15 ms·

You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition

130 points by fisherjeff 11y ago

Gatsky 11y ago
As a science I find nutrition grossly deficient, despite food being so obviously important and occupying so much of humanity's attention. It seems that something like this would be at least as good as food diaries: http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/google-calorie-counter-news/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/google-calorie-coun... EDIT: Can't find any trace of it since that one press release in June 2015. Looks like it isn't being developed.
- stinos 11y ago
  As a science I find nutrition grossly deficient Imo it's not really the science itself, but rather the results which are deficient and the article lays out pretty well why that is. That, combined with the huge amounts of pseudo-science and almost-religious takes on what and how to eat (esp. by people who read a popular food book and think it is The Sole Truth) definitely creates an image that the whole of food science is utter BS. It seems that something like this would be at least as good as food diaries It would be relatively easy to test properly how correct the calory estimate is. Which wouldn't be bad maybe, I know a bunch of people who sort of swear by it for estimating clary intake. (not sure if it's the same app, but they definitely use something like it. And also tend to think everything it says is 100% correct..)
  - legulere 11y ago
    Don't forget that there's also tons of misinformation spread by companies that have an interest in it: coca-cola spends millions to tell us that drinking as much cola as we want is okay as long as we exercise enough. But they don't tell us the ridiculous amount of exercise we would need to do to burn the calories of a small glass of cola.
    - stinos 11y ago
      Ha, indeed forgot about that. Good point!
    - phalangion 11y ago
      It's not really a ridiculous amount of exercise for a small glass of soda. A can of Coke has 140 calories. 30 minutes on an exercise bike will burn around 300 calories for an average sized man. So it's around 15 minutes of exercise to burn off a Coke. Hardly a ridiculous amount.
      - Vraxx 11y ago
        Fair point, but a small glass of soda isn't exactly the typical serving size. Go to any gas station and that small glass of soda option got turned into 3 or 4 as your default option. As for the claim of drinking as much as you want as long as you exercise, I could see that easily getting out of hand with those types of conversion ratios.
- amelius 11y ago
  Just wait until the field of nutrigenomics catches on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrigenomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrigenomics
  - vanderZwan 11y ago
    Isn't that putting the cart in front of the horse? That is, isn't poorly conducted nutrition research getting in the way of doing proper nutrigenomics research, meaning nutrigenomics can't really catch on until that is fixed?
xcambar 11y ago
But can I trust a nutrition article about the need to avoid trust in nutrition articles? It's the liar paradox all over again.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It's not a nutrition article, it's a statistics article. From 5:38. They have a pretty good reputation so far. That's besides the fact that their point is absolutely obvious, and the biggest value of that article is that some widely recognized outlet put the problems with nutrition "science" in terms of actual numbers.
  - coldpie 11y ago
    Just FYI, "538" is a reference to the number of electoral votes in the United States, since the blog was born while covering the 2008 presidential election.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Thanks for the reference. I didn't know where it came from, but since posting the comment above I've learned the correct way to write it :).
- coldtea 11y ago
  It's an article about nutrition articles, not a nutrition article itself. Russell's types save the day again. Note that even if it was a "nutrition article", it telling you not to trust those articles doesn't fully invoke the liar's paradox. Unlike with the liar's paradox, where the case is supposed to always hold ("cretans always lie") and as such the statement doesn't hold (and vice versa), a call to "not trust" doesn't translate to a call for never trusting. It only means do not trust in advance, you can still trust the ones you have verified (which breaks the infinite loop).
mbrock 11y ago
David Chapman wrote about the pseudoscience of nutrition in context with scientism: http://meaningness.com/nutrition http://meaningness.com/nutrition An older essay on a similar topic, with a critique of cognitive science too: http://meaningness.com/perfection-salad http://meaningness.com/perfection-salad
- cableshaft 11y ago
  Perfection Salad explains a lot about the attitudes of my parents and grandparents about food and how it seems so contrary to more modern "knowledge" about nutrition. How Crisco ever came into existence and was once popularly used finally makes sense to me. Also the actual Perfection Salad, basically a salad encased in a jello mold, looks pretty disgusting.
jrapdx3 11y ago
In line with the point of the article, I can attest to the difficulty of tracking food intake. It's an experiment I've done several times in the past 20 years. The idea is not only recording everything eaten, but weighing every item consumed to assure accuracy. Doing that for a week is a lot of work, but also highly educational. What's interesting, on repetition the experiment has shown 2 somewhat contradictory results. Day to day there was wild variation in diet, always found surprises in what or how much I ate. OTOH at the end of the week, the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable at 2100 +/-100 kcal/day. Of course there was a wealth of info about my diet composition as well. I'd understand how very difficult it would be to scale up my experiment to the point of having enough participants to make it scientifically useful. In fact I'm not at all sure I'd recommend it to anyone unless the individual was so committed to the project to willingly put up with its arduous and tedious process. However, as a personal nutrition learning tool nothing else I know of could possibly ever beat it.
- dspillett 11y ago
