Tuesday, April 05, 2005



AND SO IT GOES ......

What the do-gooders oppose today they may well be trying to impose tomorrow

Peanuts, a dietary outcast during the fat-phobic 1990s, have made a comeback, with consumption soaring to its highest level in nearly two decades and more doctors recommending nuts as part of a heart-healthy diet. When peanut butter and snack peanuts plummeted as Americans switched to lowfat diets, the peanut industry responded with studies showing the health benefits of peanuts. Total consumption of peanuts jumped last year to nearly 1.7 billion pounds, compared to 1.5 billion pounds the year before.

The amount of snack peanuts eaten climbed to 415 million pounds in the 2003-2004 crop year, the highest since the mid-1990s. And peanut butter consumption soared to 900 million pounds, from a low of about 700 million in the '90s. "Mothers gave us peanuts and peanut butter. Now, we've figured out that Mom was right. But it took a lot of researchers and universities to figure that out," said Don Koehler, executive director of Georgia's Peanut Commission.

The federal government's latest dietary guidelines say peanuts, which contain unsaturated fats, can be eaten in moderation. "Now we know that the type of fat found in peanuts is actually good for us," said Lona Sandon with the American Dietetic Association. "It doesn't clog our arteries like saturated fat. It helps keep the arteries clean." ......

When peanuts were out of favor in the last decade, American consumers seemed to overlook the respectable list of nutrients — vitamin E, niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin B6, and minerals such as copper, phosphorous, potassium, zinc and magnesium. They also are a good source of fiber and protein. Peanuts also have a small amount of resveratrol, the antioxidant in red wine that has been linked to the "French Paradox" — a low incidence of heart disease among the French, despite their love of cheese and other high-fat foods. Research at several universities suggests peanuts may help prevent heart disease, that they can lower bad cholesterol and that they can help with weight loss, possibly by making people feel satisfied so they eat less overall. One Harvard study showed an association between peanut butter consumption and a reduced risk of diabetes.

Even the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized a qualified health claim for peanuts and some tree nuts. Producers can say they may reduce their risk of heart disease by eating 1 1/2 ounces daily. Anna Resurreccion, a University of Georgia food scientist, has focused her research on the resveratrol found in peanuts. By subjecting the nuts to stress — slicing the kernels, or subjecting them to ultrasound — the resveratrol level greatly surpassed that found in red wine, she said. This development opens the door for new products, such as enhanced peanut butter that could offer even more health benefits and serve as a way to get resveratrol into children's diets, she said. "Young children can't very well drink wine," Resurreccion said. "But most of them love peanut butter and peanut snack foods."

More here



TOTALITARIAN FEMINISM

(An article by Charlotte Allen)

Harvard University President Lawrence Summers gave a speech in January speculating that innate differences between the sexes may have something to do with the fact that proportionately fewer women than men hold top positions in science. Even if you're not up on the scientific research -- a paper Mr. Summers cited demonstrating that, while women overall are just as smart as men, significantly fewer women than men occupy the very highest intelligence brackets that produce scientific genius -- common sense tells you that Mr. Summers has got to be right.

Unless you're at Harvard. There, the professoriate -- quickly joined by academics and media intellectuals from all over the country -- has deemed Mr. Summers' mild references to innate sex differences to have been so outrageous as to deserve severe censure. The reason? The statements violated the central tenet of feminist ideology: that the two sexes are intrinsically identical except for a few superficial physical characteristics and that any perceived differences between them can be blamed on sex discrimination and social conditioning. Scientific evidence to the contrary be damned; a feminist professor in Mr. Summers' audience announced that his remarks made her feel as though she was "going to be sick."

Recently, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a vote of no confidence in Mr. Summers, the equivalent of demanding that he be fired. The measure carries no legal weight, but it is a damning indictment nonetheless. This despite the fact that Mr. Summers has apologized over and over for what he said. He's also set up two new "gender diversity" (that is, affirmative action) panels designed to boost the number of women on Harvard's science and engineering faculties. In short, he's made like Galileo shown the instruments of torture, except that, unlike Galileo, he's not muttering "e pur se muove" (but it still moves) under his breath. The parallel is apt, however. Doctrine -- in this case, feminist doctrine -- has trumped the scientific data.

