> Multiple academic findings corroborating each other is typically seen as enough evidence upon which to base action.
There is little of that in nutritional research.
> Also, it would be helpful if you could point out aspects of peoples lives in which they generally behave according to your definition of rationality, or in which they maintain a 'high' standard of evidence.
I'll try, but first I'd like to point out that I don't think there's hardly any important decision people make rationally. I personally believe that people are utterly incapable of rational thought in all but the most emotionally-neutral of situations (and even when they are somehow able to think rationally, they are often unable to follow through with action), but that is a little beside the point.
People require an impossibly rigorous proof to sway their political opinions (you can call it the opposite kind of superstition. If healthy food is a new cult, politics is like an old, established religion).
Also economics and finance. Economics is also a highly debated field with about as much scientific rigor as nutritional research in its current form, and yet most people are much more careful about changing their spending habits -- or the economic policy they support, which brings us back to politics -- and certainly much less radically than their eating habits. Again, this may be superstition that causes inaction rather than action, but I think it's qualitatively different from our food superstition.
Raising children, too, I think, is different. I can't quite compare it to food (I haven't had the time to think it), but while there are many child-rearing fads, they somehow "feel" different from food fads. They feel more like fads, while healthy eating feels more like religion.
Sorry for not being very rigorous myself, but I'm just raising some things we can think about.
> How long ago was it that science was controverting centuries of populist knowledge that carbs are what made you fat, not eating fat?
I've looked into that and all I can say is the history is disputed - some people say there really was a nutritionist consensus, others that this was a popular misunderstanding based on overzealous popularisation of a small number of papers (similar to the myth that the consensus among climate scientists in the '70s predicted an ice age) and that working scientists never thought this.
Either way it's a failing of the process, but the appropriate response is quite different; in the first case all we can say is mistakes do happen, in the second we need to get better at ensuring that the real scientific consensus gets translated into appropriate policy actions.
> I really do not like these articles that say "science says not to worry, you must be a very stupid and uneducated person to be worried about this." Any honest scientist will tell you that science does not know exactly how the human body processes food and there is no model which will exactly predict the effects of the human body ingesting a certain food.
It's true that we have a very limited understanding of the human body.
But this is the whole point. Unless there's some science to back something (or you have some personal experiences) then it's irrational to change your behaviour. [Note that I'm certainly not discounting personal experience here. Because the body is complicated, I think that's worth more than science. But you've got to be careful about your biases.]
The example of trans fats is an interesting one. AFAIK, the science (early 90s?) predated anyone seriously changing behaviour or policy. Although people suggested a connection earlier, it would not have been reasonable to start altering the entire food industry around some unsubstantiated claims. There are random connections suggested all the time. Unfortunately, they are only insightful in retrospect and no one remembers the ones that didn't turn out to be true.
> So I am very very suspicious of any food additives. The only rational decision for a human being is to eat the type of foods humans have eaten for tens of thousands of years before and for which our bodies have evolved.
While it's sane to be suspicious of food additives, I don't think it's rational to go back ten of thousands of years. Modern humans live much longer and are healthier than humans ten thousand years ago. There are plenty of modern additives about which there is little to no debate:
* Iodine added to salt.
* Vitamins A and D added to milk in Northern countries (incl. USA and Canada).
* Fluoride added to tap water.
I'm sure there are many other additives that are generally accepted as good, but I'm not aware of. And aside from additives, I certainly wouldn't want my food to stop being pasteurized...
> MSG is especially worrying because there are some studies that show negative effects of MSG and the fact that other studies show no effects does not quite negate these.
IIRC, the studies that showed negative effects were done by injecting MSG directly into rats. I believe the consensus is that the ingestion of glutamate is much different than direct injection. You consume glutamate every day in your food (I'm sure there are plenty of things you eat which would do very bad things if injected directly into your blood). I don't think anyone has the view that studies are negated because they are contradicted by others, but they are frequently negated due to poor protocols or new information.
I actually don't find MSG very worrying because it seems to be a cultural phenomenon, more than a scientific one. (There are many: third-hand smoking, resveratrol, anti-oxidants, etc. Not to say there's no science there, just that the cultural view is only tangentially related to the science. It's like our fan death.)
