Something occurred to me whilst replying to (part of) a comment from Vesta. When it came to mind I thought how come I didn't quite see it this distinctly before?!!
Researchers aren't ever going to find anything out about obesity because they aren't really looking.I honestly hand on heart cannot quite get why this isn't more evident to others especially in FA anyway. Although it is more in the hiding in plain sight mode, it's pretty obvious. The big clue is to compare with other fields of science/medical research.
The history of research into fatness and weight hasn't been as uniformly pointless as it is right about now. (That's of course taking for granted that studying fatness in isolation-as a separate subject is actually a useful way of studying weight/metabolism-I'm not sure that it is). It has gone in waves, or more aptly, cycles. People have genuinely had a spirit of inquiry when it came to fatness of the without fear or favour sort.
However.
The doozy is, it repeatedly gets stuck with the calorie angle and calorie restriction as the remedy and that cannot be budged from. No matter what the facts say, it has therefore become, sacred. Wherever you start you must end there regardless of what has been found. If something doesn't fit, file as 'paradox'.
OK, you might say. We know all that so what?
That this stagnancy is its corruptness. The inability to move on from there doesn't just stop, it creates atrophy and regression. This is the antithesis of the lack of the more usual, let the chips fall where they may, that signifies good science.
The adherence to this article of faith is corrupt and attracts further corrupt mentalities, rather than the other way around as I thought.
This is what has caused it to become a bit of a non science. Some people got hold of obesity science about 10-15 years ago, after a period of more rigorous investigation and objective interpretation. Then decided to reimpose this as the dominant code. Even though with all we hear about the threat of obesity, this should be a golden age for obesity research.
Instead it has been pretty much a useless irrelevancy that cannot provide care for those who could benefit from it, nor for the millions of people who wish to lose weight, for whatever reason. They have not been served by this either, even though they tend to be its most vociferous defenders. They are defending hope of getting what they want and the profoundly held assumption that obesity science works like any other, or how it has done in the past.
It concentrates on finding out how dangerous obesity is supposed to be using questionable decisions to exclude whatever favours a better outcome for slimness, thereby not only putting a question mark on the figures on paper, but the application of those figures in real life.
That takes precedence over what is supposed to be the best way fat people should proceed as fat people-an obvious sticking point is the unethical refusal to accept incontrovertible evidence of weight loss diet fail. It claims to be able to find the active ingredient, in what can best be categorized with placebo-or even nocebo- and claims this is the route to increasing diet success for those who wish it to succeed.
They don't even give a damn about those who still believe in them. Gary Taubes referred to this saying that objectively speaking, obesity science just doesn't function the way science should. It's a bit of an oxymoron really.
“The institutionalized vigilance, “this unending exchange of critical judgment”, is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades.”
My emphasis.
You don't have to know diddly about scientific medicine to have picked up on what the focus of other medical disciplines tends to be, and how other medical scientists tend to behave, to know that the whole field operates more like a parody of science, rather than an actual one.
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