Why I am not "evidence-based" & don't respect people's credentials

I don't respect nobody's autharatah!

I don’t respect nobody’s authoritah

You might’ve noticed that I don’t use people’s titles or credentials. There are plenty of doctors, PhDs, Masters, and who knows what else in the nutrition space.

It’s extremely common to see them post their fancy title abbreviations in their Twitter handle, on their blogs, and on their YouTube channels to really play up their credentials:

Plenty of these people even cosplay their profession/credentials in YouTube videos or other appearances by wearing lab coats or medical scrubs on camera:

As you can probably imagine, I HATE appeal to authority. Humans (like you and me😬) are tribal creatures, and we like hierarchies if we feel that they are a fair structure our tribe approves of.

This is why you’ll often times hear carnivores refer to “Dr Baker” or “Dr Chaffee” or vegans to “Dr Greger” and so on.

I’m not claiming nobody should get a PhD or an MD, and I’m not claiming nobody should use these titles when referencing their favorite diet influencer.

But I’m claiming that the arguments must stand on their own.

I don’t see anyone’s PhD or MD as “social proof” that their hypotheses are correct. If anything, it’s the opposite: I suspect people who got these titles are yes-men, because the system filters for people who go along with the (PhD) program and don’t rock the boat. I automatically counter-weigh the arguments of people who promote their credentials in an ostentatious way.

In fact, the most interesting hypotheses, and the best arguments in nutrition, seem to come from non-PhDs and non-MDs.

Grant Genereux, who discovered the Vitamin-A-toxicity theory of disease, is an engineer. Engineers are trained to take a problem and solve it. I have yet to see Grant wear a hard hat in any of his videos, or promote his personal credentials instead of his arguments.

Amber O’Hearn, one of the OG carnivore and keto researchers and influencers of this generation, doesn’t even mention any of her education. I do believe she has a degree in Computer Science from a very reputable university, but it’s not even mentioned on her page. She has published several papers relating to ketosis, sleep, and other things. Her arguments stand on their own.

It’s a bit harder to pin down MPT (Modern PUFA Theory) because there are more players, it seems to me, and some of them do have medical credentials:

Chris Knobbe, who has written The Ancestral Diet Revolution, has an MD, and boy does he want you to know it:

chris knobbe’s chris knobbe website by chris knobbe, presented by chris knobbe

Knobbe’s book was the first book I read about PUFAs once people drew my attention to the relevance of this hypothesis. It’s a great book, and I recommend you read it.

But plenty of other big players in this field don’t have any degrees.

Tucker Goodrich, maybe THE authority on MPT in our day, doesn’t even have a degree in the profession that was his day job for decades: IT/software engineering. He ran large software groups on Wall St and became a CTO for a hedge fund, and was entirely self-taught. His arguments (& and presumably IT success) stand on their own.

Almost the entirety of nutrition debate and discussion revolves around non-arguments like which side has the better credentials, which status quo bias makes up the null hypothesis, and so on.

Naturally, I am very allergic to any of that. If you tell me you’re right because you have credentials, I’ll probably downgrade your likelihood of being correct substantially.

Piled higher & Deeper

Growing up, many of my best friends ended up pursuing PhDs. Most of them in physics, widely considered a “hard science.” Some of the credentials you wouldn’t believe, from very regal institutions that carry far in Science Land.

I never had the impression I was cut out for true science work. I liked to actually get stuff done. Science seemed like an intellectual circle jerk.

After a few years, almost all of my starry-eyed science friends became cynical. Getting your PhD takes long enough, but then you are “encouraged” to work for a pittance on your “post-doc” which is where you already have your PhD but they pay you like an intern.

Since each scientific field is such an in-group clique, it’s basically just Mean Girls. You could of course quit and go to work elsewhere, but word would get around, and you’d be bullied for the rest of your scientific career.

So most of my friends, now cynical of science as an institution, went into industry.

Luckily, if you’re good at math and you have fancy credentials, you can just get hired as a management consultant. McKinsey & Co. is very happy to rent your useless PhD title out to big companies that need an excuse to fire people. Nothing like a 26 year old physics PhD, hot off the presses, to tell a CEO whom he needs to lay off.

And while many of my friends were quite enthusiastic going into their PhD training, by the end of the thesis, they were all dismayed: it was clear that nobody was ever going to read their dissertation. There were typically only a handful of people on the planet who even had the context to understand it or care for the topic. These people were either already their peers in the program, and would thus have talked with them about it anyway, or competitors. The competitors would rather be caught dead than reading/referencing/promoting a “competing” thesis or theory.

Science is said to be so petty because the stakes are so low: when you file your PhD thesis, that’s probably the last time anyone sees it.

tHe wOrSt thEsiS eVer

I am reminded of all this because of a bit of internet soap opera that is currently going down in the bodybuilding/fitness world. I don’t usually care for such drama, but this one is fun because I dislike the main protagonist.