  * Day to day there was wild variation in diet ... at the end of the week the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day. The average person's daily calorie burn is generally not as stable as they think it is unless they are closely following a plan. You can calculate base rate then add the standard percentage for a normal relatively sedentary lifestyle to guestimate your normal daily output but that ignores the fact that you body's daily routine is not fixed. In your working day you will walk around more or less some days, the difference won't be massive but if you are micromanaging (which you probably shouldn't: that can lead to over-worrying and potentially to certain physiological eating disorders) it counts, your social hours will vary too and probably more so on a day-to-day basis then your working and "doing nothing" hours, your environment will vary, particularly by temperature which will affect what your body does to maintain internal equilibrium, and unless you eat exactly the same food at exactly the same time every day there are differences there: different foods take different amounts of time to digest, have their energy extracted, and have their waste pass on through, have different water content which adds to the natural variation in what you drink, different amounts of drugs (caffeine and alcohol for most people) that affect water intake/output in the body is an issue and so forth. There are extra complications for a woman: changing hormone levels over the course of their regular reproductive cycle can make quite a difference to water retention and hunger levels. Basically: your body's routine does not follow an exact 24 hour cycle - this is why your weekly diet is a lot more predictable than your daily one, over the longer time the natural variances average out. But we do have mechanisms that alter out hunger levels to try make sure things do even out over time. There are things that these mechanisms don't account for though: problems such as diabetes and other illnesses that affect energy absorption and use, and it is generally believed that a high sugar diet "breaks" these systems because they are geared towards slow-ish release foods and the energy in compact food high in small sugars is very quickly either used or stored away (so you have the energy ready for use, but you become hungry because the food is so easy to break down that it has already passed the parts that register hunger). I monitor my intake very closely, having gone (over the last ~30 months) from ~18.5 stone to ~10 and wanting to stay somewhere near there. I weigh myself every day or two but only really watch a fortnightly average as a key value because I know there will be daily variations both that are due to either my routine not being very routine or sometimes are far less intuitively understandable. It is actually easier for athletes because they can measure their extra calorie output with some accuracy, and if you are training a lot then this output is going to be more significant than the random daily variations. Their incoming diet is likely to be far more predictable than that of the man on the street too. I'm not an athlete by anyone's definition but I do exercise "recreationally" these days (mostly running, some strength/tone work, some cycling & walking for fun/exercise not just to suit commuting requirements) and I do notice the results being more predictable in periods when I do quite a bit of that compared to times when I do very little.
ars 11y ago
I see two solutions. You can do nutrition studies on animals that are most like us. And you can study people in structured environments like the military, space, or prison and accurately track what they eat.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  And the best option I think actually seems to be mass surveillance. Just take that somewhat structured environment, where people stay all the time, and surveil the shit out of it. Without telling the subjects. Task a group of people to objectively observe and note what is being eaten and how it affects people's health. A pure observation like this could provide a lot of useful data, that would be free from biases introduced by subjects underreporting things or simply changing their behaviour because they know they're being studied.
  - deegles 11y ago
    How about grocery store loyalty cards? A big study could be done by offering everyone a $x gift card if they fill out a survey about their family, get a baseline medical test and promise to get another one in say 1 year. Changes in diet could be induced by mailing them coupons for specific foods and tracking their use.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      An interesting proposal, but I see following problems with it: - You have both zero control and zero objective input on what subjects are actually eating. They can ignore your coupons, they can lie or omit (by simply forgetting about) what they've eaten. They can buy stuff without using loyalty card (and probably will, in different stores - just how many people shop in one and only one store?). - The data would be very imprecise - while individuals would do the medical tests, unless you're targeting singles, their grocery shopping will go towards the household, and you have no idea who ate what. - I'm not confident that mailing them coupons would change their diet, unless you've got yourself either very poor, or very cooperative subject. The outcome I expect is that people would mostly ignore the coupons if they don't feel like eating the thing you want them to. In the end, while interesting, it seems less precise than the current questionnaire/journal/self-reporting based approach.
np422 11y ago
According to the statistic available the number of drowning accidents among children and sale of ice-cream is highly correlated, we must take measures to lower sale of ice-cream, please think of the children! Most of the time a journalist will easily believe a statement like above and rewrite into a newspaper article. And soon thereafter official recommendations and legislation will follow. I'm looking forward to http://nusi.org/ http://nusi.org/ publishing some results, they appear to be intellectual honest.
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  Drowning accidents and the sale of ice cream probably have a common causal factor -- warm weather. A lot of the correlations in the article are a lot weirder and harder to explain.
- plafl 11y ago
  I'm always wary of articles that try to support their point by showing some ridiculous correlations. It's very easy to look at thousands of correlations and select the few most ridiculous, ignoring the vast amount of them that maybe make sense. Suddenly it seems like statistics are irrelevant and we cannot trust anything. I suppose that nobody is free from personal bias since even Fisher, yes the great statistician, rejected correlation between smoking and lung cancer as a spurious correlation (look up in Wikipedia)
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > It's very easy to look at thousands of correlations and select the few most ridiculous, ignoring the vast amount of them that maybe make sense. The reality is in fact reverse. Out of thousands of correlations you could pick, only very few actually make sense. It's trivially easy to find - or accidentally stumble upon - a meaningless correlation.
