Is nutritional "science" woo?

[Dragoonster]

And does it do great damage to other sciences by being so utterly useless?

I'm sparked to make this thread by recent news that whole fat actually makes us lean:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/20...-full-fat-paradox-whole-milk-may-keep-us-lean

And the also recent "vitamins are useless" BS (where the rather enormous caveat was: they don't do much good for people having a PROPER BALANCED DIET, which I imagine not many real actual humans have).

Plus in my lifetime studies have shown that:

Eggs are bad for you. No wait, they're good. Bread is bad, no good. Red meat bad, no good, no bad again. Drinking a glass of wine a day reduces risks, no it doesn't. Margarine is a better butter substitute, no wait it isn't, but no, actually they're virtually equal. High fructose corn syrup is deadly, no wait it's really not much different than suger. This diet is the best. No wait, this one is. No, that one. And on and on and on.

So after being inured and cynical, I'm currently thinking:

1. Why in the hell should I trust any new "study" when it's likely going to be 180-degree refuted in 5 years? Physics doesn't do that. Math doesn't. Archaeology doesn't. Large shifts in those actual sciences do happen, but not several times a decade. And not 180-degree of the former theory.

2. These people are claiming they're doing actual careful scientific research (I assume), yet are often exactly wrong. How many folks on the edge of skepticism about woo look at this and think "wow, scientists really don't know ****** Bread is proven to be good, then bad, then good, then bad? How can I trust evolutionary or astronomical or any sciences?"

3. I'll just keep eating whatever the hell I want to, since it's going to be shown as good or bad for me +/- 10 years from the current time.

ETA: An interesting article that has a lot more footnotes and likely knowledge of the subject than I do:

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/science_and_pseudoscience_in_adult_nutrition_research_and_practice/

 

[John Jones]

IMO, there is a lot of woo in the subject of nutrition, but that doesn't mean that I think nutrition science is all woo.

Nutrition is a subject that seems to attract more than it's share of crackpots and charlatans. I can remember bags of potato chips marked with big, bright tags announcing they were cholesterol free.

The subject of HFCS and sugars in general is near and dear to this diabetic. I've read so many conflicting things about fructose(for example) that I just try to avoid it altogether.

 

[Brian-M]

Are you sure you're not getting nutritional science confused with nutritional science reporting?

I suspect that many of the things you mention are the product of media hyperbole misrepresenting, distorting and sensationalizing proper nutritional science for the sake of generating headlines.

 

[Dragoonster]

IMO, there is a lot of woo in the subject of nutrition, but that doesn't mean that I think nutrition science is all woo.

Nutrition is a subject that seems to attract more than it's share of crackpots and charlatans. I can remember bags of potato chips marked with big, bright tags announcing they were cholesterol free.

The subject of HFCS and sugars in general is near and dear to this diabetic. I've read so many conflicting things about fructose(for example) that I just try to avoid it altogether.

I'm not familiar with a diabetic diet, but glad that nothing leads you astray. As for me, I have high cholesterol, which is actually (at least from my excellent doctor) a result of many things I need to stop or begin. And I've done so, such as eating more fish. Which I guess nutrition studies think for the moment is good fatty cholesterol or something. Or maybe in a few years I will have killed myself since that was completely wrong.

I don't think it's all woo either. But any scientific-method-using member of the field seems to not be distinguished from the BSers. Again, I tend to not trust any and eat whatever.

I should've found the links that by cherry-plucking agree-with-me prior to starting the thread, but here's another:

http://www.the-scientist.com/?artic...18/title/Opinion--A-Wolf-in-Sheep-s-Clothing/

When anti-science rhetoric occurs at a Kansas school-board fight over creationism, we can nod our educated heads in silent amusement, but if multiple generations of nutrition researchers have been trained to ignore contrary evidence, to continue writing and receiving grants, and to keep publishing specious results, the scientific community as a whole has a major credibility issue. Perhaps more importantly, to waste finite health research resources on pseudo-quantitative methods and then attempt to base public health policy on these anecdotal “data” is not only inane, it is willfully fraudulent.

