Monday, May 10, 2010

It's may already!

Wow, I must have been busy. I have some adjustments to make to the blog - suggestions by my supervisor have included changing some language to make it less ambiguous. I have now written around 13,000 words althought it is very much a work in progress. I have also changed the structure of my master's considerably. It's going to go something like this:

• Abstract
• Intro
• Methodology
• Selective literature review
Brief history of food
Food sociology
New social movements (theory) }
New food movements } – the role of the internet
• Praxis: breakdown and response
Scientific paradigm, consensus and dissent –
Case study: Fat – break down in praxis
Hard sciences and lay understandings
Case study: Raw milk
Weston A. Price
WAPF and Nourishing traditions – example of praxis
• Blog research
Blog/internet literature
• Discussion

4 comments:

  1. Kia ora Isa,

    I was trying to comment yesterday after I saw your comment on Star-cooked (couldn't get open ID to work from a WPress account).

    Your research looks very interesting. I'll be following your blogs now.

    There's been some criticism of Fallon and Enig from European and North American herbalists. Henriette Kress has a bit here:

    http://www.henriettesherbal.com/blog/cholesterol-and-statins.html

    Not alot, but interesting because they support the general idea that fat is good, and contest the fat/cholesterol hypothesis but find Fallon and Enig's work inaccurate.

    cheers,
    lus.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Lus,
    I will look into that. I've found it really hard to find information written about the WAPF. There's nothing academic published about them, which is odd because it seems like a pretty big, fast-growing movement to me. I have found a few blogs that complain about them, usually with vegan or mainstream health leanings.

    It's interesting that the website you linked to says not to trust Fallon and Enig but to trust Ravnskov - who is published by them (New Trends Publishing). Last year, when I was writing a directed study about fat/the lipid hypothesis, I contacted Sally Fallon to ask where I could find some of her references and she sent me Ravnskov's book "The Cholesterol Myths".

    I'm quite happy to take everything I read with a pinch of salt - preferably unrefined sea salt :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I haven't followed Henriette Kress's suggestion of looking up the references myself, but I know a few other people have said similar things. I'm still not sure what to make of it all. Look forward to seeing what you find out though.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I found it hard to find some of the fat related refs in Nourishing Traditions. Some of them are out of print and I'm not a scientist so I rely on other people's interpretations of the data and look at it in a social/political context. Part of the trouble with 'scientific' research is that it's often funded by corporate interests in order to promote their agendas - the low-fat/diet industry is huge and there's no money in independent research these days. It's a very interesting topic.

    ReplyDelete