“Joy of Cooking” versus the Food Scientist
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Even his poster child Bottomless Bowls study is now under dispute. Something rotten indeed.
it's kind of amazing that he has a job
No less than as head of a research lab at Cornell, in one of the top 10 applied economics schools in the world.
>...the inaccuracies stemmed primarily from a statistical and reporting/formatting error that led to further inaccuracies.
>The review found that there was no intended deception or evidence of deliberate misconduct, and that the significance of the results and discussion in the article would not change because of the errors.
>However, since the number of errors is too voluminous to be executed by issuing a correction statement, the journal is withdrawing the article and will republish it as a corrected version in a subsequent issue, and will utilize the same DOI as the originally published version of the article. The authors agree with this decision.
This is good/ Not bad?
Huh? That's not what the study concluded.
Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more soup […] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls.
Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/oby.2005.12
1. Dishes with the same name are conflated despite being completely different.
2. Many dishes don't have a serving size they simply yield things like "1 cake".
3. The researcher choose a particularly small sample size (18 out of ~4500)
As a cooking enthusiast I find it frustrating that a researcher forces a narrative that home cooked meals are the problem when the reality is that all the fast an processed foods we have today are much more likely the culprit of obesity. We need to be encouraging people to cook for themselves with fresh ingredients and not publishing dubious studies that suggest to do the opposite.
4) researcher is a serial p-hacker who even boasted about the practice
5) reason given for the small sample (most recipes had changed) was a lie and sample appears to have been cherry-picked
It wasn't a sample, it was supposedly (but very much not, in fact) the entire universe, that is, the set of recipes that were present across the entire time period from the first to the most recent edition, and thus could be compared across time.
> Wansink also insisted on only comparing recipes that bore identical names in different “Joy” editions, regardless of the accompanying recipes, which sometimes led him to compare two entirely different dishes. He liked to point to gumbo as one of the most egregious calorie gainers, but the recipe from 1936, a clear soup of chicken and sliced vegetables simmered in water, has almost nothing in common with the sausage-studded, roux-thickened chicken variety featured in the 2006 book. “It’s like comparing a Chateaubriand to a whole roast steer,” Heathers said, “and saying they’re both roast beef.”
Presumably this would also exclude many recipes whose names were changed but are basically the same.
It really doesn't matter that your potatoes have been sitting in the fridge for two weeks, or that your steak's been in the freezer for a month, or that heaven forbid, your onions did not magically arrive from a farmer's market to your plate. The problem is that you fried your potatoes in half a cup of butter, and that you're eating steak.
More seriously: correlation is not the same as causation, but one of the obvious correlated changes is the increase in consumption of sugary beverages: soft-drinks, fruit juices &c.
We ate big meals, but we didn't eat anything else. When I see families now, they stock up with super mega sized snack food at Costco and cram it in their minivan (the 2 reasons for having a minivan being to drive soccer teams around and to take your super mega sized snack food home </snark>) When I was a kid, people didn't buy stuff at that scale. Homes were smaller too, as were refrigerators. You just couldn't do that kind of thing easily.
Of course, my excuse for getting fat these days is because I live in Japan and there is nowhere in Japan that isn't walking distance from a convenience store... That and my wife believes that beer has no calories -- a misunderstanding that I'm loathe to correct.
I don't know about your parents, but when I look at what was done for free time when my grandparents(born ~1930s) and my parents (born in the 1950s) did in their free time vs what my friends and I did I can't help but see a significant difference in the time spent active. I'm not just talking about going out to ride a bike/play basketball with my friends, but later in life. When my grandfather went to work, school, and even to a bar he always walked and my father had a similar relationship with mobility during his early to teen years. Of course that changed when they both were old enough to own a car, but for both of them that wasn't until they're late teens.
Combine that with the only entertainment being other places or outside you have a populace who expends significantly more calories every day than my generation (Millenial).
As time progresses I think you might see parents from the earlier generations feeding their kids at the level they were fed as kids not recognizing that little Billy watches youtube for 3 hours after finishing his homework instead of going and playing basketball with Tuk-Tuk leading to a daily calorie surplus. Over time a daily intake of +200 calories can easily add up to a significant amount of weight.
I don't have any data to support this other than my anecdotal story and how I approached weight loss (by decreasing intake and increasing passive/everyday calory burn rate), but I think it'd be a cool thing to see studied.