If you’re on the fitness side of the internet at all, especially bodybuilding or lifting weights, you’ve probably heard of this guy:

This is Dr. Mike Israetel, who goes by “Dr. Mike” in his videos. You’ll quickly notice that he starts off pretty much every video by introducing himself as “Dr. Mike.”

To say that his PhD is a MASSIVE marketing instrument for this guy is an understatement.

He’s also one of those guys who promote themselves as “evidence-based” or “science-based,” which I think is both really dumb and really uncouth - he is of course implying that other people are NOT following the evidence or the science.

Enter stage left: Solomon Nelson

Two weeks ago, a young Australian guy named Solomon Nelson started sort of a take-down campaign of “Dr. Mike.”

From what I can tell, Nelson is a law student? I’m not even sure, as he doesn’t usually mention his credentials. A large portion of his YouTube channel is trickjumping and other video games content. This nerd-cred immediately elevated his opinion in my mind.

Nelson plays with picmip, as God intended. Also, is this the best map in the history of video games or what?

Anyway, here’s his YouTube video “takedown” of Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis:

Now what Solomon Nelson did was actually hilariously simple. He read Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis. These are all publicly filed with the universities, I suppose, because they are all about “furthering the science” and “creating knowledge to be shared.”

Nelson found a lot to be desired in “Dr. Mike’s” PhD thesis. If you don’t want to watch his 1 hour video on it, here’s a brief summary:

• Tons of typos, grammar & formatting errors

• Lots of copy & paste incl. of errors

• Many tables contain impossible values which obviously represent carelessness when dealing with the statistics. E.g. athletes that would’ve had to be negative years old or weigh 3 pounds.

• Nelson thinks that Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis doesn’t produce anything in science, is extremely low in value, & generally not worthy of a PhD

• Nelson implies that Mike Israetel is thus not a “real” PhD or at least not worthy of it

Because Mike Israetel is extremely cocky and frequently criticizes/mocks other people in his space, lots of people dislike him. The video clip about his PhD being shit thus went viral and got millions of views.

Israetel (to my knowledge) didn’t address the topic directly on one of his own channels, but he did go on somebody else’s channel and talk about it for a bit.

He basically explains away the issue with 2 main arguments:

• The version of his PhD thesis downloaded & reviewed by Solomon Nelson was just a draft version, not the final PhD version, and it got uploaded to the university server by accident

• Regarding the actual scope, content, & quality of the PhD thesis: this was not his favorite topic, but at this point he knew he didn’t want to become a researcher, but work in the industry instead.

• His professor told him to pick a small scope so it’d be easier to concentrate instead of getting lost in the complexity.

• That many studies are just “repeats” trying to revalidate earlier findings, and that reproducing (or invalidating) prior findings is a pretty valuable thing in science.

• And that, at the time (12 years ago) exercise science wasn’t yet quite as confident in some of these things.

If you’re curious, Israetel’s study compares muscle mass & fat mass in college athletes and measures their strength, jumping ability, and sprinting performance.

The thesis largely concludes that athletes with more muscle mass and less fat mass perform better at sports.

In a way, duh, right?

I think they’re both correct, and there’s an inconvenient truth that explains it:

Most PhD work is shit

The only reason people are even mad at Israetel here is because we think of PhDs as very smart people that have proven to have done invaluable work. That’s the entire myth that wearing an effing lab coat on YouTube is built on.

And it doesn’t help that he’s being so cocky and constantly mentioning his PhD and credentials.

If people knew how the PhD sausage was made, they’d laugh or cry or both. Maybe I just got “lucky” that so many of my friends ended up going that route; I was exposed to the whole scam in my early 20s when they went through their programs.

We revere Science (tm) and Scientists (tm) and PhDs and Doctors because we associate legitimate authority with them: we imagine them to be Very Smart and Very Knowledgeable and, because we humans (😬) are silly creatures, we infer that they must be morally righteous as well. I mean, could an asshole even WEAR a lab coat?!

But this is largely wrong. Maybe it was true in the past, I don’t know. Certainly not in my lifetime, I’d say.

Academia nowadays is a meat grinder, turning starry-eyed young scientists into cynical management consultants.

The #1 lesson these guys learn is “What’s in it for me?” because they just spent the better part of a decade being taken advantage of.

A lot of them just want to get done with the PhD. Finish it any way possible. They know nobody’s ever going to read it. As long as they get the credential, that’s it.

Actually finding out something true, or new, or valuable, is not very important.

And Israetel is right about one thing: a lot of science is actually just very “boring” and bureaucratic stuff like his own thesis.

They say “measure twice, cut once” and that’s even more true in science. Measuring takes the form of a PhD thesis. That means many of these are just a re-run of an experiment somebody else already did, potentially hundreds of times. If you’re lucky, you get to change one slight variable and explore that part of the problem space.

