It's a shock when you try to switch mental gears from reading something like a HEP paper, talking about 3 sigma like a big "Well, it could be interesting, probably not." Then you read a front-page "study" about something involving nutrition and "Five people tested, effect confirmed!! Everyone eat Goji Berries!!"
Studies of the form article mentioned helped solidify the link between smoking and cancer also.
People are looking for smaller effects than before, and the incentive to publish any and all significant results is just so great that you get tons of noise.
The whole notion of 'controlled variables' is a ridiculous exercise. At some point we have to cop to the fact that biological interaction is too complex for our shitty parameterization. We're carving mountains with a tack hammer. Maybe there is a better math out there that can manage, but I haven't seen it yet.
I'm not saying "it's impossible to control anything", I am complaining about the idea that the world can be represented as a set of variables, that everything can be quantified and broken down into axes, and this parameterization is a useful or helpful way to model the vast interacting complexity of a biological system. If you have ever tried to do PCA on a gene expression dataset, you know my pain. The exercise is futile; you are attempting to produce a description of the world based on a presumption that is wholly inadequate.
My point was that you're introducing the nirvana fallacy: rejecting all attempts because they cannot satisfy a perfect outcome.
That it's impossible to perfectly model reality is not news in any scientific field.
In any case, I was talking about grossly observable variables such as "does this person exercise at all?", or "do they smoke?" or "do they drink?". You'd be surprised how many studies don't bother to check simple factors like these.
Great points. Often times studies would be much better served collecting more data and looking at interesting correlations than trying and failing to "control" for all the hidden variables and winding up with biased sample sizes of 20 or less.
A confounder can remain a confounder even when you think you have controlled for all variables. Clearly social scientists are not properly analyzing their data, why should I trust them to be properly controlling for counfounding variables? I'd rather just see studies with enough data to measure the strength of a correlation than studies which are completely unreliable because of bad statistics or not enough data, as explained in the article.
For example, you could do a large study where you measured the correlation of wine drinking with obesity. This study would at least tell me interesting information, even though I wouldn't know exactly if there is a causative relationship. But if the correlation was high and I wanted to lose weight I would stop drinking wine and see what happens. Maybe there is a confounding variable, maybe there isn't, I'd take that chance if I wanted to lose weight. This is much better than the current state of food and exercise studies where none of the information is reliable because of cherry picking stats and low sample sizes. As detailed in the article, we don't know anything about food and exercise from studies besides the basic physics that to lose weight you need to use more calories than you take in.
The problem is that a study of the correlation of wine drinking with obesity would find an inverse correlation, as people who drink wine are more likely to be affluent and thus less likely to overeat. I think that when we get down to it the obesity epidemic in the US is a consequence of people not having enough time or money to buy unprocessed foods and cook them, and not a consequence of their lack of control.
I would need to see the data. But already we can have a useful conversation about this fictional data, as opposed to a study where they gave an extra glass of wine to 10 people as opposed to a "control" sample of 10 more people and observed what happened. Such a study is basically useless given the noise in what gets published.
For years tobacco companies argued that correlation is not causation.
Today is your lucky day. Many of the kinds of huge observational studies you would like to see actually exist! One example: https://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/
Gary Taube's NuSI initiative tried to control for some of these factors with metabolic chambers, having subjects in a controlled environment with exact meals, etc. Still was very hard since the subjects actually burned more calories when let out of their room.
On a slightly offtopic note; the first results of NuSI have not been published but in this video, one of the researchers discusses the findings which may (or may not) come as a surprise:
I would argue that 4 weeks is not enough to get rid of significant insulin resistance (most sources tells that in 4 weeks is about average timeframe for body to get adapted to keto regime.) I would love to see study on keto diet and energy expenditure by body for time frames of 1 year or more.
An unmentioned problem is the idea of norms, a moddishness that is sometimes equated with 'science', whatever that is. Humans - species, biology - is not normative, it is diverse. Genetic diversity means two individuals are not just variation from a mean, they are different. The attempt to produce summations of what a human should be is flawed at the root. But we are too attached to Gaussians and standard deviations, so I imagine we'll continue beating our heads against this wall in a vain attempt to create a knowledge that can't exist.
Doesn't the diversity get represented in the standard deviation of the distribution? The Gaussian distribution is more than just a convenient statistical assumption. Normal and power law distributions seem to be consistent with a remarkable array of human diversity and central tendencies.
Yes, the central limit theorem is great because it conveniently masks complexity and lets us represent diversity as outliers on a spectrum. But the basic model of a Gaussian - of a central tendency and deviations from it - doesn't represent the biological reality, that the "central tendency" is only the product of our summary, and that there is no gross general 'generating' principle underlying it.
That is - the outliers often differ from the mean in a biological system because they are fundamentally different; they have different underlying biology, and while we might be able to place everybody on the same normal distribution, any conclusions we draw based on that normal won't apply to individuals whose private variation makes them behave differently.
You should probably eat things that are good for you, like fruits, vegetables and protein, and not eat too much that is bad for you, like boxes full of ingredients. And don't worry about coffee and a little bit of alcohol.
I think he means processed foods, which usually come in boxes and have a never ending list of ingredients which are 50% sugar/syrup/salt and 25% chemicals/unknowns.
I love chemicals. I try to eat a variety of chemicals every day. But I want to eat the ones that are good for me, not the ones that are designed to keep things in a box from rotting.
Obviously it means: a) get some boxes, b) get some ingredients, c)place said ingredients in the boxes until they reach the top, and d) eat them. Doing this, however, is a poor health decision according to the OP.
Except you're forced to eat something every day, whether you've studied or have a study in hand. So just be sensible and don't worry about it too much.
I think a safe intuition is lots of cookies and chips are probably bad for you, and mostly vegetables, fruits and protein are probably better for you.
