Why Trolls Attack!

 

For many years, I’ve worked as a technical editor and writer. As a result, I’ve had the privilege of proofreading the work of some truly brilliant, highly educated people. I’ve also had to write highly technical material that was then reviewed by experts. The review process is usually cordial and intellectually stimulating. Educated people are generally grateful when you fix their typos and their dangling participles. They tend to be tough but fair when criticizing your writing. They generally stick to a rational discussion of facts. So I was unprepared for the kind of comments I got from the general public after I started blogging. Occasionally, someone would say something like, “Wow, that’s interesting.” But most of the comments are nothing more than poison pen letters: abusive nonsense intended to serve no other purpose than to provoke an emotional response. In short, I often get attacked by Internet trolls.

I have a Web site (www.gorillaprotein.com) and a blog (www.wheredogorillasgettheirprotein.blogspot.com) that explain scientific research about human nutrition. Reactions to my Web site and blog are mixed. People who have actually studied nutrition or dietetics in college or graduate school love my work. However, many people who have no training in nutrition or dietetics hate my work, simply because I tell them things that they do not want to hear. They want to hear that fatty foods are good for them. As a result, they worship the self-appointed nutrition gurus who tell them to eat meat and fish instead of potatoes. They heap scorn on me for pointing out that people who eat a diet based on unrefined starches and vegetables are generally slim and have a low risk of chronic degenerative diseases. As a result, I get a lot of hostile comments on my blog and even some hostile e-mail.

I’m disappointed that nobody seems to post serious comments about the scientific issues I discuss. Instead, the feedback is filled with nonsense, insults, and wild accusations from people who are obviously uneducated. Commenters have told me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I don’t care about human health, that I’m in league with some organization whose work I actually oppose, or even that I hate women (because one of several persons whose work I criticized was female). Such comments are not only obnoxious, they are stupid.

The troll metaphor is appropriate for two reasons. First, the trolls of mythology were stupid, ugly, and potentially dangerous (though perhaps slow-moving). Second, the trolls of mythology could operate only under the cover of darkness. They turned to stone in the light of day. Likewise, Internet trolls sit alone with their computers, thrilled by the opportunity to annoy people who would never socialize with them in person.

The first rule of Internet etiquette is “Don’t be a troll.” The second is “Don’t feed the trolls.” The Internet creates an environment where bad behavior is often rewarded but never punished. As any dog trainer can tell you, that’s a recipe for disaster. Never reward a dog for doing something that you dislike. Otherwise, you will essentially be training the dog to misbehave. Similarly, if you respond to Internet trolls in any way other than by deleting stupid comments and blocking repeat offenders, you are rewarding them with attention for behavior that should be discouraged.

I usually delete stupid comments from my blog, unless the stupid comment offers a useful “teachable moment.” Likewise, I generally ignore abusive e-mail, unless I want to get a better understanding of troll psychology. Such correspondence has allowed me to test a theory about trolls. Some trolls are just jerks. They just want to annoy other people. However, some trolls genuinely believe that they are participating in genuine intellectual exchange. These sincere trolls think that what they are saying is true and important. They think that they are dazzling you with their brilliance. If you break off the discussion with them, they imagine that they have “won.” They genuinely don’t realize that they are making fools of themselves.

The sincere trolls are suffering from a problem called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that people with poor intellectual and social skills typically don’t realize that their skills are poor. Because of their lack of skill, they can’t notice their own mistakes. Nor does anyone in their daily life bring those mistakes to their attention. As a result, people with poor skills end up thinking that their skills are above average. In other words, ignorance and incompetence beget overconfidence. Fortunately, this problem can be solved through training. As the unskilled people’s skills improve, their overconfidence melts away.

There seems to be a distressingly large number of sincere trolls in the United States. I think that the problem stems from failures in our educational system, which I’ve explained in my book Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free (www.not-trivial.com). In the early 20th century, powerful people within our educational establishment decided to promote a method of reading instruction that slows down the rate at which people learn to read and leaves many people functionally illiterate. The rate of learning is so slow that many adults “don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology.” Our educational system also deliberately suppresses the formal teaching of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Yet those are the disciplines that you must learn if you want to go on to have real intellectual dialogues with other people, about any subject.

The sincere trolls have never learned how to parse or reason. Thus, they cannot be persuaded by facts. Nor can they recognize the flaws in their own reasoning, even when those flaws are pointed out to them. As a result, they will be unwilling to learn anything until they discover that they have a lot to learn. Yet they will not make that discovery until after they have already learned a lot. So pity the trolls. Just don’t feed them.

Bovine Growth Hormone and IGF-1

Below is an interesting graphic about milk. I have one quibble. The problem with hormone exposure from drinking cow's milk comes from the cow's own steroid hormones, mainly estrogen, and from the amount and amino acid balance of the protein in the cow's milk. Thus, it's a problem even with "organic" milk.

