
The complications of nutrition science - prostoalex
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/10760622/nutrition-science-complicated
======
stevebmark
This was fully covered in "In Defense of Food" \- good intro read for
nutrition. Read that, not Vox, which is rife with strange opinions, like
"overeating" being the cause of modern disease? You damn nutritional science
then come up with your own solution to everyone's problem, not based in
evidence? Neat.

It's oversimplifying to say the only studies nutritional science can use are
observational ones. There are plenty of high quality, controlled studies on
specific aspects of nutrition. We learn from those. That's also not to say
that observational studies are all bad. They can be useful for determining
when things _don 't_ work and aligning controlled evidence. The fact that
nutrition is a hard problem doesn't mean it's not a real science.

TL;DR Learn who you can trust on nutrition (Vox is not a good start)

~~~
jjoonathan
Isn't "In Defense of Food" the one that tries to alter the definition of
"food" until it no longer encompasses many of the unhealthy things we eat?
(EDIT: yes, yes it is.)

I originally dismissed it without a second thought because I associate that
sort of puerile silliness with... well, things other than science. But now
you're saying it gives a solid overview of nutrition science and I can't help
but wonder.

> Vox is not a good start

Yeah, but why _is_ "In Defense of Food" a good start? The author is a
professor of journalism and the wiki page links to an opinion piece by a
professor of nutrition titled "'In Defense of Food' is short on science,"
which is precisely what I'd expect from a professor of journalism and from
someone who tries to redefine what food means. Which puts me back in square 1
of not knowing where to start.

~~~
stevebmark
It's a good start because it's an unbiased, well researched book that's not
alarmist / linkbait like "Why (almost) everything you know about food is
wrong."

------
jernfrost
Learning about diets and food is also terribly difficult because the internet
and books are so full of people who are so dead certain about their pseudo
science. There is so much emotion attached to food that getting an objective
rational opinion on anything food related is next to impossible. Personally I
like the Soylent creators take on it. He seems extremely focused on figuring
out the objective truths and ignore all the wishy washy emotional bullshit.

And also with so many eating exclusively the soylent mixture which is easy to
control what goes into, they got an excellent opportunity to study many
hypothesis about food. E.g. how important is it to eat "live fresh food" vs
just getting the micro nutrients in the right mix.

~~~
MCRed
There are diet specific versions of soylent, now:
[https://www.thebairs.net/product-
category/ketochow/](https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/)

here is the recipe: [https://diy.soylent.com/recipes/keto-chow-104-master-
rich-ch...](https://diy.soylent.com/recipes/keto-chow-104-master-rich-
chocolate)

Its true that its hard not to sound like an evangelist when you've lost
weight-- but it's not pseudo science when there are studies that support the
hypothesis (of course a lot of diets are fad diets and are pseudo science).
The thing is its hard to tell the pseudo science from the real science.

Personally, in my experiment, I'm going to try adding Keto Chow to my diet
over the next couple of months and see how I feel about it.

~~~
axlprose
You know the dogma is bad when even an innocent comment like this gets
downvoted.

While I think the term 'pseudoscience' gets thrown around way too loosely
these days, it's no secret that the science surrounding nutrition is a
convoluted mess, with various peer reviewed studies showing seemingly
conflicting results.

------
deegles
There is a really low bar for human nutrition in the short term. Depending on
body fat, a person can go many weeks without eating _anything_ , so a juice
"cleanse" will seem to work, low-carb will seem to work, high-carb low-fat
will seem to work too, vegan, paleo, etc. Nutritional deficiencies might not
develop for years!

~~~
MCRed
Low carb for 8 months, so I think I'm beyond the short term measure. My
bloodwork is better now than before. I can't imagine what nutrition I'm being
deficient in, and the things that are potential issues I already take
supplements (and since there's not a lot of risk in vitamins I take more than
I probably need and for more types of vitamins than I need.)

Of course this is anecdote and it gets to the key problem the article is
addressing-- there's no controlled group of statistically significant size who
are all eating the same diet for decades.

When I hit my target weight I'll go into a maintenance mode anyway hat will
include more carbs. I've done this twice- once when I was moving and once over
christmas where I didn't want to be on the diet and increased carbs. I was
able to keep my weight relatively flat.

But there are studies where people do this diet-- not just the scores of
anecdotes on reddit/r/keto- but actual studies. And of course self reporting
is not ideal, but I saw a meta study of a variety of diets that seemed to
indicate the more low carb/high fat you went the more effective you were
(there is a spectrum- keto, zero-carb, atkins, protien power, pescatarian
diets, etc.)

The practical thing is, this diet not only caused me to lose weight ,but
totally changed my relationship with food-- I'm not longer hungry. I eat as
much as I want so long as I keep carbs under 20 a day (and really I usually
hit less than 10 known carbs, often zero known carbs, but carbs slip in to all
kinds of things, like cheese which should be no carbs has some, etc.)
Sometimes I forget to eat meals. When I go off the diet and eat carbs, I find
myself hungry soon after eating.

This change in my relationship with food and no longer being hungry indicates
to me that part of the cause of my previous over eating is the carbs causing
hunger. This points to it not being me starving myself, but an orientation
towards food, or types of food.

Which I think is hormonal. Since many people report similar effects, and it is
reproducible, there's room for real science there.

~~~
rebelidealist
If low carb is working so well for you, why are you adding more carbs? Seems
like people rave about ketonic diets but don't want to be on it for the long
term.

~~~
great_kraken
It flies in the face of modern food culture, and it's a difficult decision
socially. I think this drives a lot of people. That, and they're unable to
remove their associations of "how normal people eat" and they feel a lust to
consume sugars / complex carbohydrates again. However, the ones that don't
start eating more have much better results long-term. You can't get fat again
if you don't go back to eating that which got you fat in the first place.

~~~
DrScump

      it's a difficult decision socially
    

This derails a number of people. Eating keto often means eating separate foods
altogether from your family/peers, and your choices when eating out become
limited and/or disproportionately expensive[0]. It also means that you are
often put in a role of educating people (or trying to) about what you are
doing, and why, and that can also mean overcoming skeptics.

Generally, however, after a few months of showing continued positive results,
the skepticism turns more to curiosity... and you find people _coming to you
for dietary advice_ and reference material.

[0] some restaurants will work with you on this, and it never hurts to ask.
For example, I've eaten at multiple diners where they would make a larger
omelet in lieu of potatoes and toast.

------
martinpw
Interesting that the cure for scurvy is used as the example of the first
clinical trial. The story is an instructive one, since the real reason for the
cure was not understood, leading to the cure being lost for ~150 years, due to
a variety of bad assumptions, eg that it was the acidity of the fruit that was
preventing scurvy. This lead to lemons being replaced with limes (that had far
less vitamin C but were more acidic) because they could be sourced from within
the British Empire rather than outside.

Long article here:

[http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm](http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm)

and shorter summary of above here:

[https://lonechemist.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/82/](https://lonechemist.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/82/)

------
sinamdar
PG referenced/tweeted a quote by someone "Eat food, not too much, mostly
plants". That sums things up pretty well.

~~~
sandmansandine
That would be Michael Pollan[0]

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/In-Defense-Food-Eaters-
Manifesto/dp/01...](http://www.amazon.com/In-Defense-Food-Eaters-
Manifesto/dp/0143114964)

~~~
Gibbon1
The tl'dr: Eat actual food.