Indeed. If nutritional science claims to be an actual predicting, objective science, then its utter failures via U-turn advice in the public eye damage all other sciences' value. To lay people. And of course there seem to be no non-lay people re: nutritional science. Any layman could publish anything about any food and it would seem to be as equally valid as the actual "experts"'s articles.

 

[icerat]

Are you sure you're not getting nutritional science confused with nutritional science reporting?

I suspect that many of the things you mention are the product of media hyperbole misrepresenting, distorting and sensationalizing proper nutritional science for the sake of generating headlines.

Bingo. The issue is nutrition is really complex and journalists, their readers, and to a certain extent researchers, are interested in getting simple headlines promoting or disproving the latest fad silver bullet.

Nutrition doesn't work that way.

 

[Dragoonster]

Are you sure you're not getting nutritional science confused with nutritional science reporting?

I suspect that many of the things you mention are the product of media hyperbole misrepresenting, distorting and sensationalizing proper nutritional science for the sake of generating headlines.

Well, I almost did reference that in the OP. But no. I don't think nutritional science reporting is anywhere near as blameable as the hodgepodge "studies and findings" that they're reporting on. Dumb press headlines and summaries are of course also a problem. But they only are so because nutritional science is actually, in actual "scientific" studies, claiming and disclaiming the same foods as good or bad every few years.

If a nutritional study shows X food is great for Y, the media will naturally trumpet that. If five years a new study shows X is terrible for Y, the media will trumpet it equally; but the blame is on whoever initially said X is great for Y and now has been shown to be wrong (until of course a few years from now when X is again great for Y).



In my ideal world, since nutritional science is so awful, they should never release any study results until they get their crap in order and start actually producing scientifically valid results. Hell, they've probably led to the death of many people by publicly claiming their ******** has merit when it turns out it didn't; and trusting people followed/dieted by their claims.

 

[icerat]

If a nutritional study shows X food is great for Y, the media will naturally trumpet that. If five years a new study shows X is terrible for Y, the media will trumpet it equally; but the blame is on whoever initially said X is great for Y and now has been shown to be wrong (until of course a few years from now when X is again great for Y).

How often does that happen though? Usually it's not food per se they're talking about, but rather particular micro or macro nutrients, then people extend whatever finding to food containing those particular nutrients.

And that IMO is the heart of the problem. Food doesn't come packaged as individual nutrients, and even when it comes in food it gets mixed with all the other food we eat at the same time, not to mention is then processed by the differing flora in people's guts and then effects the different genes of different people in different ways.

It's complex.

 

[Dragoonster]

Bingo. The issue is nutrition is really complex and journalists, their readers, and to a certain extent researchers, are interested in getting simple headlines promoting or disproving the latest fad silver bullet.

Nutrition doesn't work that way.

Nutrition researchers do make findings based on lousy studies. They do put those findings available to the public media. Citizens do alter their diets due to this. Many, way too much of those findings are disputed 180-degrees a few years later. I don't know why any rational person would think the media is more to blame for that problem than nutrition "science".

By the way, what do you mean by "really complex"? Seems to me it may be a euphemism for "well, this is what we think now, but we really have no idea". What other science is "really complex" (ignorant) in that way? Maybe astronomy in the times of Copernicus or Brahe? If they or Galilleo were putting out competing theories several times a year, only to be shown to be completely wrong the next year (of course, all were 90% of being right and arguing only over 10%; nutritionists are often 100% wrong), would it have been the fault of the press that they reported claims? Or would it have been the fault of the astronomers for not actually being certain yet still popping out flawed studies to the press?

 

[Dragoonster]

How often does that happen though? Usually it's not food per se they're talking about, but rather particular micro or macro nutrients, then people extend whatever finding to food containing those particular nutrients.

