Thursday, February 12, 2015

Cholesterol: A Case in Point as to Why Torah Need Not Necessarily Defer to Science

Cholesterol: 
A Case in Point as to Why Torah Need Not Necessarily Defer to Science

Talmidim often ask me concerning the correlation of Torah and Science. I tell them it's OK, so long as they keep in mind that Torah is eternal and science constantly in flux; that yesterday's Orthodox Science is on today's dung heap. I often use the static universe and Einstein's fudge factor as an example. Here is a very contemporaneous example!


U.S. health panel to nix cholesterol warnings - UPI.com

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2015/02/11/US-to-drop-cholesterol-warnings/6751423677061/

h/t, Reb Reuvain Meir Caplan

Worth checking out:

http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/104/10/867

The great cholesterol myth, unfortunate consequences of Brown and Goldstein's mistake.

11 comments:

  1. I would be cautious. Medical science based on statistical "studies" and especially when it comes to food science are very very low on the trust factor in terms of science. I would never lump these studies in with the general term "science".

    For example, there is a gemara that says that if a pregnant woman drinks wine, the baby comes out good (or maybe nice - i forget exactly). Today drinking any wine during pregnancy is taboo, but that is based on statistical studies of anarexic alcoholic women in the UK.

    However, when it comes to mud-mice, swan-plants, spontaneous-generation, domes int eh sky, etc. I do not think it is proper to just say "science is in flux". Rabbi Miselmann makes this mistake throughout his book, and although in some cases such a response is warranted, in other cases it comes off as ignorance of evidence and reason.

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    1. It is certainly applicable to hot issues like evolution and the flood.

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    2. I'll tell that to all the pediatricians who have looked after babies with fetal alcohol syndrome. I'm sure they'll find that comforting.

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  2. If you have FB access, check out the discussion at https://www.facebook.com/bigdei.shesh/posts/10153027176323389

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    1. This great finding is nothing new. It has long been known that 90% of a person's blood cholesterol level is genetically based, not diet based but the Western consumer wanted a boogey man so marketing gave it to them.

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  3. In general, biochemistry is in its infancy nowadays. We have a long way to go. The ideal is to understand the exact chemical and physical interactions between all the complex molecules in the body and their components. These are also likely to differ from person to person depending on his genetic makeup. Statistics are only to give a broad sense of direction in the absence of real understanding. When we really understand a system, it should work 100% of the time, or close to it. We don't use statistics when we turn on a light or turn the steering wheel of a car. We expect it to work every time, unless there is a specific problem, and in that case we expect it to be fixed and have the knowledge to do so. We don't compile statistics as to what percentage of the time the steering wheel works. It is only when we don't understand things well that we resort to statistics. Those are the things that change every few years in new studies. The public seems not to distinguish when using the term scientifically proven, whether the case in question refers to a statistical correlation, or a mechanistic explanation based on first principles.

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  4. There are two components here.
    1) Yes, science is always changing but not everything in science changes. For example, once we thought the Earth was stationary and the Sun revolved around it. Then we thought that it was the opposite. Now we know that the Earth revolves around the Sun and that the Sun also moves as the Milky Way revolves. But there's no going back to the original geocentric position.
    We thought the world was flat, now we know it's a sphere and there's no going back.

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  5. you know, you could say the same thing about torah and halacha. there are things we keep now that we didn't before, and things we used to keep that we no longer keep.
    so really both torah and science are in flux and maybe we should take both with a grain of salt.

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  6. The news story is overblown. All they're saying is that you don't to worry about cholesterol intake per se.

    But there's still tons of evidence, which they're not contradicting at all, that people shouldn't eat very much saturated fat, in large part because it increases one's cholesterol level. One's cholesterol level is still the biggest predictor if whether one gets a heart attack.

    If we eat as Jews (and virtually everyone else) used to before recent times, which is to eat meat only once a week or so, and mainly eat vegetable foods (like the pea or lentil dinners mentioned in the Gemara), then this would lower the rates of heart attacks considerably. Studies on vegetarians and near-vegetarians show that they have far less heart disease, significantly less cancer, and live longer and healthier lives.

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  7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjUk29qH0k0

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  8. People who don't know much science, don't understand science, and have most likely never done any science, often seem to take much smug joy in pointing out how science has been wrong about this or that and like to say that "science has changed its mind". The problem with this attitude is that it makes claims for science that science itself does NOT make. Scientists understand and agree that scientific knowledge, facts and theories, are moving targets. That what was considered to be true yesterday is today found out to be not true is the whole point of doing science -- to keep refining its understand of how things work even if that means upending what was thought to be true. This is the challenge of science and what drives scientists to keep digging deeper and deeper. While it is true that there have been some significant upheavals, such as abandoning the idea that there were only four elements -- earth, air, fire, and water -- most of the time what happens is that the understanding mostly stays the same but it is refined and improved. This controversy about cholesterol is an example. It has not been said that cholesterol isn't bad for you but the argument is about how bad and when it is bad. The state of knowledge about cholesterol is undergoing this process of refinement before our eyes and it should be understood as such. It is the normal way that science progresses; it is the normal way science works. Religion deals with absolute and immutable Truths. Science deals with an approximation of truth and strives to improve the accuracy and precision of that approximation and furthermore, it admits it may never be able to arrive at the final Truth. Science may only approach the Truth ever closer but might never get there. Another example: Newton worked out some laws of motion and they worked without controversy for a very long time. Then along came Einstein. Some point to Einstein's version of these laws and try to use it to show how science can't be trusted because it constantly changes. In reality, Newton's laws still hold as long as you are not going too fast and, if you are, then Einstein's law kick in. That is, Newton's laws are just a special case of Einstein's laws that hold under certain conditions. This is more typical of the way science operates than major upheavals. So, the cholesterol case is does not support the notion that "... Torah Need Not Necessarily Defer to Science."

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