- noondip 11y ago
  NuSI is straight-up fraud. See http://plantpositive.com/warning-signs-nusi-guys-1/ http://plantpositive.com/warning-signs-nusi-guys-1/
facepalm 11y ago
At least I think nobody advises to increase intake of sugar? Maybe just reducing sugar gets you 99% of the way... The thing about humans is, they manage to live in all sorts of environments. I think the Inuit have no access to vegetables at all, meat only? But other societies probably don't eat meat at all (for example some castes in India, afaik). So I suspect the human digestive system is actually very adaptive. Problems may start if you try to manipulate the signals the digestive system reacts to, as is happening with industrialized, processed food. If you lie to the system, it can not (always) react in a healthy way. (That's my guess, anyway). On the other hand, comparing different societies might yield some valid insights? If a whole country doesn't eat certain foods? Or what about the result that general health declined with the advent of agriculture?
- coldnebo 11y ago
  I think you have to be careful because there are two things that need to be separated: 1) the human digestive tract is adaptable -- this measures the amount of adaptation the individual is capable of. 2) evolutionary pressure selects individuals who are highly adapted to their environment (I.e. The others simply die off!) -- this measures the adaptations of a population towards diet. Ex: Swedish ability to digest lactose in adults. Asian insulin response to high carb/rice diets. It seems that if we really want to crack this nut, we should be looking at DNA data as well. I.e. This population gets this response with this diet, while that population has a completely different response. And yes, unfortunately adding DNA populations makes all of this research even more complex than it already was.
  - facepalm 11y ago
    Absolutely, just because population A does well on some diet doesn't imply everybody does. Actually that is for me often a good heuristic to discard most nutrition advice right away. A lot of recommendations I see include lots of diary products. Yet 16% or more of the (European) population are lactose intolerant (even more in other countries). So that advice simply can't be true, and it seems like a good idea to regard the rest of it with suspicion, too. I guess that at least shows it is not completely hopeless for the individual, some common sense might go a long way. A lot of people are Fructose intolerant, yet the "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" advice won't die. Then again there is a lot of fear mongering about milk going on. But the ability to digest lactose (as an adult) spread like wildfire at some point in time, seems to have had some evolutionary advantage. "my body tells me what I need" doesn't reliably work either, because it might crave for sugar, alcohol and nicotine :-/ Nassim Taleb avoids foods that haven't been eaten by his population for thousands of years, for example Mangoes. Might be too extreme, but worth thinking about. Atm there is a new craze in my country about some new healthy grain from South America. I pass - it seems obvious that people can be healthy without that grain (because people have survived in Europe for millennia), so why risk it? So maybe if Bananas were a new fad I would feel the same way, I only eat them because they were already a fad when I was born.
wanda 11y ago
Nutrition is like SEO: lots of studies, lots of claims, lots of data... but all the claims/conclusions seem to be based on post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning and anecdotal evidence where the true reasons for success were either misunderstood or not known at all. And both fields have a lot of "experts" who all somehow manage to disagree with one another. and then there are some basic/no-brainer principles that do seem to make sense: don't eat loads of sugar, include a <title>.
- spooningtamarin 11y ago
  This is completely false. Scientific studies, controlled, on nutrition and health are going back at least 30 years, and in these 30 years you can find a huge amount of quality research and quality data. Problem is that no one looks at meta-analyses, no one reports about it. WHO has reports that are sometimes half-assed and clearly * put large food industry * neutral. Just take the newest biggest report on eating processed meat being equivalent to 3-5 cigarettes per day (cancer up by 18%). They did a meta-analysis on 800 articles, and in those articles and conclusions authors clearly state that meat can be substituted by alternatives that do not cause cancer, but WHO decided to skip that and mention that there are health benefits to eating meat (high iron which is not that high compared to plant sources, B12 which of course, cannot be found anywhere except animals and fortified foods). They do the same thing with milk, supplements etc.
  - trentmb 11y ago
    > milk Oh god, I go through a gallon of milk a week- what do I need to know?
    - talmand 11y ago
      Current study says it's bad for you. Next study says it's good for you. Next study says it's bad for you. Next study says it's good for you. This study is good because group A paid for it. This study is bad because group B paid for it. This study is good because group B paid for it. This study is bad because group A paid for it. And so on. And so on. And so on. And, of course I'm generalizing.
henrik_w 11y ago
I just finished reading "Why We Get Fat" [1] and was really surprised by it. The research seems quite plausible to me, but the recommendations in terms of not getting fat are not what I have heard as the common advice. The advice in short is: avoid all carbohydrates as much as possible, and eat protein and fat. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259/ http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259/
- maxerickson 11y ago
  There are multiple fad diets that are popular in the US that boil down to 'low carb'. I often wonder if it isn't anything subtle, just that processed carbohydrates are incredibly energy dense. 100 grams of sugar or flour has twice the calories of 100 grams of beef (prepared bread still has more calories per gram than beef). 100 grams of greens or non starchy vegetables almost doesn't have calories.
  - coldpie 11y ago
