The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

https://undark.org/2019/07/18/science-of-eggs/

by Tomte • 5 years ago

121 131 5 years ago

sph• 5 years ago

Imagine how rigorous nutritional science can be when state-of-the-art double-blind scientific tests are pretty much impossible or extremely expensive to do, and when there is a lot of $$$ interest and lobbying in presenting one outcome or the other.

Nutrition is not rocket science, we are all expert in eating and especially in how our body reacts to certain food types, yet we take studies of abysmal quality for granted and preach them to our fellow human as if they were the ultimate truth.

I can say I'm going to run a marathon naked in Antarctica and everyone would cheer me, but if I mention I'm going vegan, carnivore or adding some butter or tofu to my cheeseburger, everyone, from both camps, is ready to point out why I am killing myself and on the way to premature death. Yet they are not speaking from experience, but mostly from hearsay from their favourite echo chamber.

I've stopped caring what common wisdom around nutrition is, and since I've started listening to how my body reacts I feel much better, healthier, and I roll my eyes every time I read the latest "nutrition" article or comment thread posted on here or anywhere else.

We're still in the middle ages of nutritional sciences.

spidersouris• 5 years ago

Eggs could easily be replaced with salt. Consuming too much salt (more than 2g a day) is heavily discouraged by some because it is said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases as well as increase blood pressure to a dangerous level, but others repudiate these claims and assert they are untrue, and that salt has positive health benefits above this limit.

Even if we take a group of people, put them in a closed place and strictly control what they eat, it is extremely difficult to say if a certain food has had a particular impact on X or not. There are some many elements which are unrelated to nutrition at play that X could decrease or increase for any reason other than what one ate: stress, tiredness, physical activity, mood...

Now, I reckon the wisest thing to do is to follow what the author concludes with: eat moderately and have a balanced nutrition. I doubt we'll ever get concrete and truthful research on nutrition soon enough. We first need to learn more about the extremely complex system that is the human body.

snarf21• 5 years ago

Agreed. The thing that irritates me so much in all these studies is how they conflate correlation and causation. Studies to truly isolate just one ingredient would be both time and cost prohibitive. We are better served by just eating as varied and unprocessed a diet as possible.

caeril• 5 years ago

I think the issue with salt and eggs is that we talk of humans in the aggregate.

For eggs, there is some small percentage of the population that passes the cholesterol into actual high levels of serum LDL.

For salt, there is some small percentage of the population that reacts to high sodium levels with hypertension.

And these subsets of population studies skew the results to a degree that adversely affects the conclusions for the median case.

For most of us, dumping salt onto a plate filled with eggs is not only fine, but healthy.

Medicine deals in aggregates, averages, and statistical variation, which is to some degree useful. But it does precisely nothing to offer testing to tell you if you are in a reactive or nonreactive group to stimulus X, which would be extremely useful.

We do this with allergies - stick 50 different allergens on a grid pattern into your back to determine your precise reactivity. But with nutrition? Haha, go screw yourself, all humans are the same, eat your 14 servings of grains, regard bacon and eggs as poison, and we'll medicate you for your resultant metabolic syndrome.

bserge3• 5 years ago

Pretty much. Same with humans with a "leaky" blood-brain barrier. They can actually get GABA and other amino acids from the stomach to the brain, leading to vastly different effects than the majority of people get.

fivefifty• 5 years ago

This is very true, a few years ago that I started eating around 4-6 eggs a day because it seemed a good source of nutrients and I had seen various articles saying the cholesterol thing was a myth etc. After about 3 weeks of that many eggs per day, I ended up at the doctor feeling lightheaded and not quite right and turned out my blood pressure was insanely high and after a blood test my cholesterol was through the roof.

I cut out the eggs but otherwise kept my diet fairly similar and about a month later my bloodwork showed I was back to normal cholesterol.

Definitely there are some people who when they eat eggs it will spike their blood cholesterol significantly, but I have also seen other people who can eat lots of eggs and it doesn't seem to change their cholesterol in bloodwork at all.

kevin_thibedeau3• 5 years ago

it is said to increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases

How? Salt is a convenient bogeyman, but nobody can demonstrate what it role it plays as an agent of disease. Every cell in your body regulates isotonic balance and excess sodium is rapidly excreted. Complex lifeforms wouldn't exist without this fundamental ability.

Mikeb85• 5 years ago

It was demonized because of the vast quantities contained in many processed foods but you're right and to add to that you'll die much quicker from a lack of salt than from excess salt.

sithadmin3• 5 years ago

The link between high sodium intake and elevated blood pressure is well documented. This is mostly because of the attempt of body systems to maintain isotonic balance.

There’s also a signficant portion of the population with a genetic predisposition to have above-average increases in blood pressure shortly after consuming large amounts of salt, to the point that it will even cause hypertension in some people that had otherwise normal blood pressure.

Salt -> elevated blood pressure -> complicating factor in pulmonary and cardiac disease.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 5 years ago

It is very simple. If you suffer from high blood pressure (above 140/90mm Hg) and your sodium intake is considerable, your blood pressure rises even more. You can easily set up a study with a control group and test it repeatedly, the results will be the same.

However, the mitigating factor is potassium. If you consume an adequate amount of foods rich in potassium, the negative effect of sodium on your blood pressure is neutralized somehow. The exact behaviors depend on the amounts of each.

And here's the problem: in salt, sodium is very concentrated. You would have to eat a large amount of foods considered rich in potassium, such as tomatoes, in order to neutralize a teaspoon of salt.

Justin_K• 5 years ago

EXCESS salt raises BP, which raises the chances of a cardio event. Excess sodium is not rapidly excreted, in fact the body requires far more hydration to balance it out. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...

nomel• 5 years ago

Every cell in your body regulates isotonic balance and excess sodium is rapidly excreted.

If I eat something salty for dinner, I wake up with swollen eyes, with others in my immediate family doing the same. My family uses very little to no salt. My wife can eat as much salt as she wants, without any visible effect at all. Her family uses, in my perspective, extreme amounts of salt. My naive assumption is that salt sensitivity is somewhat genetic, with research suggesting the same [1]. Maybe related, near hypotension runs in my family, while hypertension runs in hers.

1. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180705115632.h...

wins32767• 5 years ago

Higher salt levels raise blood pressure. High blood pressure leads the body to strengthen blood vessel walls, which make them less flexible. Less flexible blood vessels put more strain on the heart, which in cardiac patients (who are operating with a damaged heart) is obviously suboptimal.

There is a ton of studies about this and heart patient life expectancies have been going up for the last several decades because we have figured this (and a few other things) out.

spfzero• 5 years ago

Salt is something regulated well in all higher organisms. Probably dating from when we evolved in a salt-water ocean. That said, in a modern diet with lots of sodium, but also lots less of other important minerals like magnesium, potassium, etc., who knows?

Probably depends on the totality of the diet, for instance if you are getting a lot of salt "artificially", and eating an otherwise nutrient-poor diet, maybe lowering salt intake is a good thing. But if you are eating a varied and mostly natural diet, so that you're getting a wide variety of vitamins, minerals, sun-exposure etc., your absolute sodium intake may not matter much.

mrfusion2• 5 years ago

I constantly see people suffer through painful cramps after exercising because they refuse to replace the salt they lost through sweating due to salt being bad for you.

jonasmerlin• 5 years ago

Relevant Scientific American article about the dubious scientific foundation the general vilification of salt is based on: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...

sorenn111• 5 years ago

I'm having deja vu. We had a top story on HN recently where either the article or the consensus of the comments was "you pretty much cannot believe any studies about food or nutrition."

faeyanpiraat5• 5 years ago

The problem is that humans are incredibly complex and diverse, react to stuff in wildly different ways, and you cannot A/B test on the same individual, as you cannot reseg it to the same starting state, you cannot run two experiments on them, and you cannot get two completely matching people.

InitialLastName• 5 years ago

And it's somewhat-to-entirely unethical and logistically impossible to conduct even uncontrolled studies over a human's entire lifespan, which is really what we're talking about here. I don't think anybody is worried that eating eggs every day will cause health problems for an otherwise-healthy 25-year-old.

rafaelero3• 5 years ago

That's too dramatic. If we were that different, research into medications would be a waste of time.

ssivark• 5 years ago

Most “science” that denies the reality of studying complex systems is broken. The concept of studying strength of correlations, even applied in the context of randomized controlled trials is only really effective in low dimensional spaces and linear dependences (I’m being very loose here, for brevity). But complex systems break all those assumptions.

To steal a quote, researchers use data/statistics like a drunkard uses a lamp post — for support, rather than illumination.

This applies to nutrition, medicine, ecology, economics, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if their experimental arms run largely on confirmation bias.

spicymaki• 5 years ago

Industrial egg production is bad for the chickens, especially male chicks. I consume egg alternatives such as Just Egg and use alternatives (e.g. tapioca starch) for baking and no one notices.

faeyanpiraat5• 5 years ago

Industrial anything production is bad for the thing.

jtdev• 5 years ago

You can find locally raised free range eggs in almost any city/town in the Americas... Egg alternatives are nutritionally inferior to real eggs.

pvaldes2• 5 years ago

Industrial egg production is bad for the chickens

Most successful bird in the planet. Almost 26 billions of chicken lives in this planet because egg production. But yeah, farming is bad. Dodos are fortunate to live such wild and happy lives currently.

reducesuffering2• 5 years ago

You'd be wishing for the fate of the dodo if you were trapped inside a cage 1.5x your volume for your entire life, your only consolation being there's another 100 billion of you. "How successful of me," you'd be saying to yourself?

adrianN3• 5 years ago

Now imagine being the most successful bird on the planet but not living a short life of suffering before being killed. Eggs can be produced without torturing the birds. It just costs more.

tersers• 5 years ago

The concept of sticking to one particular form of eating has always bothered me. It's always felt like an attempt to find a panacea that doesn't require much analysis by the person of what they input to their bodies. Realistic eating is a lifelong responsibility of paying attention to what you're eating and the effects it has on your body. Perhaps what we need is a faster feedback loop of what the current state of your body is so you can make an adjustment.

There are definitely some foods that are better than others, but choosing a diet because it'll solve all your problems is the wrong way to address health.

Akronymus• 5 years ago

I am trying to shed quite a lot of weight. The only guideline I strictly follow is trying to keep my caloric intake slightly under my usage. (Altough, I am additionally aiming towards cutting out as much added sugar as possible and instead consuming more fiber and protein)

A specific diet would just lead to me giving up and rebounding.

nedludd• 5 years ago

"Dr. Mehmet Oz even touted it on his television show." Yeah, no.

Gibbon12• 5 years ago

There is also this

"Other nutrition research critics, such as John Ioannidis of Stanford University"

There is a good appeal to authority for you.

nradov3• 5 years ago

John Ioannidis is a critic of bad clinical research in general, not just nutrition. This is his most widely cited paper on the topic.

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Ensorceled• 5 years ago

I remember him initially being sort of balanced and reasonable then he started pushing supplements etc. Then a few years later, he started showing up in infomercials pushing all sorts of crap.

I liked his cookbook, I presume it was ghost written.

kevin_thibedeau3• 5 years ago

His usual shtick is to have a guest on who promotes quack notions and he just sits there pitching softball questions without challenging the BS coming from their mouth. That gives him cover when Congress calls him in to testify about misleading the public.

faeyanpiraat5• 5 years ago

“the study tracked participants’ health outcomes over periods ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and participants were queried about their diet only once, at the beginning of the study. Can we assume that the participants gave a reliable depiction of their diet at the outset, and then that they maintained that same diet for the years — in many cases, decades — that followed?”

That seems like an awful way to design an experiment.

rich_sasha• 5 years ago

I was going to say something defensive about the science, like it’s really difficult to do a double-blind large randomised diet study over decades, but then I read this bit. It is beyond bad science. If someone makes an error in statistics, well, happens, we can’t all be experts. But this is almost taking the mick.

Graffur• 5 years ago

I eat 3 eggs a day - I hadn't heard of that study that more than 2 would kill me!

In general I aim for lots of protein, a good bit of fat and less carbs.. with a specific aim to avoid carbs from bread, fries, cakes, chips/crisps

the-dude• 5 years ago

IIRC in the 80s, the Dutch Nutrition board said max 1 egg a week. They just discovered Cholesterol or something.

drdrey• 5 years ago

Most experts recommend avoiding processed foods as much as possible and sticking with a Mediterranean-like diet because it makes intuitive sense. It is not too restrictive. It is heavy in fruits and vegetables. It has the right kinds of fats and some grains. It includes fish and generally lean proteins.

But that’s the point of the article, who’s to say what the right kind of fats are? Or if grains should be part of your diet, etc?

rednerrus• 5 years ago

My experience with this is that you have to take a n=1 approach to nutrition. You need to figure out what works for you by experimenting.

fomine3• 5 years ago

Even if N=1 is fine, accurate measuring is hard. There are many variables and placebo works very well. Is there any good way?

adrianN3• 5 years ago

Getting regular assays of all relevant biomarkers to make informed choices in your diet seems like a lot of work that I would like to outsource to some team of scientists...

amanaplanacanal• 5 years ago

Honestly I expect diet doesn’t matter that much unless you are trying to lose weight, except that eating lots of sugar is probably not good for you. Exercise is probably more important for long term health than what particular kinds of animals or plants you eat.

abfan11275• 5 years ago

my experience has been exercise moderately, avoid sugar, and life is good.

dalbasal2• 5 years ago

So... I think I have 3 points.

First is worst. Looking back over a few generations, standard nutritional advice informing doctors, institutions and the public have been poor. Not only inaccurate, but de facto pushing people down bad paths. Low fat & low cholesterol labels led to foods, with processed foods with high sugar & many additives. Cereal instead of a boiled egg.

Second is that many norms, like the food pyramid hanging in classrooms during the 80s & 90s were based on long forgotten, often arbitrary decisions. Self correction was fatally weak. Challenging norms had a higher burden for proof than the norm had faced. Proof is really hard, it turns out.

Third is that "what's a healthy diet?" was never answered better by science than book gurus or old cultural understandings of nutrition. That is, a practicable, science based understanding of nutrition wasn't achieved. Lots of things about nutrition have been learned but it doesn't really add up to a Big Theory.

I think the real issue here is "what to do when we bust." Science doesn't predictably produce answers to questions we think it should answer. We discover what we discover. But, what do you do when hospitals, health ministries and such need scientific guidelines? IDK is not an acceptable answer. I do know is not a scientific one. "Lets not do science " doesn't (didn't?) work either. The only choice left is between a lie and a delusion. Postmodernism is inevitable.

colordrops• 5 years ago

You are leaving out one of the biggest reasons "science" has failed us - big food industry has been heavily influencing politics, public opinion through PR campaigns, and even science by funding their own studies.

FredPret• 5 years ago

Actually, IDK is a great answer if it’s true

dalbasal2• 5 years ago

In theory, sure. In practice, skepticism can be impractical. The guys printing the food pyramid postor needs science's guidelines. The hospital director wants to provide guidelines for the catering contract. Etc. IDK is fine, but they'll just ask the next guy until they get an answer. What do you mean science doesn't know what we should eat? Oh FredPret, you're such a contrarian. Don't be difficult.

minikites• 5 years ago

Self correction was fatally weak. Challenging norms had a higher burden for proof than the norm had faced.

This is the biggest problem, in my opinion. People don't want to look foolish, so it's difficult to change. Doubly so if you made it part of your identity, as diet so often is. It's also why obstructing progress is much easier than creating the conditions for progress. If the status quo serves the powerful, it's going to be difficult to change, because they have more to lose by looking foolish.

ska• 5 years ago

like the food pyramid hanging in classrooms during the 80s & 90s were based on long forgotten, often arbitrary decisions.

The food pyramid was not arbitrary, it was the result of highly concentrated lobbying.

JoeAltmaier2• 5 years ago

I eat astonishing numbers of eggs, and salt nearly everything heavily. My N=1 study shows its all good for you, letting you stay active for life with low cholesterol and no health issues.

It reminds me of the 100+ year old lady asked "What do you attribute your advanced age?" and she replied "Whisky and a cigar every day!" I wonder if she was in this study?

stronglikedan• 5 years ago

Another anecdote: My grandma lived to 98, and only couldn't get around so well and lost mental sharpness around 96. She grew up on "southern" cooking, complete with lard at almost every meal. She refused to eat anything green. Most of her diet in her later years, when she just didn't feel like cooking any more, was KFC chicken, Papa John's wings, and Domino's pizza, and always a sugary dessert. Her joke was the grease kept her lubed. She never went to the doctor for checkups, and the only time she set foot in a hospital was when she had a cancer on her neck in her late 80's. The doctors asked what she did to stay so healthy for so long, and she said, "I just keep breathing". She died of nothing more than old age. I hope I got most of her genes.

bserge3• 5 years ago

Some people are obsessed with diets and risk factors that amount to pretty much nothing over the course of one's life.