I went through my own little discovery: A few years ago, I was shocked to discover that a girl I was dating frequently cooked with an MSG sauce (she was from Mexico). Stunned, I researched the whole MSG thing. Turns out it's quite popular all over the world, except in english-speaking countries. The popular demonization stemmed from a few poorly-done studies that very quickly become part of the zeitgeist (it's suggested that this was partly due to racism/xenophobia since it was seen as an asian thing). And despite its widespread use for decades, there's no real evidence that suggests what people fear about it. And because of the fear, it's actually one of the most-tested of all food ingredients and yet it remains legal to sell and use as an additive everywhere.
> Furthermore, I myself feel negative effects when eating certain foods that I suspect of containing MSG.
One last quick point --
I don't think you should treat your own experience as the addendum. As you suggested, the human body is a complex system so I think the best thing that you can do is listen to your instincts. [Of course, you should also try to keep in mind the psychology at play. You feel bad, so you suspect the food has MSG; or you suspect the food has MSG, so you feel bad.]
It seems like it is incredibly difficult to perform conclusive research around nutrition, human growth etc without violating a bunch of ethical standards. The relative inability to perform research that comes to solid conclusions combined with the fact that food is something that people make purchasing decisions around every day (ie there are lots of $'s involved) creates huge scope for dubious ideas and ethically dubious businesses to thrive.
> And yet, the food pyramid continues to exist. Scientists disputed it at the time it was introduced only to be blackballed.
Change takes time. Do you have any theory (besides "FDA are idiots") about why exactly the food pyramid is still taught in school? I doubt it's a conspiracy of Big Food, because they can easily switch their "Fit" product lines from low-fat to low-carb and people buying it probably wouldn't even notice the change.
Personally, I'm betting inertia, which is an inseparable part of the way big groups of people work. But whatever the reason will turn out to be, it most definitely won't be proving that the FDA is torturing citizens.
> Who is this "everyone else"? And are you suggesting we want people doing whatever they think is wrong?
No, I am suggesting that we want people doing whatever is right, as opposed to whatever they think is right. Those two things don't always overlap in large societies.
> For the love of god, go back to high school science class. You have it backwards, in so so many ways.
Now do I? Please elaborate on those ways. I stand by my assertion. Disease spread patterns are simple, because they follow relatively simple rules that are easy to verify empirically. Dietetics on the other hand is very hard for the same reason psychology is very hard - both fields are based around understanding insanely complex mechanisms and it's almost almost impossible to set up clean double-blind experiments with large samples for them, pushing practitioners to pursue advanced statistical methods that they aren't really equipped to handle. Thus both fields are mostly filled with bogus and bullshit results, making it unwise to believe anything there until it has been thoroughly analyzed and replicated many, many times.
> You're calling yourself and your family mentally ill criminals?
You started with torture and mental wards. I'm only adjusting it slightly. The important point to note is that governments don't magically appear - they are born out of people's desire to set up some rules as they notice that "everyone doing whatever they think is right" only leads to death, destruction and pain.
But still; on large scale, people really are idiots. And yes, myself and my family are also idiots in many contexts, though understanding the difference between local and global optimization helps in becoming smarter in time.
The irony here is delicious. You've gotten sucked into yet another evidence-free fad diet, but you're lecturing me on only listening to fad diets.
And no, it's not a matter of "only looking at stuff that hits the news"; the FDA and FNS, which should be following strong scientific principles, change their dietary recommendations and rules all the time, without particularly strong evidence for doing so.
> Look at the boring diets, that's where the good stuff is.
Do you make this claim based on strong evidence, or does this just sound like good Common Sense (tm) to you?
> How about "don't go against conventional wisdom unless you have a good reason; the more conventional the wisdom, the better the reason needs to be"? Possibly combined with "be humble and give subject matter experts some credit,
I have a feeling that this is basically the generic talking point to use when your opponent is more radical than you. The opposite would be you accusing your opponent as luddites or whatever because they're too bought into "conventional wisdom". Neither are actually helpful epistemically because the line for "good reason" is entirely arbitrary, and is easily colored by your beliefs.
>an hour on Google Scholar doesn't mean you've learned everything".
>If the conventional wisdom is "don't order research chemicals from a lab in China then self-inject them", then maybe a plan to get a peptide lab to manufacture cheap Semaglutide is dangerous, even if you can't explain exactly why it's dangerous (in this case it's probably pretty obvious).