    I have a tricky time talking to people who subscribe to fad diets. I don't want to discourage people from caring about their health. The fact that they have gone from eating whatever to trying to control their diet is a positive step and I want to encourage them for doing that in the first place. But then there's garbage crap like paleo and "cleanses" that are ridiculous and can be actively harmful. So how do you tell someone their diet is stupid while not insulting them for caring about their diet? Mostly I settle for trying to give them well-written articles by scientists and nutritionists to read, but at the end of the day, I'm not their main source of information and good information gets drowned out in the hours spent on Pinterest. It gets even trickier with diets like gluten-free. The vast majority of people on gluten-free diets do not have any gluten allergy. But, as you said, cutting down carbs would vastly improve the health of most Americans. So, cutting out gluten also cuts down on carbs which leads to a healthy outcome, even though there is actually no reason for them to cut down on gluten itself. So their reason for cutting down on carbs is wrong, but the final effect is good. Is this misconception worth correcting? Can I tell them they don't actually have an allergy and it's OK to have a bagel or a beer if it fits their calorie requirements? Would that be defeating the ultimate goal of improving their health? In the end, mostly I just butt out. Let people do whatever they feel is best to their bodies and I'll continue to do so to mine: "eat food; not too much; mostly plants."
cauthon 11y ago
Lemonade is associated with a positive belief that Crash deserved Best Picture and iced tea is associated with a negative belief that Crash deserved Best Picture. I wonder what the consensus on Crash's Oscar is among Arnold Palmer drinkers.
mokkol 11y ago
This book really made it much clearer for me: http://www.amazon.com/The-Enzyme-Factor-Hiromi-Shinya/dp/0982290039 http://www.amazon.com/The-Enzyme-Factor-Hiromi-Shinya/dp/098... Advise of a doctor called Hiromi Shinya, who studied/observed intestines all his live. He is one of the best in his field and the explanations he gives in his book are really really logic and inspirational. I highly recommend it, it changed my perspective of food. Counting calories never done it for me. Not all calories are not the same. Hiromi Shinya also made it clear that we only think about our outside and not about. The inside and the inside is all what counts to stay healthy and live a long live. You can be thin and extremely unhealthy. It is the inside what counts and we shouldn't exhaust our organs.
jordanpg 11y ago
Putting in a word for common sense, and Pollan's condensed advice: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." I have been astonished at how just not eating quite so much makes a difference.
sangeronimo 11y ago
nutrition/fitness arguments are always so hilariously awful in this website
- trowawee 11y ago
  TFA: "Most nutrition advice is based on badly-structured or (possibly willfully) misinterpreted studies." TFC: "HERE'S A STUDY THAT PROVES THAT PROTEIN/CARBS/FAT/FIBER/VEGETABLES/VEGEMITE/GUM IS THE DEVIL AND GIVES EVERYONE BRAIN CANCER!"
bmajz 11y ago
It's great that Five Thirty Eight called out the lack of rigor behind these studies. Most of them are indeed shoddy. However, that's not to say that we don't have a pretty good general idea of what's good for you. Here's a pretty well-balanced article on the topic, with this awesome TL;DR: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/upshot/simple-rules-for-healthy-eating.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/upshot/simple-rules-for-h...
- HelloMcFly 11y ago
  That line by Michael Pollan is the most universally applicable line to any diet. My grandmother had a similar saying: "Beans and greens first, everything else second."
the_economist 11y ago
I can use diet to cause or fix acne in myself or another person in a week. It works every time. People who don't eat western diets don't get heart disease, acne, or many other inflammatory related conditions. Just look at this study Loren Cordain ran in Papua New Guinea: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12472346 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12472346 - 0 incidents of acne in the entire cohort. Pinning down the long term effects of individual nutrients is very difficult, but we know a lot more about the positive and negative effects of diet choices than this article lets on.
- Lambdanaut 11y ago
  I'm curious(and skeptical), what sort of diet do you change to?
  - the_economist 11y ago
    It's pretty extreme. No sugar, no flour, no alcohol, no refined foods in general. No cheap oils (only olive oil). And no caffeine. Basically, the diet Tom Brady eats: http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/2016/01/04/meet-the-chef-who-decides-what-tom-brady-eats-and-what-definitely-doesn/gERAd0pkpmuELDZztIA56K/story.html http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/2016/01/04/me...
- brandonmenc 11y ago
  Acne is thought to be largely genetic [1], which could explain why no one in that study had it. Anecdotally, I had cystic acne as a teen and was cured after a single cycle of Accutane. It never returned, even though I kept eating the same diet - which included a lot of dairy and a lot of fast food. [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjd.12149/abstract;jsessionid=3A9F532B7ADB09F31B44D85A25CE3811.f02t02 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjd.12149/abstrac...
  - the_economist 11y ago
    Sugar is the real culprit when it comes to acne.
hias 11y ago
I counted my calories for a half year and successfully lost 14 kilos. But since I like to feel full and I enjoy eating I only ate foods with low calories/gram ratio. These foods are generell also healthy as well. Calorie-couting definately works, you just have to be honest with yourself and count everything you eat and measure always exact. I recommend you workout a bit while doing this though, I lost not only fat but muscle mass and my daily calories intake my body need went down about 400 calories.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>But since I like to feel full and I enjoy eating I only ate foods with low calories/gram ratio. These foods are generell also healthy as well. Yes. Berries are great for this, especially blackberries. They have very low sugar compared to other fruits, and high fiber. So they are good for satiety. They go bad relatively quickly though, and tend to be expensive out of season. :)
wmnwmn 11y ago
There's no value in nutrition studies that don't identify an actual physical mechanism for the effect. Virtually all past and present nutrition advice is just superstition. Since we are only just now gaining an understanding of the microscopic mechanisms that actually run the body, we can hope for truly valuable nutrition advice in the future.
justncase80 11y ago
The only diet advice you'll ever need: http://muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/22-ThePhysicsDiet.htm http://muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/22-ThePhysicsDiet.htm

