Nutrition science isn't futile

Nutrition science is horribly underfunded by the government, so food companies and industry groups sponsor research.

Industry-funded studies tend to have results that are more favourable to the industry.

Researchers discovered that different bodies have very different responses to the same food. This makes nutrition research more difficult.

Israeli scientists tracked 800 people over a week, monitoring their blood sugar levels to see how they responded to the same foods. Every person...

In the distant past, studying nutrition was a relatively simple science. Diseases such as scurvy, pellagra, anaemia and goitre were solved by developing hypotheses and running experiments until they found what was missing in people's diets.

However, nutrition is no ...

The randomized controlled trial is considered the gold standard for many areas of medicine. People are randomly assigned to two groups, and the only significant difference between the groups is the treatment.

But with nutrition, it's too difficult to randomly assign different diets to peop...

Studies that track very large numbers of people who already eat a certain way can be very valuable. For example, that is how scientists learned about the dangers of smoking and the benefits of exercise.

But observational studies are rife with uncertainty. These studies aren...

Many observational studies rely on surveys and have subjects report on their diets.

An obvious challenge is that people don't remember what they ate for lunch yesterday or if they sprinkled something over the salad or snacked afterwards. Yet, much nutrition research rests ...