Frankly, I don't think I agree with this, because someone who's cooking with fresh ingredients gets to see, for instance, that they are adding a boggling amount of sugar to their food.
Who actually adds a mind-boggling amount of sugar to their food when they cook from basic ingredients? Everyone I know overdoes fats, but sugar?
The sugar contents of some of the staples - bread, sauces, etc. - can be shockingly high. A tablespoon of ketchup has more sugar than a chocolate chip cookie.
Ketchup isn't really any less fresh than the butter/oil.
Ketchup has about 1/3 the calories of a chocolate chip cookie. What does it matter that it has the same amount of sugar?
http://www.kraftrecipes.com/products/kraft-16-fo-dressing-li...
Or even if you are making your own, a surprising number have sugar or honey as ingredients.
I was agreeing with your point.
As to your second paragraph, well, here is my point illustrated. Added sugars are probably our biggest problem. Even when it comes to lipids, I don't think most people cooking at home are making Cheesecake Factory-style meals. But my understanding of the latest research is that trying to remove fats from your diet is no longer necessarily recommended.
It's not the only way (Honestly, I prefer duck/goose fat if I'm feeling fancy, beef if not), but it's a perfectly acceptable way of making crispy delicious hash browns.
Probably with cheese sauce for good measure...
I have never used a full stick of butter in the making of either of these. For hash I use as little as I need to lubricate the potatoes. For mashed I use about 1 tablespoon per 2.5 pounds of potatoes. Since I have never made 20 pounds at once, I have never used a full stick.
He'll often point out the conflicts of interest behind the funding of various studies as well as analyzing them on their face.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illnes...
. . . specifically whole plant-based foods. He describes the health problems of hydrogenated oils, sugar, and products made from them.
Is there a whole plant based food industry funding studies on broccoli and collard greens? If not, is he biased or simply stating what his research implies?
That isn't to say that the research is flawed, but somehow Greger only sees this funding mechanism to be fundamentally bad when they contradict his predetermined conclusion...he conveniently doesn't see any reason to question a study on kale funded by the kale industry.
And yes, Greger is biased. His opinions start with the premise that vegan==good and anything else is bad, and he works backward from there to shape a view of research that bolsters that premise. It's no different than Mormon scientists attempting to prove that coffee is bad for you, or Muslim scientists that attempt to prove that pork is bad for you. The idea that humans shouldn't eat animals or animal products has a valid philosophical foundation, and while a vegan diet is likely far more healthy than the average diet, editorializing the science to attempt to prove nutritional superiority of that philosophy is irresponsible pseudoscience.
Assuming the proper procedures are observed I don't think I see something wrong in principle with these examples. Certainly if they're massaging the data we're talking about something different.
For example, let's say that 10% of all studies are poorly executed. If there are 100 studies that conclude that X is good, I can find 10 of them that are poorly executed. Let's say there are 20 studies that conclude that X is bad. If 10% of them are poorly executed, then I can find 18 which are well executed. In reality there are 90 good studies concluding that X is good and 18 good studies concluding that X is bad. However, I can show the 10 poor studies showing something is good and the 18 well done studies showing it is bad, leading you to conclude that there is some kind of conspiracy, even though most of the evidence concludes that X is good.
Meta studies are particularly prone to selection bias in this way.
Already "trying to probe X" is a bias. And if you have a religious or monetary interest on top, you shouldn't be doing such research in the first place.
Even if you intend to follow all correct procedures, your prior beliefs might still affect your results subconsciously.
Probably.
>If not, why is that different?
It's not.
(Now, sure, they could do it. In fact, they do do it. It's not like my opinion is law. That said, historically, researchers with some personal bias had all kinds of problems related to that in their research -- many examples).
Yeah, but note how this presupposes that its equally easy to "carry it out properly" in either case.
Whereas what I say is that
(a) it's less likely for biased researchers to carry their research out properly (I say less likely, not impossible).
(b) so for that, we should try to have less research from biased researchers
(That's because I don't think that "(c) biased researchers should try more to handle their research properly" is an option -- because of how bias works, biased researchers will always be more prone to not handling their research properly).
I'm willing to bet my life that the author has taken liberties with this "delivered the news as if a relative had died" part. I bet if there still exist actual record (say an email) of the delivery that it would be something he wouldn't want us to see. It's a small lie, sure, but it's so unpleasant. In an article whose supposed topic is honesty no less.