And that IMO is the heart of the problem. Food doesn't come packaged as individual nutrients, and even when it comes in food it gets mixed with all the other food we eat at the same time, not to mention is then processed by the differing flora in people's guts and then effects the different genes of different people in different ways.

It's complex.

Yeast (carbo sugar? not sure what yeast is) products good/bad? That's one nutrient. Fish fat good/bad? Alcohol molecule good/bad? Lactose as fat good/bad? These are very simple components which nutritionists have done 180s on whether good/bad. They're not just ignorant of combined foodstuff. They don't know which basic nutrients are good or bad for health.

If food did come packaged in individual nutrients they would still have no idea whether ingesting them was good or bad. (Or would claim it was, until they claimed the opposite in a few years).

Sure, it may be very complex. It may be 7 billion different suggested diets, for everyone, many massively opposite. The problem is that nutritional scientists are doing studies, and claiming that X food, or nutrient, or type of sugar or fat, is GOOD or BAD. (or maybe more correctly, better or worse. As in, Margarine is better than butter. Until it wasn't.)


Bottom-line again though is that no normal common citizen can currently trust any dietary suggestion/study, since many of that is reversed as suggestion every few years. And as long as nutrition is seen as a real "science", common citizens will be skeptical of all other sciences, since they may think they all are equally demanding of studies/results/scientific method and whatnot.

 

[Iamme]

I can remember bags of potato chips marked with big, bright tags announcing they were cholesterol free.

Did the reason you mentioned this be similar to a bottle of arsenic claiming it is strychnine free?

 

[NorfolkAtheist]

Here is an interesting article in the NYT about the high percentage of irreproducible published research. Some researchers have concluded that a majority of published studies are simply false. I think this would explain a lot of what we see when it comes to nutritional reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/new-truths-that-only-one-can-see.html

 

[icerat]

Nutrition researchers do make findings based on lousy studies. They do put those findings available to the public media. Citizens do alter their diets due to this. Many, way too much of those findings are disputed 180-degrees a few years later. I don't know why any rational person would think the media is more to blame for that problem than nutrition "science".

I've encountered a classic example just this week. Swedish media is reporting on a study from a university here on Omega-3. The researcher, and the media, are stating that their new findings show that Omega-3 supplements for are not needed because the body produces it's own Omega-3. They are claiming they found is that the body converts more ALA to DHA (one form of omega-3 to another) than was previously thought.

Except that's not what they found at all. It was a mice study, with extremely controlled diets. And it's not even what the study was designed to look at, and this claim about humans wasn't even mentioned anywhere in the study!

Without even going in to mice-human fat metabolism differences, you simply can't state with any kind of certainty that the same thing is going on in humans, who have significantly uncontrolled diets.

The science in the actual paper appears to be just fine (it's a bit outside my knowledge to properly evaluate) - what is rubbish is the extrapolation and hypothesizing that's going on and being promoted as "fact".

By the way, what do you mean by "really complex"? Seems to me it may be a euphemism for "well, this is what we think now, but we really have no idea". What other science is "really complex" (ignorant) in that way?

The issue with nutrition is the multiple number of interactions occurring. Pharmaceutical studies have the same weakness, but they're dealing with a highly purified, manufactured intervention.

Imagine taking 1000 different pharmaceutical drugs and throwing them in to one pill and then trying to work out if it helps against cancer or not. That's the kind of thing people try to do with food all the time.

of course, all were 90% of being right and arguing only over 10%; nutritionists are often 100% wrong

Are they? Is the mouse study wrong or are the conclusions people are making from it wrong?

 

[icerat]

These are very simple components which nutritionists have done 180s on whether good/bad.

apart from alcohol, which is not a nutrient, none of those examples are even remotely "simple".