Radical feminism has somehow become modernity's sole triumphant totalitarian ideology, at least in the universities and other elite-culture hothouses where it counts (the vast majority of women shun the label "feminist," but they don't control public discourse). As with the other leading totalitarian ideologies of our time, Marxism and National Socialism, the tenets of ideological feminism need not be argued but merely asserted -- and then enforced by any means necessary. Critical examination of those tenets is not permitted, as Mr. Summers has learned to his detriment.

On a university campus or on the pages of The New York Times (or Time or Newsweek) you are not allowed to question the feminist dogma that "gender" -- that is, the assertion of distinctive masculine and feminine traits -- is merely a social construction, and that all such reflect nothing more than a patriarchal society's behavioral dicta designed to weaken women and reinforce male hegemony. You must believe -- on pain of ostracism -- that most men have been socialized to ruthless competition and maladaptive hyper-aggression but can be changed with sufficient re-education, while most women have been socialized to a nurturing, pacifistic egalitarianism that society ought to make the norm for both sexes. These are non-negotiable propositions.

Of course, there is plenty of physiological and social-science evidence that the reality of gender is quite different from the ideological picture. Asserting that men and women are innately identical is, in strictly scientific terms, like asserting (as the Nazis did) that Jews are an inferior race or (as the Marxists did) that the history of the world can be explained as a process of class struggle.

Totalitarian ideology, however, is actively hostile to scientific inquiry and will seek to extirpate whatever scientific conclusions don't accord with it. In Stalin's Soviet Union, scientists went to the gulag for contesting Trofim Lysenko's rejection of Mendelian gene-based heredity, a rejection that was thoroughly unscientific but dovetailed nicely with the reigning Marxist effort to create a "new Soviet man" via collectivization and propaganda. Hitler's regime denounced both quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity as "Jewish physics" designed to contaminate pure Aryan thinking. Similarly, the American Sociological Association, in a clear rebuke to Larry Summers, issued a Lysenko-esque statement on March 8 declaring point-blank that "overriding social determinants," not "innate biological differences," provide "the most powerful explanation" why women are statistically overrepresented in some fields and underrepresented in others.

Indeed, academic sociologists have come up with an array of bizarre and elaborate theories blaming chauvinist society, not biology, for the dearth of women in top science jobs. One of those theories is something called "stereotype threat," developed by Stanford sociologist Claude Steele. The idea is that if a female student is viewed through the lens of a negative gender stereotype, she feels so much "anxiety" that, say, she flunks her math test. Another current theory holds that women in reality perform just as well as men, but we view them as less competent because we're prejudiced. Yet another theory is that, yes, biological differences between the sexes may exist but we should never talk about them because that could sap girls'self-confidence.

All this flies in the face of the fact that brilliant women have been winning Nobel Prizes in science since 1903, even during the bad old days when girls were discouraged and even forbidden from seeking advanced scientific education. "Stereotype threat" was not an impediment for Marie Curie. Genuine sex discrimination was the barrier that she had to overcome, of a kind that has not existed in American higher education for at least 30 years.

Wouldn't it be preferable, rather than pretending that the sexes are identical and interchangeable and blaming society for women's problems, to talk openly about men's and women's strengths and weaknesses (as groups, not as exceptional individuals) and explore rationally the reasons relatively few women seek scientific careers? The reasons probably range from slight variances between the sexes in the extremes of intellectual ability to the likelihood that some gifted girls find science and math just plain boring.

But don't count on that happening soon. The lesson that Larry Summers has taught us is that our academic and intellectual establishment is in the grip of a poisonous feminist ideology that will not tolerate open and rational discussion or genuine inquiry. Speak out, even in the gentlest possible way as Mr. Summers did, and you will have that entire establishment calling for your job.

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