Don't worry about the best diet, just try to be sensible.
Indeed. The most succinct version of this school of thought that I have heard, which was a NYT Magazine cover story about ten years ago, is "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much."
Let's face it, the majority of the population lazily look for simple formulas along the lines of "(Don't) do this, and you'll get that". Media panders to that when drawing conclusions from studies often leaving out most or all of the important details. 99% of folks out there hear of these studies via media and not by reading research papers. Meanwhile most simple formulas of this kind are not worth the energy it takes to draw the pixels given the profound variety of genetic and environmental factors at play.
I find the suggestion at the end of this article truly pathetic: "Some medical experts say the problems with lifestyle studies are so overwhelming — and the chance of finding anything reproducible and meaningful so small — that it might be best to just give up on those questions altogether." This is typical big media bullshit pandering to the inert.
I mean come on... How about we don't give up on questions? How about we learn to ask the right questions instead? How about we spend more time training and studying our own bodies than we spend reading our Facebook feeds?
I don't think you could've written anything more arrogant if you tried.
> the majority of the population lazily look for simple formulas
Great! After all, it's not that different from "a good programmer is a lazy programmer" and "keep it simple, stupid" -- if at all possible, look for simple solutions and quick fixes.
> This is typical big media bullshit pandering to the inert.
"Epidemiology--is it time to call it a day?" (http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/1.full), an essay that comes to pretty much the same conclusion as this article, was published in 2001 in the International Journal of Epidemiology. As far as I know the International Journal of Epidemiology is not big media.
> I mean come on... How about we don't give up on questions?
Rhetorical questions don't count as arguments.
> How about we learn to ask the right questions instead?
Observational research is intrinsically very, very hard. Statisticians are working at making it more reliable (especially in the context of causal inference: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-...), but there's only so much you can do with data that is full of noise and confounders.
> How about we spend more time training and studying our own bodies than we spend reading our Facebook feeds?
You don't get to decide other people's priorities in life.
> if at all possible, look for simple solutions and quick fixes.
Oh boy. I'm not OP but you and I could easily have the same altercation. Quick fixes and simple solutions are two different tools, and conflating the [two] leads to endless disagreements and hurt feelings.
Pascal and de Saint-Exupery both have famous quotes that apply to the distinctions between the two.
I know I can look those quotes up, but that endeavor will most likely end up ramifying into a lot more procrastination than I can afford right now. Could you post those quotes?
A letter from Blaise Pascal to a colleague starts, "I apologize for the length of this letter. It would have been shorter if I'd had more time."
Exupery has the one about perfection being achieved when there is nothing left to take away. I confess you have to unpack that one a bit to turn it into a commentary on simplicity and how it's challenging to achieve.
There's the one attributed to Einstein about 'as simple as possible but no simpler', and for some reason I occasionally swap the two in my head. Any problem is easy to solve if you misunderstand it properly.
I read a beautiful anti-anti-participation rant recently that I thought did a great job of arguing that showing up is half the battle, and so heck yeah you should get kudos just for showing up.
Some people try to go their whole lives without showing up for anything. You should be encouraged to get off your ass and try.
Convincing yourself that everything is pointless is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Convincing yourself that everything is meaningful is also a self fulfilling prophecy.
I understand what you're saying, and they are certainly valid thoughts. I might even agree, largely. But there's not much objective in what you expressed.
Well, not quite. Showing up is half the battle, maybe. But that sentiment assumes the choice of battle is correct. I thought some more factual objections would help clarify whether this is the battle to show up for.
What would it take for you to change your mind on this?
There are certainly limits to inductive reasoning. And there's probably a limit when it comes to understanding complicated systems with observation. It's valid to ask whether we have reached some of those limits and how we can know in general.
The same smart researchers (and the excitement of the general public) could be focusing on more tractable problems. Maybe carbon capture or inexpensive desalination.
That particular sentence is just a rhetorical bridge from the quote. I am really suggesting that it is quite possible to forgo one or two hours of Facebook and Netflix a day and invest that time into asking questions about self. Exercising. Studying biological responses to nutrition strategies and various stressors. One can learn useful stuff armed with sufficient time, gadgets from Amazon, software, and the Internet. And one can demand even more useful tools with his or her wallet.
the majority of the population lazily look for simple formulas along the lines of "(Don't) do this, and you'll get that".
I don't know about population level effects but the Internet (more random blogs than the big media) has delivered a super simple formula (cutting carbs, lifting weights Starting Strength-style) which works every time I stick to it and in mere weeks. Perhaps it's not the demand for simplicity driving this nonsense but the opposite -- trying hard to sound smart at the dinner parties and avoiding obvious answers.
Then again, my workout is not nearly as fun as CrossFit, and my conversations about it rarely last longer than two minutes.
I am no expert on non-physics sciences, but recently I am starting to worry that the way we do science today depends on ideal experimental and theoretical conditions.[1] In physics we see 2 sigma events vanish all the time, just last week we have seen the disappearance of the di-photon excess at the LHC. That was an excess that two experiments did see independently to a significance better than p < 5%, with well controlled statistics and well understood experimental set up. Similar the Auger anisotropy [2] was on the cover of Science and did just vanish. Again an effect with p < 5%, using blinded data analysis. My understanding is, that this data analysis is quite a bit better than the standard in other fields, and it does not really work reliably in physics, a field that is to some extend defined by ideal experimental conditions. (The saving grace for physics is, that the Standard Model and General Relativity tie different experiments together. So an experiment in conflict with expectations is immediately in conflict with a lot of other experiments.)
To be clear what I am saying, I do not think that other sciences are a waste of time in general. But I think that their methods are too much inspired by physics. I think that we need a much more cautious approach to the scientific method and a lot more robust tools. In a way, it looks to me like building a car by taking inspiration from Formula 1, when the task at hand is crossing rivers and navigating rough terrain.
