This week’s Annals of Internal Medicine reports few or no reliable studies on weight loss. The one reliable study by Weight Watchers shows modest losses over six months, usually regained.
I’ve quoted my oldest daughter in earlier blogs, that you can’t lose weight so better not put it on in the first place.
I’ve never seen a half way decent weight loss study. How can a society as large and supposedly scientific as ours go on so long with only a single reliable study?
I wish Steven J. Gould were still alive so I wouldn’t have to keep making these points about science in the public media.
Gould always started his essays with some obscure fact and a description of the context of that fact. I just go for the jugular.
The article that raised my ire was Even Einstein Had His Off Days By SIMON SINGH in the NYTimes last Sunday. Singh tells us that Einstein was a genius but he wasn’t always right. Einstein firmly believed in a steady state universe. When scientific theory, later in Einstein’s life, got a consensus on the big bang theory, Einstein reluctantly admitted he had been wrong. So Einstein became a humble genius.
I’m not kidding you. The New York Times.
What has genius, right and wrong and humility got to do with science? Singh clearly believes there is an absolute reality and genius is about finding it.

Mr. Singh, science is premised on the absence of a reality. Only the testable world exists and all tests are susceptible to rejection in the long term. The big bang theory could well have been disproved three months ago for all we know. It has no inherent truth; it just explains a great deal of data and is excellent for making predictions.
The most popular universe theory these days is multi-dimensional string theory and the big bang almost disappears in string theory.
I wish Steven and his Harvard chair were here to ridicule the New York Times for publishing that article.
On the otherhand, many scientists may think like Singh, that science is about genius discovering reality. Dozens of Nobel winners had the arrogance to sign newspaper ads telling Americans that John Kerry was the best candidate for president.