How did we get so casual about conspiracy theories?
I was talking with someone today about nutrition. This person has a PhD in material science. They mentioned eating beef daily and I asked about the cholesterol implications. The answer was about a vague ‘they’ wanted us to think that, but it wasn’t true anymore.
I hear the vague ‘they’ so frequently now it’s just a normal conversation. In truth, as soon as I hear the vague they I dismiss the speaker’s credibility on the subject, but how did we get here? Vague they wanted us to think X is a valid counter argument by the most highly educated people in our society?
This sounds like more of a rant than a question, but I do truly want to know how this happened? Was it pop culture like the X Files that made conspiracy theories main stream? Was it social media? When will the vague they stop being an accepted explanation? Has it always been this way and I didn’t notice?
Thanks, love you!
At some point we all got smart enough to realize that, even if everybody believes it, it still might be totally wrong.
1000 years ago that kind of thinking would get you burned at the stake.
So ya, progress.
The funny thing is that 3000 years ago you wouldn’t get burned at the stake for thinking like that.
You better start believe in conspiracy theories, because you’re in one
Food is definitely a weird one. A lot of us were taught advertisement slop (the food pyramid) in science class. And we witnessed the boom and bust of fad ‘diets’ pushed by well-respected yet-to-be-disgraced lunatics. Nowadays both those things merged and live on as the Instagram ‘health and wellness’ influencer industry.
Mk ultra, contra, sterilization of native American women and the intentional infection of African Americans, operation snow white, operation mocking bird, 5 eyes, the business plot, the ongoing business plot 2.0
Uhhh that one room that’s capturing the internet in real time, I forget it’s name.
False flags throughout history.
https://www.pbssocal.org/food-discovery/food/revisiting-the-evils-of-the-food-pyramid
Food is a weird one. I’ve heard it wasn’t just lobbyists but an attempt to drop inflation, by prioritizing low input foods over high input foods.
I feel in this new world ruled by social media and the need for online attention as a measure of self worth, conspiracy theories are the low hanging fruit answer to standing out and getting that attention.
Paranoia is a survival trait dating back to our ape ancestors.
Honestly I think that this isn’t in inherent to the modern world, in earlier ages it “they” was probably attributed to gods and what not. “Why does lightning spark fires in the fields”: “They (the Gods) are probably angry at our insolence”. Fast forward to the present where religion and the supernatural have less hold on human thinking and that type of idea is shifted to a nameless, faceless “they”, orchestrating and manipulating events in secret.
For a fun look at this occurrence, read James Tynion’s fantastic Department of Truth comic that deals with the truth and popular American conspiracy theories.
I don’t know, but I started realizing that nearly all of the holiday traditions I’d ever participated in originated by way of some well received piece of advertising. It’s all a mess. It’s all people lying to each other for power, influence, and resources back to the very beginning. The internet certainly allows for messages to travel and build to critical mass faster, but humanity and this behavior originated together, only the tools change.
- Actual conspiracies and manipulation (leading to probably most imperial wars of the 20th century till today)
- A justified distrust in the government, who people identify readily as not defending their interests in the slightest
- Conspiracy theories straight up cooked up by states to misdirect, or propagated heavily from media that are either state aligned or conveniently left unsanctioned
- The manufacturing of a climate of anti-science (in the US specifically)
Are the main reasons I can identify for why it’s become such a norm. When things like MK Ultra, Cointelpro, Operation Gladio…etc are all declassified, the bar gets puts pretty fucking high for what states are willing and able to do.
MKUltra was a secret government program that experimented on people using LSD and torture. The man who became the Unabomber was one of its victims.
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. This included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement , Chicano and Mexican-American , and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups).
The Iraq War was predicated on “weapons of mass destruction” which the government knowingly lied about.
The United Fruit Company backed a coup in Honduras.
General Motors conspired to collapse the streetcar industry to gain a monopoly on public transportation.
Cigarette companies suppressed information on the health effects of cigarettes.
Oil companies suppressed information on the environmental effects of fossil fuels.
Purdue Pharma conspired to suppress the risks of Oxycontin and to expand the use of the drug to levels they knew would cause addiction.
My point is, there are true conspiracies all the time. The internet has made it possible for more people to know about it. Unfortunately it has also made it easier for false conspiracy theories to propagate
Also, the fact that those conspiracies were real severely eroded trust in institutions both government and corporate. For example, does anybody really believe the FBI stopped suppressing leftists in 1971? Hell no; they just started calling it something other than COINTELPRO that’s still classified.
Yes, there is ample evidence that we should be distrustful of capitalist, imperialist states and the corporations & capitalists which run them. Previously. Previously.
Speak for yourself. Whenever I hear the vague “they” I ask who exactly that is supposed to be. Sometimes in earnest, sometimes I just sarcastically throw it back at them: They?
But as far as I can I try to make sense of what people are trying to tell me.
