11 Quotes by Richard David Feinman

How can you say one thing when your data shows something else. One doesn't know what was on the authors' minds and maybe they interpreted things differently but the sense is that the literature maintains an attitude somewhat like the approach of lawyers. If the jury buys it, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. In scientific publishing, the jury are the reviewers and the editors. If they are already convinced of the conclusion, if there is no voir dire, you will surely win the case.

The Mediterranean Diet is widely recommended for its health benefits although the data is pretty weak and it is not obvious that anybody knows what the diet is beyond the idea that you have to pour olive oil on everything.

The most difficult part of writing this book is understanding or, again, at least describing – I don’t think it is possible to understand – how the whole field of medical nutrition could be wrong.

In some sense, the problem with convincing people of the benefits of a reduced carbohydrate strategy is that it appears to be good for everything, good for what ails you. You can sound like a hard-sell pitchman.

When I went back to the original literature to find the evidence supporting low-fat recommendations, as I had to do for preparing my lectures, it was a rude awakening. My assumption that there was at least a grain of truth in the diet-heart hypothesis was overly optimistic. If it is not a total sham, it is pretty close.

The strange collection of bedfellows currently involved in the political movement that I call fructophobia, the attack on sugar, forgot to tell you that sugar is a carbohydrate. If you cut out sugar and replace it with “healthy” high-grain, high-carbohydrate oatmeal, you are stacking the cards against yourself.

Red meat isn’t a chemical. What is it about the red meat? The meat? The red? To be fair to the authors, they also studied white meat which was mostly beneficial. But what about potatoes? Cupcakes? Breakfast cereal? Are these completely neutral? If we ran these through the same computer, what would we see? Unspoken, in everybody’s mind is saturated fat, that Rasputin of nutritional risk factors who will come after you despite enough bullets in its body to have killed several scientific theories.

Scientifically, the burden of proof is on anybody who would say that it is a good idea for people with diabetes to have any significant amount of carbohydrate.

The resistance of the medical profession to dietary carbohydrate restriction in the treatment of metabolic syndrome and, more important, to its most obvious risk, diabetes, I find incomprehensible.