Plagerizing Plagiarism, and the Plagiarists Who Plagerize Them

Yes ... I know "plagerize" isn't a word, but

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As you may or may not have heard, Time magazine, where all dutiful Americans turn for information on what the government and others think we should be eating, has done an about face.  Eat Butter they say ... in a cover article written by one Bryan Walsh.

What?  Not Nina Teicholz you ask?  Nope, not Nina.  But it sure sounds like her.  Or does it?

Teicholz was all over Twitter several days ago, egged on by many who tweeted along in support.  These ideas are just too new and original to have come from anywhere other than The Big Fat Surprise.  

    

Here is the full Time article (thanks CharlesG).   Given the media deluge of Teicholz these days, it's hard to recall a time when it was others that were making many of the same arguments .... for years now.    But her ideas are not new.  They are not even all that new to her ...

When I first highlighted this post by Seth at The Science of Nutrition -- FAT IN THE DIET AND MORTALITY FROM HEART DISEASE: A PLAGIARISTIC NOTE -- I didn't realize that the first example he used, from Nina Teicholz, was from back in 2007.  Seth linked to an NBC "reprint" of an article dated October 10, 2007 in Men's Health:  What if Bad Fat is Actually Good for You? For decades, Americans have been told that saturated fat clogs arteries and causes heart disease. But there's just one problem: No one's ever proved it.

Good Calories, Bad Calories hit the stands for the general public Sept. 25, 2007.  

I see no mention of Gary Taubes, nor his (then) hot-off-the-presses new book in Nina's article.  Do you?

Suppose you were forced to live on a diet of red meat and whole milk. A diet that, all told, was at least 60 percent fat -- about half of it saturated. If your first thoughts are of statins and stents, you may want to consider the curious case of the Masai, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania.

In the 1960s, a Vanderbilt University scientist named George Mann, M.D., found that Masai men consumed this very diet (supplemented with blood from the cattle they herded). Yet these nomads, who were also very lean, had some of the lowest levels of cholesterol ever measured and were virtually free of heart disease.

~~~~~~~

The Masai nomads of Kenya in 1962 had blood-cholesterol levels among the lowest ever measured, despite living exclusively on milk, blood, and occasionally meat from the cattle they herded .  {Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (Kindle Locations 850-851). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.} 

I found this "lowest ever measured" characterization to be rather interesting as I haven't seen it in the literature or other references to it (particularly the saponin references in this post).  It is one thing to describe the Masai as having lower cholesterol than predicted by their diet, or even to have low cholesterol levels, but "lowest ever measured" seems a bit of a stretch not to have been routinely incorporated in some manner into the literature.   In one study, looking at whether absorption might be a factor, the average cholesterol was around 155 mg/dL, they say simply:  "Maasai have low levels of serum cholesterol (2)".  Elsewhere in the paper they use the term "relative hypocholesteremia".   It seems odd that two people would simultaneously and independently arrive at "lowest ever measured".

Now, let's not forget the quote Seth called her out on:

At the time, plenty of scientists were skeptical of Keys’s assertions. One such critic was Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. In a 1957 paper, Yerushalmy pointed out that while data from the six countries Keys examined seemed to support the diet-heart hypothesis, statistics were actually available for 22 countries. And when all 22 were analyzed, the apparent link between fat consumption and heart disease disappeared.

~~~~~~~ 

Many researchers wouldn’t buy it. Jacob Yerushalmy, who ran the biostatistics department at the University of California, Berkeley, and Herman Hilleboe, the New York State commissioner of health, co-authored a critique of Keys’s hypothesis, noting that Keys had chosen only six countries for his comparison though data were available for twenty-two countries. When all twenty-two were included in the analysis, the apparent link between fat and heart disease vanished.  {Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (Kindle Locations 713-716)}

Here's my challenge to Ms. Teicholz ... Without shooting the messenger(s) here, can you explain the similarities in the above two pairs of quotations?   Do you consider your failure to credit Gary Taubes as your "source for these arguments" to be plagiarism?   Should Men's Health  revisit work published under your name and whether or not it may have contained plagiarized content?    

It may well be possible that a fair number of the plagiarizers that Seth identifies were actually plagiarizing Teicholz's Men's Health article.  Should Teicholz or Men's Health go after Sadiqua Hamden on the US Wellness Meat's blog?   While Hamden states "Men's Health published an excellent article that explained how saturated fats became known to be so bad", the blog post is undated, there is no mention of the author, nor the date of publication.  Better go after the Palliser Group (Little Organic Strawberry) for publishing her article in full without any attribution whatsoever!  Teicholz's article was reprinted in full on numerous blogs and websites (even with attribution this violates copyright and even the most lenient interpretations of Fair Use), here is only one such example.   

