The Collapse of a $40 Million Nutrition Science Crusade

https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-dollar40-million-nutrition-science-crusade-fell-apart/

by aantix • 8 years ago

27 25 8 years ago

aantix2• 8 years ago

It's interesting to hear him talk more humbly..

"Taubes sounds tired. “I say this to my wife all the time: ‘Maybe I’m a quack.’ All quacks are sure they’re right. Isn’t that the defining characteristic of a quack? But the fact is that we funded four studies and the three randomized trials were highly successful operationally."

0xdeadbeefbabe2• 8 years ago

Nah, that's his typical analytical style. The wired reporter would have you believe otherwise, because--well, I don't know.

yasp• 8 years ago

You are editorializing with the headline.

TimSchumann2• 8 years ago

Yep. This is what's going on here, nothing in the article about the actual studies failing.

This title is analogous to saying "Amazon is imploding" as a result of the Fire Phone's failure to launch.

grzm• 8 years ago

Actual article title: "The Collapse of a $40 Million Nutrition Science Crusade"

kryogen1c3• 8 years ago

I don't know how anyone could read this whole article word-for-word. It's so light in information density but also without a story-telling feel.

Anecdote: I have been ketogenic (usually <20g/day, almost always <30g/day) for a few months now. I measure my urinary ketone levels to verify I am in ketosis. This difference is astounding. I have higher peak energy, higher average energy, sleep better, lower peak hungriness, lower average hungriness, the ability to skip meals without feeling starving, and am losing weight. And it's cheaper. The only negative is actually significant: it's much more work. Hours of picking recepies, crosschecking ingredients that we have vs what we need to buy, shopping, cooking, and cleaning the many dishes generated.

I strongly encourage everyone to do it.

TimSchumann2• 8 years ago

Just rolled into day 6 of a fast.

Between fasting and a ketogenic diet I've managed to lose 80 lbs and keep it off for more than a year. It was much faster and easier than any other method of weight loss I'd tried in the past, and the results have been easier to maintain.

kryogen1c3• 8 years ago

I've managed to lose 80 lbs and keep it off for more than a year.

Hell yeah!

easier to maintain.

I've never done any other diet, but I've found keto to be self regulating because eating cheat meals like pizza makes me feel like _garbage_. I suppose eating healthy carbs like apples might be doable, but I'm honestly not even interested

ebiester• 8 years ago

So, it turns out that the combination of calories in calories out and cutting out the junk food while keeping a 30% protein 30% fat 40% carbohydrate diet has also increased peak energy, average energy, sleep, and lower peak hunger for me.

(It was at the same expense of the work to manage that diet that keto does, of course.)

That isn't to say that keto can't work, but rather it may be a function of the quality of food in the diet over the diet composition.

To the topic at hand, it might just be that he didn't prove what he set out to do, but it's still interesting in and of itself.

shock• 8 years ago

How do you measure your urinary ketone levels? I'm interested in trying out a ketogenic diet.

kryogen1c3• 8 years ago

Local drug stores have dip sticks like https://www.amazon.com/Smackfat-Ketone-Strips-Measurement-Ad... Not meant for quantitative, just qualitative data; more of a go/no-go

kristerv• 8 years ago

Bad headline. Here's the important paragraph:

Taubes says the fundraising trip to Zurich went well, though he won’t share specifics. It could just be the jet lag, or it could be the mental burden of having to sing for his supper, but Taubes sounds tired. “I say this to my wife all the time: ‘Maybe I’m a quack.’ All quacks are sure they’re right. Isn’t that the defining characteristic of a quack? But the fact is that we funded four studies and the three randomized trials were highly successful operationally. One of these has been published in a top journal with interesting results and I remain hopeful that we will soon see if the last two studies will move some needles. Our convictions have gotten us this far, and despite some disappointments these questions still seem vitally important to test.”

The article basically says the team fell apart and the original donations got closed down because of this. Doesn't actually talk much about the studies themselves.

gxs• 8 years ago

Thanks for this comment.

It's a nice example of how how to think critically as you read an article - even a decent quality article.

To your point - I agree. Taubes is a technical guy - I've read a couple of his books and I think there is a lot of truth to what he says, just maybe one of those situations where it's not the whole truth in a horizontal way.

everdev• 8 years ago

Actually, it does. In the process of trying to get the study participants to a baseline by feeding them a 4 week "control diet", they all lost weight before they even got to the low-carb diet.

