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Coming from a hard science background, I just ignore nutrition studies altogether nowadays. The reproducibility seems even worse than psychology research. Thi
by Xcelerate 8y ago
Coming from a hard science background, I just ignore nutrition studies altogether nowadays. The reproducibility seems even worse than psychology research. This isn't a knock on the researchers themselves — these are hard subjects to make definitive conclusions in — but we do need to at least be able to accurately quantify the uncertainty on the results. It's not acceptable to have so many studies contradicting each other, particularly when the general public is making lifestyle decisions on the basis of the nutrition findings.
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoNutrition research is really hard. You want a good study, you have to take a large population, randomly assign them to two different diets, then make sure they follow those diets, for some long period of time. This is incredibly expensive. One of the ways people have tried to get around this expense is to take a large population and ask them what they have been eating over their lives. This has two major problems that make it almost useless: People don't remember what they actually ate, only what they think they ate. And there are too many co-founding variables. Some people try to be healthy, so they make lots of changes to their lifestyle, and you can't separate out the effects from diet, exercise, stress levels, and everything else people do.