
“Joy of Cooking” versus the Food Scientist - elsherbini
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/the-strange-uplifting-tale-of-joy-of-cooking-versus-the-food-scientist
======
tahw
It's kinda amazing that Wansink has so much reach when his work has been the
subject of an upsetting amount of retractions:
[https://retractionwatch.com/2017/12/28/another-retraction-
ap...](https://retractionwatch.com/2017/12/28/another-retraction-appear-
cornell-food-scientist-brian-wansink/)

~~~
llimllib
> It's kinda amazing that Wansink has so much reach

it's kind of amazing that he has a job

~~~
pjc50
Research metrics measure quantity, not quality :(

~~~
conistonwater
I don't see how that works, retractions hurt quantity too, don't they?

~~~
coldtea
Nope, the publicity is still there.

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jwilk
> his famous “Bottomless Bowls” study concluded that people will eat soup
> indefinitely if their supply is constantly replenished.

Huh? That's not what the study concluded.

 _Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more
soup […] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming
73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive
themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls._

Source:
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/oby.2005.12](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/oby.2005.12)

~~~
pbreit
Perhaps not “indefinitely” but the description doesn’t seem unreasonable.

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jsonne
Tl;dr

1\. Dishes with the same name are conflated despite being completely
different.

2\. Many dishes don't have a serving size they simply yield things like "1
cake".

3\. The researcher choose a particularly small sample size (18 out of ~4500)

As a cooking enthusiast I find it frustrating that a researcher forces a
narrative that home cooked meals are the problem when the reality is that all
the fast an processed foods we have today are much more likely the culprit of
obesity. We need to be encouraging people to cook for themselves with fresh
ingredients and not publishing dubious studies that suggest to do the
opposite.

~~~
vkou
'Fresh ingredients' are not the problem, slathering everything in oil and
butter is. People do that in home-cooking too, because it is the easiest way
to make things taste delicious.

It really doesn't matter that your potatoes have been sitting in the fridge
for two weeks, or that your steak's been in the freezer for a month, or that
heaven forbid, your onions did not magically arrive from a farmer's market to
your plate. The problem is that you fried your potatoes in half a cup of
butter, and that you're eating steak.

~~~
aidenn0
Per-capita butter consumption in the US peaked in 1911, so we've all gotten
slimmer since then /s.

More seriously: correlation is not the same as causation, but one of the
obvious correlated changes is the increase in consumption of sugary beverages:
soft-drinks, fruit juices &c.

~~~
bluedino
What’s interesting is my parents and their parents before them, had multiple
slices of white bread+butter and glasses of whole milk with almost every meal.
It was cheap and filling. And they were thinner than we were.

~~~
kaennar
I've got a working theory that the problem isn't necessarily just in how we've
changed eating, but in what we do in our free time.

I don't know about your parents, but when I look at what was done for free
time when my grandparents(born ~1930s) and my parents (born in the 1950s) did
in their free time vs what my friends and I did I can't help but see a
significant difference in the time spent active. I'm not just talking about
going out to ride a bike/play basketball with my friends, but later in life.
When my grandfather went to work, school, and even to a bar he always walked
and my father had a similar relationship with mobility during his early to
teen years. Of course that changed when they both were old enough to own a
car, but for both of them that wasn't until they're late teens.

Combine that with the only entertainment being other places or outside you
have a populace who expends significantly more calories every day than my
generation (Millenial).

As time progresses I think you might see parents from the earlier generations
feeding their kids at the level they were fed as kids not recognizing that
little Billy watches youtube for 3 hours after finishing his homework instead
of going and playing basketball with Tuk-Tuk leading to a daily calorie
surplus. Over time a daily intake of +200 calories can easily add up to a
significant amount of weight.

I don't have any data to support this other than my anecdotal story and how I
approached weight loss (by decreasing intake and increasing passive/everyday
calory burn rate), but I think it'd be a cool thing to see studied.

~~~
emodendroket
You have to do a really pretty extreme amount of exercise to burn off a
hamburger.

~~~
kaennar
You're definitely right, but 200 excess calories a day is 74,000 a year which
can translate to 21 lbs a year in weight gain. It doesn't take much to get fat
over a few years with a calorie surplus like that.

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ballenf
[https://nutritionfacts.org](https://nutritionfacts.org) has some of the most
understandable analyses of published food and nutrition research. Really well
done. I use just by searching an ingredient or topic of interest and see
whether he's covered it. Then compare with other sources, of course.

He'll often point out the conflicts of interest behind the funding of various
studies as well as analyzing them on their face.

