Why nutrition science sucks and why there is more to curing a cancer than eating veggies

As time goes by, nutrition science is getting more and more popular . I remember when I first got interested by nutrition, I was amazed at how little [good] information about food was available. Most of the information available was based on myth, beliefs and pseudo theories. Unfortunately, little has changed since then. At the time, I was looking for a way to improve my performance in the gym. I was very underweight and I had a pathetic level of strength. I wasn’t pleased about my slow progress and I figured that the quality -instead of the quantity- of calories I was eating might play a bigger role. A few years later, I’m amazed at how popular (how mainstream) nutrition has become when you consider how limited  progress we  made since the golden age of nutrition (The era of vitamin discoveries).

Folks, let’s face it : the optimal diet is yet to be found. Indeed, I’m amazed at how popular it has become to talk about nutrition when you consider how fragile the pillars of such an argumentation are. For instance, I can’t say how often I have heard one of the following statement in a casual discussion with friends: ”Sorry, I can’t eat that, there is bad fat in this food”, ”I’m on a low carbs diet, I want to lose weight”, ”I’m eating tons of vegetables because I don’t want to die of cancer”, ”No, sorry, can’t do… I’m watching my calories”, ”OMGZ vitamin water soooooooooooo healthy dude!” or ”I went for the low fat and low sodium 100 calories biscuit packs so I can control my calories”. It’s trendy to talk about nutrition.

Would we have heard any of these claims 80 years ago? No! Nutrition science was not as popular and it cared more about general health than optimization. By the way, it takes more than ”nutritional optimization” (as if it even exist) to be healthy. Just saying.

More importantly, nutrition science was not as present in the media. Nutrition started getting popular the moment we noticed a mind shift in the media ($$$$$$). In other words, the moment they realized that they could make money with media, they started to optimize their strategy to do so and applied it to about any topic. Nutrition was no different.

I have said it many times : If you want to have a huge impact in a given society, all you need to do is play the ”fear card”. In this perspective, it’s no wonders that nutrition is so present in media. Indeed, reporters know how to get readers to read their science deprived articles by using certain words combinations to their advantage. Actually, scratch that. People only read the headline so you might as well make it extremely catchy if you want ”readers”.

As a side note, how many readers do you think I would have right now if I changed the title of this post to ”Bacon removes 10 years from your lifespan, scientists say” [fictive claim!]? A lot! If you know how to play the ”fear card”, you know how to control people and make money.

The pillars of nutrition science are weak because of the approach used. Population studies are irrevelant in most cases and, yet, they are very popular. I think we all remember the china study pseudo scientific craze and how biased the whole thing is.

The focus in lots of diet trials is on nutrients instead of foods. While you can play with foods, it’s very hard to play with nutrients. How can you be sure it’s the ratio of nutrients – instead of the food choices, total calories, type of nutrients, and the person itself- that really produced the results?

Most studies are short term studies. Also, using questionnaire as a way to gauge food intake and choices has been done extensively. We all know how unreliable these questionnaires are : People lie in these questionnaires.

The biggest problem in my opinion is the lack possible comparison between diets. Diets are a cultural thing (an inuit eats very differently than an Australian aborigine). Also, believe it or not, some people can be healthy by eating crappy foods (at least ”look healthy” on various tests). We all remember the twinkie diet guy, don’t we [refer to my comment about short term studies]? So, how do we know if it is a certain food, a cultural habbit or the lack of a certain food that is making us sick? In other words, it’s very hard to define what being healthy really means.

Another problem we face is the lack of multidisciplinary knowledge amongst nutrition experts. How can we know if something is good to cure cancer if we understand very little about cancer in the first place? How can nutritionists try to help people if they have limited education in biology, genetics and neurology? Really, nutrition is supposed to be a branch of biology so I would expect nutritionist that have knowledge in metabolism, cellular biology, and even neurology. Yet, most nutritionists (at least around here), have very limited knowledge in these domains.

Mr. Preston of the Abundant Brain blog wrote an interesting post about how we could possibly know for sure if our dietary choices are right. The idea -which comes from Keith Grimaldi- is that if the foods we think are making us sick really make us sick, then we would be able to detect some DNA damage. Therefore, we should spend time researching DNA alteration when consuming foods. In my opinion, this is very good idea because we would be sure of how unhealthy some foods are.

The bottom line is this : Modern nutrition science sucks because too many variables are into play with no mean of knowing what’s really harmful or not. People are getting fat and most of their focus is nutrition since it’s so popular in the media. However, making people healthier require people with multidisciplinary knowledge and unbiased information. Both are not too present and this is why -not carbs, not fruits, not tubers, not fat, etc.- people are not getting healthier. As a side note, question the claims of all medias. If you want to eat an healthy diet, eat foods you can pick in the nature. It’s the only way to lower the probability of diseases.