Science vs tradition 🔬

Dealing with new information

Author

Seed Oil Scout
January 16, 2024

When new science contradicts ancestral wisdom we should be highly skeptical and demand a larger burden of proof.

When it aligns or rationalizes ancestral wisdom, we should pay close attention.

Let’s explore:

Humility

Science has brought us many conveniences, but when it comes to biology, some of the gaps in our medical knowledge are quite shocking.

Modern science has little-to-no understanding of the following:

  • How smell works: Isomers (mirror image molecules) smell different from each other, science is baffled. It involves quantum mechanics. (See: Luca Turin)

  • How heart disease develops: The French paradox remains a paradox, many populations with high cholesterol have no signs of heart disease

  • Gut biome: We know it’s important, but the small intestine remains a black box, and we can’t even really culture or identify most anaerobic bacteria. Few actual clinical recommendations on pro/prebiotics

  • IBS, depression, obesity etc: Most modern chronic diseases are just labels for poorly understood baskets of symptoms, affecting about half of Americans.

Modern medicine is great at treating infectious disease and acute trauma, (and certain rare genetic conditions), but outside of that it is largely “moving deck chairs around on the Titanic”.

Nutrition is particularly fraught with bias and hard to study, see prior newsletter here

Superstitious

Ancestral wisdom can often sound wonky because it is false when taken literally but true taken metaphorically. 

If you asked a neolithic farmer why they practiced crop rotation, they’d probably say it was to please some Pagan diety, which is silly, but regardless the crop rotation does actually produce better yield.

Religious dietary prohibitions, Ayurvedic practices, forms of meditation, and all of our most long standing societal norms have shades of this. The explanation may be bogus, but the practice is beneficial.

Of course many of these beliefs (Mayan ritual sacrifice, etc) were rightfully discarded of.

A mayan depiction of a Sauna. Lots of civilizations invented Saunas separately, a strong indication they are actually good.

Incentives

The peer-review industrial complex of academia is a system with highly perverse incentives, rarely aiming towards the truth.

Trendy papers that fit the current narrative get published in big journals, while disruptive ideas never even get funding. Layers of review, process, and selection craft a narrative to please the industries which are pumping in the funds.

Scandals like the faked Alzheimer data and the shelving of the Minnesota Coronary experiment results are the tip of the iceberg. (Malcolm Gladwell covers in a short podcast here, this is a great deep dive for seed oil haters, study below)

Examples

Science rejects wisdom and fails:

  • Soybean oil is going to save America

  • Saturated fat kills you

  • Dietary cholesterol from eggs clogs your arteries

  • SSRI’s are better than CBT

  • Whoever made us do static stretching before gym class

Science aligns with wisdom:

Science rejects wisdom and is correct:

Conclusions

When building a diet or set of daily practices, you want to reach for what’s tried and true over the latest fads and crazes. The key is doing the research to see around the current trends back to sanity. (I think anyone alive before 1950 would have starved before eating a bowl of raw, noncaloric kale, for example)

A human who spends ample time outdoors, moves adequately and eats only real food prepared properly should be generally free from chronic disease.

Don’t get distracted by the headlines, supplements and trends. Get the big things right and nature will take care of the rest.

Dine fearlessly

🫡

Further reading: