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?
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.
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.
I'd add that it might feel like we're in some sort of dark ages, but that could stem from a growing awareness where people know more about how much we can't claim to know for certain. That awareness replacing over-confidence might imply things aren't so bleak.
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!?!?"
People like to eat. It feels good. There is of course a lot of ignorance about food (and even if you aren’t ignorant it’s still easy to willfully make bad choices) but that doesn’t mean we should dehumanize it. Just like with sex, we should study it and develop a healthy culture for it that balances pleasure and what’s good for us.
Also, I’m somewhat convinced myself that the reason poor people tend to be very fat is that food for them provides way more bang-per-buck than anything else at certain income levels. Yeah you may not be able to afford a car or a nice place to live, or healthcare, or education for your kids, but goddamn you can eat some delicious food for relatively cheap. It sucks that poor people get hit hardest by obesity and almost nobody wants to be fat... but at the same time, I feel like trying to decouple food from pleasure would mean depriving poor people of one of the few joys they can afford
But that's the problem. Sugar hijacks the body's receptors making it think that it tastes delicious and is healthy and yummy. Because why would something yummy be so bad for you?
Im also a type 2 diabetic. After cutting sugar out of my diet (damn, its hard AF to avoid sugar everywhere), sugar tastes bitter and leaves a weird aftertaste. Of course, unlike what many say is polemic, sugar absolutely is poison to me.
Yet, I find more and more foods that have sugar crammed in for no good reason. After seeing product after product with artificially added sugar, I can only assume that this is a conspiracy of some sort. Why? To make food addicting? Cheap and easy? No clue. I just know I end up paying more for unadultered products - where this should be the default.
I respectfully disagree. People put all sorts of terrible fuel into their car. In my opinion, price is the determining factor for most people when it comes to fuel, not quality. I think the prevalence of ethanol based fuel supports that.
I also think there is a somewhat analogous argument to be made for food as well. People go for what is cheap and fast. If time = money then people go for cheap and cheap. Although I agree with your point about the emotional dependence. Anecdotally I've been doing Keto for 2 years and removing carbs and sugar from my diet has allowed me for the first time in my life to view food as fuel and not some sort of emotional validation. I've seen a lot of people on r/keto speculate that it's because of the lack of sugar rushes and the then inevitable dopamine hit. Kind of like a drug when you think about it.
It's not like Trainspotting withdrawal, of course, but when you're drying out from a sucrose binge, "just getting a little taste of that sweet stuff" does tend to intrude upon one's thoughts annoyingly often.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026156140...
One of the few camps that doesn’t have huge lobbying power is organic whole foods or sustainable plant-based foods.
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.
Plus I feel like really understanding nutrition science would require much more medical/biology training than nutrition scientists typically receive.
Basically was due to a force of charisma, presidents getting heart attacks and industry funding.
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
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)
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.