[1] Previously I assumed that it is just complicated, that all I see from studies is the headline "Coffee is/is not healthy" and if one would look into the studies I would find that a better picture is Coffee has some positive and some negative effects.
2-sigma events should vanish all the time. p < 5% just means that you see it (vanishment) happening less than 1-in-20 times. If you have hundreds of such events, you'll have dozens of vanishings.
Yes, exactly. My argument is the opposite, if you reason from evidence that vanishes from time to time, then you will have a very hard time to build a reasonable sound argument.
I'm no expert on this but isn't p < 5% riddiculously low threshold? I would rather set standard at p < 0.5% or even 0.05% This would probably solve "replicability crisis" in "soft" sciences like psychology.
The problem is that then you will never find anything. There's always a trade-off between finding stuff that's not there and not finding stuff that really is out there.
Actually physics is the one I'm least worried about. You see tons of small studies with very weak methodology everywhere that never get replicated, yet people base recommendations on it and think they are true.
The solution is coming. Life-streaming. Don't rely on self reporting, just track everything and pick out the data that's relevant. Software to identify specific markers in the video streams, such as the presence of food, eating, drinking, exercise, etc will make this much more feasible.
A multi-year study with thousands of participants is possible. If you aren't worried about perfect data, wait a decade and start consuming what I'm sure will be many public life-streaming feeds.
With regard to the status quo, you could say: "All population studies are subject to incomplete or inaccurate data. It needs to be accounted for and minimized, but it doesn't have to be eliminated".
I guess livestreamers are another data point, so in a perfectly pure framework, they can't actually make your epistemic situation worse, no matter how bad the selection bias is, but I don't see how they're going to make the situation that much better.
I think they do help. For constant dollars, each study has to balance the detail of the data captured against the size of the population included. Anything that allows more detailed data to be gathered from a larger population is helpful.
While that population is going to skew wealthy if the study involves the participants making a purchase, that can be counteracted by seeking out under-represented populations and asking and/or incentivising them to participate.
>I think they do help. For constant dollars, each study has to balance the detail of the data captured against the size of the population included. Anything that allows more detailed data to be gathered from a larger population is helpful.
Not exactly because we don't know all the factors to control for. You end up with a bunch of correlations but often it isn't clear why. Are people who eat X foods Y because they eat that, or because the common genetic background of people who eat X are Y? Or maybe it is because before they were born their parents did Z?
For the public feeds? Possibly. That's not the entirety of the point though, just a note about a large corpus of public data that will likely be available in the near future.
I think that will really help some people who are in denial about their eating habits. They complain that they can't lose weight even though they "count calories" and "hardly eat". Yet in reality they underestimate portions and don't count snacks, condiments, or beverages.
This is a big topic in HCI called 'Total Capture'. The name implies that all audio and video of your daily life will be captured and enable many interesting studies.
I really don't understand why people have so much trouble staying fit. Granted if you're already fat, you have a lot of work to do to get back into shape (I say "back into shape," because nobody is born fat). But the formula for maintaining a healthy body is really pretty simple.
- Avoid junk food (if it comes in a vacuum sealed bag, it's junk food)
- Avoid sodas, juices, and other high sugar drinks. If you choose to indulge yourself, don't finish the whole thing - the portion is probably too big anyway.
- Exercise at least a few times a week. Meaning, break a sweat and keep it up for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour. Eat (or drink) protein afterwards.
- Only eat when you're hungry. Stop eating when you're full.
I hate this advice. When I'm exercising, my body is telling me that I'm tired and that I should give up. When I'm eating chocolate, my body is telling me that it's delicious and I should have more. Sure, there are things that you probably should listen to your body about, but there are just as many that you should ignore and overcome.
When I don't lift for a few days my muscles get "itchy" and antsy until I lift again. It's a really uncomfortable feeling to stop if you lift weights regularly.
Crack addicts also get withdrawal symptoms, it's not necessarily a sign of being in a good situation. I'm glad for you that you're in a position where your urges steer you in a healthy direction, but that doesn't make "listen to your body" always good advice.
In most countries they are not. It's really only a big problem in the US, where portion sizes are absurdly large and fast food is cheaper than anything else.
Interesting, thanks for the link. Further research led me to this wiki article [0] containing a partial hypothesis:
> Reasons for this issue include mining operations that have left not much arable land; as a result, much of the local diet is of processed, calorie-dense, imported food such as Spam or corned beef, rather than fresh fish, fruit and vegetables
This actually isn't remotely true. It's far cheaper to buy more nutritious foods from the grocery store (especially in bulk) and then cook your own meals: http://www.leannebrown.ca/good-and-cheap.pdf
You can't have organic beef every night, but you can nutritionally and calorically out-gun fast food for the same (or a smaller) amount of money.
I can buy 10 pounds of potatoes for $5. Ten pounds of french fries at a fast food place are going to cost me much more than that. Yeah, I know, I need to buy some cooking oil and some salt, too, but it's still clearly a financial win to cook it myself.
Depends. If I was going to be home anyway, and bored, wondering what to do with myself? Having to cook can be positive. If I'm in a rush? Fast food can be worth paying for.
But if I'm poor, the difference between a ten-pound bag of potatoes and one fast-food meal can really matter.
High, which is why I cook: To get the same quality as I can make myself costs a minimum of 5 times at much in a restaurant. I'm not the best cook in the world by any means, it is just that most "restaurants" serve flavorless garbage for cheap and I won't eat that. Once you decide that quality actually is a factor the economics change.
