5 ms·

I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition scie

I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that?

village-idiot 8y ago
As best I can tell: 1. There is a ton of money at stake for a ton of actors. Farmers, processors, manufacturers, restaurants and pharma have huge incentives to not change things. 2. From my observation, nutrition scientists tend to suffer from herd mentality more than anticipated, for reasons I'm not certain about (although grant money certainly is part of it). Hell, they will even prosecute their own members who don't conform 100% to the official story, it's nuts.
- opportune 8y ago
  There are cultural and demographic inclinations within academic fields, and I would bet at least some problems with nutrition science stem from a lack of statistical knowledge on behalf of study authors and readers. Plus I feel like really understanding nutrition science would require much more medical/biology training than nutrition scientists typically receive.
chimeracoder 8y ago
> I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that? We're not really in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science - we've actually learned a whole lot in the last century, but we take a lot of those advances for granted because food is such an integral part of our daily lives. That said, nutrition is also much more difficult to study because not only are there ethical concerns that aren't present in a lot of other scientific fields, but there are an incredible number of confounding variables that make it difficult to perform conclusive, properly controlled experiments for anything but the most basic and straightforward hypotheses. And that's all before you get into the issue of genetics and nutritional effects varying across a heterogeneous population.
- TheCowboy 8y ago
  I think you described it well. I'd add that it might feel like we're in some sort of dark ages, but that could stem from a growing awareness where people know more about how much we can't claim to know for certain. That awareness replacing over-confidence might imply things aren't so bleak.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  It's incredibly expensive to take a population, then randomize them to two different diets, then see that they actually follow those diets that you have assigned them to, for any length of time. You can't just observe people after the fact, because people don't remember what they actually ate, and even if they did you don't know what all the confounding variables even are. I'm not sure how this can even get any better than it is.
trophycase 8y ago
The more complex the system, the more difficult science is to perform. Isolating variables is extremely difficult.
jmcmichael 8y ago
A move to capitalist and away from socialist modes of scientific research production in the nutritional field due to neoliberal decimation of research budgets and encroaching business interests both in the funding and dissemination of research relevant to corporate business models.
Retric 8y ago
We have learned a lot about nutrition. Military Rations for example are successfully designed to allow for people to stay reasonably healthy indefinably on them. This is a fairly hard problem with most cultures having failed throughout human history. Vitamin C deficiency is the most well known, but Thiamine deficiency has also killed plenty of people including several of the upper crust in Japan after white rice became more common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency The problem is when we go from survival to optimum you need to look at weak order effects. 0.01% is significant across 7 billion people, but really hard to discover. Further, you encounter trade-offs is 0.01% worse in these 20 things, but 0.01% better in these 30 things what's the importance of each of those things and how does that interact with the 10,000 other chemicals people are eating daily.
- mrob 8y ago
  Military ration design has different priorities than civilian food. Slightly increased risk of heart disease is irrelevant if you're killed in action because you didn't have the energy to carry your gear. Potentially dangerous preservatives are safer than risking the food decaying where resupply is impossible. Military rations have to focus on short term considerations that aren't relevant to people in safer occupations.
- nradov 8y ago
  US military MREs pack in a lot of nutrition, but people who eat them for several days at a time complain they cause terrible constipation due to lack of fiber.
nonbel 8y ago
>"I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that?" Perhaps its just easier for non-specialists to understand the issues surrounding some areas than others, eg nutrition research. A lot of the "advance" could be illusory.
ballenf 8y ago
There is only one explanation for the resistance up to hostility I see against sound advice--willful ignorance. People are so emotionally dependent on food for a feeling of success, happiness and reward that their mind responds to any threats like that of an addict threatened with supply interruption. It's crazy to me how hard it is to switch to a view of food as fuel instead of as a reward. People who readily eat the worst foods on earth would never think of putting bad fuel in their car. With that backdrop, all the food industry needs to do is sew the tiniest amount of confusion and that lets everyone do whatever they want, because "who knows for sure!?!?"
- opportune 8y ago
  Asking people to view food as fuel is akin to asking people to view sex as for procreation. Seems very Puritanical to view the pleasure we receive from food as a problem or distraction. People like to eat. It feels good. There is of course a lot of ignorance about food (and even if you aren’t ignorant it’s still easy to willfully make bad choices) but that doesn’t mean we should dehumanize it. Just like with sex, we should study it and develop a healthy culture for it that balances pleasure and what’s good for us. Also, I’m somewhat convinced myself that the reason poor people tend to be very fat is that food for them provides way more bang-per-buck than anything else at certain income levels. Yeah you may not be able to afford a car or a nice place to live, or healthcare, or education for your kids, but goddamn you can eat some delicious food for relatively cheap. It sucks that poor people get hit hardest by obesity and almost nobody wants to be fat... but at the same time, I feel like trying to decouple food from pleasure would mean depriving poor people of one of the few joys they can afford
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    "Among men, obesity prevalence is generally similar at all income levels, with a tendency to be slightly higher at higher income levels." https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db50.htm#mennn https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db50.htm#mennn
    - zeroego 8y ago
devmunchies 8y ago
There is so much money in the entrenched parties. The animal ag (which promotes high fat diets), the snack industry (which promotes refined fats and carbs). But then the animal ag and snack industries both want cheap corn and soy produced en masse, one to feed to animals, and the other to put into snack foods. One of the few camps that doesn’t have huge lobbying power is organic whole foods or sustainable plant-based foods.
dalore 8y ago
For a good history to see how we got to the state we are at is to have a read of "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz. Here is an article with a summarized version https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-science-of-saturated-fat-a-big-fat-surprise-about-nutrition-9692121.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families... Basically was due to a force of charisma, presidents getting heart attacks and industry funding.
jcutrell 8y ago
Generally speaking, nutritional studies are observational and very difficult to control for confounding variables. Think about it this way: "We want to feed group A organic apples, group B apples that have been doused in insecticide, and then use a group C that isn't fed anything." This is already hard - specifically if people are resistant to eating something they perceive as harmful. But now add in further separation for confounding variables: - Weight - Race - Age - Sex - Other foods you eat - Exercise And everything else that can vary drastically from one person to the next. In order to actually perform this study, you would either need A) a VERY large group of people to observe (who haven't opted in to a controlled study) so you can have statistically significant sub-groups that can be stratified into quartiles or whatever (for example, sedentary, low activity, moderate activity, high activity), Or, B) a fair sized group of people who want to opt in to such a restrictive controlled study. Nutrition is something that typically needs to be studied for decades for things that we don't already have a pretty good idea about (like acute allergies, botulism, those kinds of things). We are very unlikely to have this data until we have MUCH better observational data over the course of someone's life. Maybe we will have these points as people born in the early 00's start to grow up with more tracked data available, but can you tell me how many apples you ate per week in 1997? (Quick edit to clarify some confusing language)