Take "fish fat". The nutrient composition of fish fat varies dramatically depending on the type of fish, what it ate, where it was bred, even how it's cooked. And that's without even considering toxin contamination and accumulation. Then whether it's "good or bad" depends on what else you eat and how much of all the different things you eat, not to mention genetic and metabolic variation.

They're not just ignorant of combined foodstuff. They don't know which basic nutrients are good or bad for health.

Again, not so simple. Water is essential to life. Too much can also kill you.

The problem is that nutritional scientists are doing studies, and claiming that X food, or nutrient, or type of sugar or fat, is GOOD or BAD. (or maybe more correctly, better or worse. As in, Margarine is better than butter. Until it wasn't.)

Again, look at the DHA mouse study above. The actual study didn't even remotely claim any of the things the media - and the researcher they quote - is claiming.

The study is fine. The reporting is rubbish. In this instance the scientists involved are complicit.

Bottom-line again though is that no normal common citizen can currently trust any dietary suggestion/study

Eat (real) food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Michael Pollan's advice stands up to scrutiny.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Indeed. If nutritional science claims to be an actual predicting, objective science, then its utter failures via U-turn advice in the public eye damage all other sciences' value. To lay people. And of course there seem to be no non-lay people re: nutritional science. Any layman could publish anything about any food and it would seem to be as equally valid as the actual "experts"'s articles.

failure to report science in the popular press isn't a failure of the science. get a sense of proportion!

It seems to me it's you that has a problem with Nutrition rather than there being a problem with the science.

 

[Cuddles]

Are you sure you're not getting nutritional science confused with nutritional science reporting?

Bad as science reporting often is, I don't think it's entirely fair to blame all the problems on it here. The trouble with food is that there is very little regulation on what you can say about it, and a huge amount of vested interests in trying to sell things to people. If a company thinks they can get an advantage over rivals by throwing together a study that at least looks reasonably scientific at first glance and then boasting about the results to anyone and everyone they can find, there's really nothing to stop them from doing so. That's nothing to do with science or reporting, it's capitalism. When it comes to things like medicine we have much stricter laws and regulations to stop precisely that. Figuring out which are actually decent studies and which are little more than adverts isn't necessarily easy.

And the also recent "vitamins are useless" BS (where the rather enormous caveat was: they don't do much good for people having a PROPER BALANCED DIET, which I imagine not many real actual humans have).

Not sure what you're talking about here. Of course vitamins aren't useless, and the whole point of a proper balanced diet is that you will already have enough of them. Unless what you mean is actually vitamin pills, in which case I've never seen anything other than adverts from the people who make them that claim there's actually any point to them at all. But that's not recent at all, it's very well known that there's no point in healthy people taking supplements.

1. Why in the hell should I trust any new "study" when it's likely going to be 180-degree refuted in 5 years? Physics doesn't do that. Math doesn't. Archaeology doesn't. Large shifts in those actual sciences do happen, but not several times a decade. And not 180-degree of the former theory.

Yes they do. Of course they do. You can find studies in any field showing pretty much anything. What changes much less is the overall consensus based on the whole body of studies. If you base your opinion on a single study that says one thing, and then change it a few years later when a single study says something else, you're doing it very wrong.

2. These people are claiming they're doing actual careful scientific research (I assume), yet are often exactly wrong.

Yes. Welcome to science.

3. I'll just keep eating whatever the hell I want to, since it's going to be shown as good or bad for me +/- 10 years from the current time.

That depends entirely on what you eat. I'm not aware of any studies showing that a healthy, balanced diet has changed at all. There is plenty of research trying to figure out the exact details of how specific things affect our bodies, but if you just eat sensible food - plenty of fruit and vegetables, not too much of any one thing, don't deep fry everything in arms reach - you really can't go far wrong. Most of the advice that keeps changing is aimed at people who aren't doing that and trying to find the best way to get them to do so.

By the way, what do you mean by "really complex"? Seems to me it may be a euphemism for "well, this is what we think now, but we really have no idea".