BTW a PhD does not protect one from being nuts, please perish the thought.
In the case you mentioned I’d really like to know why they said it wasn’t true anymore, in addition to who “they” are.
I do the same with “we”. Someone will say something like “How did we get so casual about conspiracy theories?” and my first thought is “Who is ‘we’? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?” because I personally don’t feel like I am casual about conspiracy theories. It doesn’t matter if that’s accurate or not. When someone uses “we” like that, they are speaking for others in a way that might not be true and in my opinion that’s a manipulative way to trick some people to think incorrectly and excludes the possibility that other people might think in a different way. I don’t like when others speak on my behalf, I am not part of their “we” world.
Deconditioning. If we had a really serious full-on plague we’d eventually get casual about the corpse disposal wagon.
covid sends its regards. “hey, 30k people died today of just this disease.”
its still a thing, that kills a cripples some people, but its like it doesn’t even exist anymore.
A perfect example. Early “conspiracies” like bloating the numbers by counting anyone who died “with COVID” as having died “from COVID” and the disease having come from a lab due to gain of function research appear to have been borne out, among many others, too many to count, that ended up being bullshit.
That was a perfect storm of misinformation and disinformation that is still being pored over to this day.
Another good example is 9/11. People who refused to believe that steel infrastructure could not be damaged to an extent that it would implode and collapse into its own footprint - even if it wasn’t hit by a plane at all - were labeled “truthers”. Whatever you believe about 9/11, it’s very difficult to look at it in retrospect and not admit that something very wrong happened, and many questions are glossed over or left unanswered.
Labeling something a conspiracy immediately causes people to recoil lest they be categorized as tinfoil hat kooks, but the idea that powerful people will do horrifying things for their own interests under the thinnest cover and get away with it is not new.
That said, it is far too easy to lose grip on reality and start seeing everything as a conspiracy, so it’s always advisable to hold truths lightly, and examine them frequently. Hand waving things away with “they” statements is the worst kind of intellectual laziness and doing so is a great disservice to oneself.
The Cholesterol thing is mostly true though.
Saturated fats aren’t a problem for most people, trans fats are a problem. Saturated fats are what you get with things like meat, trans fats are what you get with processed foods and vegetable oils.
In the early 1900s a Dr. Stefansson MD lived with the Inuit for 6 months. He was used to the diet meta of the times which dictated a vegetable heavy diet was necessary for health, the Inuit don’t have vegetables, they eat fish and fatty meat exclusively. He saw the Inuit as a healthy people and his own health improved during his time with them. He returned to the US and tried to spread his experience, he was dismissed because of racism towards the Inuit. They said that the diet and health of the Inuit has no relevance to the white man because the Inuit are primatives that have no culture or civilization.
He later did a study on himself and another man where they ate nothing but meat and had regular tests done. They were in perfect health, except when they ate too much lean meat and going back to fatty meats corrected the issue. Doctors, unwilling to find out what they knew was wrong, disregarded the study.
In the 50s, as a result of Eisenhower’s heart attack, a study was done of diets in 22 countries and their rates of heart disease. Of those 22 countries, 6 of them were chosen to be the basis of the argument that saturated fats are bad because they showed a direct link between a diet higher in saturated fats and a higher rate of heart disease. When you look at all 22 countries, no such correlation can be drawn. That study was reported on heavily and saturated fats were now the cause of heart attacks.
Later on in the 70s the government got involved with nutrition and diet, in order to address the growing heart disease, and did what government does best and they fucked it up with a commission that was made up of politicians. They spent 10 years wanting to say that fats were bad because there was fatty deposits in patients with heart disease, so fat must be the problem. Their entire argument was that the cholesterol observed in hearts and arteries was a result of eating fatty foods. There was no evidence, only an unsupported hypothesis based on logic about as bulletproof as saying that meat makes maggots because you find maggots on meat. They pointed to the 1950s study as supporting evidence, they remember when it broke as news and held onto it religiously. Doctors at the time disagreed and wanted more studies done before saying that fatty foods were the problem. No evidence from those studies supported removing meat, nuts, cheese, and other fatty foods from your diet improved one’s health. At the end of it, the commission declared that some fatty foods is ok but grains, fruits, and vegetables should be most of your diet.
The whole fat is bad argument comes from that dietary and nutrition commission. It was also the basis for the food pyramid, which has no foundation in nutritional science.
Epidemiological studies are an inflammatory aspect of the cholesterol issue. They are poorly conducted studies that show vague associations and then the media pulls small associations from and blow it up to say things like egg yolks cause a greater risk of hearth attack when the data they got didn’t say that.
Tl;Dr: Eating lots of meat isn’t a problem for cholesterol, you only think that because of decades of bad science.
So your friend isn’t a conspiracy theorist, they just couldn’t or wouldn’t tell you all of that and what I wrote is like 10% of the whole story.
