How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat
New York Times:

The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat."

mindbound, ctulhu un citiem adeptiem: go read David Hume.

It took almost 50 years to starting to debunk health issues created by Sugar. It took decades to accept the health issues created by Lead and Asbestos.

Of course this happened. Duh. It's still happening today. I'm not saying where because I don't know where. But if you do the simple math about how many people are working as scientists, it's not hard to figure out that there are companies who could benefit from positive scientific findings--no matter how wrong--and realize that some of what we're reading in original research was paid for and not really true.

I wish people would keep that in mind when they get all worshippy about science being self-correcting and a great system.

It's not a particularly great system if you are looking, for example, for certainty. If you want absolute certainty, a good dose of syllogistic reasoning will serve you better than any inductive method.

The problem is that syllogistic methods break down very quickly in real world applications because you have to find ways of classifying all the objects that may or may not fall into your category of "all", "some", or "none".

The scientific method is not a bad method, but it's not great. And it's weak in ways like this. It is not even close to the best method. But it's the only one we've found that's generally applicable to the human endeavor.

That's all it is. Better at being more general. I wish we'd get over ourselves and be honest about that.