130 points by fisherjeff 11y ago

As a science I find nutrition grossly deficient, despite food being so obviously important and occupying so much of humanity's attention. It seems that something like this would be at least as good as food diaries: http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/google-calorie-counter-news/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/google-calorie-coun... EDIT: Can't find any trace of it since that one press release in June 2015. Looks like it isn't being developed.

stinos 11y ago
As a science I find nutrition grossly deficient Imo it's not really the science itself, but rather the results which are deficient and the article lays out pretty well why that is. That, combined with the huge amounts of pseudo-science and almost-religious takes on what and how to eat (esp. by people who read a popular food book and think it is The Sole Truth) definitely creates an image that the whole of food science is utter BS. It seems that something like this would be at least as good as food diaries It would be relatively easy to test properly how correct the calory estimate is. Which wouldn't be bad maybe, I know a bunch of people who sort of swear by it for estimating clary intake. (not sure if it's the same app, but they definitely use something like it. And also tend to think everything it says is 100% correct..)
- legulere 11y ago
  Don't forget that there's also tons of misinformation spread by companies that have an interest in it: coca-cola spends millions to tell us that drinking as much cola as we want is okay as long as we exercise enough. But they don't tell us the ridiculous amount of exercise we would need to do to burn the calories of a small glass of cola.
  - stinos 11y ago
    Ha, indeed forgot about that. Good point!
  - phalangion 11y ago
    It's not really a ridiculous amount of exercise for a small glass of soda. A can of Coke has 140 calories. 30 minutes on an exercise bike will burn around 300 calories for an average sized man. So it's around 15 minutes of exercise to burn off a Coke. Hardly a ridiculous amount.
    - Vraxx 11y ago
      Fair point, but a small glass of soda isn't exactly the typical serving size. Go to any gas station and that small glass of soda option got turned into 3 or 4 as your default option. As for the claim of drinking as much as you want as long as you exercise, I could see that easily getting out of hand with those types of conversion ratios.
amelius 11y ago
Just wait until the field of nutrigenomics catches on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrigenomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrigenomics
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  Isn't that putting the cart in front of the horse? That is, isn't poorly conducted nutrition research getting in the way of doing proper nutrigenomics research, meaning nutrigenomics can't really catch on until that is fixed?

xcambar 11y ago

But can I trust a nutrition article about the need to avoid trust in nutrition articles? It's the liar paradox all over again.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
It's not a nutrition article, it's a statistics article. From 5:38. They have a pretty good reputation so far. That's besides the fact that their point is absolutely obvious, and the biggest value of that article is that some widely recognized outlet put the problems with nutrition "science" in terms of actual numbers.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Just FYI, "538" is a reference to the number of electoral votes in the United States, since the blog was born while covering the 2008 presidential election.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Thanks for the reference. I didn't know where it came from, but since posting the comment above I've learned the correct way to write it :).
coldtea 11y ago
It's an article about nutrition articles, not a nutrition article itself. Russell's types save the day again. Note that even if it was a "nutrition article", it telling you not to trust those articles doesn't fully invoke the liar's paradox. Unlike with the liar's paradox, where the case is supposed to always hold ("cretans always lie") and as such the statement doesn't hold (and vice versa), a call to "not trust" doesn't translate to a call for never trusting. It only means do not trust in advance, you can still trust the ones you have verified (which breaks the infinite loop).

mbrock 11y ago

David Chapman wrote about the pseudoscience of nutrition in context with scientism: http://meaningness.com/nutrition http://meaningness.com/nutrition An older essay on a similar topic, with a critique of cognitive science too: http://meaningness.com/perfection-salad http://meaningness.com/perfection-salad

cableshaft 11y ago
Perfection Salad explains a lot about the attitudes of my parents and grandparents about food and how it seems so contrary to more modern "knowledge" about nutrition. How Crisco ever came into existence and was once popularly used finally makes sense to me. Also the actual Perfection Salad, basically a salad encased in a jello mold, looks pretty disgusting.

jrapdx3 11y ago

In line with the point of the article, I can attest to the difficulty of tracking food intake. It's an experiment I've done several times in the past 20 years. The idea is not only recording everything eaten, but weighing every item consumed to assure accuracy. Doing that for a week is a lot of work, but also highly educational. What's interesting, on repetition the experiment has shown 2 somewhat contradictory results. Day to day there was wild variation in diet, always found surprises in what or how much I ate. OTOH at the end of the week, the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable at 2100 +/-100 kcal/day. Of course there was a wealth of info about my diet composition as well. I'd understand how very difficult it would be to scale up my experiment to the point of having enough participants to make it scientifically useful. In fact I'm not at all sure I'd recommend it to anyone unless the individual was so committed to the project to willingly put up with its arduous and tedious process. However, as a personal nutrition learning tool nothing else I know of could possibly ever beat it.

