Similarities Between Lysenkoism and Prevailing Obesity Advice

Wikipedia defines Lysenkoism thus:

Lysenkoism is used colloquially to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism)

Wikipedia informs us that Lysenko was a Russian agronomist who, in 1928, "claimed to have developed an agricultural technique, termed vernalization, which tripled or quadrupled crop yield by exposing wheat seed to high humidity and low temperature." His many ideas/theories were politically popular with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but because the theories did not stand up in practice when the farmers tried to achieve the successful results claimed by the theory, the theories were eventually discredited, but that was only after decades of serious harm to agriculture and Russian science, and after terrible unjust punishments, including executions and being sent to labour camps, had been meted out to Russian geneticists who disagreed with Lysenko's claims.

I suggest there are strong similarities between 1) Lysenkoism, which made the already unsuccessful forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture at the time catastrophically worse, and 2) the already huge problem of obesity on the increase throughout much of the world being made very, very much worse by the harmful and incorrect misinformation and advice being given to the public and in particular to the overweight and obese people themselves.

In the main, the advice can be summed up as something approximating to 'eat less food/fewer
calories/smaller portions/less fat and do more exercise'. When their clients/patients/victims try to lose weight by following this advice very few succeed. For most of them, following the advice causes weight gain, not weight loss, because when a fat person eats insufficient food for the body's needs, the body has to feed on itself. This makes the skin and the walls of the blood vessels become thinner and weaker, with the result that the fluid retention that has initiated the excess weight increases, along with further weight increase. See how to lose weight safely.

When these innocent subjects of this vast, damaging, unscientific worldwide 'experiment' report back that they have genuinely tried hard to lose weight but have not succeeded in so doing, the usual response is not to believe them and to say that they are mistaken or lying or have not followed the instructions properly, and they have really been eating more calories, which accounts for the weight gain. - You get the idea. - And so the failures of the results of following the conventional advice do not get accepted. - To exclude these results, which are the results for most obese people who try to follow the advice, is obviously Bad Science, like the propaganda machine in Soviet Russia, which also omitted mention of failures.

Now when obese people lose weight the fast, easy, safe way by seriously reducing their intake of salt/sodium but not their calorie intake and they report this welcome result to their advisers, their reports too are manipulated/doctored/distorted. The researchers who studied the fact that when children cut down on salt intake they lose weight, refused to believe that the weight loss was because of reduction in fluid retention. They introduced an unnecessary and unscientific explanation for the result.

Cutting down on salt intake reduces weight because it reduces thirst and so subjects drink less and fluid retention (excess weight) is reduced. But the researchers claimed that the reduction in weight was because when their thirst was reduced they stopped drinking so many fizzy drinks and that the fizzy drinks were sugary and contained a lot of calories, so weight loss was really caused by calorie reduction! That is Bad Science, like the Soviet propaganda, distorting the evidence and leading to a predetermined conclusion. The researchers in this instance recorded the data correctly, as far as I know, but then extrapolated from it to invent the explanation of the calories in drinks that were assumed to have been drunk.

If you have a pet dog or cat that is obese, it is obese because it has been habitually given salty food to eat - for example the last bit of its owner's takeaway meal. If you give it food that contains no added salt it will rapidly lose weight by excreting more water in the urine. - Hands up anyone who gives their pet dog or cat sugary fizzy drinks instead of water? - No hands up for that, I suspect. So losing weight by reduced salt intake occurs because of sodium reduction, not because of calorie reduction.

Failure to admit the truth about how best to reduce obesity is causing weight gain in the obese people who try to lose weight by dieting and reducing calories. And lying about salt reduction as a means of losing excess weight and claiming it is really calorie reduction resembles the history of Lysenkoism in its damage to Science and in the massive harm it is doing to millions of innocent obese people.

If you want to lose excess weight, do it the fast, easy, safe way by avoiding salt and salty food.
See Obesity and the Salt Connection and Sodium in foods.