You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition

[HuckleB]

We found a link between cabbage and innie bellybuttons, but that doesn’t mean it’s real.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/

"As the new year begins, millions of people are vowing to shape up their eating habits. This usually involves dividing foods into moralistic categories: good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, nutritious/indulgent, slimming/fattening — but which foods belong where depends on whom you ask.

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recently released its latest guidelines, which define a healthy diet as one that emphasizes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or nonfat dairy products, seafood, legumes and nuts while reducing red and processed meat, refined grains, and sugary foods and beverages.1 Some cardiologists recommend a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, the American Diabetes Association gives the nod to both low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine promotes a vegetarian diet. Ask a hard-bodied CrossFit aficionado, and she may champion a “Paleo” diet based on foods our Paleolithic ancestors (supposedly) ate. My colleague Walt Hickey swears by the keto diet.

Who’s right? It’s hard to say. When it comes to nutrition, everyone has an opinion. What no one has is an airtight case. The problem begins with a lack of consensus on what makes a diet healthy. Is the aim to make you slender? To build muscles? To keep your bones strong? Or to prevent heart attacks or cancer or keep dementia at bay? Whatever you’re worried about, there’s no shortage of diets or foods purported to help you. Linking dietary habits and individual foods to health factors is easy — ridiculously so — as you’ll soon see from the little experiment we conducted.

Our foray into nutrition science demonstrated that studies examining how foods influence health are inherently fraught. To show you why, we’re going to take you behind the scenes to see how these studies are done. The first thing you need to know is that nutrition researchers are studying an incredibly difficult problem, because, short of locking people in a room and carefully measuring out all their meals, it’s hard to know exactly what people eat. So nearly all nutrition studies rely on measures of food consumption that require people to remember and report what they ate. The most common of these are food diaries, recall surveys and the food frequency questionnaire, or FFQ.

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A very good read, IMO.

[Journeyman]

1. Mark Twain cautioned against reading health books: "You may die of a misprint." . . .

[HuckleB]

3. Are you referring to the OP?

[REP]

4. Very interesting!

I had no idea recommendations etc were made on such hazy data. The "how many tomatoes" example was particularly interesting; like the author, in the summer I practically mainline fresh tomatoes but I couldn't tell you the last time I ate one nor how many I've eaten in the last six months.

[HuckleB]

6. Compound that with the way the media dramatizes single studies...

... and, yeah, few people know what's best.

[bhikkhu]

5. The basic food pyramid recs have always been good enough for me

...and I'm in my 50's, have maintained a consistently good health my whole life, and still have a job that's fairly physically strenuous. I eat a simple diet based around the old food groups idea, and I really don't think about it much.

Most diet and health schemes are about as likely to be good or bad as any opinion on the internet, I think.

[WinkyDink]

7. My over-arching goal is to avoid diabetes.

[bklyncowgirl]

8. Nutrition is the new religion.

If you want to get up a good argument start talking about diet--especially among educated, upper middle class people. You've got the organic evangelists, the supplement seekers, paleo protestants and the true believers who think that eliminating certain things from your diet will make you stronger, smarter faster all of it faith based and much of it complete nonsense.

So far no one's really improved on the ancient advice--all things in moderation.

It's the moderation that's so tough to live up to of course.