Top Tweets for #THEScience

Nobody in America got sicker on the morning of 4 June 1998. Twenty-nine million of them went to bed a healthy weight and woke up overweight, because the NIH had moved the BMI line from 27.8 to 25 overnight. That is the whole business model. Here is the headcount. 1994: a WHO panel invents osteopenia. Bone thinner than a young woman's, nowhere near thin enough to break. Half of all postmenopausal women qualify on the spot. 1998: the overweight threshold drops to 25. Twenty-nine million new patients. Not one of them gained a pound. 2001: the cholesterol panel publishes ATP III. Americans recommended a statin go from 13 million to 36 million. Twenty-three million new customers in one afternoon. 2003: the blood pressure committee invents prehypertension. A diagnosis for people whose blood pressure is normal. Forty-five million qualify on day one. 2013: the statin guideline is rewritten. Another 12.8 million eligible, almost all over sixty, none with heart disease. Eight of the nine men who wrote it were on the payroll of statin manufacturers, disclosed only when they were forced to. 2017: hypertension moves from 140 over 90 to 130 over 80. The share of American adults labelled hypertensive jumps from 32 per cent to 46. Thirty-one million people, before lunch. 2026: the new cholesterol guideline lands in March. Another 21.5 million eligible, total now 87.5 million. The people it just added carry an average ten-year risk of 3.1 per cent. Which is to say, almost none. Not one of those was a discovery about the human body. Every one was a decision about where to draw a line on a chart, taken in a room, by a show of hands. And note the direction. Thirty years, four organ systems, and the line has never once moved back. No panel has ever sat down, reviewed the last panel's work, and handed several million people their health back. Over 140 million reclassifications in a single country. A woman of sixty-eight can sit on four of those lines at once and be four kinds of ill without a single symptom, on five tablets, for a body that is doing exactly what a sixty-eight-year-old body does. A cure is capped by the number of people who have the disease. A threshold is capped by the population.

Every decade of the last century had a consensus that killed people, and a name for whoever disagreed. 1900s: heroin sold over the counter for a child's cough. Non-habit-forming. Settled science. 1910s: eugenics taught at Harvard and Yale, written into thirty states' sterilisation laws. Settled science. 1920s: radium tonic sold as a health drink, until a millionaire's jaw came away in pieces. Settled science. 1930s: the lobotomy enters practice and takes a Nobel Prize with it. Settled science. 1940s: DDT sprayed onto children's heads. Its inventor gets the Nobel in 1948. Settled science. 1950s: thalidomide approved as safe in pregnancy, and doctors put in the cigarette adverts. Settled science. 1960s: the sugar industry pays Harvard to blame fat. No declaration. Settled science. 1970s: a Senate committee with no scientists on it tells America to cut fat to thirty per cent. Settled science. 1980s: ulcers are caused by stress, until the man who said bacteria drank the bacteria. Settled science. 1990s: hydrogenated margarine is the heart-healthy butter, and trans fat is not on the label. Settled science. 2000s: opioid addiction risk put under one per cent, on the strength of a five-sentence letter. Settled science. 2010s: statins declared safe and effective for anyone over a threshold, with the trial data held privately and never released for independent review. Settled science. 2020s: seed oils protect your heart, red meat is a carcinogen, and the answer to a metabolic disease is a weekly injection. Settled science.