Nutrition Science Is Broken. This New Egg Study Shows Why. (2019)

“There is always uncertainty in science, but real science gradually establishes some stable facts; it eventually strongly supports some theories and conclusively dismisses others. … Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing. After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless. … My point is not that nutrition is bad science. Unquestionably, it is bad science; a competent statistician, looking at the design of most experiments, will immediately say “this is meaningless; you can’t learn anything this way.” It’s worse than just incompetence … even the best studies have been useless. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, such that doing the same sort of science better wouldn’t help.”

https://metarationality.com/nutrition

Good article. The jist of why nutrition science is so bad is a few paragraphs in:

> Nutrition research tends to be unreliable because nearly all of it is based on observational studies, which are imprecise, have no controls, and don’t follow an experimental method. As nutrition-research critics Edward Archer and Carl Lavie have put it, “’Nutrition’ is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape.”

The specifics of the recent “eggs are bad” study is just shocking:

> The new study linking eggs and cardiovascular disease deserves similar scrutiny. Statistically speaking, 30,000 participants makes for a very powerful study. And in fairness, the study’s defenders say that it did a good job accounting for factors that might have influenced the findings, such as overall fat consumption, smoking, and lifestyle.

> But on the other hand, the study tracked participants’ health outcomes over periods ranging from 13 to more than 30 years, and participants were queried about their diet only once, at the beginning of the study. […] Who eats the same way for 10 years?

What a joke.

"Here's Why" summarized by kagi

The egg has been a source of debate in the nutrition world for decades, with some touting its health benefits and others warning of its cholesterol content. A recent study published in JAMA found that eating more than two large eggs a day was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and death. However, nutrition research is often unreliable due to its reliance on observational studies, which are imprecise and lack controls. Dr. Jules Hirsch's controlled experiments on human nutrition are considered a gold-standard in nutrition science, but are impractical to do on a large scale. Experts recommend avoiding processed foods and sticking with a Mediterranean-like diet. Interestingly, studies of one particular food or macronutrient are impossible to disentangle from the accompanying foods and macronutrients that characterize a typical dietary pattern.