Are some diets mass murder?

Richard Smith writes of the demonization of certain foods based on weak science and how it may have been a form of mass murder. He focuses especially on the coordinated denunciation of fat.

Reading these books and consulting some of the original studies has been a sobering experience. The successful attempt to reduce fat in the diet of Americans and others around the world has been a global, uncontrolled experiment, which like all experiments may well have led to bad outcomes. What’s more, it has initiated a further set of uncontrolled global experiments that are continuing. Teicholz has done a remarkable job in analysing how weak science, strong personalities, vested interests, and political expediency have initiated this series of experiments.3She quotes Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of the Mediterranean Diet Cookbook and one of the founders of Oldways, as saying, “The food world is particularly prey to consumption, because so much money is made on food and so much depends on talk and especially the opinions of experts.”31 It’s surely time for better science and for humility among experts.

Medium-length piece, well worth a quick read.

It's a tough habit to shake, isn't it, this American hatred of fat? Most people around me still cut the fat off on any piece of meat they eat, despite the fact it may be a good, filling source of calories. Maybe you don't like the texture, but much of that negative association may be as the result of thinking it will just go straight into your artery as a gelatinous plug.

A real world experiment in police enforcement

In the wake of the murders of two NYPD officers, arrests in NYC have plummeted.

Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.

Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.

Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241.

Drug arrests by cops assigned to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent, from 382 to 63.

The latest official stats are here (PDF).

The police unions deny any coordinated work stoppage.

Mr. Bratton said on Monday that a “weeklong period of mourning” and demonstrations that were straining resources were contributing to the drop-off in arrests and summonses. But he said the slowdown should not concern New Yorkers. “I would point out it has not had an impact on the city’s safety at all,” Mr. Bratton said.

A top union official flatly denied that there was a job action and pointed to the orders to double up and the need to police demonstrations as the main reasons.

We rarely have such a stark change in public policy with which to analyze the effects in the real world. This is a case where a crude A/B test jump-started itself in the real world (it would be more useful if it were only specific precincts within NYC that saw this decline in arrests rather than all of them, but we can still look at the effects across cities). It will be interesting to look back in a few weeks and see if there are any new conclusions to be drawn about the broken windows policy.

You shall not pass

Having spent the first morning of 2015 surfing links on my iPad, it's striking to me how much better the user experience of so-called “new” media sites is on mobile than it is for “old” media sites.

It's almost entirely because the newer sites don't resort to full-screen takeover ads which, on mobile, often make it impossible to find the close or skip button because the ad unit isn't centered properly in the in-app or mobile browser. I don't know how many times I've tapped on a link in Twitter to read an article, only to have it hidden behind a giant black blob, with no idea which direction to scroll to find the close button. I wonder how many such sites even bother to test the experience of trying to read their content the way most people find it nowadays, through links posted on social media, on mobile devices.

Let's hope in 2015 we see more native ad units as on most social networks or new media sites, and fewer of these obtrusive non-native ads like banners and full-screen takeovers. Native ads got a bad name somewhere along the line, but their user experience is far superior.