No, obviously not. "Really complex" simply means that it is, in fact, really complex. People aren't all the same, our environments aren't all the same, and food isn't all the same. Medicine is complicated enough. For the most part testing drugs boils down to simply putting a single chemical in people and seeing what happens, yet it's still extremely difficult to be sure of exactly what the effects of a given drug is, to the point of sometimes needing millions of people to take it over a period of decades before we notice harmful effects. Food, on the other hand, consists of everyone constantly ingesting thousands of different chemicals in different amounts in an almost entirely uncontrolled fashion, then trying to figure out exactly what effect each individual chemical has.

What other science is "really complex" (ignorant) in that way?

None that I can think of really. Many different scientific fields have their own troubles. Palaeontology, for example, studies things that don't actually exist any more and relies entirely on someone managing to stumble across them and dig them up. Cosmology studies almost entirely things that aren't anywhere near Earth and can never be visited or studied in any way other than simply watching them and hoping something interesting happens. Medicine has huge ethical problems because the only way to find out if something works is to actually try it out on ill people. But for sheer complexity in the number of simultaneous interactions that can't possibly be controlled for, you'll struggle to find anything much worse than nutrition.

Maybe astronomy in the times of Copernicus or Brahe? If they or Galilleo were putting out competing theories several times a year, only to be shown to be completely wrong the next year

Several? Ha. arXiv is an archive for mainly physics and maths related papers, not all peer reviewed. The physics section is split into 13 different fields. One of those fields has 61 new papers in it. From today. Competing theories several times a year is nothing, these days we get competing theories several times a day.

Or would it have been the fault of the astronomers for not actually being certain yet still popping out flawed studies to the press?

Why do you think scientists should ever be certain of anything, and why do you think having studies which disagree with each other must mean they are all flawed?

 

[Belz...]

Bingo. The issue is nutrition is really complex and journalists, their readers, and to a certain extent researchers, are interested in getting simple headlines promoting or disproving the latest fad silver bullet.

Nutrition doesn't work that way.

Few things work that way. Doesn't stop journalists.

 

[Joey McGee]

Just go to the government authorities on health they always have need and handy guides, like

http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/index.html

 

[xjx388]

Nutritional science is just fine. Nutritionists themselves don't make changes to their recommendations based on every latest study. They focus on the stuff that has been tested and accepted as general fact -like every other scientist. Take doctors: There are new studies coming out everyday about the benefits of something or other on heart disease. But doctors don't change the standard of care based on every study, they change slowly when a certain benefit has been found in study after study.

The problem is when laypeople get their hands on a study, they tend to read too much into it. Take Resveratrol for example. Some study somewhere reported a benefit of resveratrol in mice. So supplemental Resveratrol skyrocketed based on all the publicity this study got. But no evidence of a benefit has been found in human models. Doctors and nutritionists understand that and don't recommend Resveratrol, but it doesn't stop supplement companies from capitalizing on the opportunity.

Journalists and pop-sci writers don't help.

 

[bigred]

Good OP and good points/counter-points followed.

I think it's a combo of the media, studies which are sometimes flawed, and people generally thinking that just because a "scientific study" was done on something, it should automatically be taken as indisputable fact. Frankly I've seen that approach/attitude on this site many times.

 

[Dr. Keith]

While others are right in saying "it's complex" and "science reporting ain't great" I think a more fundamental problem is the way in which consumers approach nutrition. As an example see:

Eggs are bad for you. No wait, they're good. Bread is bad, no good. Red meat bad, no good, no bad again.

Nothing we eat is all good or all bad. Looking for a simple good or bad label to put on each food will always lead to poor eating habits. You will end up overeating from one group of foods and not getting some nutrients that are only available in the foods you have labeled bad.

So, consumer info on nutrition sucks because we are bad consumers and demand useless information.

Moderation is the key. Except chia seeds, those things are a miracle sent from heaven and will save us all!!!!!!!!!!!!