8 ms·

The Problems with Food and Exercise Studies

113 points by eagerToLearn 10y ago

Aelinsaar 10y ago
It's a shock when you try to switch mental gears from reading something like a HEP paper, talking about 3 sigma like a big "Well, it could be interesting, probably not." Then you read a front-page "study" about something involving nutrition and "Five people tested, effect confirmed!! Everyone eat Goji Berries!!" It's mindbogglingly bad, non-science.
- psycr 10y ago
  Depends on the effect size. You probably only need n = 5 for a confident answer to the question "What happens when you are shot in the head?"
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - fullshark 10y ago
    Studies of the form article mentioned helped solidify the link between smoking and cancer also. People are looking for smaller effects than before, and the incentive to publish any and all significant results is just so great that you get tons of noise.
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    Maybe, but even then you have the Gabrielle Giffords, Malala Yousefzais, not to mention Phinneas Gages of the world.
jacques_chester 10y ago
Based on seeing a lot of exercise literature, back when I took an interest: * Small sample sizes * Self-reporting and diary studies * Many uncontrolled variables * Inconsistent interventions (not isocaloric, not volume-equivalent or tonnage-equivalent etc) * Impossibility of performing blind trials to control for placebo
- astazangasta 10y ago
  The whole notion of 'controlled variables' is a ridiculous exercise. At some point we have to cop to the fact that biological interaction is too complex for our shitty parameterization. We're carving mountains with a tack hammer. Maybe there is a better math out there that can manage, but I haven't seen it yet.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    Two things. First, "it's hard and we can't control everything" isn't the same as "it's impossible to control anything". Second, large sample sizes are preferred exactly to help even out the variables that are uncontrolled or, especially, unknown.
    - astazangasta 10y ago
      I'm not saying "it's impossible to control anything", I am complaining about the idea that the world can be represented as a set of variables, that everything can be quantified and broken down into axes, and this parameterization is a useful or helpful way to model the vast interacting complexity of a biological system. If you have ever tried to do PCA on a gene expression dataset, you know my pain. The exercise is futile; you are attempting to produce a description of the world based on a presumption that is wholly inadequate.
      - jacques_chester 10y ago
        My point was that you're introducing the nirvana fallacy: rejecting all attempts because they cannot satisfy a perfect outcome. That it's impossible to perfectly model reality is not news in any scientific field. In any case, I was talking about grossly observable variables such as "does this person exercise at all?", or "do they smoke?" or "do they drink?". You'd be surprised how many studies don't bother to check simple factors like these.
  - throw_away_777 10y ago
    Great points. Often times studies would be much better served collecting more data and looking at interesting correlations than trying and failing to "control" for all the hidden variables and winding up with biased sample sizes of 20 or less.
astazangasta 10y ago
An unmentioned problem is the idea of norms, a moddishness that is sometimes equated with 'science', whatever that is. Humans - species, biology - is not normative, it is diverse. Genetic diversity means two individuals are not just variation from a mean, they are different. The attempt to produce summations of what a human should be is flawed at the root. But we are too attached to Gaussians and standard deviations, so I imagine we'll continue beating our heads against this wall in a vain attempt to create a knowledge that can't exist.
- chewyshine 10y ago
  Doesn't the diversity get represented in the standard deviation of the distribution? The Gaussian distribution is more than just a convenient statistical assumption. Normal and power law distributions seem to be consistent with a remarkable array of human diversity and central tendencies.
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    Yes, the central limit theorem is great because it conveniently masks complexity and lets us represent diversity as outliers on a spectrum. But the basic model of a Gaussian - of a central tendency and deviations from it - doesn't represent the biological reality, that the "central tendency" is only the product of our summary, and that there is no gross general 'generating' principle underlying it. That is - the outliers often differ from the mean in a biological system because they are fundamentally different; they have different underlying biology, and while we might be able to place everybody on the same normal distribution, any conclusions we draw based on that normal won't apply to individuals whose private variation makes them behave differently.
a3n 10y ago
You should probably eat things that are good for you, like fruits, vegetables and protein, and not eat too much that is bad for you, like boxes full of ingredients. And don't worry about coffee and a little bit of alcohol.