dspillett 11y ago
* Day to day there was wild variation in diet ... at the end of the week the average daily calorie intake was very consistent/predictable I think this is quite normal and why people recommend not measuring yourself every day. The average person's daily calorie burn is generally not as stable as they think it is unless they are closely following a plan. You can calculate base rate then add the standard percentage for a normal relatively sedentary lifestyle to guestimate your normal daily output but that ignores the fact that you body's daily routine is not fixed. In your working day you will walk around more or less some days, the difference won't be massive but if you are micromanaging (which you probably shouldn't: that can lead to over-worrying and potentially to certain physiological eating disorders) it counts, your social hours will vary too and probably more so on a day-to-day basis then your working and "doing nothing" hours, your environment will vary, particularly by temperature which will affect what your body does to maintain internal equilibrium, and unless you eat exactly the same food at exactly the same time every day there are differences there: different foods take different amounts of time to digest, have their energy extracted, and have their waste pass on through, have different water content which adds to the natural variation in what you drink, different amounts of drugs (caffeine and alcohol for most people) that affect water intake/output in the body is an issue and so forth. There are extra complications for a woman: changing hormone levels over the course of their regular reproductive cycle can make quite a difference to water retention and hunger levels. Basically: your body's routine does not follow an exact 24 hour cycle - this is why your weekly diet is a lot more predictable than your daily one, over the longer time the natural variances average out. But we do have mechanisms that alter out hunger levels to try make sure things do even out over time. There are things that these mechanisms don't account for though: problems such as diabetes and other illnesses that affect energy absorption and use, and it is generally believed that a high sugar diet "breaks" these systems because they are geared towards slow-ish release foods and the energy in compact food high in small sugars is very quickly either used or stored away (so you have the energy ready for use, but you become hungry because the food is so easy to break down that it has already passed the parts that register hunger). I monitor my intake very closely, having gone (over the last ~30 months) from ~18.5 stone to ~10 and wanting to stay somewhere near there. I weigh myself every day or two but only really watch a fortnightly average as a key value because I know there will be daily variations both that are due to either my routine not being very routine or sometimes are far less intuitively understandable. It is actually easier for athletes because they can measure their extra calorie output with some accuracy, and if you are training a lot then this output is going to be more significant than the random daily variations. Their incoming diet is likely to be far more predictable than that of the man on the street too. I'm not an athlete by anyone's definition but I do exercise "recreationally" these days (mostly running, some strength/tone work, some cycling & walking for fun/exercise not just to suit commuting requirements) and I do notice the results being more predictable in periods when I do quite a bit of that compared to times when I do very little.

ars 11y ago

I see two solutions. You can do nutrition studies on animals that are most like us. And you can study people in structured environments like the military, space, or prison and accurately track what they eat.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
And the best option I think actually seems to be mass surveillance. Just take that somewhat structured environment, where people stay all the time, and surveil the shit out of it. Without telling the subjects. Task a group of people to objectively observe and note what is being eaten and how it affects people's health. A pure observation like this could provide a lot of useful data, that would be free from biases introduced by subjects underreporting things or simply changing their behaviour because they know they're being studied.
- deegles 11y ago
  How about grocery store loyalty cards? A big study could be done by offering everyone a $x gift card if they fill out a survey about their family, get a baseline medical test and promise to get another one in say 1 year. Changes in diet could be induced by mailing them coupons for specific foods and tracking their use.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    An interesting proposal, but I see following problems with it: - You have both zero control and zero objective input on what subjects are actually eating. They can ignore your coupons, they can lie or omit (by simply forgetting about) what they've eaten. They can buy stuff without using loyalty card (and probably will, in different stores - just how many people shop in one and only one store?). - The data would be very imprecise - while individuals would do the medical tests, unless you're targeting singles, their grocery shopping will go towards the household, and you have no idea who ate what. - I'm not confident that mailing them coupons would change their diet, unless you've got yourself either very poor, or very cooperative subject. The outcome I expect is that people would mostly ignore the coupons if they don't feel like eating the thing you want them to. In the end, while interesting, it seems less precise than the current questionnaire/journal/self-reporting based approach.

np422 11y ago

According to the statistic available the number of drowning accidents among children and sale of ice-cream is highly correlated, we must take measures to lower sale of ice-cream, please think of the children! Most of the time a journalist will easily believe a statement like above and rewrite into a newspaper article. And soon thereafter official recommendations and legislation will follow. I'm looking forward to http://nusi.org/ http://nusi.org/ publishing some results, they appear to be intellectual honest.

NoGravitas 11y ago
Drowning accidents and the sale of ice cream probably have a common causal factor -- warm weather. A lot of the correlations in the article are a lot weirder and harder to explain.
plafl 11y ago
I'm always wary of articles that try to support their point by showing some ridiculous correlations. It's very easy to look at thousands of correlations and select the few most ridiculous, ignoring the vast amount of them that maybe make sense. Suddenly it seems like statistics are irrelevant and we cannot trust anything. I suppose that nobody is free from personal bias since even Fisher, yes the great statistician, rejected correlation between smoking and lung cancer as a spurious correlation (look up in Wikipedia)
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > It's very easy to look at thousands of correlations and select the few most ridiculous, ignoring the vast amount of them that maybe make sense. The reality is in fact reverse. Out of thousands of correlations you could pick, only very few actually make sense. It's trivially easy to find - or accidentally stumble upon - a meaningless correlation.
noondip 11y ago
NuSI is straight-up fraud. See http://plantpositive.com/warning-signs-nusi-guys-1/ http://plantpositive.com/warning-signs-nusi-guys-1/

facepalm 11y ago

At least I think nobody advises to increase intake of sugar? Maybe just reducing sugar gets you 99% of the way... The thing about humans is, they manage to live in all sorts of environments. I think the Inuit have no access to vegetables at all, meat only? But other societies probably don't eat meat at all (for example some castes in India, afaik). So I suspect the human digestive system is actually very adaptive. Problems may start if you try to manipulate the signals the digestive system reacts to, as is happening with industrialized, processed food. If you lie to the system, it can not (always) react in a healthy way. (That's my guess, anyway). On the other hand, comparing different societies might yield some valid insights? If a whole country doesn't eat certain foods? Or what about the result that general health declined with the advent of agriculture?