It's a bit of a mess, isn't it, tracking down serial plagiarism of varying degrees.   Not that she'd take my advice, but Teicholz may want to tone down her plagerism (sic) rhetoric aimed at Walsh and Time ... lest Knopf (although apparently Taubes doesn't care) be given reason to look more closely at her own efforts published in Men's Health and by Simon & Schuster.    But speaking of Gary Taubes, he not only doesn't seem to care about being plagiarized by Teicholz, he contributed to her manuscript bearing striking resemblances to Good Calories, Bad Calories.  

Revisiting Seth's post ... What is Plagiarism?

In all the flurry of media excitement and the flat-out journalistic garbage that The Big Fat Surprise is, a major point -- the "plagiaristic note" -- in Seth's post has fallen a bit by the wayside.

What makes the quotes he cites -- and countless more that can be found using a search engine and a few search strings -- plagiarism is that they do not credit the ORIGINAL source of the material.   Consider this scenario:

• Person A conducts a study, publishes and interprets the results.  
• Person B reports on this new study citing Person A and perhaps either quoting form the paper or from a press conference or interview.  
• Person C writes their own synopsis of the findings of Person A, citing their study, but either selective quotes (out of context) and/or puts their own spin on the results.
• Person D writes an analysis very similar to that of Person C but presents such as original thought and/or attributes the analysis to Person A.

In this scenario, Person A (or rather Persons) are Yerushalmy & Hilleboe.  Seth has made the full text of their study available here.  I'm sure there are many Persons B out there, but in Good Calories, Bad Calories, Gary Taubes was more of a Person C.   

Y&H didn't really challenge Keys on the correlation or chastise him for his supposed crime of assuming causation.  No, instead they challenged how "specific" the association was, and whether he ignored data.

DIRECT QUOTE FROM THE PAPER:

Since no information is given by Keys on how or why the six countries were selected for Fig. 1 [Keys' famous "J"], it is necessary to investigate the association between dietary fat and heart disease mortality in all countries for which information is available.  This is shown in Fig. 3 for males aged fifty-five to fifty-nine years in 22 countries.  It is immediately obvious that the inclusion of all the countries greatly reduces the apparent association.  {blue and red emphasis mine}

Taubes was guilty of his usual biased scientific re-enactment shenanigans whereby "greatly reduces the apparent association" morphed into "vanished".    Where plagiarism comes into play here, as Seth demonstrated with copious occurrences, is when this Person C editorializing was repeated by Teicholz and essentially attributed to Person A.  Teicholz is a "D" here, which would be a very generous grade were her various writings submitted to even a modicum of critical review on their journalistic merits.    This type of plagiarism is easy to spot because Person C -- in this case Gary Taubes  -- was mistaken in their "original work".    If only Taubes had been more accurate in his portrayal of what Y&H really said, those copying him could argue (rightly) in their defense that they were merely citing the Y&H paper.  Even if their phraseology was similar to "was reduced" or even something closer to the original like "the association was greatly reduced", etc., it would be difficult to charge plagiarism.  There would have been more than a reasonable chance that such wordings and expressions could have been arrived at independently based on what was said in the original source.

But GCBC is Taubes' "original work" in that it contains his take on things, and it is often unique in the extent of his "errors".    Teicholz has quite clearly plagiarized him in both Men's Health and her new book The Big Fat Surprise.

Is Bryan Walsh of Time Off the Hook?

Before moving on, I'll briefly address Teicholz's accusations against Walsh and Time magazine.  I don't think she has a leg to stand on.  There's nothing all that unique in this "debunking", and if there were any original work to be defended, it most assuredly is not hers.   She has her own moment in the Person C sun these days with her innumerable references to the 2008 Shai/DIRECT study and claims that it leads the way in providing "proof" that is "definitive", "unequivocal" etc. in the form of an RCT that is metabolic-wardly in its description (see here and previous installments -- my profuse apologies for the run-on sentence!).  Not only does she exaggerate the degree to which a "high fat" diet outperforms a "low fat" diet, but she manufactures superiority of LC over the Mediterranean diet where none exists in the original paper.  Anyone who repeats THAT without citing Teicholz is guilty of plagiarizing her "original work".   So when I finally got to the part of his article that references Shai, I noted that Walsh portrays LC and Mediterranean as being equivalently superior to the low fat diet, and additionally claims the Mediterranean diet was high in fat.  So ... it would be a tough case if you asked me.

Is there stuff in there that she could have written?  Most certainly, perhaps.  Has he repeated some of her "original errors"?  Again, perhaps.   But ... It would probably be best for her to drop this "journalists' code" nonsense and finger pointing, because the three fingers pointing back at her may well be pointing legal scholars to the true culprit here.

