them? The discovery of vitamin C cured scurvy. Vitamin D
prevents rickets. These were big wins with simple solutions.
So when scientists turned their focus to heart disease, it was
seductive to buy into the simplistic reductionism:
Cholesterol is found in the arteries of heart attack victims.
Eating more saturated fat increases blood cholesterol levels.
Therefore saturated fat causes heart disease by increasing
blood cholesterol levels. Just complex enough to be
plausible to doctors, and just simple enough to neatly
package the story for the public.
But as computer programmers like to say, “Garbage in,
garbage out.” The enormous complexity and interplay
between food and biology often defies our ability to model
it, let alone tinker with it by introducing purified or synthetic
foodstuffs. Statistician Nassim Taleb, who focuses on
randomness, probability, and uncertainty, and who
predicted the 2008 financial crisis, makes no bones about it:
Much of the local research in experimental biology, in
spite of its seemingly “scientific” and evidentiary
attributes, fails a simple test of mathematical rigor. This
means we need to be careful of what conclusions we
can and cannot make about what we see, no matter
how locally robust it seems. It is impossible, because of
the curse of dimensionality, to produce information
about a complex system from the reduction of
conventional experimental methods in science.
Impossible.In other words, given the incredible complexity of our