I think you're painting effective altruism with too broad a brush and giving them too little credit. I'm very skeptical that the typical effective altruist is ordering semaglutide from china or that the typical EA analysis on x-risk is based on "an hour on Google Scholar".
>If, on the other hand, the conventional wisdom is "eat 6 - 11 servings of grain and 3 - 5 servings of vegetables a day", but many nutritionists are recommending less grain and there's new research out saying that much higher vegetable intake is good, maybe a plan to eat more vegetables and less bread is good.
Hold on, all it takes to turn over "conventional wisdom" on nutrition is "many nutritionists" and "new research"? Does some well researched books like "The Precipice" or "What We Owe the Future" suffice here? I'm sure that among all the effective altruists out there, you can find among them "many" to support their claim?
> And yet here we are almost 200 years later and many common illnesses are still closely related to diet, and many still feel as though treatment through diet is flakey or inferior to modern drugs or surgery.
It certainly doesn't help that the science on diets nowadays contain so many contradicting studies. Moreso that some of them are pushed by powerful corporations for their own vested interests.
>There are forums of people who follow Ray Peat's ideas
Sorry, but this sounds like a personality cult. How about following the state of the art dietary advice?
Sure, consensus scientific advice can change over time, and be conflicting at times. But it will always be better than following some individual's opinions.
> Virtue signaling. A loaded term, yes. But it is exactly why these discussions go off the rails. Nutritional 'science' doesn't even really exist, so you can always find something out there that sounds very objective and intelligence which will back up the positions you already hold on faith.
What you're describing is more confirmation bias than virtue signaling. Certainly there's plenty of both here.
>All of your questions are actually unanswerable with certainty from the current state of nutritional science if you replace the word 'vitamin' with 'nutrient'.
Well, my questions were open ended in nature. "We don't know" would be a perfectly objective thing to say about a lot of stuff.
But even if there are very few 'confirmed' food facts (i.e. we dont know anything), that does not exclude the possibility that there are many 'rejected' food beliefs, since those statements are not open questions.
For example: many people belief that the more vitamins they eat the healthier they get. Every scientific experiment falsified this statement! That doesn't mean we know what makes people healthy, but we can still know that 'health is a proportional relationship to vitamin intake' is a bullshit belief not backed up by any experiment.
Science can and has rejected hypotheses, without the requirement that they replace it with anything. "We don't know" is perfectly acceptable. "Drink this high vitamin juice, it will make your life last longer" means the person uttering those words is either a fraud or an idiot.
> So I'd argue that the bigger problem is people reading oversimplified reports of scientific information.
And what about the AHA[1] and other policy makers and shapers? What leads them to make recommendations based on weakly established conclusions?
I think the pressure to deliver, and the lack of generalist knowledge are somehow involved here. In the case of food and drugs, I would also blame elitism.
>> ...going against recent studies, and backing the otherwise-disproven science of the fifties.
A handful of studies that find different results to a majority of studies to date do not "disprove" the majority results. Not even if that handful of studies is more recent. Especially if those more recent studies are few among many, also recent, that confirm the "science of the fifites".
I understand it's hard to know who to trust, like one of the responding comments says but here's a rule-of-thumb: don't listen to your gut, listen to the majority opinion of the experts.
... because "your gut" will typically be strongly biased towards discounting evidence you don't like (e.g. because it tells you not to eat the things you crave in large quntities).
> if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis
Mainstream nutrition fads clearly were. A big part of of those fads were about lay generalization of what science supported for very specific diseases as general advice. Another big part was commercial propaganda from food vendors.
> Sounds convenient but IMHO somewhat beside "the point" of all these pontifications
It is until it isn't; most of the time when I deal with "normal people", they seem to expect getting sick from "bad" food almost immediately, and are confused why I haven't died of cancer already because I'm using artificial sweeteners with my tea. My rule of thumb applies primarily to that kind of situations.
Not denying the importance of long-term considerations, but given the amount of nonsense media publish (c.f. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-...), I just ignore the topic altogether until some entity like WHO or FDA starts making noises.
Much of "the best nutritional and scientific knowledge" is hardly science and mostly magical thinking. Nutrition studies are probably the most misleading "scientific" papers out there. When John Ioannidis demonstrated in 2005 that most medical research findings are false, he singled out two particularly grievous offenders: genetics and nutrition. Yes, we know a few things about what's healthy and what's not, but precious few.