The theory that calories from sugar produces more weight gain than the same number of calories from any other source (veggies, meat, etc.) still hasn't been proven. But, I think the idea that calories from sugar are less filling, and therefore promote over-eating is pretty established.

The EBC’s pilot project would lock 17 overweight men inside metabolic wards for two months, feeding them precisely formulated meals and pricking and prodding to see what happened to their bodies on a low-carb diet.
The data showed “no significant difference” in energy expenditure.
Taubes in particular had issues with many of the study’s designs, which fed participants a “standard American diet” for four weeks before switching them to an extremely low-carb, or ketogenic, regimen with the same amount of calories. It was supposed to get them to a stable weight, or energy balance, to establish a baseline before going keto. But the subjects all lost weight even before they started cutting out carbs. Taubes contended that was because the standard diet didn’t have enough refined sugary beverages to depict average American consumption.

frou_dh• 8 years ago

The movement might be reclassified as 'The Flintstones' LARPing

0xdeadbeefbabe2• 8 years ago

NuSI wanted to see the data, and began providing extensive critiques once they had it.

That's good, but I'm supposed to be suspicious, right?

torgoguys• 8 years ago

Yes, I think so, but the article is somewhat unclear. It mentions "NuSI would have no control over the pilot study’s design, operation, or reporting. He could build the study he wanted." But a couple of sentences later mentions that "The EBC researchers met with NuSI quarterly to finalize the study’s design and clinical procedures."

Assuming I'm reading between the lines correctly, I'm interpreting the sloppy writing there to mean that the study was to be done independently by EBC and the type/style of study was something EBC got to design, but the that specifics of the design were signed off by both EBC and NUSI. If that interpretation is correct, it makes NuSI then critiquing it a bit shady given they had already signed off on the design as being good before the study started and now when it didn't provide the results they wanted they suddenly had problems with the design.

To their credit, it doesn't look like they interfered with the reporting of result though.

IB885588• 8 years ago

The article doesn't say what the HN headline says, or at least, not in the way that most people reading the headline would interpret it.

mcguire• 8 years ago

"By August of 2014 the EBC researchers had preliminary results on their 17 volunteers: The data showed “no significant difference” in energy expenditure. That didn’t mean it was a failure; to the researchers, they had succeeded in verifying the methodology before using it in an even bigger, longer study.

"But when Hall presented the pilot’s results in-person to representatives from NuSI at a meeting in Bethesda in September, they were not so rosy-eyed.... “From my perspective, the pilot was a failure for several reasons,” says Taubes."

Then, there's

"The fourth and largest [NuSI-backed study], conducted at Stanford, randomized 600 overweight-to-obese subjects into low-fat versus low-carb diets for a year and looked at whether or not their weight loss could be explained by their metabolism or their DNA. Published this February in JAMA, the study found no differences between the two diets and no meaningful relationship between weight loss and insulin secretion. The most significant finding was that it’s hard to stick to a diet for a whole year."

The rest of the story may not describe the failure of studies.

"As the remaining researchers continued to clash with NuSI over the summer about the second phase, the pilot results were finally published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in July. They received a lot of media attention, in no small part because Hall said the pilot, along with another study he’d conducted previously, “basically falsify” the theory that sugar makes people fat. By the end of the summer the Arnold Foundation had decided not to fund the second phase of the study."

0x4f3759df• 8 years ago

Whenever low carb gets popular, industry is threatened and spins up some FUD as illustrated in this talk 'Undoing Atkins: A Cautionary Tale' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIegMp5cWBY

Keto sub is really growing fast, up 400k this year http://redditmetrics.com/r/keto

aantix2• 8 years ago

Why would the industry feel threatened?

And this is Taubes's initiative - it's an attempt to prove his insulin hypothesis. It's his doing.

skookum2• 8 years ago

Keto sub is really growing fast

"We know that people can maintain an unshakeable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers." - Daniel Kahneman

ENTP• 8 years ago

So no subs that are popular are based on fact?

sctb• 8 years ago

We've reverted the title from the submitted “Gary Taubes's Low Carb Clinical Studies Were a Failure” to that of the article. Submitters: when you editorialize like this, users (rightfully) flag and moan and it just makes everything worse. Please don't do it.

The Collapse of a $40 Million Nutrition Science Crusade

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