The New Plagerism, Same as the Old Plagiarism

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that The Big Fat Surprise is an exercise in plagiarism to varying degrees.  Even 5-star gushers have noted the eerie similarities to GCBC.   Gary Taubes doesn't seem to mind, presumably because his own books have fizzled out and perhaps because he's aware how easy it is for folks to find credible refutations of so much of what he wrote in that book.  Attach the same tired shiz to a new name and all of a sudden (in the spirit of this post I'll credit Kade Storm here, although I've been thinking much of the same things) it kills two birds with one stone:  1. Put a badly needed fresh face on the movement (doesn't hurt that she's an attractive woman), and 2. It appears the number of converts is multiplying and their positions are reinforced by endurance + growth.

screenshot @ Kindle Location 622
NOTE THE CAPTION AND EMPHASIS ON
*no*

In the new book (and such an excerpt for the purposes of educating the public falls WELL within Fair Use guidelines, lest anyone get ideas of shutting me up on that sort of technicality), Teicholz writes, beginning at location 615:

Keys had developed a sizable following among his nutrition colleagues, yet at least one scientist in his audience, Jacob Yerushalmy, was not impressed.   Yerushalmy was the founder of the Biostatistics Department at the University of California, Berkeley; he saw Keys speak at a World Health Organization (WHO) conference in Geneva in 1955. Yerushalmy thought that the data seemed a little fishy.   Right there in Geneva, for instance, the local population consumed a great deal of fat— animal fat— but did not die from heart disease very often.  Like the so-called French paradox (those surprisingly healthy omelet eaters), one could also observe a Swiss paradox. In fact, if you looked at all the twenty-two countries for which national data were available in 1955, such “paradoxes” existed also for West Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark; clearly these were not paradoxes but data points demanding an alternative explanation. [above figure appears after this in the Kindle book]

Yerushalmy’s objection was that Keys seemed to have selected only certain countries that fit his hypothesis. There were other factors that could equally well explain the trends in heart disease in all these countries, he asserted.   In a 1957 paper, Yerushalmy listed some of them: the number of cars sold per capita, number of cigarettes sold, consumption of protein, and consumption of sugar.  These were all associated with one common factor: wealth.  So anything that accompanied a growing midcentury prosperity, including meat, sugar, car exhaust , and margarine, could be causing heart disease.   As for fat, when Yerushalmy and his colleague, Herman E. Hilleboe, plotted the data for all twenty-two countries instead of just the six that Keys had selected, they observed that his correlation nearly disappeared. Only a random Jackson Pollock–like splatter of data points was left.  That mess of data points did not go over so well with Keys.

This is sourced to Yerushalmy and Hilleboe, not Gary Taubes.   I contend that "nearly disappeared" -- a more nuanced version of simply "disappeared" in 2007 -- is still closer to "vanished" than "greatly reduces the apparent association".  This is more than a matter of mere semantics.   As Taubes portrays things, and Teicholz plageristically parrots, the reader is left with the *original thought* that Y&H were critical of even Keys' assertion of a relationship.  They were critical of the extent or specificity thereof, yet offered no statistical analysis of their data to justify any wording implying that there was none.   Indeed, rather than Jackson Pollack-like, their data shows a clear positive correlation that reached statistical significance.   

We'll Always Have France (and Switzerland) ...

As the plagiaristic parade marches onward ... I have to point out something I noted and tweeted a little while back.   Keys is always accused of cherry-picking to further his agenda.  While the second (or third, etc.) country cited varies from iteration to iteration, the point is consistent:  Keys ignored data that would have refuted his hypothesis, and France was data point numéro un Keys apparently ignored.  In my above excerpt, Teicholz makes it out that Yerushalmy pondered paradoxes while munching on fatty foods with the Genevan populace.  This Keys data was *fishy*.  Here is a quote later in the book with an annotated Y&H plot.

My apologies that my color codes don't match up with the highlighted text, but ...

• This notion that "low fat" diets were anathema to human consumption, even in the so-called Western world and/or developed nations is a total farce.  The red 30% line finds over one-third of countries surveyed  (8) at or below it in 1950.
• An additional five countries -- bringing our total to 13 or roughly 60% of countries -- at or below 33% that the US has "dutifully" cut its fat consumption to.  

France is listed at 28-29% fat.  Let me repeat.  There is NO paradox in the Yerushalmy and Hilleboe data.  NONE.  Or do we now question the venerable skeptics of Keys?  Further, Switzerland, while over 30%, is no big paradox at what appears to be ~33% fat.  In the Uffe Ravnskov overlay, it's not far off the scatter.    Oh ... and 33% fat is what the US is now dutifully following as a *cough* low fat *cough* diet.  

Keys can perhaps be accused of many things, but not including France and Switzerland for fear that their high fat consumption and low heart disease mortality rates would have thrown his graph into disarray?  That was not amongst them.

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A note on spelling.  Yeah, yeah.  I make mistakes too.  Imagine the shitstorm spelling asinine with a double s will cause.  Oh wait, you don't have to, we know. 

 

Meanwhile, a journalist misspelling plagiarize?   

I know.  It looks strange.  I often check if it's been a while ... because I know there's an "i" in there and plaigarize seems to make more sense.  A foreigner learning English would phonetically sound out the proper spelling quite differently.    Forget the "s" vs. "z" thing, that's not always consistent.  

There's no "e" in plagiarism.  There is, however, an "e" in team.  This latest onslaught does, indeed, appear to be a team effort.