Most of nutritional "findings" are based on sketchy statistics run on inaccurate data obtained from really bad experiments. If anything, what little evidence there is suggests that there may not even be such a thing as "healthy" or "unhealthy" food, but food that may be more or less healthy for a specific individual. And what is more certain (from large scale statistics) is that the effect food has on our health (within a reasonable margin) is quite small in most healthy people without some genetic anomalies. What makes it seem large is simply magical thinking (or placebo, if the two are different).
Which raises the far more interesting question of why is it that otherwise scientifically minded people treat nutrition as a science rather than the "science" it really is? The psychologist and anthropologist Jonathan Haidt believes that this is a psychological manifestation of a drive for "purity" (one of several common moral drives he's classified in many societies) as it expresses itself among some people, especially liberals. He says conservatives channel purity to sex and liberals to food. He says people in all cultures believe that some behaviours contaminate us; conservatives tend to think those behaviors are sex related, and liberals think they're food related. Which is why accounts of people "feeling more energetic" after changing their diet read just like conversion stories -- they are simply two manifestations of the same phenomenon. And just like what religion people convert to doesn't matter, the accounts of being "more energetic" and "feeling better" are the same no matter what diet people switch to (of course, sometimes you read other accounts, but such is the nature of placebo -- it's complicated). As long as there is the slightest excuse to justify a particular choice of diet -- and in the case of science fans that can be a "science" paper -- psychology kicks in.
> The danger in the constant back and forth of poor nutrition science being hyped up in the media, reversing last week’s headline, is that eventually the general population just gives up, and stops listening/acting on ANYTHING coming from this expert group.
That is exactly the goal here. To confuse the public, discredit scientists so that people just throw their hands in the air and just eat whatever they want and are used to.
For example, the tobacco industry had this famous memo that said "Doubt is our business". For 40 years, they never had to prove that smoking caused cancer. No, all they had to do was to create doubt due to contradictory studies, and the public would be confused and just keep smoking.
That is the goal with these studies and headlines, it's to confuse the public. The study they made actually said that there is a link between eating meat and a series of diseases.
It was the incredibly unscientific conclusion that its not worth to stop eating meat to avoid disease since people like it so much that caused the headlines, not the actual science of the studies.
Climate change, human health and animal welfare are all 3 huge reasons to not eat so much meat, the science is clear.
>You'd think that science would make things here a little more conclusive by now...
One of the troubles is human bodies are quite complex and able to thrive on a wide variety of diets so any simple looking at the correlation of factor A and result B is likely to be shaky due to all the other stuff that happens. One example I found amusing is the correlation between alcohol intake and health. My recollection is the UK government did some study to do health recommendations on how much to drink but found the healthiest drank something like 4 pints a day so thought we can't say that and recommended max 2 pints or some such but the thing is cause and effect are basically the wrong way around - people drink till they feel ill and the healthy can drink more. There's a lot like that.
My rule of thumb is to ignore the 'science' stuff unless they can quantify how many years the bad habit takes off your life. Salt was never like that. The big ones are smoking - 10 years or so, obesity - of the order of 10, air pollution - of the order of 2 years.
There is little of that in nutritional research.
> Also, it would be helpful if you could point out aspects of peoples lives in which they generally behave according to your definition of rationality, or in which they maintain a 'high' standard of evidence.
I'll try, but first I'd like to point out that I don't think there's hardly any important decision people make rationally. I personally believe that people are utterly incapable of rational thought in all but the most emotionally-neutral of situations (and even when they are somehow able to think rationally, they are often unable to follow through with action), but that is a little beside the point.
People require an impossibly rigorous proof to sway their political opinions (you can call it the opposite kind of superstition. If healthy food is a new cult, politics is like an old, established religion).
Also economics and finance. Economics is also a highly debated field with about as much scientific rigor as nutritional research in its current form, and yet most people are much more careful about changing their spending habits -- or the economic policy they support, which brings us back to politics -- and certainly much less radically than their eating habits. Again, this may be superstition that causes inaction rather than action, but I think it's qualitatively different from our food superstition.
Raising children, too, I think, is different. I can't quite compare it to food (I haven't had the time to think it), but while there are many child-rearing fads, they somehow "feel" different from food fads. They feel more like fads, while healthy eating feels more like religion.
Sorry for not being very rigorous myself, but I'm just raising some things we can think about.
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