My Kid is a Damn Nutter

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Those parents have been tested in blind studies. The parents go away, half the kids get sugar, the other half get sweetener. The parents come back. And they can't tell whether their kid has had the sugar.

Hang on a second. They compared sugar to artificial sweeteners, another substance that is widely suspected to cause behavior problems? Did they ever compare sugar to nothing, or artificial sweeteners to nothing? For crying out loud, when most parents say "sugar" makes their kid hyper they're really talking about artificial sweeteners to begin with. How many shelf products (cake mixes, cans of frosting, sodas, candy bars) are made with real sugar anymore?

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Cancer mortality has been cut right in half in the last 30 years.

Not according to the American Cancer Society, who say that rates didn't even start going down until the early 1990s, and since then they have dropped 18.4% in men and 10.5% in women. And the majority of that drop is due to prevention (i.e. smoking rates are down and breast cancer screenings are becoming more common and more advanced,) not improvements in chemotherapy.

But whatever, cancer is not the point. I only brought it up to illustrate that there are many drugs out there with similar rates that are considered "effective." It was an especially bad choice because there are a wide variety of chemo drugs with varying effectiveness, and most of the time its only goal is to extend life a few more years, not cure the disease.

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Life expectancy doubled in the last 150 years. Not through bullshit websites. Science.

And yet, the rates of a crapton of other things are inexplicably rising at an alarming rate, including but not limited to autism, Celiac disease, life-threatening allergies, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, type 1 diabetes, and all types of thyroid disease. Science works very hard, no doubt, but it's not the God you want it to be.