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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)

#81

So... I think I have 3 points. First is worst. Looking back over a few generations, standard nutritional advice informing doctors, institutions and the public have been poor. Not only inaccurate, but de facto pushing people down bad paths. Low fat & low cholesterol labels led to foods, with processed foods with high sugar & many additives. Cereal instead of a boiled egg. Second is that many norms, like the food pyram…

> like the food pyramid hanging in classrooms during the 80s & 90s were based on long forgotten, often arbitrary decisions.

The food pyramid was not arbitrary, it was the result of highly concentrated lobbying.

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

#82
Do researchers even get taught about the difference between correlation and causation? People who eat large numbers of eggs probably also eat large amounts of bacon (compared to others), and bacon as a highly cured meat with high levels of salt and other toxic compounds, could easily explain the results. And then there is this:

> But on the other hand, the study tracked participants’ health outcomes over periods ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and participants were queried about their diet only once, at the beginning of the study.

Wow I don't know what to say.

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

#83

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.

Higher salt levels raise blood pressure. High blood pressure leads the body to strengthen blood vessel walls, which make them less flexible. Less flexible blood vessels put more strain on the heart, which in cardiac patients (who are operating with a damaged heart) is obviously suboptimal.

There is a ton of studies about this and heart patient life expectancies have been going up for the last several decades because we have figured this (and a few other things) out.

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

#84

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 greas…

Some people are obsessed with diets and risk factors that amount to pretty much nothing over the course of one's life.

There's heavy alcoholics and smokers living to 90, then there's the poor sods doing everything "right" and dying of cancer at 50. Nutrition is just a very small, imo insignificant, part of it - assuming you're not starving or eating the exact same thing every day for years.

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

#85
post #82

Do researchers even get taught about the difference between correlation and causation? People who eat large numbers of eggs probably also eat large amounts of bacon (compared to others), and bacon as a highly cured meat with high levels of salt and other toxic compounds, could easily explain the results. And then there is this: > But on the other hand, the study tracked participants’ health outcomes over periods rang…

Yeah, I had a hard time believing that. Surely there's no way you could publish a paper purporting to be about health affects of what people ate if you only asked them once what they ate and used that to evaluate a multi-decade time frame. That hardly seems better than basing your findings on intuition.

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

#86

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…

[deleted]

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

#87
post #61

Industrial egg production is bad for the chickens, especially male chicks. I consume egg alternatives such as Just Egg and use alternatives (e.g. tapioca starch) for baking and no one notices.

> Industrial egg production is bad for the chickens Most successful bird in the planet. Almost 26 billions of chicken lives in this planet because egg production. But yeah, farming is bad. Dodos are fortunate to live such wild and happy lives currently.

You'd be wishing for the fate of the dodo if you were trapped inside a cage 1.5x your volume for your entire life, your only consolation being there's another 100 billion of you. "How successful of me," you'd be saying to yourself?

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

#88

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…

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?

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

#89
post #71
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…

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?

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

#90

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.

The reason we cry about it is because they were extremely confident in their conclusions then, although in retrospect the evidence was terrible, and half of it even apocryphal. There's no break in continuity from the experts then to the experts now that I'm aware of.

The problem is not the gradual improvement through study, it's the cargo-culting, "common sense" that became prevailing consensus, and political motivations from the funders of research.

Science seems to know a lot about poisons, but not a lot about nutrition. It's like how neuroscientists know a lot about the results of ablations, but not a lot about normal function.

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