March 2, 2024 — Nutrition research in medical journals follows trends that define what the cognoscenti can regard healthy – or not. For decades, the bad stuff was fat. Then we switched to the sugar is toxic meme and that was the preoccupation through the 2010s. Now there can be no doubt. Research on ultra-processed foods is providing a steady […]
September 5, 2023 — When an idea captures the imagination, it can become something like an ink stain. Tough to alter. One such idea that captured our imagination is the idea that gut microbiota might be a causal factor in obesity. But a new review in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B suggests rethinking this idea. Matthew Dalby […]
March 9, 2023 — Reporting on supposed dangers of “fake” sugar is a self-replicating genre that seemingly never fades. The Washington Post this week published a prime example, telling readers: “The food industry says sugar substitutes help people manage their weight and reduce intake of added sugars. But studies suggest that fake sugars can also have unexpected effects on […]
February 19, 2023 — Sixty years ago, President John F. Kennedy warned the graduating class at Yale that too often “We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Public discourse on the subject of obesity right now is certainly bringing that thought into vivid view. Over and over again, we hear supposed experts expressing their comfortable […]
July 18, 2022 — Every week from the Obesity and Energetics Offerings, we get sharp reminders. Headlines about nutrition and obesity science very often don’t stand up to a careful look at what the study behind the headlines actually found. This charade, though, has a serious downside. As two studies in the last week show, it perpetuates a fiction […]
December 24, 2019 — We see a pattern. Take a look at the list of the top attention-getting stories on the JAMA network for 2019. Because if you do, you will see that most of them are about correlations. Or associations. Or links. In other words, they’re not about experimental evidence of causality or effects. It seems that we […]