Dairy products area major dietary source of estrogen, which can be absorbed from your food. That's why birth control hormones can be given in a pill. As an anabolic hormone, estrogen promotes growth, including the growth of cancers. The bovine growth hormone that is given to cows is a peptide hormone. It's a small protein, like insulin. Even if a protein hormone were to get into the milk, it would be broken down in the digestive system before it could reach its target tissues. That's why diabetics can't take insulin by mouth.

Although you can't get a peptide hormone directly from the milk, the large load of "high-quality" protein in dairy products provokes your liver to secrete your own insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), which is identical to the hormone that a cow secretes when exposed to recombinant bovine growth hormone. The problem is the amount and amino acid balance of the protein. You could get a similar effect from eating way too much soy protein. So too much "high-quality" protein in your food, not the BST given to cows, causes the abnormally high levels of IGF-1 in the human body. You are supposed to have some IGF-1 in your system, but having too much promotes cancer and accelerates aging. I think that the fat and estrogen in the dairy products and the IGF-1 that they provoke are likely responsible for the link between lactose consumption and ovarian cancer. I doubt that the lactose, per se, has such an effect.

Many people have voiced concerns about the possible effects of bovine growth hormone on the health of the cows. These effects could be bad for the cows as well as bad for humans who drinke cow's milk. Use of bovine growth hormone could increase the cows' risk of mastitis, or udder infection, which is then treated with antibiotics. That poses problems related to the overuse of antibiotics, which could increase antibiotic resistance in bacteria, as well as increasing the risk of antibiotic residues in the food supply.

 

Young Gorillas Outsmart Some Poachers

Check out this story from National Geographic: After a poacher's snare killed a baby gorilla from their troop, two young mountain gorillas worked together to find and destroy traps in their Rwandan forest home, according to conservationists on the scene.

Why Are All the Vegan Authors Skinny?

Notice how lean all the advocates of a low-fat, high-carb, plant-based diet are! Notice that the advocates of fatty diets tend to have multiple chins. Does anyone think that this is a coincidence?

Americans Eat Like Sumo Wrestlers

It’s no surprise that so many Americans look like sumo wrestlers. They eat like sumo wrestlers!

As this video explains, ordinary people from the East Asian countries, including Japan, eat a diet that is based heavily on steamed rice and vegetables. To pack on the pounds, sumo wrestlers eat a dish called chanko-nabe, which is high in fat. They also eat a lot of rice and drink a lot of beer. The goal is to eat a lot more calories than they burn up in their training. They’ll burn the carbohydrate and alcohol calories right away. Any excess fat calories that they have is then efficiently stored.

The guy in this video did say a few things that weren't exactly correct. You don't have to sweat away excess sodium. Your kidneys normally excrete excess sodium and water. 

Extra calories from carbohydrate or alcohol can help you pack on the pounds, but only if you are already eating a fatty diet. The human body doesn't readily convert carbohydrate to fat, and it does so inefficiently. That’s why people on a starchy diet tend to be skinny. A similar principle applies to alcohol. That's why people who are drinking heavily but not eating much food tend to be slim.

Notice that these Sumo wrestlers from the 1870s weren’t terribly fat. Modern sumo wrestlers are obese and are prone to illnesses that are uncommon in Japan. Their life expectancy is correspondingly shorter than that of an ordinary Japanese person.

It's been a while since I've shown any footage of gorillas eating. Notice that they're eating only one of the USDA's four main food groups.

Starches Are the Solution to Your Weight and Health Problems

 

For years, the bestseller lists have been dominated by books urging people to eat plenty of meat and fat but to shun carbohydrates. The Atkins Diet led the parade; but there have been many imitators, such as the Zone, the South Beach Diet, the Paleo Diet, and the Dukan Diet. Even some of the vegan-oriented books encourage people to avoid starches. Yet the scientific evidence shows us that human beings are specifically adapted to thrive on a starchy diet. So I was delighted to see that the title of Dr. John McDougall’s latest book is The Starch Solution. He explains something that nutritional epidemiologists and experts on clinical nutrition have known for many years, namely that human beings stay naturally slim and healthy on a diet based on unrefined starches and vegetables.

Back in the 1970s, when Dr. McDougall started practicing medicine as a family doctor on a sugar plantation on the big island of Hawaii, he noticed something peculiar. His older patients were slimmer and healthier than his younger patients. His older patients were immigrants from Asian countries, such as China, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. They ate a traditional East Asian diet of rice and vegetables. Their sons and daughters tended to eat a more Americanized diet, with more meat and dairy foods and processed foods. They were fatter than their parents, and some of them had chronic degenerative diseases such as atherosclerosis and diabetes. The third generation was fully Americanized and just as fat and sick as the rest of the U.S. population.