It’s just not this romantic Indiana-Jones-in-a-Lab-Coat activity people imagine it is.

It’s not Dustin Hoffman staring into a microscope and going “By God… we’ve cured cancer!”

It’s mostly just sitting around for 2 years designing an experiment, waiting for 2 more years for some lab tech to finish it, and then opening Microsoft Word and typing “Nothing happened, as expected. More research is needed.”

The days of people attempting to induce Essential Fatty Acid Deficiency in themselves or starving people on purpose or sneaking corn oil into a Veterans’ home are over. Modern “science” is a desk job, you’re pushing papers like anyone else.

After Israetel went onto that podcast to defend himself and his PhD, people inspected the alleged “corrected” and “final” version of the PhD. Some claim that the timestamps don’t line up and that he’s been lying in his defense. Whatever.

This is exactly why I don’t put any value in people’s PhD or MD credentials to begin with.

Science is clearly Systematically Biased

And maybe the biggest reason I don’t respect, or actually even disrespect, credentials from mainstream institutions: the paradigm they just learned is clearly wrong!

Ahhhhhhhhhh!

We have more than doubled obesity rates in the U.S. since 1990. Does anyone here get the impression that our mainstream nutrition scientists & doctors are doing a great job?!

If 75% of all flights crashed, and 45% of all flights killed everybody aboard, I ABSOLUTELY wouldn’t trust any aviation engineers with mainstream credentials! Heck, if we trusted those, we wouldn’t have invented planes to begin with.

Human flight was largely “known” to be impossible by experts right before it was demonstrated.

Modern nutrition science has maneuvered itself into a convenient corner in which they believe in an impossible paradigm (hard CICO) as the fundamental & only mechanism relevant in obesity.

It’s a corner because they have systematically barred themselves from ever testing & proving their own assumptions. All interesting studies (like those old school ones mentioned above) are now impossible to get past ethical review boards.

And good luck getting the funds approved for a study that attempts to test & disprove CICO, or that PUFAs aren’t actually heart healthy, or anything else that questions the mainstream paradigm.

“There are no studies!” shout the adherents of this paradigm. But it’s a career-ending move to even attempt those studies, and when they actually exist, they are buried or ignored.

The only n that matters is YOU

One final thing that’s always funny is the alleged “Hierarchy of Scientific Evidence.”

This, of course, has nothing to do with science. Here’s one example of such a pyramid. (Note that, hilariously, this one is apparently from Procter & Gamble, according to Wikipedia.)

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_evidence#/media/File:Research_design_and_evidence.svg

We can see that meta-analyses and systematic review sit at the top, right before “a knowledge” should make it into the clinical practice guidelines, aka what your doctor learns to tell you.

Case reports or series are the second lowest level, the only thing worse is animal and lab studies.

But of course, in yourself, n=1 “case report” studies or anecdotes are all that matters.

What do I care that “protein produces more satiety with a p-value < 0.05” when it’s clearly the opposite in myself?

What do I care that “keto does this/that” when it’s clearly not happening in myself?

If you’re telling me that meta-analyses have PROVEN that the sky is green and water is dry, I’ll just shrug my shoulders and make a note to ignore you - you’ve clearly lost your mind to believe this. And it discredits meta-analyses and the entire field of “nutrition science” as well.

You’ll thus excuse if this is my mental image of the average scientist:

average scientists

Short Update on ex150nosauce+ACV

In case you’re wondering, I updated the title from “ex150nosauce” to “ex150nosauce+ACV” cause, well, I am taking the Bragg’s ACV tablets (1 serving/3 capsules a day).

And boy, is it working.

It’s day 19 and I’m down over 7lbs from my lowest weight from last month, i.e. it’s not just water weight.

Even if I don’t lose another pound, this is already the 4th best fat loss month I have ever had since starting ex150, only beaten by the first 3 months of 20, 10, and 10lbs lost if memory serves.

I do think the ACV is structural in this.

Ever since I did ex150vinegar, almost every experiment has worked. I lost 4-6lbs that experiment. ex_plainrice left me 5.5lbs down. On ex150-15 I didn’t clearly lose much fat, but it was a very chaotic travel month and I was definitely down overall, although there were a lot of water weight ups and downs.

Also, at that point it had been over a month that I’d taken any ACV, and the studies show the effects sort of taking several weeks to 2 months to fully spool up, so maybe it wound down during ex_plainrice or the beginning of ex150-15, who knows.

And now, with the ACV capsules at much lower dosage, this. Would be a weird coincidence.

Still, taking away the sauce seems to make it even more potent. If this pace continues I might break my old all-time low of 217lbs. But even if not, I was less than 2lbs away this morning, which is still one of the best results I’ve ever had with any experiment.

Effin’ Jaromir.