- mhurron 10y ago
  > boxes full of ingredients What the hell does this mean?
  - hanniabu 10y ago
    I think he means processed foods, which usually come in boxes and have a never ending list of ingredients which are 50% sugar/syrup/salt and 25% chemicals/unknowns.
    - a3n 10y ago
      Exactly.
    - dagurp 10y ago
      God forbid we eat chemicals
      - a3n 10y ago
        I love chemicals. I try to eat a variety of chemicals every day. But I want to eat the ones that are good for me, not the ones that are designed to keep things in a box from rotting.
  - nerdponx 10y ago
    Probably the box on the label where ingredients are listed.
  - BaronSamedi 10y ago
    Obviously it means: a) get some boxes, b) get some ingredients, c)place said ingredients in the boxes until they reach the top, and d) eat them. Doing this, however, is a poor health decision according to the OP.
tigerBL00D 10y ago
Let's face it, the majority of the population lazily look for simple formulas along the lines of "(Don't) do this, and you'll get that". Media panders to that when drawing conclusions from studies often leaving out most or all of the important details. 99% of folks out there hear of these studies via media and not by reading research papers. Meanwhile most simple formulas of this kind are not worth the energy it takes to draw the pixels given the profound variety of genetic and environmental factors at play. I find the suggestion at the end of this article truly pathetic: "Some medical experts say the problems with lifestyle studies are so overwhelming — and the chance of finding anything reproducible and meaningful so small — that it might be best to just give up on those questions altogether." This is typical big media bullshit pandering to the inert. I mean come on... How about we don't give up on questions? How about we learn to ask the right questions instead? How about we spend more time training and studying our own bodies than we spend reading our Facebook feeds?
- stdbrouw 10y ago
  I don't think you could've written anything more arrogant if you tried. > the majority of the population lazily look for simple formulas Great! After all, it's not that different from "a good programmer is a lazy programmer" and "keep it simple, stupid" -- if at all possible, look for simple solutions and quick fixes. > This is typical big media bullshit pandering to the inert. "Epidemiology--is it time to call it a day?" (http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/1.full http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/1.full), an essay that comes to pretty much the same conclusion as this article, was published in 2001 in the International Journal of Epidemiology. As far as I know the International Journal of Epidemiology is not big media. > I mean come on... How about we don't give up on questions? Rhetorical questions don't count as arguments. > How about we learn to ask the right questions instead? Observational research is intrinsically very, very hard. Statisticians are working at making it more reliable (especially in the context of causal inference: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-...), but there's only so much you can do with data that is full of noise and confounders. > How about we spend more time training and studying our own bodies than we spend reading our Facebook feeds? You don't get to decide other people's priorities in life.
yk 10y ago
I am no expert on non-physics sciences, but recently I am starting to worry that the way we do science today depends on ideal experimental and theoretical conditions.[1] In physics we see 2 sigma events vanish all the time, just last week we have seen the disappearance of the di-photon excess at the LHC. That was an excess that two experiments did see independently to a significance better than p < 5%, with well controlled statistics and well understood experimental set up. Similar the Auger anisotropy [2] was on the cover of Science and did just vanish. Again an effect with p < 5%, using blinded data analysis. My understanding is, that this data analysis is quite a bit better than the standard in other fields, and it does not really work reliably in physics, a field that is to some extend defined by ideal experimental conditions. (The saving grace for physics is, that the Standard Model and General Relativity tie different experiments together. So an experiment in conflict with expectations is immediately in conflict with a lot of other experiments.) To be clear what I am saying, I do not think that other sciences are a waste of time in general. But I think that their methods are too much inspired by physics. I think that we need a much more cautious approach to the scientific method and a lot more robust tools. In a way, it looks to me like building a car by taking inspiration from Formula 1, when the task at hand is crossing rivers and navigating rough terrain. [1] Previously I assumed that it is just complicated, that all I see from studies is the headline "Coffee is/is not healthy" and if one would look into the studies I would find that a better picture is Coffee has some positive and some negative effects. [2] An anisotropy in the arrival directions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.2256 https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.2256
