and they never LEARN?

It's after brunch in our house -- I just sat down with a short cup of chocolate and the laptop, so my mind and stomach could both digest something tasty....

I had to go to the C-list to find something both unread and potentially interesting, and ended up on Sharma's website.  The article discussed a study in which mice seem to have liver involvement in appetite control.  The title WAS interesting, but it went downhill from there.

THREE different points irked me, and I didn't finish reading it -- THREE!  Mouse studies (just one rung-of-the-ladder better than the in-vitro kind) just plain SUCK when it comes to hacking HUMAN problems.  Mice are not small humans.  Not even close.

Then, the mice they were using were the knockout kind.  Now, if one is trying to identify what a transmitter/hormone does, or what a receptor is for, KO animals help you figure that out, but by NO stretch of the imagination can one extrapolate from their experience to ours.  One must conduct ANOTHER study to see if normal specimens of the same species respond as predicted, based on the KO behavior ... then work into other species.  From-KO-mouse-to-human is either idiocy or lunacy -- i'd have to mull over which is more likely....

One also doesn't report this kind of "discovery" to the GENERAL PUBLIC with fanfare.  As yet, it doesn't MEAN anything to medical PRACTICE (or the amateur biohacker) -- it's way too early for that.  It may be exceedingly important and exciting to other mouse-experimenters but ... is Sharma just having a hard time finding something to write about today?

As icing on the cake -- and the thing which inspired me to close the window and rant -- the words "a high-fat diet" popped quickly into the conversation.  Bye-bye!

We all know that researchers feeding a "high-fat diet" are in fact poisoning their little charges with a combination of ingredients DESIGNED to sicken lab animals, usually things like soybean oil, sucrose and synthetic protein mixtures, "made healthy" by the addition of a standard vitamin-mineral supplement.  They're nearly always high SUGAR diets, misnamed.  The only thing worse is the "cafeteria diet" researchers used to use to show how we're poisoning our SCHOOL CHILDREN, most of the components of which have probably been featured in the propagandistic blog of Dr. He-who-shall-not-be-named.

These people are supposed to be intelligent and insightful -- our universities are supposed to be run and staffed by the BEST.  Here's another "not even close" moment:  they're too often interesting in nothing but finding a big-business source of grants.

WHY is most of the developed world either fat-and-sick, or rapidly going that direction?  Because research pursues this kind of BULLSHIT instead of to-the-point, practical, everyday SOLUTIONS, and touts novelty in place of developing useful, tried-and-true things that we KNOW work, but which are just simply ... unpopular ... like well-formulated low-carb diets.