A also believe that healthy meals can potentially increase my lifespan and quality of life within that lifespan. (I don't know if science backs this up). When I cook for myself I'm assured that cheap by unhealthy foods are not hidden in my meals - even the most expensive restaurants won't do that. (Trans fats and excess salt are two examples)
When your job 'forces' 10+ hours of inactivity a day in the office + commute and the only house you can afford requires driving everywhere, and cheap entertainment is passive TV/Computers. And most food is minimally nutritious and pumped full of empty calories so your body says eat more I need X.
Ok, maybe I should have said "I don't understand how people who want to stay fit have so much trouble staying fit." If you want to stay fit, you won't make stupid excuses like "I don't have time" or "all this junk food I'm eating tricks me into being hungry!"
It's perfectly consistent to want to stay fit, and at the same time have staying fit on your priority list as something like #3, behind e.g. succeeding at your career, or spending time with your kids, or getting adequate sleep, or whatever.
"I don't have time" is a somewhat common situation for anything that's important but not #1 important, since a single priority area can easily sometimes take all the waking hours in a week and more than that (on account of e.g. "sleep debt"); and getting an hour for something you want means taking that hour away from something you need.
There are so many bad lifestyle choices our society accepts as normal so people get overwhelmed by all the changes they should make
- Long work hours, mostly sitting
- Long commutes
- Portion sizes way too large (in restaurants I am often full after appetizers)
- Eating at the desk, eating late at night, skipping meals
- TV watching
- Nothing reachable by walking
- Not enough sleep
- Not enough vacation
- Most foods in stores that are labeled "healthy" are not healthy
You need a certain level of stubbornness to realize that the generally accepted lifestyle is so far away from reasonable that almost everything that's considered "normal" needs to be changed.
Exactly, I notice people that become unemployed tend to lose weight, sleep better, get in shape ect not because they try but because the 9-5+ grind promotes a lot of bad habits. As a friend put it, I get 2 hours of 'me' time every week day, I don't spend 1/2 of that working out.
That said while the default is bad you really can live a healthy lifestyle without to much work. It just takes planning to avoid spending 10-15+ hours a week in a car etc.
I started a job in the burbs about six years ago, and people all but laughed at me for walking to lunch. But most of the office was about four or five years younger than me.
A couple years in and they all hit the same wall I had, clothes stopped fitting, too much stress eating. No exercise, sleep problems.
By the time I left we occasionally had almost the entire team out walking to lunch together.
Addiction comes in many forms, as does willpower. Not understanding it means you are probably fortunate to not be susceptible or predisposed to addictions.
There have been studies in animal populations where certain members of the population are observed to keep returning to opium fields while others will come just once and then never return.
Many of us can think back to our own childhoods and recall that, depending on your geography, the choices of what you could buy at the store were fairly limited in terms of fruits, vegetables, and produce. Getting fat wasn't something people used to worry about.
It's hard to be smart/make conscious decisions when you're stressed out, and you're probably going to be even more stressed out if you're poor and/or uneducated.
Because we are constantly taught that grand gestures are a solution to all your problems.
Since lack of discipline is a character flaw, the confirmation bias is that since I can't follow through on my grand gestures that I'm a bad person and I should just give up. My fate is sealed, better luck next life.
The minority's view is that discipline is a lot like a muscle, and that you need to be able to identify ways to exercise it without injuring yourself. Start small, work up, be aware of your limits. And yes, you're going to feel ridiculous at first because what kind of a baby can't safely do X and Y?
Yeah, good point re: "grand gestures." I think we see this especially in tech or "millenial" circles, where people think that there's a life hack for everything. The many studies on dieting/weight loss/exercise only further perpetuate this myth, so that people spend more time looking for "the right way" to stay in shape than they do consistently practicing a healthy and balanced lifestyle. Sometimes, the simplest solution is the right one.
It might be simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy to implement. I'm too skinny, I forget to eat and have a hard time paying attention to when I'm hungry. Not that I never feel hungry, but my hunger drive is not powerful enough to keep me at a healthy weight, I must choose to eat extra, using calorie counting and a rough knowledge of how much I should eat.
This is just a problem with capitalism. Food and exercise studies are turned into health products, and a minimum amount of scrutiny results in the widest range of products. Advertising-supported media can only write about those products positively or not at all, because it takes money from them, or may potentially in the future. Rewriting a press release is cheap.
There's also the mentality that every aspect of what you consume must be scrutinized intensely, or else you risk destruction. We probably get that from our more adventurous forebears eating poisonous stuff, through religion.
The first issue is that it's extremely difficult to run a long term controlled study on nutrition. Adherence to diet interventions is difficult to measure and it drops off over time. As a result most nutrition studies are epidemiological cohort studies which are not particularly good at determining causality.
The second issue is a question of funding. Diet and exercise interventions are not something that are typically monetized be the pharmaceutical industry. As such there is little private sector funding going into nutrition studies. Couple that with the fact that they're extremely expensive and you have a serious deficit in studies.
The third issue is the food categories are way too broad and ill-defined. For example "meat" and "fat". There is meat and there is fat that tastes good (incl. hours later, when the gut had a chance to sample it more thoroughly - there's a "brain" and there are taste receptors down there).
There's meat and also fat that doesn't (taste good). It's not just the meat/fat itself, it's also the combination with other foods and the preparation that can change completely how my body perceives a food. Since those "feelings" have developed for a reason - we didn't have science to tell us what is good to eat for the 1st million years of humans (and pre-humans) - I dare claim it is significant for ones long-term health.
But studies don't make any such distinction. To assume everybody eats what tastes best is a stretch, not just because circumstances in our stressful lives, but also because the brain can only ask for food that it knows, and I remember the stories from that British chef who showed American kids tomatoes and potatoes and they had no clue what that was, they only knew processed food.
So how can you seriously leave it at "they ate x amount of meat" when such a person eats "meat" compared to someone who had opportunity to taste "traditional" (pre-industrial) foods and prepares him- or herself a good piece, including a good combo with other stuff and well-prepared?