There's heavy alcoholics and smokers living to 90, then there's the poor sods doing everything "right" and dying of cancer at 50. Nutrition is just a very small, imo insignificant, part of it - assuming you're not starving or eating the exact same thing every day for years.

cko• 5 years ago

Many years ago my uncle told me eggs were bad because cholesterol. So naturally, I ate 6-8 eggs a day for a few weeks, then went for a lipid panel. My HDL went from 50 to 60 and my LDL went from 80 to 70. I think I had two ramen noodles right before that too. Granted, the initial readings were from a year before, so maybe it wasn't the eggs.

JoeAltmaier2• 5 years ago

Yeah my total cholesterol has always been between 120 and 140. Not sure what the details are, but it seems to work for me.

Buttons840• 5 years ago

It's been awhile since I went down the cholesterol rabbit hole, but there was this guy out there claiming he could control his colesterol, and unless he was lying, the measurements back him up. He'd check his cholesterol daily and could influence which direction it was headed with his diet.

yboris• 5 years ago

Nutrition Science is broken because of the financial incentives of companies to fund sham research to get their products sold.

I strongly recommend going to https://nutritionfacts.org/ for your information -- a nonprofit that never sells anything or promotes any products, just tries to distill research on nutrition in easy-to-understand videos and posts.

Here's an example: "How the Egg Board Designs Misleading Studies" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s25RaOZsFM

bigcorp-slave3• 5 years ago

It would be great if this website answered the question “what is a healthy diet”, instead of trying everywhere to get me to watch some of its hundreds of videos.

beering• 5 years ago

I feel like this attitude is part of why nutrition science is the way it is.

People are boxed into this "healthiness is a one-dimensional scale" thinking. Are eggs healthy or not healthy? Are potatoes healthy or not healthy? Is pizza healthy or not healthy?

But reality is way more complex and nutrition science knows very little about "healthiness" (to the extent that you can distill diet into a one-dimensional scale). Scientists only claim, "X is maybe correlated with Y (in Z population)".

So this simplification, plus the lack of definitive known truth, leads people to latch onto B.S. like "eating eggs is unhealthy because eggs have cholesterol".

ipsi• 5 years ago

Isn't that literally impossible, because there are so many different things that a subset of people need to avoid eating? e.g., if you have a nut allergy, your healthy diet can't include nuts; if you're lactose-intolerant your healthy diet shouldn't include lactose; if you have coeliac disease, your healthy diet can't include gluten; if you have IBS your healthy diet shouldn't include anything that triggers it (which is different per person); if you have diabetes (type 1 or 2) your healthy diet can't include sugar; etc., etc. And god forbid you have 2 or more dietary issues...

Plus different activity levels make different diets healthy - if you're a professional athlete needing 6,000+ calories per day, "healthy" for you is very different to healthy for me, who sits at their desk all day.

This isn't even accounting for personal preferences like being vegan, or religious restrictions.

vanderZwan• 5 years ago

Here you go, best TL;DR he has: https://nutritionfacts.org/2021/07/29/dr-gregers-daily-dozen...

nradov3• 5 years ago

I don't want to go through a bunch of training to learn how to write good software. It would be great if a website just told me which buttons to press on the keyboard.

alisonatwork• 5 years ago

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

joshe• 5 years ago

The non profit university researchers do just as bad, the whole field is one where good research is very very rare.

To be a little fair, we don't really understand much about nutrition or have easy ways to do high quality studies. A "gold standard" study is just the best of a bad lot. It's the rarest of humans that can say, "I spent 3 years of my life doing a study and didn't find anything significant".

suresk• 5 years ago

Misaligned incentives are certainly part of the problem, but this article points to it being more than just that - even if you want to run a good study, it is incredibly difficult to do so.

I have spent a bunch of time on that site and read Dr. Greger's book "How Not to Die". He certainly works hard to understand how studies could be flawed, but he is still limited by the fact that really good underlying studies are hard to come by.

A few things stood out to me reading that book:

1) So, so many studies are hopelessly flawed.

2) Even ones that seem relatively good often have other studies showing the opposite result.

3) The evidence for a plant-based diet seemed fairly overwhelming, but some of the specific recommendations felt more questionable.

