My general conclusion is more like, if it relates to food or drink, there's both positives and negatives that can be spun either way.
Take eggs, an easy example. The protein is good for muscles, but the cholesterol is bad for arteries. A scientific study will balance these variables in depth. But the clickbait headlines that filter up to public internet visibility will polarize on one or the other because that's what gets the clicks and attention.
Moderate drinking: good for stress, bad for the liver. Easy to frame a headline to highlight either aspect.
Agreed that the real problem is 90% of diet "wisdom" coming from clickbait headlines rather than seriously considered science.
I think a lot of it is just garbage science by people who were paid by some industry to come up with anything that could result in a snappy headline that might boost sales of their product, combined with media being perfectly happy to misrepresent even honest research if they can get a clickbait title out of it. "Science says Bad Thing you like is actually good for you!" is about as sure to generate clicks/views/ad impressions as "Science says Healthy Thing is actually killing you!"
With near zero accountability for garbage science and journalism we're pretty much stuck dealing with this situation.
I think a big problem is that science, by and large, doesn't control their message. News media does.
Come to think of it, science related stories about what food is/isn't good for you etc are the original clickbait. They're a headline, when the devil is actually in the details.
A great example is why you hear that horrible list of side effects during every prescription commercial. Once, during testing, someone got cancer. Therefore, it's in theory possible cancer was caused by that medication, however unlikely.
It's interesting that the population seems to be very critical of any food-health articles, presumably from over-saturation of poor science reporting. (Best example of this I know of - http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/ - a study of things the UK's "Daily Mail" "newspaper" has claimed cause or cure cancer, many are in both categories).
But it is also clear that what and how we eat has a significant effect on our health, which is interesting and relevant to us.
How to sort the wheat from the chaff?
A "truth database" or factchecking site might be pretty useful. Or would it just boil down to "eat your vegetables and do a bit of exercise"?
True. It almost seems that science and research as a whole is increasingly just a channel for pushing an agenda. I don't think we've advanced much in that regard. Anyone can fund a study and twist it to support their agenda or just not publish it. Then the media gets ahold of it and cherry picks what they want and use questionable headlines.
In many cases it results in consumer confusion and serious health issues (sugar vs saturated fat war you noted).
I think part of this is that a lot of “scientists say” advice that makes it to the mainstream is mostly a media creation.
Somewhere down the trail of sources is a scientific paper measuring the affect of a difference in X in Y specific population.
Then the magazine / newspaper / newsblog article comes out as “Is X killing you? Scientists say cut it out of your diet to live longer!”
And of course the population ends up being dismissive of “Science(tm)” when the articles on their Facebook feed alternate between “Scientists say X is good” and “Scientists say X will kill you” from week to week or month to month.
I subscribed to Men's Health for over 5 years. I read every issue and many times headlines would contradict one another. Many of the headlines were based on studies from what felt like arbitrary Universities or Research Centers. It's pretty much the equivalent of click bait. When you read past the big letters and highlighted sections you see clearly that the studies aren't scientific at all. Their sample size is always too small or they always leave out important human factors or they leave out the middle man of cause and effect. When it comes to diet and nutrition I most definitely see a lot of bad science out there.
Literally every nutrient or substance has a million good effects as well as bad. Articles extolling the virtues (or 1 virtue) or a nutrient are generally clickbait, including the original research. I hate how researchers take some nutrient and study it hoping it will cure this and that. It's literally a dead end. There will never be medical progress this way. It's a good way to spend _some_ resources because it's still possibly good research, but that's it.
You could let a few of these slide, because they're just being contrarian to get a clickbait headline and arguing against anything that democratic governments do, because that's their thing.
But alcohol and bacon and red meat? That's not really a gray area in the science is it.
Nutritional information is one of those areas dominated by "fake news", or at least overhyped dietary advice in the popular press. See e.g. http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/
I wouldn't blame people for giving up trying to make sense of what foods are currently considered beneficial or harmful.
Absolutely, the big ones are health discoveries where a study has found such and such is good/bad for you. It hits the headlines and suddenly everyone is eating more/less of X or taking supplement Y. The follow up studies that discover procedural/statistical problems or just over reaching claims get far less press and the meme continues.
It is like the myth that you should drink 8 glasses of water a day. In this case the advice (from the WHO I think) was people needed 2 litres of water a day, which can be sourced from your normal food and beverage intake. This was altered to drinking 8 glasses of water a day and promoted by the bottled water industry. I get into discussions with people about it over and over but because it is all pervading I rarely make headway.
Another one is wheat grass . . though I find a more receptive audience for that one usually, except from the committed hippy types.
The popular press is completely useless regarding nutritional science -- every study is reported in absolutist and exagerated fashion. But even the science is in pretty poor shape, as this move points out. Expert consensus as embodied in recommendations like the cholesterol limit are founded on the basis of slim evidence and maintained by inertia.
You know… I'm not sure the press and the readers are more culpable that scientists and scientific institutions.
