The World Turned Upside Down Quotes

“A man comes to Mozart and wants to become a composer.  Mozart says that they have to study theory for a couple of years, that they should study orchestration and become proficient at the piano, and goes on like this.  Finally, the man says “but you wrote your first symphony when you were 8 years old.”  Mozart says “Yes, but I didn’t ask anybody.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The strange collection of bedfellows currently involved in the political movement that I call fructophobia, the attack on sugar, forgot to tell you that sugar is a carbohydrate. If you cut out sugar and replace it with “healthy” high-grain, high-carbohydrate oatmeal, you are stacking the cards against yourself.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“Like most such tasks, cooking vegetables involves investing large amounts of time in deep thought and procrastination and a relatively small amount of time actually doing the job.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“Red meat isn’t a chemical. What is it about the red meat? The meat? The red? To be fair to the authors, they also studied white meat which was mostly beneficial. But what about potatoes? Cupcakes? Breakfast cereal? Are these completely neutral? If we ran these through the same computer, what would we see? Unspoken, in everybody’s mind is saturated fat, that Rasputin of nutritional risk factors who will come after you despite enough bullets in its body to have killed several scientific theories.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The problem is that many authors of papers in the medical literature allow statistics to become their master rather than their servant: numbers are plugged into a statistical program and the results are interpreted in a cut-and-dried fashion. Statistical significance (that two sets of data are not from the same population) is confused with clinical significance (that differences are sufficiently large to have a biological effect).”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“In some sense, the problem with convincing people of the benefits of a reduced carbohydrate strategy is that it appears to be good for everything, good for what ails you. You can sound like a hard-sell pitchman.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The “concerns” about low-carbohydrate diets still revolve around the imagined risk of cardiovascular disease from fat in the diet despite the continued failure to show any risk. Carbohydrate restriction, however, improves the usual markers, notably HDL (“good cholesterol”) and triglycerides.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“Scientifically, the burden of proof is on anybody who would say that it is a good idea for people with diabetes to have any significant amount of carbohydrate.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“Unbelievable” is the key word. That a science is incomplete or has flaws is what one expects but that the whole of the establishment opinion on diet-heart is totally meaningless, is hard to understand. How could they keep doing the same experiment over and over without success? How could that be? How could they get away with it? Why would they want to get away with it? New trials continue to show nothing. Well, not nothing. They clearly show that low-fat is ineffective for weight loss or just about everything else.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The story of the political triumph of an idea that was clearly contradicted by the science has been told numerous times (e.g., references [11, 22, 23, 26, 27]) and yet the phenomenon still persists. Every time you see a low-fat item in the supermarket you are looking at an artifact of one of the most bizarre stories in the history of science.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The Mediterranean Diet is widely recommended for its health benefits although the data is pretty weak and it is not obvious that anybody knows what the diet is beyond the idea that you have to pour olive oil on everything.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The anti-fat campaign has been one of the truly bizarre phenomena in the history of science — in this most scientific of periods, we have simply ignored the failures of the numerous experimental tests of the low-fat idea. Proponents of fat reduction have done all the big, expensive studies. They’ve put it to the test. The experiments almost always fail, but they keep doing them on the chance that something new will happen, on the chance that some unexpected change in the universe will make the saturated fat that they know is so bad, actually have a bad outcome. It’s got to be.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The most difficult part of writing this book is understanding or, again, at least describing — I don’t think it is possible to understand — how the whole field of medical nutrition could be wrong.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“I was suspicious of such a theory because biology tends to run on hormones and enzymes, that is, control mechanisms, not on mass action (the principle that chemical processes are determined by how much reactants are put into them). The grand principle in biochemistry is that there is hardly anything that is not connected with feedback. If you try to lower your dietary cholesterol, the liver will respond by making more. So simply adding more or less is not guaranteed to give much change at all and I was skeptical if not well-informed.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The three rules for getting control of your diet. Rule 1. If you’re OK, you’re OK. Rule 2. If you want to lose weight: Don’t eat. If you have to eat, don’t eat carbs. If you have to eat carbs, eat low-glycemic index carbs. Rule 3. If you have diabetes or metabolic syndrome, carbohydrate restriction is the “default” approach, that is, the one to try first.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“There is almost nothing in biology that is not connected with feedback. This fundamental idea is widely ignored but it is pervasive. If you reduce your intake of cholesterol, your body will respond by synthesizing cholesterol. If you stop eating carbohydrate, your body will respond by synthesizing glucose and making other fuels available. This grand idea puts severe limitations on what you can do (as in the case of cholesterol) but can point to some opportunities (as in the case of carbohydrate reduction) but generally, it suggests caution in jumping to conclusions.