Ranting to /dev/null

More on food

Slate has a response to the NYT Mag article I linked a few days ago. He disagrees with many of the basic premises, and asserts that modern science is entirely capable of dealing with nutrition as it is currently doing.

I'm not so optimistic, and largely because of the sciences he lists as counterexamples: climatology and psychology. Both are largely still magic, as far as I'm concerned, especially the latter. I'm not convinced that we're capable of much climate studies beyond the "Yep. It's getting warmer." kind of pronouncement. As far as the latter... it's crap. Psychology is not science the same way that physics is. I've discussed this elsewhere, and don't feel like defending the thesis here, but the level of scientific rigor is simply not there.

Though I do concede that the article in question probably does overstate its position, I still think the basic idea is sound and the Slate criticism is ill-founded.