Am I seriously to believe a McDonalds burger's "meat" is correctly put into the same place - as "meat" - as a real meal?
Of course, if you acknowledge this difficulty you have to give up on studies because I see now way to reliably collect that information on a scale large enough and long-term enough for a useful study. As the article suggests, actually (to give up going down this path). The story of that guy looking for his car keys under the street light even though he lost them somewhere else comes to mind, in the desire to study this at all this seems to be what happened.
It isn't about giving up as some readers took away from that paragraph, it's about choosing another path. For example, get down to understand what's actually happening instead of high-meta-level studies and see if that gives us new ideas.
Oh and here's a nice article related to the subject: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8264355/research-study-hype(I hope nobody tries to count the dots on each side of the plot to use that to draw conclusions... it's an example and incomplete and even if it had dots for every single study could not be used for that purpose)
Once I found out that food calorie count today is still determined by literally burning the food in a calorimeter and measuring the heat, a practice started in the 1800-s, I realized that I am on my own.
I get that the laws requiring calorie content on labels have lead to finding an efficient way to measure and provide the numbers, but it is obvious to me that the measuring system is completely broken or very inaccurate at best.
I'm not sure what your problem with this method is, given that the amount of heat given by burning is the definition of a food calorie.
That's like saying "once I learned that voltage was measured by the deflection of a coil in a current (a practice started in the 1800s)" or "once I learned that heat was measured by the expansion of a liquid in a glass tube..."
You could argue that the heat definition of calorie doesn't really reflect the health function of the food (for example, maybe glycemic index is more useful), but I'm not sure why complaining that a calorie isn't a calorie is really insightful.
Your body isn't actually burning the food. Therefore, why is this an important measure, other than it is easy to measure?
Bioavailability / metabolizable energy varies not only in the small, ie composition and cooking of food, but in the large, as long run diet choice changes gene expression.
My problem with this method is that my body does not burn the food in the same way. And, it doesn't burn every food in a way similar to every other food.
I get that it's the best scientists could think of 100+ years ago. But putting averaged numbers derived from this absurd method on labels as if they are how my (!!) body works, and deriving all kinds of "food science" conclusions and recommendations from it is imo willful ignorance in the name of convenience.
I generally agree with your two issues 100%, but one thing I've found interesting about these discussions is that no one seriously questions the fundamental hypotheses involved, that typical diet bears any relationship to long-term health.
That is, it's assumed it does, but we just can't pin it down because of poorly done studies.
My guess is that that's true, but the other very real possibility is that our bodies are designed to process a very wide variety of foods in a very robust manner, such that as long as you're not eating something obviously poisonous, it doesn't matter as long as you're not depriving yourself of something important nutritionally (as in scurvy).
Similar arguments can me made with regard to weight and exercise, although there it seems like the effects are clearer in certain ways (e.g., I doubt anyone would argue that being in shape isn't better than being physically deconditioned).
> our bodies are designed to process a very wide variety of foods in a very robust manner
There are indications that various health conditions can impair glucose regulation, and those affected would tolerate less dietary carbohydrate than healthy people. I'm aware of two conditions, elevated cortisol [1] and elevated blood iron [2] (which can be caused by regular alcohol consumption, btw).
Did NYT just confused the whole lot of the same confused people, by not providing anything of value in this article? Couldn't they have just published a stand-alone headline, which would have served the same purpose?
At least I'm starting to read about inconsistent measurements. I'm always baffled how the only really consistent metric in use is body weight or BMI, which is pretty useless to pay attention to. I mean, you can just starve yourself and your BMI will go down whenever you want to take a test.
Where I get pissed off is that health insurance companies will create policy around research based on shitty metrics. They really only seem to be capable of understanding what might help when things go REALLY wrong - as in you require constant drug use or surgery, because hey, they have patient data on that. But in terms of preventive medicine, insurance companies can't figure out what to do. Thus, it's completely random as to what you may or may not get covered for preventative techniques - like doing physical therapy to prevent surgery instead of recover from it. And if you have to pay out of pocket for this sort of stuff, damn... it gets expensive these days.
Michael Pollan's writing on "magic ingredients" is far more telling than these studies. People want a magical solution that will allow them to be "healthy" without changing their lifestyle.
As far as I'm aware, there are less than five studies -- total -- which have been carried out on a reasonably representative sample of the population (i.e. not military service-members), which studied diet patterns, and which lasted strictly longer than two years. Most people live much longer than two years, so this would seem to be a systemic weakness.
But people lived before peer-reviewed research. They collected information somehow and used it somehow and it worked to varying degrees of success, which has been reflected in the rise and fall of various societies and in the quality of life in those societies. The challenge is not to abandon peer-reviewed research, but to integrate it effectively with other sources of knowledge.
Ok but if my body takes for example an amino acid and uses it as a building block for repairing a muscle, that building block hasn't been burned, correct? So that "calorie" is functioning in a completely different way than as an energy source.
It's like we didn't burn the wood or store it for fuel, we used it to repair the walls of the house.
Yep. Though it's still counted as a "calorie" that's stored in your body as a certain number of grams of protein. If your body later decides to lose that muscle, then the calorie is spent.
Since fat and protein each have different amounts of calories stored per gram, that's why if you want to get really accurate about weight loss/gain, you track your body's %fat & %muscle and not just your weight.
Edit: to clarify your analogy, just because we use wood to build a part of the house, doesn't mean we won't take it and burn it if we're desperate for heat and have used all the other fuel.
1) respiration is burning the food, but it's not burning all the food; "calories in" refers to calories absorbed, not calories put in your mouth; and the proportion between those two varies depending on all kinds of things, including e.g. gut microbiome and temporary changes to that due to various drugs; so if you strictly count calories put in mouth you still get a hard-to-measure variability in actual "calories in" (unless you put a respirator on the subject and measure it that way).
