{"id":42374,"date":"2019-01-07T11:45:17","date_gmt":"2019-01-07T16:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42374"},"modified":"2019-01-07T11:45:17","modified_gmt":"2019-01-07T16:45:17","slug":"why-one-should-distrust-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42374","title":{"rendered":"Why One Should Distrust the News"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Why<\/p>\n

Why One Should Distrust the News<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n

An article by the BBC on\u00a0\u201cThe world\u2019s most nutritious foods”<\/a>\u00a0ranks the healthfulness of foods on the basis of an article at the supposedly scientific PLOSone journal, titled\u00a0“Uncovering the Nutritional Landscape of Food\u201d<\/a>. That study is based on\u00a0a dataset<\/a>\u00a0that entirely ignores antioxidant-content of foods. Antioxidant-content has come to be recognized during recent decades as constituting perhaps the most important factor in nutrition. It\u2019s probably even more important than vitamin-content and than mineral-content and than protein, carbohydrate, and fat content. So, the basis upon which the article\u2019s ranking was done is the factors that were known about, in 1950, to be important, but that are now known to be far less determinative of a person\u2019s health and longevity than are foods\u2019 anti-oxidant contents. Neither the article nor its underlying dataset even so much as just mentions \u201coxidant\u201d anywhere. The authors of the BBC and PLOSone articles and of the underlying dataset were apparently entirely ignorant of the findings in nutritional research during the past 60+ years \u2014 findings about antioxidants, which have transformed our understanding of nutrition. (Furthermore, there were many other important methodological flaws producing that PLOSone ranking, not\u00a0only\u00a0<\/em>its ignoring antioxidants.)<\/p>\n

This is not unusual.<\/p>\n

(Incidentally,\u00a0\u201cORAC Values: Antioxidant Values of Foods & Beverages”<\/a>\u00a0is a ranking of foods on the basis of antioxidant-contents, as measured by ORAC; and this is likely a far more accurate indicator of the relative healthfulness of foods than is the ridiculous BBC-PLOSone ranking \u2014\u00a0but far fewer people are being exposed to it.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another example of the untrustworthiness of news-media and of other allegedly nonfiction presentations, even in many \u2018scientific\u2019 journals \u2014 but this one will be an example from what has become overwhelmingly the world\u2019s leading encyclopedia: Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why One Should Distrust the News An article by the BBC on\u00a0\u201cThe world\u2019s most nutritious foods”\u00a0ranks the healthfulness of foods on the basis of an article at the supposedly scientific PLOSone journal, titled\u00a0“Uncovering the Nutritional Landscape of Food\u201d. That study is based on\u00a0a dataset\u00a0that entirely ignores antioxidant-content of foods. Antioxidant-content has come to be recognized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,135,4394,496,512,570,5438,8203,18056],"class_list":["post-42374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-bbc","tag-cia","tag-eric-zuesse","tag-mainstream-media","tag-media","tag-news","tag-news-media","tag-strategic-culture-foundation","tag-wikipedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42375,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42374\/revisions\/42375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}