics she addresses include acupuncture, chiropractic, radical life extension, pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers, the difference between fringe-science and pseudoscience, and also the risks of science-based medicine.

Listen at ForGoodReason.org.

 

[cienaños]

And the brain reaches out to the tips. In the body throughout. To the edges and tips.

Question: Does the ability to question and/or consider the existence of a "superior-dimension", does this exclude us from being taken seriously? in other words, if we are intelligent enough to ask what we think to be the most and the highest of questions, are we to keep these to ourselves so that these **** ipods can suck my ****?!

Edited for breach of rule 10. Do not swear in your posts, and do not misspell words in order to avoid the autocensor.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Eh?

Maybe. What do you think?

 

[Dave Rogers]

Question: Does the ability to question and/or consider the existence of a "superior-dimension", does this exclude us from being taken seriously?

No. Acting on the conviction that such things exist despite the total absence of evidence for them, however, does. Asking higher questions is not the problem; the problem is the unfounded insistence that yours are the right answers.

Dave

 

[Riley]

Does Eating Late at Night Make You Gain Weight? - yes, apparently.

Harriet Hall claims that the connection between weight gain and eating near bedtime is a myth. I think her reasoning (laid out in her Oprah blog titled "Does Eating Late at Night Make You Gain Weight?" ) is flawed.

here's an excerpt:

"Researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso had 867 people keep diet diaries that divided the day into four-hour periods. It turned out that people who ate more in the morning ate fewer calories overall, and people who ate late at night ate more calories overall. This is the key. Typically, Americans who eat late at night are not simply postponing dinner from 6 to 10 P.M. They are actually eating more [...]"​

She then concludes: "So it's not when you eat, it's how much you eat."

Well, of course. But why should a behavior that results in a lower caloric intake be dismissed as not a real effect? If eating late at night results in people eating more calories, then it is not a health myth to say "Eating Late at Night Makes You Gain Weight" !

Here are some plausible mechanisms leading to different caloric intake:
- Is it possible that, when compared to morning and daytime meals, a greater percentage of the food and sugar eaten just before going to sleep is getting converted to fat during sleep? -- is it true that fat is harder to "burn-off" (because of hunger pangs) than calories of sugar still in the blood?
---and/or---
- Maybe the change in our metabolic rate at different times of day/night impacts our pangs and thus our ability to better regulate our caloric intake?

 

[GimmePepsi]

She then concludes: "So it's not when you eat, it's how much you eat."

Well, of course.

Right. The myth is that if you eat late at night, you gain more weight than if you eat the same amount of food at another time. Her reasoning that counters the myth sounds straightforward to me.

And who said eating late at night results in people eating more calories? I didn't get that from what you quoted.

 

[Staropeace]

I thought that gaining when you ate late at night was the result of not being mobile. If you eat earlier in the day,you would burn off the calories being active and on the go.

 

[BrianEngler]

I thought that gaining when you ate late at night was the result of not being mobile. If you eat earlier in the day,you would burn off the calories being active and on the go.

Seems to me (not a physician, I freely admit) that the flaw in thinking here is that caloric intake vs burn is necessarily summed in 24 hour increments. It's been my experience that a longer-term outlook is needed. Over some period of time--not explicitly one day or even one week, but over some undefined length of time--an individual should aim to take in fewer calories than he or she burns through activity. Eventually (not necessarily a quick fix) that person's weight will decrease and that decrease will be regardless of whether or not the intake is late at night or at any other time during the day, as Dr. Hall indicates. Diets--fad or otherwise--that are followed when weight gain becomes unacceptable lead to large weight fluctuations that probably are unhealthy in the long run, so what is ideal is a lifestyle that follows the adage "all things in moderation." At any rate, I've found that it works for me.