------
danblick
This article seems to suggest science is hopeless when we can't conduct
randomized controlled trials. I don't think that's fair: the methods used in
econometrics for learning from quasi-experiments (e.g. natural experiments,
regression discontinuity) seem like they would be perfectly good for studying
nutrition too.

~~~
lnufnu
I really have respect for the work of Weston A. Price. Although his work seems
to be discounted and too fringe for a lot of people, I have learned a lot
through his Foundation about nutrition as well as practices like culturing
foods, soaking grains, making broth.

He was a dentist who started looking into the relationship between diet and
teeth in the early 1900s. He decided to do a series of ethnographic nutrition
studies in villages in Switzerland, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides,
Eskimos and Indians of North America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea
Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori and the
Indians of South America during the 1930s and find out what common
denominators they had in their diets that contributed to their great teeth and
good health. He published these in his book, Nutrition and Physical
Degeneration.

I'm not exactly sure why his studies are neglected, but I agree that it's
possible to learn about nutrition using other methods.

------
qwtel
Via negativa: Avoid what is most likely bad (food processed by industry,
sodas, excess sugar, excess salt, trans fat and food blogs). Beyond that there
isn't too much you can do.

~~~
noondip
So avoid all animal products, then? Trans fat are found in all of them.

~~~
DrScump
This is the _third time in a month_ (that I've noticed) that noondip has
repeated this falsehood _knowing_ that it is false.

TL;DR: dairy products have small amounts of naturally-occurring transfat that
have no established adverse effects, while meats have essentially none.

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10858482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10858482)
for the previous example of refutation (and it has a link to the one before
that, as well as references). The one reference he posts there refers to
dairy, _not meat_.

~~~
noondip
Have a look at what the National Academy of Sciences - the prestigious and
nonpartisan non-profit scientific community in the country - has to say about
Trans Fat:

> Trans fatty acids are not essential and provide no known benefit to human
> health. Therefore, no AI or RDA is set. As with saturated fatty acids, there
> is a positive linear trend between trans fatty acid intake and LDL
> cholesterol concentration, and therefore increased risk of CHD. A UL is not
> set for trans fatty acids because any incremental increase in trans fatty
> acid intake increases CHD risk.

I know you disagree, but so far you've only cited one dairy industry-funded
paper to support the conclusion TFAs are safe - even beneficial - for human
consumption. I honestly want to know whether you have more compelling
evidence, or are just defending unhealthy fat for some ideological reason.

------
Outdoorsman
I think it's helpful to keep in mind, when deciding on our "individual"
takeaways from this article, that our DNA requires nothing more of us than
that we stay alive long enough to reproduce and pass it along...

The earliest humans likely ate whatever was immediately available to stay
alive...some survived doing that and they became your ancestors...some died
doing that, their DNA with them...

If you doubt that just observe babies when they first become ambulatory (start
crawling), and come to your own conclusions--babies put a great number of
things into their mouths to "try it out"...

We think about past humans, and ponder the dietary choices the fossil record
indicates they appear to have made...

Is a diet that kept them alive long enough to reproduce a diet that has the
potential to keep us feeling well into our 30s-50s, or to keep us alive well
into our 60s-90s...?

------
noondip
I've really enjoyed learning about nutrition science through
[http://nutritionfacts.org](http://nutritionfacts.org), especially in videos
about the conflict of interest present in modern research.

~~~
saosebastiao
Conflicts of interest like the one that Michal Greger has himself, as an
employee of the Humane Society? He literally gets paid to put an MD stamp of
approval on anything vegan and attempting to discredit anything that is not
vegan.

Have you actually critically read anything from this bullshit factory?

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

~~~
noondip
Here, take a look at this - [http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2013/02/harriet-
halls-critique...](http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2013/02/harriet-halls-
critique-of-gregers.html)

I'm simply satisfied with the format studies are presented in his videos (they
are always directly cited). I often read them for myself and usually agree
with the conclusion, but not always.

------
dschiptsov
Do they found how to factor out air, water, climate and bacteria or realized
that a body continuously adapts to behavioral patterns and environmental
conditions? Or that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and naive studies on
already overweight US student subjects does not replicate anywhere in less
developed world?