I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that?

village-idiot 8y ago

As best I can tell: 1. There is a ton of money at stake for a ton of actors. Farmers, processors, manufacturers, restaurants and pharma have huge incentives to not change things. 2. From my observation, nutrition scientists tend to suffer from herd mentality more than anticipated, for reasons I'm not certain about (although grant money certainly is part of it). Hell, they will even prosecute their own members who don't conform 100% to the official story, it's nuts.

opportune 8y ago
There are cultural and demographic inclinations within academic fields, and I would bet at least some problems with nutrition science stem from a lack of statistical knowledge on behalf of study authors and readers. Plus I feel like really understanding nutrition science would require much more medical/biology training than nutrition scientists typically receive.

chimeracoder 8y ago

> I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that? We're not really in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science - we've actually learned a whole lot in the last century, but we take a lot of those advances for granted because food is such an integral part of our daily lives. That said, nutrition is also much more difficult to study because not only are there ethical concerns that aren't present in a lot of other scientific fields, but there are an incredible number of confounding variables that make it difficult to perform conclusive, properly controlled experiments for anything but the most basic and straightforward hypotheses. And that's all before you get into the issue of genetics and nutritional effects varying across a heterogeneous population.

TheCowboy 8y ago
I think you described it well. I'd add that it might feel like we're in some sort of dark ages, but that could stem from a growing awareness where people know more about how much we can't claim to know for certain. That awareness replacing over-confidence might imply things aren't so bleak.
amanaplanacanal 8y ago
It's incredibly expensive to take a population, then randomize them to two different diets, then see that they actually follow those diets that you have assigned them to, for any length of time. You can't just observe people after the fact, because people don't remember what they actually ate, and even if they did you don't know what all the confounding variables even are. I'm not sure how this can even get any better than it is.

trophycase 8y ago

The more complex the system, the more difficult science is to perform. Isolating variables is extremely difficult.

jmcmichael 8y ago

A move to capitalist and away from socialist modes of scientific research production in the nutritional field due to neoliberal decimation of research budgets and encroaching business interests both in the funding and dissemination of research relevant to corporate business models.