4) If you combine all of the claimed increases/decreases in disease risk for a given set of foods, you can fairly quickly get to a ridiculous result where you have something like a 1 in a billion chance of getting a relatively common ailment or are almost guaranteed to get 3 different cancers tomorrow.

slibhb• 5 years ago

There are paid-for studies but the studies that aren't paid for don't seem to have a lot of predictive power either.

abfan11275• 5 years ago

he sells and promotes his book.

ooyy• 5 years ago

Nutritionfacts is ideologically driven operation. They only present one side of the argument. Plant based diet first, facts second. Being a nonprofit doesn't make you immune from bias. It's not just money perverting the field, but also ideology. The whole field of nutrition is divided into camps, when they conduct meta-analyses of all the literature, they pick inclusion/exclusion criteria so that the side that they are championing wins.

mping• 5 years ago

Where should one get the other side? Genuinely interested

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

Politics in everything, the world feels broken. What happened?

Abishek_Muthian2• 5 years ago

Your comment is valuable, but at least Nutrionfacts seems to present one side of the argument factually.

There are operations like 'Brand Power'[1] which masquerades like consumer fact checking service but in fact they just 3rd party advertisers for brands.

When I first saw their Ads in India, I thought it's disingenuous and then I learnt that they do the same even in developed countries.

https://www.brandpower.com/us/en/

derekperkins• 5 years ago

It's even more hypocritical than just cherry picking studies. Points in his books are refuted by the same studies he cites! He ignores similar / better outcomes that don't match his bias.

notJim• 5 years ago

This is definitely part of it, but I feel like it underplays the fundamental difficulty of studying nutrition.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to study this, and you rapidly see the problems. Effects of nutrition take many years to show, so you're generally going to need to track people for years. People move, get bored of talking to you, die, etc. Their diet also varies greatly over time. They don't always remember what they ate, and certainly can't quantify it with any degree of accuracy.

If you perform some intervention, it's hard to know that the people actually complied with it. You can do it in the short term by having an in-patient setting, but again you miss the long term effects, which are really what matters to most people.

I feel like people reach too easily for conspiracy theories these days…

mcguire• 5 years ago

Ya know, technically,...

"Nutrition research tends to be unreliable because nearly all of it is based on observational studies, which are imprecise, have no controls, and don’t follow an experimental method."

You could say the same things about astronomy.

beiller• 5 years ago

Ya if astronomy was done by taking photos of the sky 30 years ago, erasing them, and only using their verbal descriptions after 30 years to draw a hypothesis.

jessaustin• 5 years ago

In 1695 Edmond Halley predicted the return of his comet in 1758. That was one of the first astronomical experiments, but it was hardly the last.

DubiousPusher• 5 years ago

But observation is the point of most astronomy. Determining causatiom is usually not the goal.

Observing people's weight over time is ome of the reliable and useful things nutritiom research has accomplished. But the goal of the kind of research being discussed here though is to study causation.

adrianN3• 5 years ago

Predicting the movement of the stars is a vastly simpler problem that predicting the health effects of food.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 5 years ago

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Side note: Why do we constantly cry about recommendations from the 1970s being different from today's recommendations? That's a lot of time. Over time we tend to figure things out. It doesn't mean that in 40 years today's recommendations will be overturned.

nradov3• 5 years ago

The point is that in the absence of really solid evidence we should make no recommendations at all rather than having recommendations that change over time.

dotcommand2• 5 years ago

Side note: Why do we constantly cry about recommendations from the 1970s being different from today's recommendations?

Because hardly anything in nutrition "science" has proven to be predictive. It's all junk. Most of it intentional junk pushed by political and business interests.

For example, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." is just nonsense based on junk "science" funded by vegan/vegetarian aligned interest groups. I'm guessing with major multinational corporations peddling veganism, we'll get more junk nutrition science.

Considering life expectancy, health and development has increased with more meat consumption. This is true of the countries with the highest life expectancy - japan, switzerland, spain, etc.

Since we are omnivores, perhaps we should eat a variety of everything in moderation.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 5 years ago

That is not a vegan take. I am not vegan.

perhaps we should eat a variety of everything in moderation.

That's what the quote means?

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Since we are omnivores, perhaps we should eat a variety of everything in moderation.

That's even worse. Moderation is meaningless except in retrospect - in this context it just means the correct amount. It's not even the moderation fallacy - if I eat from 1-3 hamburgers every day, moderation doesn't tell me that I should be eating 2 because it's in the middle.

