Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

undark.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 136 posts

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

#41

Post by bigcorp-slave »

yboris wrote: post #33

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 Studie…

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.

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

#42

Post by joshe »

yboris wrote: post #33

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 Studie…

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".

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

#43

Post by mcguire »

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.

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

#44

Post by stronglikedan »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #29

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?

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.

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

#45

Post by beering »

bigcorp-slave wrote: post #41
yboris wrote: post #33

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 Studie…

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.

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".

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

#46

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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.

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

#47

Post by azinman2 »

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.

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

#48

Post by Justin_K »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #21
spidersouris wrote: post #3

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…

> 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.

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...

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

#49

Post by suresk »

yboris wrote: post #33

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 Studie…

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.

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

#50

Post by slibhb »

yboris wrote: post #33

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 Studie…

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