Retric 8y ago

We have learned a lot about nutrition. Military Rations for example are successfully designed to allow for people to stay reasonably healthy indefinably on them. This is a fairly hard problem with most cultures having failed throughout human history. Vitamin C deficiency is the most well known, but Thiamine deficiency has also killed plenty of people including several of the upper crust in Japan after white rice became more common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency The problem is when we go from survival to optimum you need to look at weak order effects. 0.01% is significant across 7 billion people, but really hard to discover. Further, you encounter trade-offs is 0.01% worse in these 20 things, but 0.01% better in these 30 things what's the importance of each of those things and how does that interact with the 10,000 other chemicals people are eating daily.

mrob 8y ago
Military ration design has different priorities than civilian food. Slightly increased risk of heart disease is irrelevant if you're killed in action because you didn't have the energy to carry your gear. Potentially dangerous preservatives are safer than risking the food decaying where resupply is impossible. Military rations have to focus on short term considerations that aren't relevant to people in safer occupations.
nradov 8y ago
US military MREs pack in a lot of nutrition, but people who eat them for several days at a time complain they cause terrible constipation due to lack of fiber.

nonbel 8y ago

>"I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that?" Perhaps its just easier for non-specialists to understand the issues surrounding some areas than others, eg nutrition research. A lot of the "advance" could be illusory.

ballenf 8y ago

There is only one explanation for the resistance up to hostility I see against sound advice--willful ignorance. People are so emotionally dependent on food for a feeling of success, happiness and reward that their mind responds to any threats like that of an addict threatened with supply interruption. It's crazy to me how hard it is to switch to a view of food as fuel instead of as a reward. People who readily eat the worst foods on earth would never think of putting bad fuel in their car. With that backdrop, all the food industry needs to do is sew the tiniest amount of confusion and that lets everyone do whatever they want, because "who knows for sure!?!?"

opportune 8y ago
Asking people to view food as fuel is akin to asking people to view sex as for procreation. Seems very Puritanical to view the pleasure we receive from food as a problem or distraction. People like to eat. It feels good. There is of course a lot of ignorance about food (and even if you aren’t ignorant it’s still easy to willfully make bad choices) but that doesn’t mean we should dehumanize it. Just like with sex, we should study it and develop a healthy culture for it that balances pleasure and what’s good for us. Also, I’m somewhat convinced myself that the reason poor people tend to be very fat is that food for them provides way more bang-per-buck than anything else at certain income levels. Yeah you may not be able to afford a car or a nice place to live, or healthcare, or education for your kids, but goddamn you can eat some delicious food for relatively cheap. It sucks that poor people get hit hardest by obesity and almost nobody wants to be fat... but at the same time, I feel like trying to decouple food from pleasure would mean depriving poor people of one of the few joys they can afford
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  "Among men, obesity prevalence is generally similar at all income levels, with a tendency to be slightly higher at higher income levels." https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db50.htm#mennn https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db50.htm#mennn
  - zeroego 8y ago

devmunchies 8y ago

There is so much money in the entrenched parties. The animal ag (which promotes high fat diets), the snack industry (which promotes refined fats and carbs). But then the animal ag and snack industries both want cheap corn and soy produced en masse, one to feed to animals, and the other to put into snack foods. One of the few camps that doesn’t have huge lobbying power is organic whole foods or sustainable plant-based foods.

dalore 8y ago

For a good history to see how we got to the state we are at is to have a read of "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz. Here is an article with a summarized version https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-science-of-saturated-fat-a-big-fat-surprise-about-nutrition-9692121.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families... Basically was due to a force of charisma, presidents getting heart attacks and industry funding.

jcutrell 8y ago

Generally speaking, nutritional studies are observational and very difficult to control for confounding variables. Think about it this way: "We want to feed group A organic apples, group B apples that have been doused in insecticide, and then use a group C that isn't fed anything." This is already hard - specifically if people are resistant to eating something they perceive as harmful. But now add in further separation for confounding variables: - Weight - Race - Age - Sex - Other foods you eat - Exercise And everything else that can vary drastically from one person to the next. In order to actually perform this study, you would either need A) a VERY large group of people to observe (who haven't opted in to a controlled study) so you can have statistically significant sub-groups that can be stratified into quartiles or whatever (for example, sedentary, low activity, moderate activity, high activity), Or, B) a fair sized group of people who want to opt in to such a restrictive controlled study. Nutrition is something that typically needs to be studied for decades for things that we don't already have a pretty good idea about (like acute allergies, botulism, those kinds of things). We are very unlikely to have this data until we have MUCH better observational data over the course of someone's life. Maybe we will have these points as people born in the early 00's start to grow up with more tracked data available, but can you tell me how many apples you ate per week in 1997? (Quick edit to clarify some confusing language)