At least the "mostly plants" part of the yuppie diet cliché takes some sort of falsifiable stand. I can know for sure that I eat mostly plants, I can never know when I'm eating "moderately," or "not too much."

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

The reason we cry about it is because they were extremely confident in their conclusions then, although in retrospect the evidence was terrible, and half of it even apocryphal. There's no break in continuity from the experts then to the experts now that I'm aware of.

The problem is not the gradual improvement through study, it's the cargo-culting, "common sense" that became prevailing consensus, and political motivations from the funders of research.

Science seems to know a lot about poisons, but not a lot about nutrition. It's like how neuroscientists know a lot about the results of ablations, but not a lot about normal function.

azinman22• 5 years ago

N=1. I was eating eggs daily. My cholesterol was high and my doc wanted to put me on statins. I said let me try diet and exercise. I changed it what I was eating (no more daily eggs) and 6 months later I dropped 50 points in bad cholesterol.

jbotz• 5 years ago

Did you do the exercise as well? There is a lot more evidence that exercise lowers your cholesterol than that eating eggs raises it.

Not only is your anecdote N=1, but you also probably changed severak variables with controlling any of them.

azinman22• 5 years ago

I did do the exercise. I'm not sure of the exact timeline, because part of it was me eating heavy breakfast ham & cheese croissants, but I also was eating eggs leading up to my wedding as part of the slow food diet to lose weight. I don't remember at which points my cholesterol was measured, but I did stop doing the daily eggs.

lmilcin• 5 years ago

And the egg and cholesterol example is even more complex.

Because the cholesterol that is ingested does not necessarily increase amount of cholesterol in your body. Because body produces cholesterol on its own and when you ingest cholesterol -- it just produces less of it.

At least assuming you are healthy person. If you are not and your body already has problems regulating cholesterol - adding more cholesterol might actually be a bad idea.

This shows how important it is to actually understand processes and relations and not just rely on correlations.

Studies are flawed because we are looking for correlations and then immediately try to look at study result as a general rule to guide our decision process.

What we should do instead, we should still do these studies, but then we need to follow with more research to actually understand where these correlations come from exactly. Like understand actual biochemistry of what is going on.

legerdemain• 5 years ago

The venal, profit-driven corruption in academic nutrition science is exactly why we should stop paying attention to it and start paying much more attention to philosophies of health that humanity has tested over decades and centuries: ayurveda, TCM, and osteopathy.

zz865• 5 years ago

Another article recommending Mediterranean diet. The healthy Greek and Italian people I know seem to have coffee and a cigarette for breakfast. It seems traditionally food was tight and often in the winter they'd skip meals and go hungry, so Med diet is probably closer to intermittent fasting.

abfan11275• 5 years ago

my own observation is that when money is tight, sugar based products tend to disappear. When money is loose, they appear. The hitch is that industry has found a way to produce highly refined carbs cheaply.

robocat• 5 years ago

Yeah - the bullshit of attributing differences to diet, and ignoring lifestyle differences. For example cars per capita: US=0.8 Italy=0.7 and Greece=0.5 (so Greece has more than twice as many people without a car – ignoring distribution).

mekoka• 5 years ago

Complex synergistic systems are notoriously challenging to understand. They can have multiple moving parts, with various intertwined causes and effects. But with our limited tooling, we often have to isolate a part from the whole to get but a glimpse at how it works. The approach is scientific, often clean and elegant. It's quite tempting. It also gives the illusion of predictability. I wish scientists would realize that sometimes, all they've actually discovered is exactly that, how the part works in isolation, with no guarantee that the sum of the set can predict the outcome of the whole.

mrfusion2• 5 years ago

Even if eggs are somewhat unhealthy you also have to balance that with the fact that they have every possible nutrient and micronutrient needed to create a living animal.

You could be getting trace nutrients we don’t even know we need.

tus89• 5 years ago

Do researchers even get taught about the difference between correlation and causation? People who eat large numbers of eggs probably also eat large amounts of bacon (compared to others), and bacon as a highly cured meat with high levels of salt and other toxic compounds, could easily explain the results. And then there is this:

But on the other hand, the study tracked participants’ health outcomes over periods ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and participants were queried about their diet only once, at the beginning of the study.

Wow I don't know what to say.