First, Universities have PR offices, a army or administrators and marketing people. They want attention and "clickbait"in their own way. It's not like they don't know that a nutrition study finding a correlation between chili and stomach fat will get traction in the world of "one weird trick." I don't think they are ticking all the boxes and misinterpreted despite all efforts.
Second, a lot of the science just isn't good. Not enough independently corroborating studies, hypothesis fitting… The world of health and nutrition has produced bad information that passed through to official recommendation used by governments, doctors… remember when we were supposed to be scared of eggs because of cholesterol? What was the evidence for that?
Third, science has rejected other knowledge systems like folk traditions, wives tails and such. That's great when they give us an alternative. The planets are not being pulled across the sky by chariots, no argument. But when it comes to nutrition, if you look back over the last 2 generations… listening to your grandmother would have been better than listening to science. They haven't earned credibility of "science."
It's like hearing that science says that fat is bad... and then eggs are bad for you... and alcohol is bad... and then another study says that a glass of wine a day is good for your heart... and salt is bad... then sugar is bad... then carbohydrates are bad... and now fat is good as long as you don't overdo carbohydrates... and eggs have good cholesterol and are really good for you... and salt is necessary to balance hydration... and sugar isn't bad as long as it's balanced with fibre.
When the studies say so many different things, all contradictory and all purporting to be good and then bad and then good again, people give up trying to understand.
Why should I believe that anything I eat today is bad when tomorrow you're just going to tell me that it's good for me again?
People are tired of listening to science that appears to ebb and flow like the tides.
Movements or fads like Avocado-based diets or the practice of drinking one glass of alcohol a day are really hard to justify scientifically because the human body has such a multitude of variables. It's almost impossible to test the effects of such a diet ceteris paribus. So I'm not sure if "science" can really be blamed. The general public wants a simple and easy solution, so the "science headlines" are going to try to give such a solution with half-proven theories and loosely-correlated results.
There are two main problems with science & especially health research "news". First is the urgent need of the Media to "sell more papers" (Or whatever the digital equivalent). Nothing sells more than vaguely alarmist news that is of concern to everybody. So "Drink 8 Glasses of Water every day or suffer the consequences" is an excellent hook to draw-in almost everybody.
Second the ability of companies to influence the research - If the research shows a slight problem with Milk (for example) you can bet that the dairy industry will promote another conflicting study that shows Milk is just GREAT!
Now the consumer is completely alarmed and confused by these two trends - so it always was and always will be.
To me, the problem is not scientific studies, but mainstream reporting of scientific studies that turn into popular fads and trends. Science doesn't deal in absolutes, but society does. This is true for dietary fat, autism, gluten, paleo, salt, etc.
Its because nutrition science reporting is actually even worse than other science reporting. Every day I can pull up an article that contradicts the article making the rounds the day prior, it's awful.
So people do what people do: believe whatever it is they want to. People like bacon, so they convince themselves that high-protein high-fat diets are a panacea for the worlds ills, and the bad reporting lends fuel to the fire.
It's a good thing that science can change. This is what distinguishes science from dogma.
The problem is not these supposed 'reversals', but rather how this information is being reported. Pop-science media reports modest studies as absolute truths to catch eyeballs. When one study merely suggests research in one direction, it's emblazoned as fact on the tabloids.
In the example you identified: "Fatty food is bad - no it's good" the issue is not the studies flip-flopping. Rather, it's a problem of regular people taking what are likely modest reports way too far and massively integrating them into their daily lives, without ever reading the study and understanding the context or scope of it. A study indicating that, say, there may be health problems associated with consuming excess saturated fat seems to compel people to follow no-fat diets. So I'd argue that the bigger problem is people reading oversimplified reports of scientific information
I mean, I'm not terribly familiar with this field, but the study itself indicates that whether high or low serotonin levels were contributory was "a matter of debate" and that "only a few studies have used molecular neuroimaging to examine serotonin dysfunction in SAD directly."[1] So this doesn't appear to be a reversal at all, but rather a study which helps clarify the role of serotonin in SAD.
I think the general conclusion isn't just "If something looks too good to be true, it should be treated with great caution" but "If it relates to food or drink, we know diddly squat". And even less if the purveyor of said knowledge is not even a full-time research scientist. Or heck, not a scientist at all. Sadly that seems to be the source of 90% of diet "wisdom".
Now let us get back to honestly saying that we like to drink to get sloshed, without any excuses of health or even just taste.
Take eggs, an easy example. The protein is good for muscles, but the cholesterol is bad for arteries. A scientific study will balance these variables in depth. But the clickbait headlines that filter up to public internet visibility will polarize on one or the other because that's what gets the clicks and attention.
Moderate drinking: good for stress, bad for the liver. Easy to frame a headline to highlight either aspect.
Agreed that the real problem is 90% of diet "wisdom" coming from clickbait headlines rather than seriously considered science.
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