------
themagician
I just wish people would stop acting like food was "designed" for us.

~~~
danieltillett
Actually it is more the other way around. The last 6-8000 years or so we have
been genetically adapting to our historically poor diet. The average peasant
has been eating nothing much more than a very limited range of grains and most
of us have become pretty well adapted to this diet. This is one of the ironies
of the palo diet craze.

~~~
Almaviva
8000 years is basically an eye blink, for evolution and natural selection to
select a whole population (through death and differences in reproduction) with
those who are thoroughly well adapted.

Yes, humans might be better off for it than we were 8000 years ago, but that's
necessarily not saying much.

~~~
danieltillett
3000 years is more than enough in humans. The lactase persistence mutation in
Europeans basically went from 0% of the population to near 100% in Northern
Europeans in 3000 years. This was totally due to a change in diet when adults
started drinking animal milk.

Evolution speed is proportional to the population size as the rate of new
genes appearing is directly proportional to the number of individuals while
the speed a gene spreads through the population is proportional to the log10
of the population size. If you increase the population 1000 fold then you get
1000 times the rate of evolution. Because the human population has grown so
much since the invention of agriculture the rate of human evolution over the
last 10,000 years is more than than the preceding million years.

~~~
Almaviva
There's a difference between some evolution and being totally ideally adapted.
Even lactase persistence hasn't spread though the whole human population.

Heck, we haven't even totally adapted to walking on two legs yet.

(Side note, you don't need to say log10, all logs are proportional to each
other by definition.)

~~~
danieltillett
The lactase gene has not spread through the human population as only a small
percentage of the human population drinks milk as an adult. The human
population is full of genes that have only partly spread through the
population - it is actually a huge problem when studying human genetics since
as a species we violate most of the assumptions of population genetics.

Humans are actually very well adapted to walking on two legs, what we are not
well adapted to is the birthing problems caused by the massive increase in
brain size and the rotation of the pelvis required to accomodate walking
upright.

Yes I know all logs are proportional, but I thought I should be precise or
else someone would ask which log ;)

------
shockzzz
Interesting choice of slugname:

 _nutrition-science-complicated_

~~~
dang
We used that (more or less) for the title above, since the article title is
linkbaity.

------
throwaway999888
> Why (almost) everything you know about food is wrong

They tell me every other year.

------
MCRed
The only proof I have is an anecdote but it is consistent with my research--
and I've lost 100 pounds in 8 months as a result.

The biggest problem is we have rejected science from food to begin with. We
have government spending billions pushing a diet designed to create obesity
(which is very high in carbs, effectively sugar, and low in fat.)

Likely there are at least two types of people biochemically- those who are
insulin sensitive and those who are insulin resistant.

The insulin sensitive tend to not be fat and if they are fat its because they
are really over eating. These people are the ones who end up thinking that fat
people are lazy, or who think that "You should just eat less sugar" (not
realizing that carbs are effectively sugar) or "calories in < calories out".

The insulin resistant people tend to be the fat ones. And for them a diet low
in carbs is effective. I've seen a lot of studies and this is consistent in
all of them.

Personally, I finally found out about the effect insulin plays on the creation
and storage of energy in fat cells.

Government has been pushing a high carb diet for decades and as at the same
time we have an obesity epidemic. Instead of recognizing the problem
(correlation is not causation but you can't claim they have caused obesity to
go down) they are going to war against fats. Transfats being banned is junk
science (I eat a lot of them and my blood work is great, and getting better,
not worse) and their use in the food system is because of government going to
war on "Saturated" fats in the first place.

The war on Fat is the cause of obesity, in my opinion, because it is
political, and not scientific, and ignores the insulin sensitivity issue.

=====================================================

I'm slow banned because this site is not tolerant of diversity, so I can't
reply to Max below. (And so I'm off to do something fun. Caio!)

Here's the reply I tried to give him:

======================================================

Fish oil is trans fats. I'm taking trans fats supplements!