2) All other things being equal, changing "calories in" will make you lose/gain weight. The trouble is, all other things are not equal - simply changing how much you eat will significantly change those other things, it has an effect on your metabolism and eagerness for physical activity, thus directly affecting also "calories out" if you don't carefully monitor that and work to keep that stable.
3) All other things being equal, changing "calories out" will make you lose/gain weight. The trouble is, all other things are not equal - simply starting/stopping working out will significantly change your natural appetite, how hungry you are and how often you're hungry, and which types of food you have cravings for, thus directly affecting "calories in" unless you carefully track what and how much you eat everything and actually do keep that schedule exactly the same.
Are we accepting that the complex biochemical mechanisms of the cells are identical to burning things in an open flame?
And, that every living human's body processes all foods in exactly the same way, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, time of day etc? Just like the open flame would?
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadIt's mindbogglingly bad, non-science.
You probably only need n = 5 for a confident answer to the question "What happens when you are shot in the head?"
People are looking for smaller effects than before, and the incentive to publish any and all significant results is just so great that you get tons of noise.
* Small sample sizes
* Self-reporting and diary studies
* Many uncontrolled variables
* Inconsistent interventions (not isocaloric, not volume-equivalent or tonnage-equivalent etc)
* Impossibility of performing blind trials to control for placebo
First, "it's hard and we can't control everything" isn't the same as "it's impossible to control anything".
Second, large sample sizes are preferred exactly to help even out the variables that are uncontrolled or, especially, unknown.
That it's impossible to perfectly model reality is not news in any scientific field.
In any case, I was talking about grossly observable variables such as "does this person exercise at all?", or "do they smoke?" or "do they drink?". You'd be surprised how many studies don't bother to check simple factors like these.
For example, you could do a large study where you measured the correlation of wine drinking with obesity. This study would at least tell me interesting information, even though I wouldn't know exactly if there is a causative relationship. But if the correlation was high and I wanted to lose weight I would stop drinking wine and see what happens. Maybe there is a confounding variable, maybe there isn't, I'd take that chance if I wanted to lose weight. This is much better than the current state of food and exercise studies where none of the information is reliable because of cherry picking stats and low sample sizes. As detailed in the article, we don't know anything about food and exercise from studies besides the basic physics that to lose weight you need to use more calories than you take in.
For years tobacco companies argued that correlation is not causation.
On a slightly offtopic note; the first results of NuSI have not been published but in this video, one of the researchers discusses the findings which may (or may not) come as a surprise:
_No Metabolic Advantage for Ketosis Found_
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUyjMjuLl0
That is - the outliers often differ from the mean in a biological system because they are fundamentally different; they have different underlying biology, and while we might be able to place everybody on the same normal distribution, any conclusions we draw based on that normal won't apply to individuals whose private variation makes them behave differently.
What the hell does this mean?
I think a safe intuition is lots of cookies and chips are probably bad for you, and mostly vegetables, fruits and protein are probably better for you.
Don't worry about the best diet, just try to be sensible.
The way those concepts are fleshed out in the story is pretty compelling: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism...
I find the suggestion at the end of this article truly pathetic: "Some medical experts say the problems with lifestyle studies are so overwhelming — and the chance of finding anything reproducible and meaningful so small — that it might be best to just give up on those questions altogether." This is typical big media bullshit pandering to the inert.
I mean come on... How about we don't give up on questions? How about we learn to ask the right questions instead? How about we spend more time training and studying our own bodies than we spend reading our Facebook feeds?
> the majority of the population lazily look for simple formulas
Great! After all, it's not that different from "a good programmer is a lazy programmer" and "keep it simple, stupid" -- if at all possible, look for simple solutions and quick fixes.
> This is typical big media bullshit pandering to the inert.
"Epidemiology--is it time to call it a day?" (http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/1.full), an essay that comes to pretty much the same conclusion as this article, was published in 2001 in the International Journal of Epidemiology. As far as I know the International Journal of Epidemiology is not big media.
> I mean come on... How about we don't give up on questions?
Rhetorical questions don't count as arguments.
> How about we learn to ask the right questions instead?
Observational research is intrinsically very, very hard. Statisticians are working at making it more reliable (especially in the context of causal inference: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-...), but there's only so much you can do with data that is full of noise and confounders.
> How about we spend more time training and studying our own bodies than we spend reading our Facebook feeds?
You don't get to decide other people's priorities in life.
Oh boy. I'm not OP but you and I could easily have the same altercation. Quick fixes and simple solutions are two different tools, and conflating the [two] leads to endless disagreements and hurt feelings.
Pascal and de Saint-Exupery both have famous quotes that apply to the distinctions between the two.
Exupery has the one about perfection being achieved when there is nothing left to take away. I confess you have to unpack that one a bit to turn it into a commentary on simplicity and how it's challenging to achieve.
There's the one attributed to Einstein about 'as simple as possible but no simpler', and for some reason I occasionally swap the two in my head. Any problem is easy to solve if you misunderstand it properly.
No, but let's not bullshit ourselves and claim half the population is not dangerously addicted to the mental equivalent of "junk food", ex: Facebook.
Don't want to be fat? Then don't be fat. Want to be fat? Wasting hours on Facebook will help you achieve your goal.
Some people try to go their whole lives without showing up for anything. You should be encouraged to get off your ass and try.
Convincing yourself that everything is pointless is a self fulfilling prophecy.
I understand what you're saying, and they are certainly valid thoughts. I might even agree, largely. But there's not much objective in what you expressed.
What would it take for you to change your mind on this?
There are certainly limits to inductive reasoning. And there's probably a limit when it comes to understanding complicated systems with observation. It's valid to ask whether we have reached some of those limits and how we can know in general.
