Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People rightly so have distrust for results coming out in fields they don't have good knowledge in. Without becoming an expert yourself it's very difficult to know who or what to trust. A problem here is that there are fields of science that are almost certainly bogus in themselves. One very likely candidate is nutrition, which seems to be fumbling in the dark and has a long history of producing worse recommendatio…
>A problem here is that there are fields of science that are almost certainly bogus in themselves. One very likely candidate is nutrition, which seems to be fumbling in the dark and has a long history of producing worse recommendations than doing nothing (e.g. replace fat with sugar). It's not the field that is bogus in that case. People were quite literally bribed to push this. This could happen anywhere, anytime, i…
Basically the digestive system is far too complex for us to understand from first principles at this time. Your diet has a very complex and very slow effect on your body, with some exceptions. Numerous diseases and environmental factors impact how this plays out exactly. So, to do real research in nutrition, the only chance right now would be to conduct massive studies over long periods of time with rigorous controls on subjects' nutrition and activities - which is basically impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive.
Instead, we get conclusions drawn from studies of a few dozen people over a few months or at best a year (in "long-term" studies). Or, we get conclusions drawn from comparing diet across huge populations ("the Mediterranean diet", "the Japanese diet", "the American diet" etc) with no possibility to control for obvious differences in nutrients, environmental factors, lifestyle differences, access to healthcare etc. Both of these are worthless conclusions, they don't tell you anything at all.
The only successes of nutrition science have been identifying the most basic nutrients we need to survive at a basic level (protein, fat, carbohydrates, and the various vitamins and minerals). Basically nothing beyond that should be trusted.
As a fun historical note, after the discovery of the macro-nutrients there was a budding field of nutrition scientists confidently recommending optimal diets using scientific methods. Unfortunately, they had no idea about the existence of micro-nutrients, so actually following some of their diets you could actually end up getting scurvy or other serious malnutrition diseases. The current slew is not that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we will look back similarly at some common diet advice of today.