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  2-sigma events should vanish all the time. p < 5% just means that you see it (vanishment) happening less than 1-in-20 times. If you have hundreds of such events, you'll have dozens of vanishings.
  - yk 10y ago
    Yes, exactly. My argument is the opposite, if you reason from evidence that vanishes from time to time, then you will have a very hard time to build a reasonable sound argument.
kbenson 10y ago
The solution is coming. Life-streaming. Don't rely on self reporting, just track everything and pick out the data that's relevant. Software to identify specific markers in the video streams, such as the presence of food, eating, drinking, exercise, etc will make this much more feasible. A multi-year study with thousands of participants is possible. If you aren't worried about perfect data, wait a decade and start consuming what I'm sure will be many public life-streaming feeds.
- hyperpape 10y ago
  That seems...somewhat subject to selection bias.
  - zardo 10y ago
    All population studies are, it needs to be accounted for and minimized, but it doesn't have to be eliminated.
    - hyperpape 10y ago
      With regard to the status quo, you could say: "All population studies are subject to incomplete or inaccurate data. It needs to be accounted for and minimized, but it doesn't have to be eliminated". I guess livestreamers are another data point, so in a perfectly pure framework, they can't actually make your epistemic situation worse, no matter how bad the selection bias is, but I don't see how they're going to make the situation that much better.
      - zardo 10y ago
        I think they do help. For constant dollars, each study has to balance the detail of the data captured against the size of the population included. Anything that allows more detailed data to be gathered from a larger population is helpful. While that population is going to skew wealthy if the study involves the participants making a purchase, that can be counteracted by seeking out under-represented populations and asking and/or incentivising them to participate.
chatmasta 10y ago
I really don't understand why people have so much trouble staying fit. Granted if you're already fat, you have a lot of work to do to get back into shape (I say "back into shape," because nobody is born fat). But the formula for maintaining a healthy body is really pretty simple. - Avoid junk food (if it comes in a vacuum sealed bag, it's junk food) - Avoid sodas, juices, and other high sugar drinks. If you choose to indulge yourself, don't finish the whole thing - the portion is probably too big anyway. - Exercise at least a few times a week. Meaning, break a sweat and keep it up for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour. Eat (or drink) protein afterwards. - Only eat when you're hungry. Stop eating when you're full. - Listen to your body.
- Leszek 10y ago
  > Listen to your body. I hate this advice. When I'm exercising, my body is telling me that I'm tired and that I should give up. When I'm eating chocolate, my body is telling me that it's delicious and I should have more. Sure, there are things that you probably should listen to your body about, but there are just as many that you should ignore and overcome.
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    When I don't lift for a few days my muscles get "itchy" and antsy until I lift again. It's a really uncomfortable feeling to stop if you lift weights regularly.
    - Leszek 10y ago
      Crack addicts also get withdrawal symptoms, it's not necessarily a sign of being in a good situation. I'm glad for you that you're in a position where your urges steer you in a healthy direction, but that doesn't make "listen to your body" always good advice.
    - hippich 10y ago
      i lift 3 times a week (strong lift regimen) - i never had lifting craving in last 3 years. so.... bodies are different :)
known 10y ago
If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed.
pessimizer 10y ago
This is just a problem with capitalism. Food and exercise studies are turned into health products, and a minimum amount of scrutiny results in the widest range of products. Advertising-supported media can only write about those products positively or not at all, because it takes money from them, or may potentially in the future. Rewriting a press release is cheap. There's also the mentality that every aspect of what you consume must be scrutinized intensely, or else you risk destruction. We probably get that from our more adventurous forebears eating poisonous stuff, through religion.
rdmcfee 10y ago
There are two core issues with nutrition science. The first issue is that it's extremely difficult to run a long term controlled study on nutrition. Adherence to diet interventions is difficult to measure and it drops off over time. As a result most nutrition studies are epidemiological cohort studies which are not particularly good at determining causality. The second issue is a question of funding. Diet and exercise interventions are not something that are typically monetized be the pharmaceutical industry. As such there is little private sector funding going into nutrition studies. Couple that with the fact that they're extremely expensive and you have a serious deficit in studies.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  The third issue is the food categories are way too broad and ill-defined. For example "meat" and "fat". There is meat and there is fat that tastes good (incl. hours later, when the gut had a chance to sample it more thoroughly - there's a "brain" and there are taste receptors down there). There's meat and also fat that doesn't (taste good). It's not just the meat/fat itself, it's also the combination with other foods and the preparation that can change completely how my body perceives a food. Since those "feelings" have developed for a reason - we didn't have science to tell us what is good to eat for the 1st million years of humans (and pre-humans) - I dare claim it is significant for ones long-term health. But studies don't make any such distinction. To assume everybody eats what tastes best is a stretch, not just because circumstances in our stressful lives, but also because the brain can only ask for food that it knows, and I remember the stories from that British chef who showed American kids tomatoes and potatoes and they had no clue what that was, they only knew processed food. So how can you seriously leave it at "they ate x amount of meat" when such a person eats "meat" compared to someone who had opportunity to taste "traditional" (pre-industrial) foods and prepares him- or herself a good piece, including a good combo with other stuff and well-prepared? Am I seriously to believe a McDonalds burger's "meat" is correctly put into the same place - as "meat" - as a real meal? Of course, if you acknowledge this difficulty you have to give up on studies because I see now way to reliably collect that information on a scale large enough and long-term enough for a useful study. As the article suggests, actually (to give up going down this path). The story of that guy looking for his car keys under the street light even though he lost them somewhere else comes to mind, in the desire to study this at all this seems to be what happened. It isn't about giving up as some readers took away from that paragraph, it's about choosing another path. For example, get down to understand what's actually happening instead of high-meta-level studies and see if that gives us new ideas. Oh and here's a nice article related to the subject: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8264355/research-study-hype http://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8264355/research-study-hype (I hope nobody tries to count the dots on each side of the plot to use that to draw conclusions... it's an example and incomplete and even if it had dots for every single study could not be used for that purpose)
webwanderings 10y ago
Did NYT just confused the whole lot of the same confused people, by not providing anything of value in this article? Couldn't they have just published a stand-alone headline, which would have served the same purpose?
mr_tristan 10y ago
At least I'm starting to read about inconsistent measurements. I'm always baffled how the only really consistent metric in use is body weight or BMI, which is pretty useless to pay attention to. I mean, you can just starve yourself and your BMI will go down whenever you want to take a test. Where I get pissed off is that health insurance companies will create policy around research based on shitty metrics. They really only seem to be capable of understanding what might help when things go REALLY wrong - as in you require constant drug use or surgery, because hey, they have patient data on that. But in terms of preventive medicine, insurance companies can't figure out what to do. Thus, it's completely random as to what you may or may not get covered for preventative techniques - like doing physical therapy to prevent surgery instead of recover from it. And if you have to pay out of pocket for this sort of stuff, damn... it gets expensive these days.
beat 10y ago
Michael Pollan's writing on "magic ingredients" is far more telling than these studies. People want a magical solution that will allow them to be "healthy" without changing their lifestyle.
scythe 10y ago
As far as I'm aware, there are less than five studies -- total -- which have been carried out on a reasonably representative sample of the population (i.e. not military service-members), which studied diet patterns, and which lasted strictly longer than two years. Most people live much longer than two years, so this would seem to be a systemic weakness. But people lived before peer-reviewed research. They collected information somehow and used it somehow and it worked to varying degrees of success, which has been reflected in the rise and fall of various societies and in the quality of life in those societies. The challenge is not to abandon peer-reviewed research, but to integrate it effectively with other sources of knowledge.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
That is an interesting aritcle but it fails to address the most important question: can we safely eat bacon?

113 points by eagerToLearn 10y ago

It's a shock when you try to switch mental gears from reading something like a HEP paper, talking about 3 sigma like a big "Well, it could be interesting, probably not." Then you read a front-page "study" about something involving nutrition and "Five people tested, effect confirmed!! Everyone eat Goji Berries!!" It's mindbogglingly bad, non-science.

psycr 10y ago
Depends on the effect size. You probably only need n = 5 for a confident answer to the question "What happens when you are shot in the head?"
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- fullshark 10y ago
  Studies of the form article mentioned helped solidify the link between smoking and cancer also. People are looking for smaller effects than before, and the incentive to publish any and all significant results is just so great that you get tons of noise.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Maybe, but even then you have the Gabrielle Giffords, Malala Yousefzais, not to mention Phinneas Gages of the world.

jacques_chester 10y ago

Based on seeing a lot of exercise literature, back when I took an interest: * Small sample sizes * Self-reporting and diary studies * Many uncontrolled variables * Inconsistent interventions (not isocaloric, not volume-equivalent or tonnage-equivalent etc) * Impossibility of performing blind trials to control for placebo

astazangasta 10y ago
The whole notion of 'controlled variables' is a ridiculous exercise. At some point we have to cop to the fact that biological interaction is too complex for our shitty parameterization. We're carving mountains with a tack hammer. Maybe there is a better math out there that can manage, but I haven't seen it yet.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  Two things. First, "it's hard and we can't control everything" isn't the same as "it's impossible to control anything". Second, large sample sizes are preferred exactly to help even out the variables that are uncontrolled or, especially, unknown.
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    I'm not saying "it's impossible to control anything", I am complaining about the idea that the world can be represented as a set of variables, that everything can be quantified and broken down into axes, and this parameterization is a useful or helpful way to model the vast interacting complexity of a biological system. If you have ever tried to do PCA on a gene expression dataset, you know my pain. The exercise is futile; you are attempting to produce a description of the world based on a presumption that is wholly inadequate.
    - jacques_chester 10y ago
      My point was that you're introducing the nirvana fallacy: rejecting all attempts because they cannot satisfy a perfect outcome. That it's impossible to perfectly model reality is not news in any scientific field. In any case, I was talking about grossly observable variables such as "does this person exercise at all?", or "do they smoke?" or "do they drink?". You'd be surprised how many studies don't bother to check simple factors like these.
- throw_away_777 10y ago
  Great points. Often times studies would be much better served collecting more data and looking at interesting correlations than trying and failing to "control" for all the hidden variables and winding up with biased sample sizes of 20 or less.

astazangasta 10y ago

An unmentioned problem is the idea of norms, a moddishness that is sometimes equated with 'science', whatever that is. Humans - species, biology - is not normative, it is diverse. Genetic diversity means two individuals are not just variation from a mean, they are different. The attempt to produce summations of what a human should be is flawed at the root. But we are too attached to Gaussians and standard deviations, so I imagine we'll continue beating our heads against this wall in a vain attempt to create a knowledge that can't exist.

chewyshine 10y ago
Doesn't the diversity get represented in the standard deviation of the distribution? The Gaussian distribution is more than just a convenient statistical assumption. Normal and power law distributions seem to be consistent with a remarkable array of human diversity and central tendencies.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  Yes, the central limit theorem is great because it conveniently masks complexity and lets us represent diversity as outliers on a spectrum. But the basic model of a Gaussian - of a central tendency and deviations from it - doesn't represent the biological reality, that the "central tendency" is only the product of our summary, and that there is no gross general 'generating' principle underlying it. That is - the outliers often differ from the mean in a biological system because they are fundamentally different; they have different underlying biology, and while we might be able to place everybody on the same normal distribution, any conclusions we draw based on that normal won't apply to individuals whose private variation makes them behave differently.

a3n 10y ago

You should probably eat things that are good for you, like fruits, vegetables and protein, and not eat too much that is bad for you, like boxes full of ingredients. And don't worry about coffee and a little bit of alcohol.

mhurron 10y ago
> boxes full of ingredients What the hell does this mean?
- hanniabu 10y ago
  I think he means processed foods, which usually come in boxes and have a never ending list of ingredients which are 50% sugar/syrup/salt and 25% chemicals/unknowns.
  - a3n 10y ago
    Exactly.
  - dagurp 10y ago
    God forbid we eat chemicals
    - a3n 10y ago
      I love chemicals. I try to eat a variety of chemicals every day. But I want to eat the ones that are good for me, not the ones that are designed to keep things in a box from rotting.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  Probably the box on the label where ingredients are listed.
- BaronSamedi 10y ago
  Obviously it means: a) get some boxes, b) get some ingredients, c)place said ingredients in the boxes until they reach the top, and d) eat them. Doing this, however, is a poor health decision according to the OP.

tigerBL00D 10y ago

Let's face it, the majority of the population lazily look for simple formulas along the lines of "(Don't) do this, and you'll get that". Media panders to that when drawing conclusions from studies often leaving out most or all of the important details. 99% of folks out there hear of these studies via media and not by reading research papers. Meanwhile most simple formulas of this kind are not worth the energy it takes to draw the pixels given the profound variety of genetic and environmental factors at play. I find the suggestion at the end of this article truly pathetic: "Some medical experts say the problems with lifestyle studies are so overwhelming — and the chance of finding anything reproducible and meaningful so small — that it might be best to just give up on those questions altogether." This is typical big media bullshit pandering to the inert. I mean come on... How about we don't give up on questions? How about we learn to ask the right questions instead? How about we spend more time training and studying our own bodies than we spend reading our Facebook feeds?

stdbrouw 10y ago
I don't think you could've written anything more arrogant if you tried. > the majority of the population lazily look for simple formulas Great! After all, it's not that different from "a good programmer is a lazy programmer" and "keep it simple, stupid" -- if at all possible, look for simple solutions and quick fixes. > This is typical big media bullshit pandering to the inert. "Epidemiology--is it time to call it a day?" (http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/1.full http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/1.full), an essay that comes to pretty much the same conclusion as this article, was published in 2001 in the International Journal of Epidemiology. As far as I know the International Journal of Epidemiology is not big media. > I mean come on... How about we don't give up on questions? Rhetorical questions don't count as arguments. > How about we learn to ask the right questions instead? Observational research is intrinsically very, very hard. Statisticians are working at making it more reliable (especially in the context of causal inference: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-...), but there's only so much you can do with data that is full of noise and confounders. > How about we spend more time training and studying our own bodies than we spend reading our Facebook feeds? You don't get to decide other people's priorities in life.

yk 10y ago

I am no expert on non-physics sciences, but recently I am starting to worry that the way we do science today depends on ideal experimental and theoretical conditions.[1] In physics we see 2 sigma events vanish all the time, just last week we have seen the disappearance of the di-photon excess at the LHC. That was an excess that two experiments did see independently to a significance better than p < 5%, with well controlled statistics and well understood experimental set up. Similar the Auger anisotropy [2] was on the cover of Science and did just vanish. Again an effect with p < 5%, using blinded data analysis. My understanding is, that this data analysis is quite a bit better than the standard in other fields, and it does not really work reliably in physics, a field that is to some extend defined by ideal experimental conditions. (The saving grace for physics is, that the Standard Model and General Relativity tie different experiments together. So an experiment in conflict with expectations is immediately in conflict with a lot of other experiments.) To be clear what I am saying, I do not think that other sciences are a waste of time in general. But I think that their methods are too much inspired by physics. I think that we need a much more cautious approach to the scientific method and a lot more robust tools. In a way, it looks to me like building a car by taking inspiration from Formula 1, when the task at hand is crossing rivers and navigating rough terrain. [1] Previously I assumed that it is just complicated, that all I see from studies is the headline "Coffee is/is not healthy" and if one would look into the studies I would find that a better picture is Coffee has some positive and some negative effects. [2] An anisotropy in the arrival directions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.2256 https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.2256

jsprogrammer 10y ago
2-sigma events should vanish all the time. p < 5% just means that you see it (vanishment) happening less than 1-in-20 times. If you have hundreds of such events, you'll have dozens of vanishings.
- yk 10y ago
  Yes, exactly. My argument is the opposite, if you reason from evidence that vanishes from time to time, then you will have a very hard time to build a reasonable sound argument.

kbenson 10y ago

The solution is coming. Life-streaming. Don't rely on self reporting, just track everything and pick out the data that's relevant. Software to identify specific markers in the video streams, such as the presence of food, eating, drinking, exercise, etc will make this much more feasible. A multi-year study with thousands of participants is possible. If you aren't worried about perfect data, wait a decade and start consuming what I'm sure will be many public life-streaming feeds.

hyperpape 10y ago
That seems...somewhat subject to selection bias.
- zardo 10y ago
  All population studies are, it needs to be accounted for and minimized, but it doesn't have to be eliminated.
  - hyperpape 10y ago
    With regard to the status quo, you could say: "All population studies are subject to incomplete or inaccurate data. It needs to be accounted for and minimized, but it doesn't have to be eliminated". I guess livestreamers are another data point, so in a perfectly pure framework, they can't actually make your epistemic situation worse, no matter how bad the selection bias is, but I don't see how they're going to make the situation that much better.
    - zardo 10y ago
      I think they do help. For constant dollars, each study has to balance the detail of the data captured against the size of the population included. Anything that allows more detailed data to be gathered from a larger population is helpful. While that population is going to skew wealthy if the study involves the participants making a purchase, that can be counteracted by seeking out under-represented populations and asking and/or incentivising them to participate.

chatmasta 10y ago

I really don't understand why people have so much trouble staying fit. Granted if you're already fat, you have a lot of work to do to get back into shape (I say "back into shape," because nobody is born fat). But the formula for maintaining a healthy body is really pretty simple. - Avoid junk food (if it comes in a vacuum sealed bag, it's junk food) - Avoid sodas, juices, and other high sugar drinks. If you choose to indulge yourself, don't finish the whole thing - the portion is probably too big anyway. - Exercise at least a few times a week. Meaning, break a sweat and keep it up for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour. Eat (or drink) protein afterwards. - Only eat when you're hungry. Stop eating when you're full. - Listen to your body.

Leszek 10y ago
> Listen to your body. I hate this advice. When I'm exercising, my body is telling me that I'm tired and that I should give up. When I'm eating chocolate, my body is telling me that it's delicious and I should have more. Sure, there are things that you probably should listen to your body about, but there are just as many that you should ignore and overcome.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  When I don't lift for a few days my muscles get "itchy" and antsy until I lift again. It's a really uncomfortable feeling to stop if you lift weights regularly.
  - Leszek 10y ago
    Crack addicts also get withdrawal symptoms, it's not necessarily a sign of being in a good situation. I'm glad for you that you're in a position where your urges steer you in a healthy direction, but that doesn't make "listen to your body" always good advice.
  - hippich 10y ago
    i lift 3 times a week (strong lift regimen) - i never had lifting craving in last 3 years. so.... bodies are different :)

known 10y ago

If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper, you are misinformed.

pessimizer 10y ago

This is just a problem with capitalism. Food and exercise studies are turned into health products, and a minimum amount of scrutiny results in the widest range of products. Advertising-supported media can only write about those products positively or not at all, because it takes money from them, or may potentially in the future. Rewriting a press release is cheap. There's also the mentality that every aspect of what you consume must be scrutinized intensely, or else you risk destruction. We probably get that from our more adventurous forebears eating poisonous stuff, through religion.

rdmcfee 10y ago

There are two core issues with nutrition science. The first issue is that it's extremely difficult to run a long term controlled study on nutrition. Adherence to diet interventions is difficult to measure and it drops off over time. As a result most nutrition studies are epidemiological cohort studies which are not particularly good at determining causality. The second issue is a question of funding. Diet and exercise interventions are not something that are typically monetized be the pharmaceutical industry. As such there is little private sector funding going into nutrition studies. Couple that with the fact that they're extremely expensive and you have a serious deficit in studies.