~~~
saosebastiao
There is an obvious vegan bias from anything by Michal Greger. In
nutritionfacts.org, it is blatantly obvious cherry picking and editorial bias.
For example, he goes through great lengths to show which studies are funded by
the various animal product industries when they contradict his viewpoint, but
makes no such effort for studies on plant-based foods. He also has a habit of
highly weighting small sample or small effect studies that have never been
replicated when they agree with his viewpoint, but requiring much higher rigor
when contradicting it.

[https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-
illnes...](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illness-
curable-by-veganism/)

~~~
spodek
> _but makes no such effort for studies on plant-based foods_

. . . specifically _whole_ plant-based foods. He describes the health problems
of hydrogenated oils, sugar, and products made from them.

Is there a whole plant based food industry funding studies on broccoli and
collard greens? If not, is he biased or simply stating what his research
implies?

~~~
saosebastiao
Yes there is. Almost every major class of produce has an industry association
(or several) which promote the interests of their industry, including funding
research. In fact, a family member of mind sits on the board of two such
associations in California, one for peach growers and one for tomato growers,
both of which have funded tons of research out of UC Davis.

That isn't to say that the research is flawed, but somehow Greger only sees
this funding mechanism to be fundamentally bad when they contradict his
predetermined conclusion...he conveniently doesn't see any reason to question
a study on kale funded by the kale industry.

And yes, Greger is biased. His opinions start with the premise that
vegan==good and anything else is bad, and he works backward from there to
shape a view of research that bolsters that premise. It's no different than
Mormon scientists attempting to prove that coffee is bad for you, or Muslim
scientists that attempt to prove that pork is bad for you. The idea that
humans shouldn't eat animals or animal products has a valid philosophical
foundation, and while a vegan diet is likely far more healthy than the
_average_ diet, editorializing the science to attempt to prove _nutritional
superiority_ of that philosophy is irresponsible pseudoscience.

~~~
emodendroket
> It's no different than Mormon scientists attempting to prove that coffee is
> bad for you, or Muslim scientists that attempt to prove that pork is bad for
> you.

Assuming the proper procedures are observed I don't think I see something
wrong _in principle_ with these examples. Certainly if they're massaging the
data we're talking about something different.

~~~
coldtea
> _Assuming the proper procedures are observed I don 't think I see something
> wrong in principle with these examples. Certainly if they're massaging the
> data we're talking about something different._

Already "trying to probe X" is a bias. And if you have a religious or monetary
interest on top, you shouldn't be doing such research in the first place.

Even if you intend to follow all correct procedures, your prior beliefs might
still affect your results subconsciously.

~~~
emodendroket
Everybody has some kind of bias. Should a scientist be barred from studying
greenhouse gas emissions if he is a known advocate of curtailment of fossil
fuels? If not, why is that different?

~~~
coldtea
> _Should a scientist be barred from studying greenhouse gas emissions if he
> is a known advocate of curtailment of fossil fuels?_

Probably.

> _If not, why is that different?_

It's not.

(Now, sure, they could do it. In fact, they do do it. It's not like my opinion
is law. That said, historically, researchers with some personal bias had all
kinds of problems related to that in their research -- many examples).

~~~
emodendroket
Clearly we're seeing some real-world issues with the actual practice of
science, but the concept is that if researchers are carrying it out properly
it doesn't matter what their personal beliefs are. You start out with a
hypothesis, design an experiment, and it either proves you right or wrong. I
don't think it's necessary or even desirable to start interrogating beliefs
and only selecting scientists we somehow judge completely unbiased; if we
followed that to extremes we'd end up with a case where the same scientist
could not even continue studying the same subject.

~~~
coldtea
> _but the concept is that if researchers are carrying it out properly it
> doesn 't matter what their personal beliefs are. You start out with a
> hypothesis, design an experiment, and it either proves you right or wrong._

Yeah, but note how this presupposes that its equally easy to "carry it out
properly" in either case.

Whereas what I say is that

(a) it's less likely for biased researchers to carry their research out
properly (I say less likely, not impossible).

(b) so for that, we should try to have less research from biased researchers

(That's because I don't think that "(c) biased researchers should try more to
handle their research properly" is an option -- because of how bias works,
biased researchers will always be more prone to not handling their research
properly).

~~~
emodendroket
It strikes me that there is a crisis of rigor more generally. I don't think
targeting religious believers would fix all the problems.

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neonate
[http://archive.is/VsIV7](http://archive.is/VsIV7) works for me.

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628C6l0
> (When my parents’ ragged copy of the 1964 edition succumbed to water damage
> a few years ago, my mother delivered the news as if a relative had died.)

I'm willing to bet my life that the author has taken liberties with this
"delivered the news as if a relative had died" part. I bet if there still
exist actual record (say an email) of the delivery that it would be something
he wouldn't want us to see. It's a small lie, sure, but it's so unpleasant. In
an article whose supposed topic is honesty no less.

~~~
emodendroket
Beep boop does not compute