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“It is a scandal at the level of Semmelweis, an early nineteenth century Viennese physician. To reduce the incidence of puerperal fever (infection after childbirth), Semmelweis suggested that physicians wash their hands after performing autopsies and before delivering babies. They refused; it was too much trouble. But it was the nineteenth century before the germ theory was established and that’s some kind of excuse. It’s hard to know how we will describe the actions of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) who believe that for people with diabetes: “Sucrose-containing foods can be substituted for other carbohydrates in the meal plan or, if added to the meal plan, covered with insulin or other glucose-lowering medications.” [9]”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“The resistance of the medical profession to dietary carbohydrate restriction in the treatment of metabolic syndrome and, more important, to its most obvious risk, diabetes, I find incomprehensible.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“When I went back to the original literature to find the evidence supporting low-fat recommendations, as I had to do for preparing my lectures, it was a rude awakening. My assumption that there was at least a grain of truth in the diet-heart hypothesis was overly optimistic. If it is not a total sham, it is pretty close.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“Total carbohydrate restriction is the most effective therapy, more effective than other diets and more effective than most drugs. And diet is safer than most drugs.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“It is low-fat that is the new idea, increasingly recognized as a fad, commonly by those who forget that they were once the strongest supporters.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“Intention-to-treat comes from the realization that, in some experiments, you don’t know who followed the protocol and who didn’t. In a clinic, you may write a prescription and not know if it’s been filled. In this case, you have no choice but to include everybody’s performance. The mechanical application of the idea in situations where you do know who complied and who didn’t is another misunderstanding and dogmatic application of statistics. ITT usually makes the better diet look worse than it actually is.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“What is the mechanism that would make you think that red meat increased mortality.  One of the most remarkable statements in the paper: “Regarding CVD mortality, we previously reported that red meat intake was associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease2, 14 and saturated fat and cholesterol from red meat may partially explain this association.  The association between red meat and CVD mortality was moderately attenuated after further adjustment for saturated fat and cholesterol, suggesting a mediating role for these nutrients.” (my italics) This bizarre statement — that”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“papers in medical nutrition make drastic claims about saving hundreds of thousands of lives by scaling up to everybody, a result that had hardly any effect to begin with.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“It does take some confidence, especially for the lay person, to feel that their intuitive understanding that the difference between white rice and brown rice is so small that it really doesn’t matter what Harvard’s computer says.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“Arguments against metabolic advantage often rely on practical considerations: how small the effect is. At the same time, the same critics espouse the value of cumulative small effects, operative in diets where you explicitly control calories, where 50 calories a day is supposed to add up over a year. It doesn’t. Metabolism doesn’t work like that. Homeostatic (stabilizing) mechanisms compensate for simple changes in calories unless they are the right kind of calories and, in fact, the effects of different macronutrients can be dramatic. In any case, if there really is any change at all, that should be a call to find out how to maximize it, not toss it.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“One of the more effective regimens is a diet strategy from Dr. Allen Fay, a psychiatrist in New York. It works like this: You pick an amount of weight you want to lose in the next week; you can pick zero but, of course, you can’t go up. You write a check for $2, 000 to the Republican National Committee (in my case) and give it to Dr. Fay. If, at the end of the week, you haven’t hit the target, he mails the check.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“Professional nutritionists, even the Atkins website, are always telling you to have a good breakfast. Why you would want to have a good anything if you are trying to lose weight is not easy to answer. They say that you will eat too much at the next meal as if, in the morning, you can make the rational decision to eat breakfast despite no desire for food while, at noon, you are suddenly under the inexorable influence of urges beyond your control. More reasonable might be: “if you find that you eat too much at lunch when you don’t eat breakfast, then…” but that is not the style of traditional nutrition.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“the scientific evidence on the subject is just not on their radar. Why not? One reason is that when you see how much endocrinologists do know, it is not surprising that they don’t know about nutrition. As for those who act as if they know nutrition but refuse to consider low-carbohydrate diets — not that they have a refutation but rather simply ignore it — causes are unknown. For some, it is not that they love their patients less but that they love hating Dr. Atkins more.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution

“It is not easy to lose weight. While people on a low-carbohydrate diet frequently say that it is easy to lose weight that is really in comparison to other weight loss diets.”
― Richard David Feinman, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution