4 ms·

Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing

by wyager 10y ago

Nutrition, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing fad diets, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about what each and every person should eat, except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy". Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a useful dietary recommendation.

wutbrodo 10y ago
"Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. In the 50 years between now and your hypothetical in which nutrition is "solved", advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt.
- wyager 10y ago
  > "Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. > science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. > advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt Much of the advice in the article is too specific and based on weak evidence. For example, the suggestion not to eat much meat; there are huge amounts of research suggesting that eating mostly meat is a very good approach. I'm not going to claim this is true, because as I said, it's actually pretty weak evidence, but there's certainly no good justification to authoritatively claim the opposite.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    > Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. Is this possible in the field of diet, considering the long timespan needed for experimentation, the numerous contributing factors, and the fact that study participants are very often not telling the truth?
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    > I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. Attacking writers (to no disagreement from me) is a pretty odd response to a defense of science's role in society. Science coverage is garbage, but that has approximately nothing to do with your point, nor my response to it. > No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. Oh for the love of God, this is a masterpiece of pedantry. You're mistaking "I assume everyone here is intelligent enough to understand what I'm getting at despite my lack of precision in a brief three-sentence comment" for "I don't understand what I'm talking about". Just because you don't fit the former statement doesn't mean I fit the latter.
- wallace_f 10y ago
  > In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. I think it's a pretty important concept for people to keep in mind that if you're not verifying your guesses with experimentation, you're fundamentally not doing science.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    Unless the general public is doing it for you. People vastly underestimate how thorough some enthusiast communities are.
  - didibus 10y ago
    I disagree. Doing science involves a mix of observation and experimentation. A lot of diet recommendations often do both. They've observed eating habits of healthy people over less healthy people, and then they've experimented by having a bunch of people try the diet, and after some years, they've observed again what was the effects. Some diets don't do that. They're sometimes based on a type of "that makes sense" intuition, like, our ancestors used to eat mostly meat, so we should eat like them. Or, this substance is known to absorb toxins, so obviously eating it will clear your bloodstream of them. These I admit aren't scientific. Though often those intuitive catch phrases are thrown on top of scientific dietary ideas as a way to convince people to it and sell a bunch of books and products.
cup 10y ago
Medicine, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing treatments, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about how each and every person should be treated, except for fairly straightforward things like "cut out a tumour". Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a new, synthetic digestive tract. --------- To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science or don't think the science is moving fast enough for your liking isn't helpful. Science is science. We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too.
- wyager 10y ago
  > To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science What makes you think A) that's my motivation or B) I don't understand the science? I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm well-versed in statistics and hypothesis testing, so I am at least equipped to make general observations about the predictive power of the field. > or don't think the science is moving fast enough When did I ever say anything to that effect? The hard biological sciences are moving extremely quickly, and soon nutrition will be subsumed into computational chemistry like the rest. > Science is science. And some fields of science have very low predictive power, like current nutrition. Do you really put psychology on the same ground as particle physics? > We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too. This is pretty much exactly what I'm saying about nutritionists, but for some reason you appear to be mad at me about it.
  - thanks4it 10y ago
    Statistics is full of p hacking bullshit. You can mislead and lie with stats and stull sound intelligent. You being a case in point. It's funny you mention psychology, they don't accept p-value assholes in their journals any longer. You have a hammer and see nails. Foolish little fuck you are.
- 10y ago
pierrec 10y ago
Sure, nutrition is littered with crackpot theories, voluntarily misleading research funded by corporations, smoke and mirrors, and so on. And if you only look at stuff that hits the news, then yes, things will change drastically every few years, probably forever. That's because people like sensationalism. However, there are reasonable diets that don't make the news, for example the "Mediterranean Diet". While it doesn't come with any extraordinary claims, it seems to have endured with a good reputation from the onset (it was invented in the 70s and first gained popularity in the 90s) (also note that this article awkwardly mentions it in a way that seems to ignore most studies on it, but that's not the point). Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is.
- wyager 10y ago
  > for example the "Mediterranean Diet". The irony here is delicious. You've gotten sucked into yet another evidence-free fad diet, but you're lecturing me on only listening to fad diets. And no, it's not a matter of "only looking at stuff that hits the news"; the FDA and FNS, which should be following strong scientific principles, change their dietary recommendations and rules all the time, without particularly strong evidence for doing so. > Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is. Do you make this claim based on strong evidence, or does this just sound like good Common Sense (tm) to you?
  - novia 10y ago
    The Mediterranean diet has been linked to longer lifespans. http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6674 http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6674 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15452459 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15452459
    - wyager 10y ago
      > The Mediterranean diet has been linked to longer lifespans Did you read anything I wrote? Every single fad diet in the world has multiple scientific papers showing how great it is. (p = 0.05. Nevermind that there were 1000 research projects about this fad diet that didn't get published because they didn't reject the null hypothesis, so who cares. Nevermind that nutrition scientists don't practice good behavior to mitigate the effect of the base rate fallacy on popular subjects.) Almost no scientific fields practice enough discipline to have very high predictive power. Particle physics mitigates base-rate failures by having an extremely high confidence requirement (5 sigma). Even with absolute best practices, it's sometimes not enough. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... Nutrition science is nowhere near best practices.
gibbitz 10y ago
I'm 42 and this is what the USDA has been saying all along with their food pyramids and four food groups and what have you. I think as a whole, nutritionists have always been on the same page, but those selling diets keep changing their opinions. Sure, there has been flip-flopping recently on fats and sugars, but the edict "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" doesn't concern itself with those. I can't recall anyone ever promoting a diet with less vegetables (even the Atkins fad diet known for it's meat and dairy included vegetables) and make sure to overeat at every meal and I highly doubt either of those will ever be considered a good idea (provided the vegetables aren't tainted by radiation or chemicals or the diet's authors aren't overly politicizing GMO or some other arbitrary thing about production). Fad diets are all about selling supplements and books and are indeed snake oil. The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff and that's what this article is really about.
- wyager 10y ago
  > I'm 42 and this is what the USDA has been saying all along with their food pyramids and four food groups and what have you. You are not remembering correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guid... > I think as a whole, nutritionists have always been on the same page, No, they certainly haven't. "Best practices" change all the time. This happened quite recently; http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/06/15/2015-dietary-guidelines.aspx http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/06/1... > but the edict "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" doesn't concern itself with those It also contradicts the recently popularized "keto" diet, which has roughly as much evidence behind it as any other popular dietary recommendation (i.e. not much). Really the only things we can say authoritatively is "if you miss out on certain nutrients, you get sick". Beyond that, we're not really very sure. > The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff Your mistake is in thinking that there's a definitive difference. Almost ever piece of nutritional research available today has an extremely low predictive power. Where you draw the wheat/chaff line is more or less arbitrary. Even what should, ideally, be the most staunchly scientific food-related organizations, the FDA and FNS, change the recommendations all the time because they're not actually using hard science.
dualogy 10y ago
> except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy". Even that's a myth, funnily enough. You don't need ascorbic acid per se, you just need.. ascorbate. With the acid we can synthesize the ascorbate our cells can work with. But we can also eat it directly pre-formed by other herbivores, contained in medium-rare meats or not-cremated-for-hours livers, or soft-boiled egg yolks etc.

by wyager 10y ago

wutbrodo 10y ago

"Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. In the 50 years between now and your hypothetical in which nutrition is "solved", advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt.

wyager 10y ago
> "Authoritative recommendations" aren't the only thing we get out of science. I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. > science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. > advice like Pollan's is a good balance between simple and as effective as we can hope for at this pt Much of the advice in the article is too specific and based on weak evidence. For example, the suggestion not to eat much meat; there are huge amounts of research suggesting that eating mostly meat is a very good approach. I'm not going to claim this is true, because as I said, it's actually pretty weak evidence, but there's certainly no good justification to authoritatively claim the opposite.
- mistermann 10y ago
  > Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. Is this possible in the field of diet, considering the long timespan needed for experimentation, the numerous contributing factors, and the fact that study participants are very often not telling the truth?
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  > I know, but when is the last time you saw a diet recommendation article of the form "Our Bayes factor on kale doing such and such is..."? The only things 99.9% of people pay attention to (or know how to interpret) are authoritative-sounding recommendations, so that's what diet writers write. Attacking writers (to no disagreement from me) is a pretty odd response to a defense of science's role in society. Science coverage is garbage, but that has approximately nothing to do with your point, nor my response to it. > No, I think you actually misunderstand what science can do for us here. Science can give us confidence intervals that let us maximize expected utility given what we know. We don't just assume that the most likely hypothesis is true. Oh for the love of God, this is a masterpiece of pedantry. You're mistaking "I assume everyone here is intelligent enough to understand what I'm getting at despite my lack of precision in a brief three-sentence comment" for "I don't understand what I'm talking about". Just because you don't fit the former statement doesn't mean I fit the latter.
wallace_f 10y ago
> In the absence of the ability to make them, science's job is to attempt to give us a best guess at what the most likely answer to a question is. I think it's a pretty important concept for people to keep in mind that if you're not verifying your guesses with experimentation, you're fundamentally not doing science.
- mistermann 10y ago
  Unless the general public is doing it for you. People vastly underestimate how thorough some enthusiast communities are.
- didibus 10y ago
  I disagree. Doing science involves a mix of observation and experimentation. A lot of diet recommendations often do both. They've observed eating habits of healthy people over less healthy people, and then they've experimented by having a bunch of people try the diet, and after some years, they've observed again what was the effects. Some diets don't do that. They're sometimes based on a type of "that makes sense" intuition, like, our ancestors used to eat mostly meat, so we should eat like them. Or, this substance is known to absorb toxins, so obviously eating it will clear your bloodstream of them. These I admit aren't scientific. Though often those intuitive catch phrases are thrown on top of scientific dietary ideas as a way to convince people to it and sell a bunch of books and products.

cup 10y ago

Medicine, as a field, is mostly quackery and bullshit. There's a reason the advice changes drastically every few years, and at any time there are 10 competing treatments, each apparently supported by some number of reputable scientific authorities. We do not have the predictive power at this time to make authoritative recommendations about how each and every person should be treated, except for fairly straightforward things like "cut out a tumour". Check again 50 years or so. Maybe by then you can walk into a medical clinic, get a DNA and gut ecosystem analysis, and walk out with a new, synthetic digestive tract. --------- To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science or don't think the science is moving fast enough for your liking isn't helpful. Science is science. We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too.

wyager 10y ago
> To shit all over nutritionists because you don't understand the science What makes you think A) that's my motivation or B) I don't understand the science? I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm well-versed in statistics and hypothesis testing, so I am at least equipped to make general observations about the predictive power of the field. > or don't think the science is moving fast enough When did I ever say anything to that effect? The hard biological sciences are moving extremely quickly, and soon nutrition will be subsumed into computational chemistry like the rest. > Science is science. And some fields of science have very low predictive power, like current nutrition. Do you really put psychology on the same ground as particle physics? > We scoff at the shamans of last centuries, and in a few centuries from now we'll be scoffed at too. This is pretty much exactly what I'm saying about nutritionists, but for some reason you appear to be mad at me about it.
- thanks4it 10y ago
  Statistics is full of p hacking bullshit. You can mislead and lie with stats and stull sound intelligent. You being a case in point. It's funny you mention psychology, they don't accept p-value assholes in their journals any longer. You have a hammer and see nails. Foolish little fuck you are.
10y ago

pierrec 10y ago

Sure, nutrition is littered with crackpot theories, voluntarily misleading research funded by corporations, smoke and mirrors, and so on. And if you only look at stuff that hits the news, then yes, things will change drastically every few years, probably forever. That's because people like sensationalism. However, there are reasonable diets that don't make the news, for example the "Mediterranean Diet". While it doesn't come with any extraordinary claims, it seems to have endured with a good reputation from the onset (it was invented in the 70s and first gained popularity in the 90s) (also note that this article awkwardly mentions it in a way that seems to ignore most studies on it, but that's not the point). Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is.

