This new article on the website of the NY Times listing "the 11 best foods you aren't eating" is a perfect example of nutritionism run amok, full of dubious claims like this:
Pumpkin seeds: The most nutritious part of the pumpkin and packed with magnesium; high levels of the mineral are associated with lower risk for early death.
Turmeric: The "superstar of spices,'' it has anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties.
I have no doubt pumpkin seeds are good for you (they're also delicious when salted and toasted or when turned into an oil) or that turmeric is a "superstar," but I've read enough Michael Pollan to dread this sort of pseudoscientific evidence. Lest we forget, at least 30 percent of major medical studies - the sort that find tenuous connections between turmeric and cancer - are wrong, or at least directly contradicted by later research (which, of course, might also be wrong). That's why I'm so skeptical of any grocery list that mentions the word "antioxidant" or "longevity". Ben Goldacre, that noble cynic, has more:
Gary Schwitzer used to be a journalist, but now he has turned to quantitative analyses of journalism, and this month he published an analysis of 500 health articles from mainstream media in the US. The results were dismal. Only 35% of stories were rated satisfactory for whether the journalist had "discussed the study methodology and the quality of the evidence": because in the media, as you will have noticed, science is about absolute truth statements from arbitrary authority figures in white coats, rather than clear descriptions of studies and the reasons why people draw conclusions from them.
Only 28% adequately covered benefits, and only 33% adequately covered harms. Articles routinely failed to give any useful quantitative information in absolute terms, preferring unhelpful eye-catchers like "50% higher" instead.
There are many good reasons to eat sardines, beets, turmeric, etc. But don't eat them because of some correlation in a medical study. There's a good chance, after all, that such a correlation will turn out to be dead wrong.
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"Lest we forget, at least 30 percent of major medical studies - the sort that find tenuous connections between turmeric and cancer - are wrong"
Lest we forget, 63% of all unreferenced statistics, and 32% of all referenced statistics (1), are wrong...
(1) The Vlad, this post.
A few years back ago in Science (the AAAS journal) there was monograph addressing the question of whether a reduction in dietary salt would increase longevity. The consensus among scientists was that such a study would cost $1 billion and take 10 years.
Nobody wanted to conduct the study. Thus, truly, the answer is anybody's guess.
The 'nutritionists', uninterested in the learning the actual truth, put their faith-based guesswork out as factual.
They glibly advise that everyone should restrict their salt intake, equating a 90-pound woman working in an office in Maine in the middle of winter and a 190-pound man working as a roofer in Arizona in the middle of summer as having identical salt needs.
Go figure.
While there is a lot of wooism in popular nutrition, I wouldn't out of hand dismiss the educated nutritionists who, affiliated with hospitals here in Canada, help people redirect often terrible food habits into healthier regimes that may save their lives. I have relatives with diabetes and various heart conditions who are probably alive today because they listened to a nutritionist.
Some dietary facts really are facts: if you don't absorb enough iron, you will eventually have an iron deficiency that causes fainting; if you skip the fruit and veg entirely, scurvy will most likely follow.