coldnebo 11y ago
I think you have to be careful because there are two things that need to be separated: 1) the human digestive tract is adaptable -- this measures the amount of adaptation the individual is capable of. 2) evolutionary pressure selects individuals who are highly adapted to their environment (I.e. The others simply die off!) -- this measures the adaptations of a population towards diet. Ex: Swedish ability to digest lactose in adults. Asian insulin response to high carb/rice diets. It seems that if we really want to crack this nut, we should be looking at DNA data as well. I.e. This population gets this response with this diet, while that population has a completely different response. And yes, unfortunately adding DNA populations makes all of this research even more complex than it already was.
- facepalm 11y ago
  Absolutely, just because population A does well on some diet doesn't imply everybody does. Actually that is for me often a good heuristic to discard most nutrition advice right away. A lot of recommendations I see include lots of diary products. Yet 16% or more of the (European) population are lactose intolerant (even more in other countries). So that advice simply can't be true, and it seems like a good idea to regard the rest of it with suspicion, too. I guess that at least shows it is not completely hopeless for the individual, some common sense might go a long way. A lot of people are Fructose intolerant, yet the "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" advice won't die. Then again there is a lot of fear mongering about milk going on. But the ability to digest lactose (as an adult) spread like wildfire at some point in time, seems to have had some evolutionary advantage. "my body tells me what I need" doesn't reliably work either, because it might crave for sugar, alcohol and nicotine :-/ Nassim Taleb avoids foods that haven't been eaten by his population for thousands of years, for example Mangoes. Might be too extreme, but worth thinking about. Atm there is a new craze in my country about some new healthy grain from South America. I pass - it seems obvious that people can be healthy without that grain (because people have survived in Europe for millennia), so why risk it? So maybe if Bananas were a new fad I would feel the same way, I only eat them because they were already a fad when I was born.

wanda 11y ago

Nutrition is like SEO: lots of studies, lots of claims, lots of data... but all the claims/conclusions seem to be based on post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning and anecdotal evidence where the true reasons for success were either misunderstood or not known at all. And both fields have a lot of "experts" who all somehow manage to disagree with one another. and then there are some basic/no-brainer principles that do seem to make sense: don't eat loads of sugar, include a <title>.

spooningtamarin 11y ago
This is completely false. Scientific studies, controlled, on nutrition and health are going back at least 30 years, and in these 30 years you can find a huge amount of quality research and quality data. Problem is that no one looks at meta-analyses, no one reports about it. WHO has reports that are sometimes half-assed and clearly * put large food industry * neutral. Just take the newest biggest report on eating processed meat being equivalent to 3-5 cigarettes per day (cancer up by 18%). They did a meta-analysis on 800 articles, and in those articles and conclusions authors clearly state that meat can be substituted by alternatives that do not cause cancer, but WHO decided to skip that and mention that there are health benefits to eating meat (high iron which is not that high compared to plant sources, B12 which of course, cannot be found anywhere except animals and fortified foods). They do the same thing with milk, supplements etc.
- trentmb 11y ago
  > milk Oh god, I go through a gallon of milk a week- what do I need to know?
  - talmand 11y ago
    Current study says it's bad for you. Next study says it's good for you. Next study says it's bad for you. Next study says it's good for you. This study is good because group A paid for it. This study is bad because group B paid for it. This study is good because group B paid for it. This study is bad because group A paid for it. And so on. And so on. And so on. And, of course I'm generalizing.

henrik_w 11y ago

I just finished reading "Why We Get Fat" [1] and was really surprised by it. The research seems quite plausible to me, but the recommendations in terms of not getting fat are not what I have heard as the common advice. The advice in short is: avoid all carbohydrates as much as possible, and eat protein and fat. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259/ http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259/

maxerickson 11y ago
There are multiple fad diets that are popular in the US that boil down to 'low carb'. I often wonder if it isn't anything subtle, just that processed carbohydrates are incredibly energy dense. 100 grams of sugar or flour has twice the calories of 100 grams of beef (prepared bread still has more calories per gram than beef). 100 grams of greens or non starchy vegetables almost doesn't have calories.
- coldpie 11y ago
  I have a tricky time talking to people who subscribe to fad diets. I don't want to discourage people from caring about their health. The fact that they have gone from eating whatever to trying to control their diet is a positive step and I want to encourage them for doing that in the first place. But then there's garbage crap like paleo and "cleanses" that are ridiculous and can be actively harmful. So how do you tell someone their diet is stupid while not insulting them for caring about their diet? Mostly I settle for trying to give them well-written articles by scientists and nutritionists to read, but at the end of the day, I'm not their main source of information and good information gets drowned out in the hours spent on Pinterest. It gets even trickier with diets like gluten-free. The vast majority of people on gluten-free diets do not have any gluten allergy. But, as you said, cutting down carbs would vastly improve the health of most Americans. So, cutting out gluten also cuts down on carbs which leads to a healthy outcome, even though there is actually no reason for them to cut down on gluten itself. So their reason for cutting down on carbs is wrong, but the final effect is good. Is this misconception worth correcting? Can I tell them they don't actually have an allergy and it's OK to have a bagel or a beer if it fits their calorie requirements? Would that be defeating the ultimate goal of improving their health? In the end, mostly I just butt out. Let people do whatever they feel is best to their bodies and I'll continue to do so to mine: "eat food; not too much; mostly plants."