wyager 10y ago
> for example the "Mediterranean Diet". The irony here is delicious. You've gotten sucked into yet another evidence-free fad diet, but you're lecturing me on only listening to fad diets. And no, it's not a matter of "only looking at stuff that hits the news"; the FDA and FNS, which should be following strong scientific principles, change their dietary recommendations and rules all the time, without particularly strong evidence for doing so. > Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is. Do you make this claim based on strong evidence, or does this just sound like good Common Sense (tm) to you?
- novia 10y ago
  The Mediterranean diet has been linked to longer lifespans. http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6674 http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6674 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15452459 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15452459
  - wyager 10y ago
    > The Mediterranean diet has been linked to longer lifespans Did you read anything I wrote? Every single fad diet in the world has multiple scientific papers showing how great it is. (p = 0.05. Nevermind that there were 1000 research projects about this fad diet that didn't get published because they didn't reject the null hypothesis, so who cares. Nevermind that nutrition scientists don't practice good behavior to mitigate the effect of the base rate fallacy on popular subjects.) Almost no scientific fields practice enough discipline to have very high predictive power. Particle physics mitigates base-rate failures by having an extremely high confidence requirement (5 sigma). Even with absolute best practices, it's sometimes not enough. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... Nutrition science is nowhere near best practices.

gibbitz 10y ago

I'm 42 and this is what the USDA has been saying all along with their food pyramids and four food groups and what have you. I think as a whole, nutritionists have always been on the same page, but those selling diets keep changing their opinions. Sure, there has been flip-flopping recently on fats and sugars, but the edict "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" doesn't concern itself with those. I can't recall anyone ever promoting a diet with less vegetables (even the Atkins fad diet known for it's meat and dairy included vegetables) and make sure to overeat at every meal and I highly doubt either of those will ever be considered a good idea (provided the vegetables aren't tainted by radiation or chemicals or the diet's authors aren't overly politicizing GMO or some other arbitrary thing about production). Fad diets are all about selling supplements and books and are indeed snake oil. The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff and that's what this article is really about.

wyager 10y ago
> I'm 42 and this is what the USDA has been saying all along with their food pyramids and four food groups and what have you. You are not remembering correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guid... > I think as a whole, nutritionists have always been on the same page, No, they certainly haven't. "Best practices" change all the time. This happened quite recently; http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/06/15/2015-dietary-guidelines.aspx http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/06/1... > but the edict "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" doesn't concern itself with those It also contradicts the recently popularized "keto" diet, which has roughly as much evidence behind it as any other popular dietary recommendation (i.e. not much). Really the only things we can say authoritatively is "if you miss out on certain nutrients, you get sick". Beyond that, we're not really very sure. > The problem is separating the wheat from the chaff Your mistake is in thinking that there's a definitive difference. Almost ever piece of nutritional research available today has an extremely low predictive power. Where you draw the wheat/chaff line is more or less arbitrary. Even what should, ideally, be the most staunchly scientific food-related organizations, the FDA and FNS, change the recommendations all the time because they're not actually using hard science.

dualogy 10y ago

> except for fairly straightforward things like "eat vitamin C or you will get scurvy". Even that's a myth, funnily enough. You don't need ascorbic acid per se, you just need.. ascorbate. With the acid we can synthesize the ascorbate our cells can work with. But we can also eat it directly pre-formed by other herbivores, contained in medium-rare meats or not-cremated-for-hours livers, or soft-boiled egg yolks etc.