From studying the scientific literature on nutrition, Dr. McDougall realized that his patients’ experiences weren’t unusual. Most of the world’s populations have traditionally based their diet on some sort of starchy staple food, including grains such as rice, corn, and wheat and starchy roots and tubers such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, taro, and cassava. People who base their diet on these starchy foods and vegetables and fruit stay naturally slim and are remarkably free of chronic disease. When Dr. McDougall taught overweight people with severe chronic diseases to switch to a diet of starches and vegetables, they rapidly lost weight and regained their health, even though they could eat as much food as they wanted.

In Chapter 4 of The Starch Solution, McDougall explains, “Three-quarters of the illnesses suffered by people living in industrialized countries are long-standing, chronic conditions, such as obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and cancers. What do people in these regions have in common? A diet dominated by meat, dairy, fat, and processed foods. Understanding the problem points to a simple solution: By replacing these body-burdening foods with healthful starches, vegetables, and fruits, we can reduce or eradicate the enormous personal, social, and economic burden of chronic disease.

“Starches support your body’s intrinsic ability to heal by providing a perfect balance of carbohydrate, protein, fiber, fat, vitamins, and minerals, along with a balance of antioxidants and other plant-synthesized phytochemicals. Unlike the foods that are making you sick, starches contain no significant amounts of dangerous cholesterol, saturated or trans fats, animal proteins, dietary acids, chemical toxins, or disease-causing microbes.”

The Starch Solution features many of the case histories of “Star McDougallers,” who are people who solved their health problems by eating the kind of diet that Dr. McDougall recommends. You can find even more of these stories on his Web site, www.drmcdougall.com. As a science writer, I find www.drmcdougall.com to be invaluable. Many of the important studies on nutrition were performed in the 1950s or earlier, yet the MEDLINE database maintained by the National Library of Medicine doesn’t provide much coverage of literature published before the mid 1960s. Fortunately, Dr. McDougall gives citations for some of the older nutrition research. I often do a search of his Web site before I do a MEDLINE search on nutritional topics.

Besides providing reliable scientific information on diet and health, the Starch Solution provides the single most important thing that anyone needs in order to switch to a truly healthy diet: meal plans and good recipes. Dr. McDougall had the great good fortune to marry a registered nurse who is also an excellent cook. Mary McDougall’s recipes have enhanced all of his books and his Web site.

The nutritional adequacy of a diet based on unrefined starches and vegetables has been known since ancient times. It was documented scientifically in the early 20th century by Russell Henry Chittenden, a Yale University professor who was a president of the American Physiological Society. The health benefits of a low-fat, plant-based diet for the general population became obvious as a result of the Danish food rationing system during World War I. The value of starchy diets for reversing type 2 diabetes was documented in the 1940s by Dr. Walter Kempner at Duke University.

In The Starch Solution, Dr. McDougall explains that plant-based foods provide all of the nutrients that are essential for human beings except for vitamin D and vitamin B₁₂. The body makes its own supply of vitamin D when the skin is exposed to sunshine, and vitamin B₁₂ comes from bacteria. Vitamin B₁₂ is the only vitamin supplement that Dr. McDougall recommends for people eating a purely plant-based diet. 

The Starch Solution is intended to provide information that applies to the general population. Thus, the book does not cover uncommon food-related problems, such as celiac disease (gluten intolerance). However, Dr. McDougall's Web site does provide a great deal of information about celiac disease and other food allergies and intolerances. 

Dr. McDougall has been singing the praises of a diet based on unrefined starches and vegetables in bestselling books since the early 1980s. However, most of the people I talk to are shocked to hear that starches are good for you. For some reason, starchy diets became unfashionable.

McDougall explains, 

 “From 1983 until the early 1990s, my books promoting simple dietary solutions to complex health problems were major bestsellers. In the early 1990s, my publisher suggested it was time to change my writing style. An editor told me that my books supporting a starch-based diet were out of date, and that diet books now must focus on increasing meat and protein and decreasing carbs. ‘Dr. McDougall,’ she advised, ‘we would like you to make this change in your future books to reflect the new trend.’ I reminded the editor that essentially all respected science corroborates that eating animal products results in heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity, while research over the last 70 years has shown that a diet based on starches, vegetables, and fruits makes people healthy. I reminded her that I was not in the book business simply to make money, but to help people improve their health. With six national bestsellers under my belt, and more than a million copies in circulation from this company alone, I parted ways with the publisher. History confirms that my editor was right. Diet books were indeed headed in the direction she predicted. History also has proven me right. Those diets made people sick, while my approach made them healthy.”