Bcoulal's Journal, 23 March 2016

I can already see that some of you might post "The China Study" as a rebuttal to my post, but I'm already way ahead of you. The China Study is a joke, and shouldn't ever be considered valid science. Understand the difference between Real Science and Pretend Science. Firstly, it was not a clinical trial that took a large group of people and randomly assigned them to either a vegetarian or meat-containing diet then followed them for a specified period of time, and found the vegetarian group had a 32% lower risk of CVD. Instead, it was a study that falls into the category of epidemiology, a field of research which without question constitutes the most useless and vague information known to real scientists. Considering the immeasurable damage caused by the modern infatuation with epidemiology and the associated and widespread misinformation that insists on accepting its statistical associations as physiological fact, despite the fact that one of the most basic rules of science is association does not equal causation (correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation). In order to understand science, you must first think like a scientist and not jump to premature conclusions, especially if your information is loosely based on a broad observation of a certain population of people. 

So what exactly is epidemiology, I hear some of you asking? Nutritional epidemiology is where researchers study populations for relationships between dietary factors and certain diseases. There are several types of epidemiological studies, including cross-cultural or ecological ones, which compare the relationships between diet and disease among different countries. This is the least reliable form of epidemiology, as you are often comparing the proverbial apples with oranges. For example, do you think, just maybe, there might be other factors aside from diet affecting heart disease risk in a country undergoing major political, economic and/or social upheaval, when compared to peaceful, affluent countries? If you answered "no" to that question, then rejoice, for a secure and lucrative career as a money-wasting epidemiologist who fills journals with useless papers that come to utterly unfounded conclusions. For the rest of you whose brains remain intact, the obvious answer to the above question is yes. Average stress levels in countries experiencing upheaval tend to be higher, and stress is a major contributor to heart disease (take a look at Eastern Europe, for example). Other factors such as cigarette smoking, differences in medical diagnosis, and excessive Vodka consumption (if you think I'm joking, take a look at Eastern Europe again) may also differ greatly from that experienced by someone living in a peaceful country. Cross-cultural epidemiology, by the way, is the very kind that gave us the so-called highly destructive cholesterol theory of heart disease. Thanks to Ancel Keys and the obsession with cholesterol and saturated fat spawned by his fraudulent epidemiology, modern medicine is still nowhere near to finding a cure for heart disease, and its preventive efforts revolve around toxic statin drugs of negligible efficacy. It's an absolute disgrace, and for that we have epidemiology to thank.