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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)

#91
post #62

Another article recommending Mediterranean diet. The healthy Greek and Italian people I know seem to have coffee and a cigarette for breakfast. It seems traditionally food was tight and often in the winter they'd skip meals and go hungry, so Med diet is probably closer to intermittent fasting.

Yeah - the bullshit of attributing differences to diet, and ignoring lifestyle differences. For example cars per capita: US=0.8 Italy=0.7 and Greece=0.5 (so Greece has more than twice as many people without a car – ignoring distribution).

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Side note: Why do we constantly cry about recommendations from the 1970s being different from today's recommendations? Because hardly anything in nutrition "science" has proven to be predictive. It's all junk. Most of it intentional junk pushed by political and business interests. For example, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." is just nonsense based on junk "science" funded by vegan/vegetarian aligned intere…

That is not a vegan take. I am not vegan. >perhaps we should eat a variety of everything in moderation. That's what the quote means?

> That is not a vegan take. I am not vegan.

Didn't say you were vegan. Just like mothers telling their children "eat your veggies" makes them vegan. But the prevalence of that saying today is due to the vegan lobby.

> That's what the quote means?

Nope. A balanced diet perhaps, but certainly not your quote. Your quote part of vegan propaganda. Sneakily get the naive to accept "mostly vegetables" and then "why not only vegetables".

You see it everywhere on social media. It's a propaganda campaign funded by the largest corporations in the world and the vegan fanatics teaching kids/people a toxic and unnatural diet to humans.

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

#93
post #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.

It's been awhile since I went down the cholesterol rabbit hole, but there was this guy out there claiming he could control his colesterol, and unless he was lying, the measurements back him up. He'd check his cholesterol daily and could influence which direction it was headed with his diet.

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

#94

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.

> Side note: Why do we constantly cry about recommendations from the 1970s being different from today's recommendations? Because hardly anything in nutrition "science" has proven to be predictive. It's all junk. Most of it intentional junk pushed by political and business interests. For example, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." is just nonsense based on junk "science" funded by vegan/vegetarian aligned intere…

> Since we are omnivores, perhaps we should eat a variety of everything in moderation.

That's even worse. Moderation is meaningless except in retrospect - in this context it just means the correct amount. It's not even the moderation fallacy - if I eat from 1-3 hamburgers every day, moderation doesn't tell me that I should be eating 2 because it's in the middle.

At least the "mostly plants" part of the yuppie diet cliché takes some sort of falsifiable stand. I can know for sure that I eat mostly plants, I can never know when I'm eating "moderately," or "not too much."

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

#95
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.

But observation is the point of most astronomy. Determining causatiom is usually not the goal.

Observing people's weight over time is ome of the reliable and useful things nutritiom research has accomplished. But the goal of the kind of research being discussed here though is to study causation.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a vegan take. I am not vegan. >perhaps we should eat a variety of everything in moderation. That's what the quote means?

> That is not a vegan take. I am not vegan. Didn't say you were vegan. Just like mothers telling their children "eat your veggies" makes them vegan. But the prevalence of that saying today is due to the vegan lobby. > That's what the quote means? Nope. A balanced diet perhaps, but certainly not your quote. Your quote part of vegan propaganda. Sneakily get the naive to accept "mostly vegetables" and then "why not only…

I disagree. I think it's helpful because many eat too much meat.

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

#97
Part of the problem is that nutrition is incredibly nuanced and unknown, but people want simple, absolute answers.

Different people have much different bodies: they react to foods differently, have different metabolisms (at least based on sex/age/height/weight/bodyfat/exercise), and different preferences. Bodies are also complex, and there are 500 different causes that can all lead to you feeling like garbage.

But that wouldn't sell papers, there wouldn't be much to write. So people make blunt statements. Most of what I see online seems to be geared towards the "average American". Which ironically means, the people reading these articles who actually care about their nutrition, most of it doesn't even apply to them.

And this isn't even getting into another factor, which is that people get particularly defensive about nutrition. So others take these blunt, over-generalized statements as fact and double down on them. I see this in-person by people who are otherwise really smart.

Examples: "eat less salt and more fiber" - you don't know how much salt / fiber I'm eating. "Almonds keep you full" - idk some people eat loads of almonds. "Keto changed my life / I hate keto" - that's your anecdote, it only applies to you.

Specifically, for eggs: if someone has high cholesterol, it will show up on bloodwork, and if the eggs raise their cholesterol, cutting / reintroducing them will show up too. If I eat 6 eggs a day and have great cholesterol, some study that says on average people who eat eggs die of a heart attack, that means nothing to me. If I eat 6 eggs a day and have terrible cholesterol, and after I stop eating eggs my cholesterol lowers, some study that says eggs usually don't spike cholesterol, that also means nothing.

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

#98

I'm having deja vu. We had a top story on HN recently where either the article or the consensus of the comments was "you pretty much cannot believe any studies about food or nutrition."

The problem is that humans are incredibly complex and diverse, react to stuff in wildly different ways, and you cannot A/B test on the same individual, as you cannot reseg it to the same starting state, you cannot run two experiments on them, and you cannot get two completely matching people.

And it's somewhat-to-entirely unethical and logistically impossible to conduct even uncontrolled studies over a human's entire lifespan, which is really what we're talking about here. I don't think anybody is worried that eating eggs every day will cause health problems for an otherwise-healthy 25-year-old.

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

#99
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nutritionfacts is ideologically driven operation. They only present one side of the argument. Plant based diet first, facts second. Being a nonprofit doesn't make you immune from bias. It's not just money perverting the field, but also ideology. The whole field of nutrition is divided into camps, when they conduct meta-analyses of all the literature, they pick inclusion/exclusion criteria so that the side that they a…

Politics in everything, the world feels broken. What happened?

Politics was always in everything.

The internet happened, and now you can discuss things and get facts and opinions from sides you previously couldn’t, with not much more than a click.

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

#100
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…

This is definitely part of it, but I feel like it underplays the fundamental difficulty of studying nutrition.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to study this, and you rapidly see the problems. Effects of nutrition take many years to show, so you're generally going to need to track people for years. People move, get bored of talking to you, die, etc. Their diet also varies greatly over time. They don't always remember what they ate, and certainly can't quantify it with any degree of accuracy.

If you perform some intervention, it's hard to know that the people actually complied with it. You can do it in the short term by having an in-patient setting, but again you miss the long term effects, which are really what matters to most people.

I feel like people reach too easily for conspiracy theories these days…

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