The fight over the sugar industry's influence on nutrition research

>"I mean, if you spent 3-5 years (sometimes much more) of your prime working on something only to come to the conclusion that your wrong would you just accept it? OR you "re-adjust" the data and somehow make your p-value significant, then BOOM, your research is valuable!"

From what I've seen I don't think there is any "OR". That is standard behavior and people don't even believe there is anything wrong with it.

There really is always some legitimate reason to adjust the data... the problem is that the method of drawing conclusions (checking for significant p-values) is incompatible with this. So one or the other practice needs to go.

It's not that bad faith. When their initial hypothesis is wrong, instead of considering the null hypothesis (which is the case of accepting you're wrong), you create new conclusions from the data to say why you're still correct. It's the same thing as you said, but it's not done with malintent but done with the just wanting to prove yourself right.

As mentioned in other threads, the role of self-preservation is hard to dismiss. Most universities drop the task of getting external funding to the researcher. In order to maintain their position they must bring in X dollars. Of course, the results of all fundings have to be made meaningful to the funder. I get it, they need to eat too.

It is a shame that the Harvards of the world don't have huge research departments where the goal is always the public good funded through their monstrous endowments. I know RWJ does this kind of research but they only run so many and we have 1000s of researchers at countless universities all trying to just stay alive who will always pick up trash studies to pay the bills.

I increasingly think that we should stop to teach kids to blindly trust to this or that group of people (army, scientists, president, past historical characters) and teach them to deal with complexity and truth instead.

It's strange to me that the gate is based on success, and not just a panel of your peers/mentors judging the way you performed the study. After all, negative results are just as valuable as positive results, unless we decide we're going to ignore them and let someone else run the same experiment... which is what we're doing.

At least when considering someone for a PhD or Masters, you'd think the point would be to learn good practice, not to actually push the field forward. There's just not as much frontier as when the rules were set.

> This article makes it sound like the _majority_ of research funding is coming from industry, very little from government.

Your implication that, were the research funded by government (or some other non-profit entity), it would somehow be "better" is false. The source of the funding in all cases influences the allowed results, and determines the likelihood of future follow-on funding.

If anything, government (at least in the US) is responsible for some truly harmful dietary advice, and funds researchers who support its policy positions.

"Eating sugar will help you lose weight" has got to be up there for the most bold faced lies of the decade, if not the century.

And the intro to the article sensationalizes in the other way: "A new study showing that sugar is definitely 'toxic'".

But if you do want to attract or turn people into mustache-twirling villains, offer money.

I think it's actually important to note that you don't even have to intend to appease your funding sources - it can happen (and I'd say most often does happen) unconsciously.

Yup. Even slight adjustments on what studies will get funded can have a huge effect in the long run.

As best I can tell:

1. There is a ton of money at stake for a ton of actors. Farmers, processors, manufacturers, restaurants and pharma have huge incentives to not change things.

2. From my observation, nutrition scientists tend to suffer from herd mentality more than anticipated, for reasons I'm not certain about (although grant money certainly is part of it). Hell, they will even prosecute their own members who don't conform 100% to the official story, it's nuts.

> I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that?

We're not really in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science - we've actually learned a whole lot in the last century, but we take a lot of those advances for granted because food is such an integral part of our daily lives.

That said, nutrition is also much more difficult to study because not only are there ethical concerns that aren't present in a lot of other scientific fields, but there are an incredible number of confounding variables that make it difficult to perform conclusive, properly controlled experiments for anything but the most basic and straightforward hypotheses.

And that's all before you get into the issue of genetics and nutritional effects varying across a heterogeneous population.

The more complex the system, the more difficult science is to perform. Isolating variables is extremely difficult.

A move to capitalist and away from socialist modes of scientific research production in the nutritional field due to neoliberal decimation of research budgets and encroaching business interests both in the funding and dissemination of research relevant to corporate business models.

We have learned a lot about nutrition. Military Rations for example are successfully designed to allow for people to stay reasonably healthy indefinably on them. This is a fairly hard problem with most cultures having failed throughout human history. Vitamin C deficiency is the most well known, but Thiamine deficiency has also killed plenty of people including several of the upper crust in Japan after white rice became more common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency

The problem is when we go from survival to optimum you need to look at weak order effects. 0.01% is significant across 7 billion people, but really hard to discover. Further, you encounter trade-offs is 0.01% worse in these 20 things, but 0.01% better in these 30 things what's the importance of each of those things and how does that interact with the 10,000 other chemicals people are eating daily.

