Too bad OP didn't include one of the major specific criticisms, instead of unconvincingly talking about the evidence pyramid: healthy-user bias.
So, the study looked at whole-grain eating and a health outcome, and the study found lower incidence of the health outcome? Who could have predicted that? (Well, everyone. It even used the Nurses’ Health Study for data!) That is almost as bad as the soda study a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8490522
I would suggest recalibrating your expectations based on the source. Vox's audience falls somewhere in between the audience of Business Insider and Buzzfeed. This is fairly in-depth for them.
Are you commenting in disregard of this paragraph near the top of the submitted article? "In this case, the study population was not randomly assigned to eat more whole grains, which means we can't know whether the people who ate them are healthier because of their diet or because of other traits they share, like their age, ethnicity, smoking status, alcohol intake, physical activity levels, multivitamin use, and family medical history."
Nope. Notice that none of those is healthy user bias - age != healthy user bias, smoking != healthy user bias, and so on. Smoking and multivitamin use may reflect it, but there's a big difference between mentioning a few confounders and pointing out a major confound that could not just explain the result entirely but also explain why nutrition results have been and will be systematically wrong.
This is like telling us not to believe everything we read... I'd agree though when he said that not all studies are equal. We also need to check their sources.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 20.3 ms ] threadSo, the study looked at whole-grain eating and a health outcome, and the study found lower incidence of the health outcome? Who could have predicted that? (Well, everyone. It even used the Nurses’ Health Study for data!) That is almost as bad as the soda study a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8490522