It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.
“There is always uncertainty in science, but real science gradually establishes some stable facts; it eventually strongly supports some theories and conclusively dismisses others. … Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing. After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless. … My point is not that nutrition is bad science. Unquestionably, it is bad science; a competent statistician, looking at the design of most experiments, will immediately say “this is meaningless; you can’t learn anything this way.” It’s worse than just incompetence … even the best studies have been useless. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, such that doing the same sort of science better wouldn’t help.”
I wouldn't go that far... Nutrition 'science' is quite valid, the only problem is the amount of people in the nutrition space who aren't actually doing 'science'.
> People who pay very close attention to their own habits and results are probably going to be more right about their own nutrition than all the scientists in the world put together.
Doubt it. People are often quite irrational about these things. Which is why there's so many people who follow fad diets (and buy the books).
> Nutrition is not a solved equation. We simply do not know how exactly various foods affect our health, the extent that human genetics and microbiome affect “proper” nutrition for a person, what all the essential nutrients are, what the immunoresponse to various foods are, and any number of unknown unknowns about diet. Any claims to the contrary are irresponsible at best.
Nevertheless the same applies to the way we changed our diets in relatively recent times, and yet that hasn't stopped us.
> Nutrition research seems to change as often as JavaScript framework of the month.
Nutrition “science”, like most health-related “sciences”, has approximately zero predictive power. A pretty reasonable strategy is to completely ignore whatever helpful advice the FDA or whomever is currently spouting (food pyramid!) and come up with some plausible first-principles model that matches available anecdata, like trying to match a plausible far-ancestral diet.
> I will not claim that nutrition science has achieved methodological purity
I'm not in a position to critique the methodology. But the reports that reach the public (and what use are reports that don't reach the public?) keep contradicting one another. If they can't get consistent results, then these reports shouldn't be appearing on the front pages of newspapers; they should stay in the pages of obscure journals.
I pay no attention at all to "nutrition science". I eat a mixed diet, no fruit at all, few green vegetables, a small steak once a week or so, quite a lot of cheese and whole grains. I let my stomach guide me. If I followed dietary guidelines, I'd probably starve. I simply can't swallow food that doesn't appeal to my appetite.
> As humans, we don't have researchers who are so talented that if you ask them to answer nutritional questions, they will consistently and independently come to the same conclusions. This isn't because nutritionists are dumb, this is because nutrition is hard. However, it makes it much harder to suss out dumb nutritionists when the smart ones disagree.
AFAICT, that's not true, and only appears true because of the vast amount of attention one side is able to get, despite being an incredibly small minority.
From what I understand (I'm not in the field and not an expert), except for the few researchers in this article, basically every scientist working in nutrition will say that the energy balance model is correct, and that there's nothing special about carbs.
The media loves to amplify the contrarian and minority voices (see also things like climate change). But they really are outliers, and there really is a consensus, at least on this one big question.
> the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved.
Anyone who makes this statement and doesn't understand that this ratio depends on personal behavior is a flat out absolute idiot and shouldn't make any public facing statements. No way to sugar coat it.
This is regardless of whether nutritionists made any progress.
From all I've seen nutritional sciences barely qualify as a science given the large corpus of falsehoods produced by it, even in recent years. (Remember cholesterol in eggs?)
> But this arbitrary validation of nutrition as medicine, unless I am doing it and then it is somehow hokum, is just one of the craziest things I have ever seen on HN.
Every nutrition as medicine claim on HN is highly controversial. Sure, there's some people that tend to vocally buy into even the most unscientific of them usually people that are personally invested in the claims made, which are often quite general in applicability. I suspect the reason you see less of that for yours isn't either a specific bias against you or anything about your particular claims except that the popular to whom they are applicable is fairly narrow. So you get the skeptics, but not the eager adopters.
> Many years ago I would have viewed an official government nutrition document as a credible source
It would be an authoritative source, but just because it's authoritative doesn't mean it is credible or correct.
All the authoritative nutritional sources are backed by corporations. Corporations fight over the nutrition standards and then have the government/NGOs/etc peddle it.
That's basically the embodiment of what is wrong with the field. Saying that nutrition science is at most in its infancy and we shouldn't derive any actions from the tiny amount of well understood information that there is ('eat something digestible with a little variety and don't drink sea water', everything else is also common sense or basically speculation).
> I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that?
We're not really in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science - we've actually learned a whole lot in the last century, but we take a lot of those advances for granted because food is such an integral part of our daily lives.
That said, nutrition is also much more difficult to study because not only are there ethical concerns that aren't present in a lot of other scientific fields, but there are an incredible number of confounding variables that make it difficult to perform conclusive, properly controlled experiments for anything but the most basic and straightforward hypotheses.
And that's all before you get into the issue of genetics and nutritional effects varying across a heterogeneous population.
> I would bet dollars to doughnuts in a few decades we will look at all current nutrition advice to something akin of medieval quackery.
All current nutrition advice? Does this equally include the nutrition advice that your cousin gives on Facebook, as well as the advice given by doctors of nutritional science?
I get where this skepticism comes from. Nutrition is complicated, and there's a lot of bad advice shared by random people you meet. There's also the diet supplement aisle at your local grocery store, which is full of poorly-regulated products with dubious claims. (At least, in the US, we have these. They are not regulated as drugs.)
At the same time, nutrition-based interventions are some of the most effective public health policies we've ever implemented. In the US, we have programs like WIC. We have iodized salt. We cure blindness in children. We cure scurvy. These are all amazing things--things which we kind of take for granted, because we're not ever exposed to scurvy, childhood blindness, etc.
This is not the first time I've heard such extreme skepticism of nutritional science and it just boggles the mind because if you talk to someone who works in the field, they have amazing success stories to talk about.
>Were you expecting a magical revelation from the gods of nutrition?
Unlike subjective ad-hoc-cy garbage like web/js frameworks, nutrition is a sound science well studied for hundreds of years. We know which people in which climes eat which food groups in what proportion, how they fare relative to each other, impact of food groups on your bile/blood/bowels , ...
There are, as you choose to call them, "gods of nutrition", with PhDs and years of experience studying the damn thing in their labs. To randomly pick brown rice over whey because "hey I don't want to support industrialized cattle farmers"...that would be like my toddler picking candy over broccoli because it just tastes better! This is supposed to be an MRP that real people eat, and hopefully has no adverse effects on them. Its not some random 8080 server that serves json whether you code it up with or without semicolons.
>> Nutrition, medicine, psychology are beset by empiricism: trying to find facts without having theories to support them.
Really? Seems to me there are a ton of theories but precious few facts.
Atkins, low carb, high carb, gluten free, etc. Theories everywhere. But science simply cannot tell us what foods to eat and what to avoid. It's very frustrating to me how limited our knowledge of the human body is.
It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.
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