Noseshine 10y ago
The third issue is the food categories are way too broad and ill-defined. For example "meat" and "fat". There is meat and there is fat that tastes good (incl. hours later, when the gut had a chance to sample it more thoroughly - there's a "brain" and there are taste receptors down there). There's meat and also fat that doesn't (taste good). It's not just the meat/fat itself, it's also the combination with other foods and the preparation that can change completely how my body perceives a food. Since those "feelings" have developed for a reason - we didn't have science to tell us what is good to eat for the 1st million years of humans (and pre-humans) - I dare claim it is significant for ones long-term health. But studies don't make any such distinction. To assume everybody eats what tastes best is a stretch, not just because circumstances in our stressful lives, but also because the brain can only ask for food that it knows, and I remember the stories from that British chef who showed American kids tomatoes and potatoes and they had no clue what that was, they only knew processed food. So how can you seriously leave it at "they ate x amount of meat" when such a person eats "meat" compared to someone who had opportunity to taste "traditional" (pre-industrial) foods and prepares him- or herself a good piece, including a good combo with other stuff and well-prepared? Am I seriously to believe a McDonalds burger's "meat" is correctly put into the same place - as "meat" - as a real meal? Of course, if you acknowledge this difficulty you have to give up on studies because I see now way to reliably collect that information on a scale large enough and long-term enough for a useful study. As the article suggests, actually (to give up going down this path). The story of that guy looking for his car keys under the street light even though he lost them somewhere else comes to mind, in the desire to study this at all this seems to be what happened. It isn't about giving up as some readers took away from that paragraph, it's about choosing another path. For example, get down to understand what's actually happening instead of high-meta-level studies and see if that gives us new ideas. Oh and here's a nice article related to the subject: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8264355/research-study-hype http://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8264355/research-study-hype (I hope nobody tries to count the dots on each side of the plot to use that to draw conclusions... it's an example and incomplete and even if it had dots for every single study could not be used for that purpose)

webwanderings 10y ago

Did NYT just confused the whole lot of the same confused people, by not providing anything of value in this article? Couldn't they have just published a stand-alone headline, which would have served the same purpose?

mr_tristan 10y ago

At least I'm starting to read about inconsistent measurements. I'm always baffled how the only really consistent metric in use is body weight or BMI, which is pretty useless to pay attention to. I mean, you can just starve yourself and your BMI will go down whenever you want to take a test. Where I get pissed off is that health insurance companies will create policy around research based on shitty metrics. They really only seem to be capable of understanding what might help when things go REALLY wrong - as in you require constant drug use or surgery, because hey, they have patient data on that. But in terms of preventive medicine, insurance companies can't figure out what to do. Thus, it's completely random as to what you may or may not get covered for preventative techniques - like doing physical therapy to prevent surgery instead of recover from it. And if you have to pay out of pocket for this sort of stuff, damn... it gets expensive these days.

beat 10y ago

Michael Pollan's writing on "magic ingredients" is far more telling than these studies. People want a magical solution that will allow them to be "healthy" without changing their lifestyle.

scythe 10y ago

As far as I'm aware, there are less than five studies -- total -- which have been carried out on a reasonably representative sample of the population (i.e. not military service-members), which studied diet patterns, and which lasted strictly longer than two years. Most people live much longer than two years, so this would seem to be a systemic weakness. But people lived before peer-reviewed research. They collected information somehow and used it somehow and it worked to varying degrees of success, which has been reflected in the rise and fall of various societies and in the quality of life in those societies. The challenge is not to abandon peer-reviewed research, but to integrate it effectively with other sources of knowledge.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

That is an interesting aritcle but it fails to address the most important question: can we safely eat bacon?