cauthon 11y ago

Lemonade is associated with a positive belief that Crash deserved Best Picture and iced tea is associated with a negative belief that Crash deserved Best Picture. I wonder what the consensus on Crash's Oscar is among Arnold Palmer drinkers.

mokkol 11y ago

This book really made it much clearer for me: http://www.amazon.com/The-Enzyme-Factor-Hiromi-Shinya/dp/0982290039 http://www.amazon.com/The-Enzyme-Factor-Hiromi-Shinya/dp/098... Advise of a doctor called Hiromi Shinya, who studied/observed intestines all his live. He is one of the best in his field and the explanations he gives in his book are really really logic and inspirational. I highly recommend it, it changed my perspective of food. Counting calories never done it for me. Not all calories are not the same. Hiromi Shinya also made it clear that we only think about our outside and not about. The inside and the inside is all what counts to stay healthy and live a long live. You can be thin and extremely unhealthy. It is the inside what counts and we shouldn't exhaust our organs.

jordanpg 11y ago

Putting in a word for common sense, and Pollan's condensed advice: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." I have been astonished at how just not eating quite so much makes a difference.

sangeronimo 11y ago

nutrition/fitness arguments are always so hilariously awful in this website

trowawee 11y ago
TFA: "Most nutrition advice is based on badly-structured or (possibly willfully) misinterpreted studies." TFC: "HERE'S A STUDY THAT PROVES THAT PROTEIN/CARBS/FAT/FIBER/VEGETABLES/VEGEMITE/GUM IS THE DEVIL AND GIVES EVERYONE BRAIN CANCER!"

bmajz 11y ago

It's great that Five Thirty Eight called out the lack of rigor behind these studies. Most of them are indeed shoddy. However, that's not to say that we don't have a pretty good general idea of what's good for you. Here's a pretty well-balanced article on the topic, with this awesome TL;DR: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/upshot/simple-rules-for-healthy-eating.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/upshot/simple-rules-for-h...

HelloMcFly 11y ago
That line by Michael Pollan is the most universally applicable line to any diet. My grandmother had a similar saying: "Beans and greens first, everything else second."

the_economist 11y ago

I can use diet to cause or fix acne in myself or another person in a week. It works every time. People who don't eat western diets don't get heart disease, acne, or many other inflammatory related conditions. Just look at this study Loren Cordain ran in Papua New Guinea: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12472346 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12472346 - 0 incidents of acne in the entire cohort. Pinning down the long term effects of individual nutrients is very difficult, but we know a lot more about the positive and negative effects of diet choices than this article lets on.

Lambdanaut 11y ago
I'm curious(and skeptical), what sort of diet do you change to?
- the_economist 11y ago
  It's pretty extreme. No sugar, no flour, no alcohol, no refined foods in general. No cheap oils (only olive oil). And no caffeine. Basically, the diet Tom Brady eats: http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/2016/01/04/meet-the-chef-who-decides-what-tom-brady-eats-and-what-definitely-doesn/gERAd0pkpmuELDZztIA56K/story.html http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/2016/01/04/me...
brandonmenc 11y ago
Acne is thought to be largely genetic [1], which could explain why no one in that study had it. Anecdotally, I had cystic acne as a teen and was cured after a single cycle of Accutane. It never returned, even though I kept eating the same diet - which included a lot of dairy and a lot of fast food. [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjd.12149/abstract;jsessionid=3A9F532B7ADB09F31B44D85A25CE3811.f02t02 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjd.12149/abstrac...
- the_economist 11y ago
  Sugar is the real culprit when it comes to acne.

hias 11y ago

I counted my calories for a half year and successfully lost 14 kilos. But since I like to feel full and I enjoy eating I only ate foods with low calories/gram ratio. These foods are generell also healthy as well. Calorie-couting definately works, you just have to be honest with yourself and count everything you eat and measure always exact. I recommend you workout a bit while doing this though, I lost not only fat but muscle mass and my daily calories intake my body need went down about 400 calories.

enraged_camel 11y ago
>>But since I like to feel full and I enjoy eating I only ate foods with low calories/gram ratio. These foods are generell also healthy as well. Yes. Berries are great for this, especially blackberries. They have very low sugar compared to other fruits, and high fiber. So they are good for satiety. They go bad relatively quickly though, and tend to be expensive out of season. :)

wmnwmn 11y ago

There's no value in nutrition studies that don't identify an actual physical mechanism for the effect. Virtually all past and present nutrition advice is just superstition. Since we are only just now gaining an understanding of the microscopic mechanisms that actually run the body, we can hope for truly valuable nutrition advice in the future.

justncase80 11y ago

The only diet advice you'll ever need: http://muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/22-ThePhysicsDiet.htm http://muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/22-ThePhysicsDiet.htm