Long ago, there was low hanging fruit, so to speak – where diet played an obvious role in diseases like scurvy or goiter or rickets. Today, though, we’ve convinced ourselves we need a spreadsheet to precisely track our food inputs, vitamins and nutrients – and if we do this, we will live longer with fewer diseases.
Except much of the research is now seen as junk science of self-reported food consumption over long periods of time, wrapped up in political agendas, with lots of industry influencing, promoted with “organic” marketing slogans.
The general assessment is most modern nutrition science, recommendations and guidelines are not of high quality – probably even wrong. It is mostly “random noise”.
- Is Nutrition Science Mostly Junk? | American Council on Science and Health
- History of modern nutrition science—implications for current research, dietary guidelines, and food policy – PMC
- The Myths About Nutrition Science – Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior
- I asked 8 researchers why the science of nutrition is so messy. Here’s what they said. | Vox
- Why everything you know about nutrition is wrong | New Scientist
- Here’s Why Nutrition Science Is Always Contradicting Itself
- Food science: should we believe anything we read about nutrition? | South China Morning Post – “Experts say nutritional studies are so flawed we can’t even trust basic advice, such as to eat plenty of vegetables and avoid saturated fat, Scientists now believe that, within the limits of common sense, what you eat makes no difference to health or lifespan” and “The simplest explanation for this mess of contradictions is that there are no underlying truths waiting to be discovered, says Ioannidis. It is all just random noise in the data.”
- Here’s Why Nutrition Science Is Always Contradicting Itself
- Is Nutrition Science Mostly Junk? | PressReleasePoint
- What Science Says about Eating Right | Scientific American
- Challenges of human nutrition research | Science
- Dietary guidelines and health—is nutrition science up to the task? | The BMJ
- Challenges of human nutrition research | Science
Like public health, there are dueling experts espousing inconsistent, contradictory and incoherent messages – messaging that changes over short periods of time. Some of the famous directives include “All fat terrible! Sugar okay!”, “Eggs bad!”, then 20 years later, “Eggs good!”, or the almost weekly, “Coffee bad!” followed by “Coffee good!”.
In the early 1980s, I sat in company-sponsored meetings about the USDA’s just released dietary guidelines. At the time, these guidelines were taken seriously and companies held meetings to convey the latest findings to staff – presumably in the view this would lower the costs of employer provided health benefits.
“Experts” preached to us that we needed to eliminate as much fat from our diets as possible. This was the secret to good health and longevity! One person, sitting behind me asked, “So fats are bad, but sugar is okay as long as we are not diabetic and brush our teeth?” The answer from the experts was that this was true – sugar consumption is okay!
Until a decade or two later, when it was no longer okay, and some thought the increasing sugar consumption was the cause of the rapid rise in weight and diabetes!
I headed down this path after looking at the USDA’s proposed 2025 dietary guidelines – which tell us to become “plant-based” (which is likely based on poor quality studies wrapped up in poor quality climate agendas) – yet their guidelines do not address the very serious health issues that will arise from an increase in nutrition deficiencies, such as vitamin B-12.
The media will run stories that promote hypothetical benefits of being “plant-based” – yet omit any mention of the health problems that many will experience (increased hip fractures, deficiencies in iron and vitamin B-12 leading to extremely serious health problems).
