Mar 16, 2022 05:19 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 16, 2022 11:19 PM by C C.)
https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/03/15/tim...meat-16184
In part two of our series on the Lancet's descent into ideological activism, we look at the journal's proposal to "transform" global dietary habits and protect the planet from the ravages of animal agriculture. Is there any evidence to justify this campaign against meat production and consumption?
INTRO: Unscientific nonsense proliferates across the internet. Amplified by celebrities, activist groups, and other assorted ideologues, this misinformation surrounding issues like vaccines and crop biotechnology leads many unsuspecting readers astray. What's often ignored, however, is that academic journals, arguably our first and best line of defense against bad research, regularly publish content devoid of scientific substance.
In part one of this series, we examined The Lancet's long history of promoting nonsense related to vaccines, GE crops, and pesticides. Here we'll analyze several instances of the prestigious medical journal advancing an openly Marxist narrative about food production and environmental protection.
Our goal isn't just to highlight and complain about ideological bias, which you can find everywhere, but also to remind science journals that they exist as a forum for academics to publish their research and analyze each other's ideas. “Transforming” the world's food system, a goal The Lancet explicitly endorses, veers far away from the journal's purpose and into a variety of activism that has little interest in evidence.
A new “sociopolitical framework”. The first question we need to address is this: why would a medical journal amplify an extensive list of long-debunked tropes about food and farming? Like many critics of modern agriculture, The Lancet's leadership seems to have an explicitly anti-capitalistic mentality, which encourages them to find villains in the private sector even when they don't exist. Longtime journal editor Richard Horton, who we met in part one of this series, said as much in a 2017 Lancet article:
"… [Karl] Marx offers a critique of society, a method of analysis, that enables explication of disquieting trends in modern medicine and public health—privatized health economies, the power of conservative professional elites, the growth of techno-optimism, philanthrocapitalism, the importance of political determinants of health, global health's neoimperialist tendencies, product-driven definitions of disease, and the exclusion of stigmatized communities from our societies."
One wonders how Horton would account for the shocking deprivations of even the most basic goods and services, including health care, that the average Soviet citizen endured. The more important point for now is that The Lancet has made its ideological motivations plain to anyone who will read what the journal has published. “Karl Marx was concerned about the health of our planet and has interested us in a way to nurture the environment and an equitable world with improved social conditions,” a team of authors wrote in The Lancet in May 2018. This project, they added, had to begin right away:
"To avoid the catastrophic consequences of the exploitation of earth's resources due to capitalism, we propose a new global sociopolitical framework that is urgently needed to protect and cultivate human health. To pursue improved planetary health, we need to transform the capitalist systems on the basis of liberal free markets into nurturing equitable systems to accomplish 'the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being,' as stated by the WHO constitution."
In recent years, The Lancet has established dozens of “commissions” to tackle critical public health and environmental issues, including the Eat-Lancet Commission created to promote sustainable food systems. “The EAT-Lancet Commission,” the journal announced in January 2019, “addresses the need to feed a growing global population a healthy diet while also defining sustainable food systems that will minimize damage to our planet.”
Meat destroying the planet? Few people would object to these laudable goals, but the Lancet's specific policy recommendations and goals have drawn intense criticism from outside experts. In 2018, for instance, the journal published an editorial warning that “the nutritional and health issues caused by meat have become a pressing concern” and calling for government intervention to change the world's dietary habits... (MORE - details)
In part two of our series on the Lancet's descent into ideological activism, we look at the journal's proposal to "transform" global dietary habits and protect the planet from the ravages of animal agriculture. Is there any evidence to justify this campaign against meat production and consumption?
INTRO: Unscientific nonsense proliferates across the internet. Amplified by celebrities, activist groups, and other assorted ideologues, this misinformation surrounding issues like vaccines and crop biotechnology leads many unsuspecting readers astray. What's often ignored, however, is that academic journals, arguably our first and best line of defense against bad research, regularly publish content devoid of scientific substance.
In part one of this series, we examined The Lancet's long history of promoting nonsense related to vaccines, GE crops, and pesticides. Here we'll analyze several instances of the prestigious medical journal advancing an openly Marxist narrative about food production and environmental protection.
Our goal isn't just to highlight and complain about ideological bias, which you can find everywhere, but also to remind science journals that they exist as a forum for academics to publish their research and analyze each other's ideas. “Transforming” the world's food system, a goal The Lancet explicitly endorses, veers far away from the journal's purpose and into a variety of activism that has little interest in evidence.
A new “sociopolitical framework”. The first question we need to address is this: why would a medical journal amplify an extensive list of long-debunked tropes about food and farming? Like many critics of modern agriculture, The Lancet's leadership seems to have an explicitly anti-capitalistic mentality, which encourages them to find villains in the private sector even when they don't exist. Longtime journal editor Richard Horton, who we met in part one of this series, said as much in a 2017 Lancet article:
"… [Karl] Marx offers a critique of society, a method of analysis, that enables explication of disquieting trends in modern medicine and public health—privatized health economies, the power of conservative professional elites, the growth of techno-optimism, philanthrocapitalism, the importance of political determinants of health, global health's neoimperialist tendencies, product-driven definitions of disease, and the exclusion of stigmatized communities from our societies."
One wonders how Horton would account for the shocking deprivations of even the most basic goods and services, including health care, that the average Soviet citizen endured. The more important point for now is that The Lancet has made its ideological motivations plain to anyone who will read what the journal has published. “Karl Marx was concerned about the health of our planet and has interested us in a way to nurture the environment and an equitable world with improved social conditions,” a team of authors wrote in The Lancet in May 2018. This project, they added, had to begin right away:
"To avoid the catastrophic consequences of the exploitation of earth's resources due to capitalism, we propose a new global sociopolitical framework that is urgently needed to protect and cultivate human health. To pursue improved planetary health, we need to transform the capitalist systems on the basis of liberal free markets into nurturing equitable systems to accomplish 'the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being,' as stated by the WHO constitution."
In recent years, The Lancet has established dozens of “commissions” to tackle critical public health and environmental issues, including the Eat-Lancet Commission created to promote sustainable food systems. “The EAT-Lancet Commission,” the journal announced in January 2019, “addresses the need to feed a growing global population a healthy diet while also defining sustainable food systems that will minimize damage to our planet.”
Meat destroying the planet? Few people would object to these laudable goals, but the Lancet's specific policy recommendations and goals have drawn intense criticism from outside experts. In 2018, for instance, the journal published an editorial warning that “the nutritional and health issues caused by meat have become a pressing concern” and calling for government intervention to change the world's dietary habits... (MORE - details)