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

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

#51
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.

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.

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

#52
post #43

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.

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.

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

#53
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.

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

#54
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.

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

#55

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.

"Nobody" but countless doctors and scientists of the AHA.

"The AHA recommendation to reduce salt intake is based on strong science, not just extrapolations or complex math," Sacco says. "There have even been randomized trials, the strongest evidence we have that show people who follow lower-sodium diets have lower blood pressure and fewer heart attacks and strokes."

https://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/20110504/study-show...

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

#56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I think you're misunderstanding the claim. It's name a healthy diet. A single one. A diet which followed to the letter for the time span its prescribed will not cause any health problems traceable back to it. Make whatever assumptions about the hypothetical person you need and assume that they follow the diet for only as long as those assumptions hold.

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

#57
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.

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

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

#58
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 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.

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

#59

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.

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.

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

#60

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?

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.
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