>"I'm still dumbfounded how we can have advanced so far in so many areas of science and technology and yet we are in the dark ages when it comes to nutrition science. Why is that?"

Perhaps its just easier for non-specialists to understand the issues surrounding some areas than others, eg nutrition research. A lot of the "advance" could be illusory.

There is only one explanation for the resistance up to hostility I see against sound advice--willful ignorance. People are so emotionally dependent on food for a feeling of success, happiness and reward that their mind responds to any threats like that of an addict threatened with supply interruption.

It's crazy to me how hard it is to switch to a view of food as fuel instead of as a reward. People who readily eat the worst foods on earth would never think of putting bad fuel in their car.

With that backdrop, all the food industry needs to do is sew the tiniest amount of confusion and that lets everyone do whatever they want, because "who knows for sure!?!?"

There is so much money in the entrenched parties. The animal ag (which promotes high fat diets), the snack industry (which promotes refined fats and carbs). But then the animal ag and snack industries both want cheap corn and soy produced en masse, one to feed to animals, and the other to put into snack foods.

One of the few camps that doesn’t have huge lobbying power is organic whole foods or sustainable plant-based foods.

For a good history to see how we got to the state we are at is to have a read of "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz. Here is an article with a summarized version https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

Basically was due to a force of charisma, presidents getting heart attacks and industry funding.

Generally speaking, nutritional studies are observational and very difficult to control for confounding variables.

Think about it this way:

"We want to feed group A organic apples, group B apples that have been doused in insecticide, and then use a group C that isn't fed anything."

This is already hard - specifically if people are resistant to eating something they perceive as harmful. But now add in further separation for confounding variables:

  - Weight
  - Race
  - Age
  - Sex
  - Other foods you eat
  - Exercise

And everything else that can vary drastically from one person to the next.

In order to actually perform this study, you would either need A) a VERY large group of people to observe (who haven't opted in to a controlled study) so you can have statistically significant sub-groups that can be stratified into quartiles or whatever (for example, sedentary, low activity, moderate activity, high activity),

Or, B) a fair sized group of people who want to opt in to such a restrictive controlled study.

Nutrition is something that typically needs to be studied for decades for things that we don't already have a pretty good idea about (like acute allergies, botulism, those kinds of things).

We are very unlikely to have this data until we have MUCH better observational data over the course of someone's life. Maybe we will have these points as people born in the early 00's start to grow up with more tracked data available, but can you tell me how many apples you ate per week in 1997?

(Quick edit to clarify some confusing language)

On one hand, I agree, however, I think it is also quite bad that many scientists effectively say 'hey, I'm a scientist so you should trust me.'

Clearly we need to find more effective ways to convey science and make people comfortable with believing research that they aren't capable of assessing.

The sugar industry has been powerful for a long time. The first slaves were sugar workers. Back then the powers settled wars by trading islands with sugar.

Sugar has and will be more powerful than cigarettes evet were.

I mean, if I eat one piece of candy a year, I won't gain weight either. Somehow I don't think that's the story they're trying to sell.

If you eat only candy you will probably lose weight after a while....

If they were trying to imply that eating candy causes kids to weigh less, then it would indeed seem to be prima facie absurd.

But if they are just claiming a correlation, that doesn't seem all that out of the question to me, because parents might include the weight and fitness of their kids as a factor when deciding how much, if any, candy to allow their kids.

Suppose a parent has two kids. One greatly prefers spending his time indoors reading or using the computer, and gets almost no exercise except when forced to do physical chores. He's not fat, but he's on the high end of normal weight for his age and build.

The other prefers to spend his time outside running around, climbing trees, playing basketball, and is pretty much constantly on the move except when sleeping.

Assume both kids like candy. I could see that parent allowing them to have it if they remain fit and not overweight, but restricting it if they start to become unfit or overweight. Under such a rule the result is going to be that the second kid is allowed to eat a lot more candy than the first kid.

That would result in a correlation between higher candy consumption and lower weight and better fitness.

The causation goes the opposite direction. If your kid is already fat, you won't give them candy. If your kid is thin, they can have some.

Thinness causes candy intake, more so than candy intake causes thinness. The study cleverly misframes that.