I think the larger issue is that people are looking at things way too
simplistically ("trans fats bad because more of them means problem x") and not
controlling for other things-- eg: there's a huge difference between eating a
pure meat and vegetable diet (And consequently a lot of fat) and eating a lot
of fats in the presence of a lot of carbs. Those anti-trans fats studies did
not control for carbs (as far as I can tell).

This is why the blood work of people on keto disproves the "trans fats bad"
hypothesis.

And also "trans fats" are a government propaganda boogeyman-- how many people
take fish oil supplements and also oppose trans fats, do you think?

I can't do two experiments on myself at once. Since things are going in the
right direction now, I want to enhance my weight loss.

~~~
jernfrost
Nothing is certain of course but I tend to believe your line of reasoning
based on the stuff I've read. I think we really should reduce carbo hydrate
intake for the stuff we eat we should use more of the whole grain stuff: whole
wheat, brown rice etc. White flower and rice is terrible and we should really
try to stop eating it. More chick peas, beans etc instead. But I also think it
is important that while pushing more fat in the diet we should emphasize
eating the right kind of fat: more fat fish, cold pressed olive oil, avocado,
nuts etc.

My problem is that I know a lot of this stuff but I don't really live it. Hard
to change habits once you have developed them. I just love bread and pasta too
much e.g.

~~~
MCRed
One of the challenges is that the entire industry is following what people
want-- so for instance, Apple rather than being mildly sweet and small and a
little ugly are now huge, bright red, and super sweet. They've been bred to
have more carbs!

For me, I love BBQ. I love Mexican. I hate cooking, so getting a crockpot and
cooking mexican dishes (eg: chicken, taco seasoning, salsa and a little bit of
peppers, plus 6 hours and you've got great tasting shredded chicken).... I
don't feel like I've given up much. It does take a week or two to transition,
though, and control over your diet (eating out is tough unless you go to BBQ
restaurants.)

------
Tycho
Three thoughts

1\. As Taleb has often argued, you dont need to fully understand a problem,
all the interaction effects etc., in order to understand that nature has
already solved it. Eat what your ancestors ate.

2\. Could it be that the people who go into food science are basically rejects
from more respected disciplines?

3\. People seem to widely hold beliefs about diet which are patently
illogical. For instance everyone seems to talk about how people put on weight
because their metabolism slows down, or because it was slow to start with.
This doesn't make sense. Rate of conversion of food into energy has nothing to
do with eating more than your activity level required. Could someone explain
this to me?

~~~
oilywater
Our ancestors at one point in time had a diet consisting 60-80% of animal
flesh. Do you think that this is what nature solved? I mean, technology has
given us a way to rise above the evolution.

We do not have claws, or teeth that could pierce an elephant, lion, gazelle.
It doesn't seem that nature solved anything. Or us, drinking cows milk? Did
nature solve the digestion of human to consume milk of another mammal? Was
this a thing in past. I do not think so.

~~~
Tycho
Nature, over time, destroys what is fragile. If your ancestors have been
drinking milk for millennia, then it is probably safe for your body. In
similar dosages. Eat what has been field tested by nature, not the latest
voodoo food.

~~~
oilywater
1000 years isn't long enough for evolution.

~~~
Tycho
we're not talking about evolution

~~~
oilywater
Oh, so you are talking about change of the species without evolution?

~~~
Tycho
We're talking about giving time for harmful effects to manifest themselves. If
you are going to eat a diet which does not resemble what the human body
evolved to deal with, then at least follow something that resembles what has
been available to your kin for countless generations. If you start consuming
brand new diets (not just in terms of the substances and nutrients they
contain, but the concentration and dosage and regularity) you're much more
exposed to potential harm.

~~~
oilywater
But we are doing a brand new diet. About 2000-10000 years ago human diet
consisted of around 80% animal flesh.

~~~
Tycho
Citation?

Besides, when I said brand new I meant things which have emerged in the last
150 years, especially highly processed foods.