The same smart researchers (and the excitement of the general public) could be focusing on more tractable problems. Maybe carbon capture or inexpensive desalination.
I don't know about population level effects but the Internet (more random blogs than the big media) has delivered a super simple formula (cutting carbs, lifting weights Starting Strength-style) which works every time I stick to it and in mere weeks. Perhaps it's not the demand for simplicity driving this nonsense but the opposite -- trying hard to sound smart at the dinner parties and avoiding obvious answers.
Then again, my workout is not nearly as fun as CrossFit, and my conversations about it rarely last longer than two minutes.
I find people, in general, to be goddamned fucking annoying because of behaviors like this.
But a simple answer doesn't mean the solution doesn't require hard work or sacrifice.
It's not wrong to desire maximum results with minimum effort. But some things just don't have shortcuts as good as the others.
To be clear what I am saying, I do not think that other sciences are a waste of time in general. But I think that their methods are too much inspired by physics. I think that we need a much more cautious approach to the scientific method and a lot more robust tools. In a way, it looks to me like building a car by taking inspiration from Formula 1, when the task at hand is crossing rivers and navigating rough terrain.
[1] Previously I assumed that it is just complicated, that all I see from studies is the headline "Coffee is/is not healthy" and if one would look into the studies I would find that a better picture is Coffee has some positive and some negative effects.
[2] An anisotropy in the arrival directions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.2256
A multi-year study with thousands of participants is possible. If you aren't worried about perfect data, wait a decade and start consuming what I'm sure will be many public life-streaming feeds.
I guess livestreamers are another data point, so in a perfectly pure framework, they can't actually make your epistemic situation worse, no matter how bad the selection bias is, but I don't see how they're going to make the situation that much better.
While that population is going to skew wealthy if the study involves the participants making a purchase, that can be counteracted by seeking out under-represented populations and asking and/or incentivising them to participate.
Not exactly because we don't know all the factors to control for. You end up with a bunch of correlations but often it isn't clear why. Are people who eat X foods Y because they eat that, or because the common genetic background of people who eat X are Y? Or maybe it is because before they were born their parents did Z?
Track enough variables in a population and you're bound to get correlations.
- Avoid junk food (if it comes in a vacuum sealed bag, it's junk food)
- Avoid sodas, juices, and other high sugar drinks. If you choose to indulge yourself, don't finish the whole thing - the portion is probably too big anyway.
- Exercise at least a few times a week. Meaning, break a sweat and keep it up for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour. Eat (or drink) protein afterwards.
- Only eat when you're hungry. Stop eating when you're full.
- Listen to your body.
I hate this advice. When I'm exercising, my body is telling me that I'm tired and that I should give up. When I'm eating chocolate, my body is telling me that it's delicious and I should have more. Sure, there are things that you probably should listen to your body about, but there are just as many that you should ignore and overcome.
> Reasons for this issue include mining operations that have left not much arable land; as a result, much of the local diet is of processed, calorie-dense, imported food such as Spam or corned beef, rather than fresh fish, fruit and vegetables
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_Pacific
This actually isn't remotely true. It's far cheaper to buy more nutritious foods from the grocery store (especially in bulk) and then cook your own meals: http://www.leannebrown.ca/good-and-cheap.pdf
You can't have organic beef every night, but you can nutritionally and calorically out-gun fast food for the same (or a smaller) amount of money.
But if I'm poor, the difference between a ten-pound bag of potatoes and one fast-food meal can really matter.
A also believe that healthy meals can potentially increase my lifespan and quality of life within that lifespan. (I don't know if science backs this up). When I cook for myself I'm assured that cheap by unhealthy foods are not hidden in my meals - even the most expensive restaurants won't do that. (Trans fats and excess salt are two examples)
It's easy to see how people get out of shape.
"I don't have time" is a somewhat common situation for anything that's important but not #1 important, since a single priority area can easily sometimes take all the waking hours in a week and more than that (on account of e.g. "sleep debt"); and getting an hour for something you want means taking that hour away from something you need.
- Long work hours, mostly sitting
- Long commutes
- Portion sizes way too large (in restaurants I am often full after appetizers)
- Eating at the desk, eating late at night, skipping meals
- TV watching
- Nothing reachable by walking
- Not enough sleep
- Not enough vacation
- Most foods in stores that are labeled "healthy" are not healthy
You need a certain level of stubbornness to realize that the generally accepted lifestyle is so far away from reasonable that almost everything that's considered "normal" needs to be changed.
That said while the default is bad you really can live a healthy lifestyle without to much work. It just takes planning to avoid spending 10-15+ hours a week in a car etc.
A couple years in and they all hit the same wall I had, clothes stopped fitting, too much stress eating. No exercise, sleep problems.
By the time I left we occasionally had almost the entire team out walking to lunch together.
There have been studies in animal populations where certain members of the population are observed to keep returning to opium fields while others will come just once and then never return.
Many of us can think back to our own childhoods and recall that, depending on your geography, the choices of what you could buy at the store were fairly limited in terms of fruits, vegetables, and produce. Getting fat wasn't something people used to worry about.
Since lack of discipline is a character flaw, the confirmation bias is that since I can't follow through on my grand gestures that I'm a bad person and I should just give up. My fate is sealed, better luck next life.
The minority's view is that discipline is a lot like a muscle, and that you need to be able to identify ways to exercise it without injuring yourself. Start small, work up, be aware of your limits. And yes, you're going to feel ridiculous at first because what kind of a baby can't safely do X and Y?
I have no idea why people need to be told this or what it even means.
By definition, if you're full you can't eat anymore and you've already crossed the threshold of hunger some time ago.
There's also the mentality that every aspect of what you consume must be scrutinized intensely, or else you risk destruction. We probably get that from our more adventurous forebears eating poisonous stuff, through religion.