ALittleLight• 5 years ago

Yeah, I had a hard time believing that. Surely there's no way you could publish a paper purporting to be about health affects of what people ate if you only asked them once what they ate and used that to evaluate a multi-decade time frame. That hardly seems better than basing your findings on intuition.

armchairhacker• 5 years ago

Part of the problem is that nutrition is incredibly nuanced and unknown, but people want simple, absolute answers.

Different people have much different bodies: they react to foods differently, have different metabolisms (at least based on sex/age/height/weight/bodyfat/exercise), and different preferences. Bodies are also complex, and there are 500 different causes that can all lead to you feeling like garbage.

But that wouldn't sell papers, there wouldn't be much to write. So people make blunt statements. Most of what I see online seems to be geared towards the "average American". Which ironically means, the people reading these articles who actually care about their nutrition, most of it doesn't even apply to them.

And this isn't even getting into another factor, which is that people get particularly defensive about nutrition. So others take these blunt, over-generalized statements as fact and double down on them. I see this in-person by people who are otherwise really smart.

Examples: "eat less salt and more fiber" - you don't know how much salt / fiber I'm eating. "Almonds keep you full" - idk some people eat loads of almonds. "Keto changed my life / I hate keto" - that's your anecdote, it only applies to you.

Specifically, for eggs: if someone has high cholesterol, it will show up on bloodwork, and if the eggs raise their cholesterol, cutting / reintroducing them will show up too. If I eat 6 eggs a day and have great cholesterol, some study that says on average people who eat eggs die of a heart attack, that means nothing to me. If I eat 6 eggs a day and have terrible cholesterol, and after I stop eating eggs my cholesterol lowers, some study that says eggs usually don't spike cholesterol, that also means nothing.

rafaelero3• 5 years ago

I think these types of takes are too harsh on nutrition. Nutrition are not only observational studies, you know? For example, we know that LDL is causally connected to our killer number one (atheroschlerosis). We are pretty pretty pretty sure that it is true (both clinical interventions with statins as well and mendelian studies confirm that). So, if that is the case, we can just split people into groups that consume one pattern of food and another one that acts like control. What happens to their LDL after some weeks? See, not that hard. There are a bunch of other biomarkers as well that can be used to do experiments like that. There are of course always a possibility that these changes on biomarkers don't mean anything at all, but this is something that will eventually show up on data. So... I don't really understand all these skepticism about nutrition as a field. People are too dramatic and react weirdly with all this "omg they are lying to me! I can't trust anyone" and go on to trust bro science. Grow up. Obesity epidemic is very real and somewhat there is this idea that we don't know anything about what a healthy diet is. This is ridiculous and shouldn't be that hard to discredit. Tribalism perpetuates that shit.

ncmncm3• 5 years ago

We were told for decades that saturated fat was really bad for us.

Now it turns out (as some pointed out even back when it started) that saturated fat is absolutely fine. All the people dropping dead from heart disease were being poisoned by trans fats, which were being added to everything (as e.g. Crisco, and margerine).

There is something wrong in (American) beef, but it's not the saturated fat. We lost decades, blaming the fat, and still don't know what it is.

Now we are being poisoned by the fructose in sugar that is added to everything. It is really hard to buy things made in the US without a phenomenal amount of sugar dumped in. Bread, pickles, salad dressing, soy milk, you name it.

The US massively subsidizes production of corn, to the point there is so much more than the market wants that they have to turn it into sugar and pump that into everything. That's not enough, so they also have to feed cows, pigs, and chicken on it, which makes them sick. That's not enough, so they have to make it into ethanol and add it to gasoline.

What is ironic is that actual corn sugar, glucose, is fine.

But they catalyze corn into fructose because it is sweeter when cold. And, incidentally, toxic. Your liver can neutralize a strictly limited amount of almost any toxin, including fructose, but most Americans take in much more than that.

So, before you eat/drink sugar, think: how much sugar do I expect to need to neutralize today?

For more actionable information, consult Robert Lustig lectures on Youtube.

1_player• 5 years ago

Recent studies point to fructose and vegetable oils being toxic for the human body, at least in the proportions used in mainstream dietary advice.

Big supermarket brands in UK are still selling low fat variants of food, more often than not packed with sugar for taste.

Because of course, fat in the arteries comes from dietary fat, isn't it obvious?

Let's not even start with the red meat propaganda.

ncmncm3• 5 years ago

Actually I am seeing hints in recent lectures that the problem with American beef has to do with residual iron.

The humble egg is an example of what’s wrong with nutrition studies (2019)

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