Does eating fat make you fat?

The National Obesity Forum and the Public Health Collaboration recently demanded a “major overhaul” of dietary guidelines. Most noteworthy is their contention that avoiding fat has been a huge mistake. This has provoked a backlash from those who defend the standard dietary advice. Anyway, the ubiquitous Michael Mosley weighs in on the debate.
5:2 author Michael Mosley: 'I'm proof low-fat diets don't work'


I'm pretty much in agreement with Mosley, and think standard dietary advice is a mistake. The fact that people are getting fatter and fatter and type 2 diabetes is becoming more and more prevalent, suggests to me that standard mainstream dietary advice is a mistake. I don't think the counter-argument that people are exercising much less and are not really eating less fat, really stacks up.

So my own view is that we shouldn’t bother avoiding fat. Contrariwise, I'm of the opinion that it is a good idea to try and minimise sugar intake and refined carbs and other processed foods. By processed food I mean food where man has interfered and altered food from its natural state by adding sugar etc. I should think complex carbs will be absolutely fine. Although, on the subject of complex carbs, I’ve noticed I put on weight the next day after eating a lot of wholemeal bread! More so than when I eat my home-made oven chips.

The 5-2 diet seems more promising than other diets in addition to having various alleged health benefits. I managed to lose weight permanently by pursuing this diet. See a blog entry by me:

How to lose weight and keep it off permanently

How to lose weight and keep it off permanently

The masks we wear

I think people put on masks, hide what they really are. A mask which one wears to gain acceptance amongst ones peers.

The thing is . . I don't think I really have a mask. I just say what I think; especially on facebook. My interests, my idiosyncrasies, my flippant comments, my fears concerning my health.

Thought Experiments

An interesting article about thought experiments here.

People do tend to ignore thought experiments. I get the strong impression that they think that thought experiments cannot tell us anything about actual reality. They are just riddles with no possible application to the real world.  To find out about reality we have to actually investigate it, not engage in armchair philosophising.

But this far from the truth.  As the article says:

Galileo devised a simple thought experiment that told us something profound about gravity. Take two weights, one light, one heavy. If heavier objects fall faster than light ones, as Aristotle said, then the lighter weight will lag behind. That implies that when the two are tied together, they will fall more slowly than the heavy weight alone. But together, they weigh more than the heavy alone, so they should fall faster. Wait, so is it faster or slower?

This is a great example which illustrates that just by thinking about something you can prove something necessarily must be true, or necessarily cannot be true. Just think that people for centuries thought that the rate at which objects fall is related to their weight. A simple thought experiment could have disabused them of this notion!

And this also disproves peoples' claim that only science tells us about the world and that philosophising is just a waste of time. Sorry, that just isn't true. George Berkeley in the early 18th Century advanced thought experiments showing the concept of absolute space was incoherent for example. But Newton's authority was too great, and he was simply ignored.  And it continues to this day. Some peoples' conviction that consciousness is wholly causally inefficacious for example.  Something which I have argued simply cannot be maintained as I argue here and here.

Playing video games when young

I remember when I was 14. Parents bought me a pong games console. I could beat everyone. I almost never missed hitting the ball. My dad and mam were absolutely hopeless and couldn't hit the ball at all. I just assumed it was because of their age! (they were 40 or thereabouts). But if I played again now I think I would be almost as good as when I was 14, and I'm much older than they were then. Maybe not quite as good as I was when I was 14 as I wouldn't put hours of practice in!
Me playing space invaders

Humans Will Have Cloud-Connected Hybrid Brains by 2030, Ray Kurzweil Says

From here:

By the end of 2030, our thinking should be almost entirely non-biological and able to function much like an external hard drive

This Ray Kurzweil guy is such a clown! Perhaps I too should make preposterous predictions and get the attention I crave.

Here's my prediction about virtual reality made a few months ago.

Reality and Quantum Mechanics

Excellent! Yes it seems that reality can be conceptualised in quite differing distinct ways. Many mutually conflicting hypotheses might describe reality. It seems quite possible that aliens won't have compartmentalised reality anything like we have.

I definitely disagree that mathematics is a man made construct though. I think that it exists and that we discover it, we don't invent it.

Is the flow of time illusory?

I've just read the following article:
There is no death, only a series of eternal ‘nows’

How do we know that presentism (only the present or now exists) isn't correct? Wheeler's delayed choice experiment doesn't show that we can influence the past. It seems to me to suggest that our observations define the past -- that is make a particular past concrete.

If the past (and future) exist just as much as the present, then this doesn't just mean my grandparents exist, but also my self of one second ago! It all seems kinda implausible.

And I'm not sure any sense can be made of the notion that the flow of time is an illusion. I experience change, both in the world around me and in my own mental states. It seems to me that "time flows" by definition (consciousness I suspect somehow creates the flow of time). And it is clear we will actually die, and indeed cease to exist, should the brain create consciousness.

Not that I do believe the brain creates consciousness. There are difficulties in supposing it does as I explain in a blog entry on my other blog:

Neither Modern Materialism nor Science as currently conceived can explain Consciousness

Neither Modern Materialism nor Science as currently conceived can explain Consciousness - See more at: http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/neither-modern-materialism-nor-science.html#sthash.4GdagbQR.dpuf

Neither Modern Materialism nor Science as currently conceived can explain Consciousness - See more at: http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/neither-modern-materialism-nor-science.html#sthash.4GdagbQR.dpuf