The first issue is that it's extremely difficult to run a long term controlled study on nutrition. Adherence to diet interventions is difficult to measure and it drops off over time. As a result most nutrition studies are epidemiological cohort studies which are not particularly good at determining causality.
The second issue is a question of funding. Diet and exercise interventions are not something that are typically monetized be the pharmaceutical industry. As such there is little private sector funding going into nutrition studies. Couple that with the fact that they're extremely expensive and you have a serious deficit in studies.
There's meat and also fat that doesn't (taste good). It's not just the meat/fat itself, it's also the combination with other foods and the preparation that can change completely how my body perceives a food. Since those "feelings" have developed for a reason - we didn't have science to tell us what is good to eat for the 1st million years of humans (and pre-humans) - I dare claim it is significant for ones long-term health.
But studies don't make any such distinction. To assume everybody eats what tastes best is a stretch, not just because circumstances in our stressful lives, but also because the brain can only ask for food that it knows, and I remember the stories from that British chef who showed American kids tomatoes and potatoes and they had no clue what that was, they only knew processed food.
So how can you seriously leave it at "they ate x amount of meat" when such a person eats "meat" compared to someone who had opportunity to taste "traditional" (pre-industrial) foods and prepares him- or herself a good piece, including a good combo with other stuff and well-prepared?
Am I seriously to believe a McDonalds burger's "meat" is correctly put into the same place - as "meat" - as a real meal?
Of course, if you acknowledge this difficulty you have to give up on studies because I see now way to reliably collect that information on a scale large enough and long-term enough for a useful study. As the article suggests, actually (to give up going down this path). The story of that guy looking for his car keys under the street light even though he lost them somewhere else comes to mind, in the desire to study this at all this seems to be what happened.
It isn't about giving up as some readers took away from that paragraph, it's about choosing another path. For example, get down to understand what's actually happening instead of high-meta-level studies and see if that gives us new ideas.
Oh and here's a nice article related to the subject: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8264355/research-study-hype (I hope nobody tries to count the dots on each side of the plot to use that to draw conclusions... it's an example and incomplete and even if it had dots for every single study could not be used for that purpose)
I get that the laws requiring calorie content on labels have lead to finding an efficient way to measure and provide the numbers, but it is obvious to me that the measuring system is completely broken or very inaccurate at best.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manufa...
That's like saying "once I learned that voltage was measured by the deflection of a coil in a current (a practice started in the 1800s)" or "once I learned that heat was measured by the expansion of a liquid in a glass tube..."
You could argue that the heat definition of calorie doesn't really reflect the health function of the food (for example, maybe glycemic index is more useful), but I'm not sure why complaining that a calorie isn't a calorie is really insightful.
Bioavailability / metabolizable energy varies not only in the small, ie composition and cooking of food, but in the large, as long run diet choice changes gene expression.
I get that it's the best scientists could think of 100+ years ago. But putting averaged numbers derived from this absurd method on labels as if they are how my (!!) body works, and deriving all kinds of "food science" conclusions and recommendations from it is imo willful ignorance in the name of convenience.
That is, it's assumed it does, but we just can't pin it down because of poorly done studies.
My guess is that that's true, but the other very real possibility is that our bodies are designed to process a very wide variety of foods in a very robust manner, such that as long as you're not eating something obviously poisonous, it doesn't matter as long as you're not depriving yourself of something important nutritionally (as in scurvy).
Similar arguments can me made with regard to weight and exercise, although there it seems like the effects are clearer in certain ways (e.g., I doubt anyone would argue that being in shape isn't better than being physically deconditioned).
There are indications that various health conditions can impair glucose regulation, and those affected would tolerate less dietary carbohydrate than healthy people. I'm aware of two conditions, elevated cortisol [1] and elevated blood iron [2] (which can be caused by regular alcohol consumption, btw).
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11724664
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26618110
Also, type 1 diabetes of course.
Where I get pissed off is that health insurance companies will create policy around research based on shitty metrics. They really only seem to be capable of understanding what might help when things go REALLY wrong - as in you require constant drug use or surgery, because hey, they have patient data on that. But in terms of preventive medicine, insurance companies can't figure out what to do. Thus, it's completely random as to what you may or may not get covered for preventative techniques - like doing physical therapy to prevent surgery instead of recover from it. And if you have to pay out of pocket for this sort of stuff, damn... it gets expensive these days.
But people lived before peer-reviewed research. They collected information somehow and used it somehow and it worked to varying degrees of success, which has been reflected in the rise and fall of various societies and in the quality of life in those societies. The challenge is not to abandon peer-reviewed research, but to integrate it effectively with other sources of knowledge.
It's like we didn't burn the wood or store it for fuel, we used it to repair the walls of the house.
Right? Or am I confused.
Since fat and protein each have different amounts of calories stored per gram, that's why if you want to get really accurate about weight loss/gain, you track your body's %fat & %muscle and not just your weight.
Edit: to clarify your analogy, just because we use wood to build a part of the house, doesn't mean we won't take it and burn it if we're desperate for heat and have used all the other fuel.
2) All other things being equal, changing "calories in" will make you lose/gain weight. The trouble is, all other things are not equal - simply changing how much you eat will significantly change those other things, it has an effect on your metabolism and eagerness for physical activity, thus directly affecting also "calories out" if you don't carefully monitor that and work to keep that stable.
3) All other things being equal, changing "calories out" will make you lose/gain weight. The trouble is, all other things are not equal - simply starting/stopping working out will significantly change your natural appetite, how hungry you are and how often you're hungry, and which types of food you have cravings for, thus directly affecting "calories in" unless you carefully track what and how much you eat everything and actually do keep that schedule exactly the same.
Are we accepting that the complex biochemical mechanisms of the cells are identical to burning things in an open flame?
And, that every living human's body processes all foods in exactly the same way, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, time of day etc? Just like the open flame would?