Just going through the wikipedia and a lot of health organizations still recommend reducing saturated fat including the WHO, the American Heart Association, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the British Dietetic Association, the World Heart Federation, the British National Health Service. These organizations are run by health professionals, not politicians with some vague anti-fat agenda.
Here’s a study going over some meta analysis and finding that
Saturated fat was associated with an 8% increase and trans fats; a 13% increase in total mortality compared with carbohydrate. Thus, replacing 5% of energy from saturated fats with equivalent energy from PUFA ( polyunsaturated fat) and MUFA ( monounsaturated fat ) was associated with estimated reductions in total mortality of 27% and 13%, respectively
It goes on to say that there is less evidence for fat in general to cause cardiovascular disease and mortality, but saturated fat and trans fats definitely do.
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/saturated-fat#evidence-to-date
Not all experts agree.
- A 2009 meta-analysis of 28 cohort studies and 16 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) concluded “The available evidence from cohort and randomised controlled trials is unsatisfactory and unreliable to make judgment about and substantiate the effects of dietary fat on risk of CHD.”
- A 2010 meta-analysis of 21 cohort studies found no association between saturated fat intake on CHD outcomes.
- A 2014 systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies and randomized controlled trials found that the evidence does not clearly support dietary guidelines that limit intake of saturated fats and replace them with polyunsaturated fats.
- A 2015 meta-analysis of 17 observational studies found that saturated fats had no association with heart disease, all-cause mortality, or any other disease.
- A 2017 meta-analysis of 7 cohort studies found no significant association between saturated fat intake and CHD death.
Plus more at the above well cited reference
Thanks for the references.
Fair enough, seems there’s not full consensus on this. Just wanted to point out that there is real science backing the idea that saturated fat is bad and it’s not just some contrived myth by a bunch of politicians like OP said.
Trans fats are from processed vegetable oils though, right?
My understanding is that typically, unmodified vegetable oils are considered the safest oils for human consumption.
“In the past, most of the trans fat in foods came from partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), formed through a manufacturing process that converts vegetable oil into a solid fat at room temperature. Trans fat also occurs naturally in food products from ruminant animals (e.g., milk, butter, cheese, meat products).”
That is my understanding of the available and validated research.
Vegetable fats are the lesser of two evils when it comes to processed vs unprocessed vegetable sourced fats.
However, I have come to the conclusion that vegetable fats are lacking in terms of overall benefits vs meat fats.
Could we eventually adapt to plant fats being better than meat fats? Absolutely, but we haven’t evolved that to be true and too many micronutrients are less available from vegetable fat sources.
No matter, processed foods are worse than natural sources and meatless diets are harder to maintain health than an omnivorous diet.
Extremely well written! Thank you for putting that together
Eating lots of meat isn’t a problem for cholesterol
There is a group of people, the LMHR (lean mass hyper responders) who do have highly elevated cholesterol on very keto/carnivore diets.
The outstanding question is if cholesterol is actually harmful in of itself - the data I’ve seen indicates that it isn’t harmful.
True, but our overall guidelines should not cater to exceptions and apply those specific needs to humanity as a whole.
Cholesterol is a broad term and doesn’t address the specifics necessary to addr iness overall average health for an individual. We do love our neat boxes to put things in.
Then there is the whole “sugar” issue. There are dozens of sugars and we only associate the term with fructose or sucrose. We can technically name all sorts of things as sugars, but if it doesn’t include sucrose and fructose explicitly, then it “isn’t” sugar on the label.
Cholesterol is a broad term and doesn’t address the specifics necessary to addr iness overall average health for an individual.
I agree completely, people should not be trying to treat a cholesterol number. They should be optimizing their metabolic health. Cholesterol should be an indicator that further follow-up is required, either arterial imaging, or diet and lifestyle interventions
Then there is the whole “sugar” issue. There are dozens of sugars and we only associate the term with fructose or sucrose. We can technically name all sorts of things as sugars, but if it doesn’t include sucrose and fructose explicitly, then it “isn’t” sugar on the label.
Happily, all of those sugars do get included in the carbohydrate label on packaging. I would say dietary carbohydrates are the biggest culprit in cardiovascular disease, and that’s what people should focus on instead of cholesterol.
That you very much for writing this up. It is super interesting, and I feel bad for dismissing her. Unfortunately, I will probably continue people whom are the vague they.
You are absolutely right to approach any vague information with skepticism, especially when “they” are behind it, because that tends to be code for Jews, reptilians, reptilian Jews, the shadow government, Soros, Soros the reptilian Jew, etc.
If I can’t call bullshit(flat earth, moon landing hoax, etc.), just get out of the conversation by saying that “I will have to look into that” or something to that effect and changing topics.
They is their preferred pronouns
I always suspected the trans were behind this
Trans-fats being demonized makes more sense now
(THIS IS A JOKE)
