The dangers of scientific consensus

From the Wall Street Journal, "The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease":

Our half-century effort to cut back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove Ancel Keys's hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to move on to test other possible culprits for our nation's health woes.

In praise of dirt

Too much cleanliness when you are young may make you unhealthy when you are old, according to one study:

To find out, Tom McDade of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues turned to health surveys, which began at birth, of 1534 children in Cebu City in the Philippines, where western levels of sanitation are generally not found. When these people reached 20, McDade's team were able to test their blood for C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of chronic inflammation.

They found that the more pathogens the people had encountered before age 2, the less CRP they had at age 20. Every episode of diarrhoea back then cut the chance of higher CRP later by 11 per cent; every two months spent in a place with animal faeces cut it by 13 per cent. Being born in the dusty, dirty dry season cut the chance by a third (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1795).