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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Nutrition is like, the worst field of medical research, and that's saying something. All of the hallmarks of typical medical research (studies sponsored by interested parties, non-repeatable results, tiny sample sizes, contradictory health recommendations, lack of properly controlled experimentation, etc.) are present in nutrition, but turned up to eleven. Future generations will lump the nutrition advice with which we struggle to survive, in with bloodletting and snake oil.

No, I don't see a way around any of this. Lots of money is spent on food, and will be for the foreseeable future.

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Open Food Facts is trying to create massive amounts of open data on all products sold. It's only a part of the puzzle, but we've already seen journalists and nutritionists leverage data to do better science or reporting.

> No, I don't see a way around any of this. Lots of money is spent on food, and will be for the foreseeable future.

I also see this as a symptom of the very low barrier to entry. Anyone can make food, make money off of food, and everyone buys food, which means the participants aren't required to be specialists and can be supplanted by anyone playing a factor differently, even if this means telling bold lies about the utility of the product (e.g. "Vitamin Water" being an intentional misnomer or "all natural" meaning nothing).

"Nutritionist" == RD exam => government licensure (required by every state in the US except 4. In AZ, MI,NJ,CO you don't even need the license [1])

However, the RD exam is a mishmash of several ill-specified fields with dubious claims & ad-hoc practices, much of which aren't scientifically verifiable.

RD exam: 12% - food and nutrition 40% - nutrition care 10% - counselling 17% - food service 21% - management

Its a multiple-choice US-centric exam which most likely any American housewife/househusband/anybody-who-cooks-regularly could pass, if (s)he just showed up on a spare afternoon. There are actual questions[2] like

Q. What is the best way to cook a roast? A. Cook it in oven at 325F

Q. What gives structure to bread ? A. Egg and Flour

Q. Glucose test should be plotted on what graph? A. Line graph.

Once you pass the exam and become a government certified nutritionist, you can tell a sick overweight person with authority- "don't eat that egg, it has cholesterol, you will get a heart attack" and people will actually take you seriously because you now have the license!

If you have some money to burn, you can purchase 3 random RD exams at eatrightprep[3] for $199 (!), which should "only be used by one person and should not be shared" heh heh heh!

The whole space is crying out for disruption. Serious startup opportunities abound.

1. https://www.cdrnet.org/vault/2459/web/files/Licensurelawsreg... 2. http://www.cram.com/flashcards/domain-1-inman-review-questio... 3. https://www.eatrightprep.org/rdn-exam

> "Nutritionist" == RD exam

No, "Dietitian" requires the requirements for the RD (which are not just an exam, there's also an education and clinical practice requirement for registration.)

"Nutritionist" is generally unregulated, though there are "certified nutrition specialist" with a required test and other requirements.

Q. What gives structure to bread ? A. Egg and Flour

Eggs in bread?

Where? Why?

Ridiculous. The future will not show that proper nutrition is a waste of time. It is absurd to think our body responds to every input the same.

You are lumping every Doctor, Biochemist, Farmer, and John Doe who call themselves a "Nutritionalist" together. They are really, really different people and some of them are totally right and some are dead wrong.

jessaustin isn't saying proper nutrition is a waste of time, but rather that nutritional research is of exceptionally poor quality due to the amount of money on the line for the vested interests that fund the studies.

To your second point, the problem is that we don't know who is right and who is wrong. The studies are conducted so poorly or with such bias that it's near impossible to have concrete recommendations.

It's common for Doctors and Biochemists themselves to do shitty science in spite of their fancy titles, as evidenced by the vast amount of contradictory and non-reproducible results in both fields [1]. Obviously the field itself isn't a waste of time but it's unfortunate that there's so much noise that it may as well be.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...

The OP did not say that proper nutrition is a waste of time, but rather nutritional medical research is flawed, so advice coming from said research is not useful.

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