Posts Tagged ‘nutritional epidemiology’

The most pervasive way of thinking about obesity is to simply regard it as “a diet-related disease.” But a new paper in Nature Food suggests we may be misleading ourselves. That’s because of a fundamental problem in the data that links patterns of diet to obesity and health. An impressive collection of scientists examined the […]

From the swimming habits of dead trout to the revelation that some mammals can breathe through their backsides, a group of leading leftfield scientists have been taking their bows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 34th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Not to be confused with an actual Nobel prize, the Ig Nobel […]

From time to time, nutritional epidemiologists take themselves entirely too seriously. This week is one of those times. Health reporting is full of warnings that your lunch sandwich might give you type 2 diabetes. The senior author of the paper in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology causing this stir, Professor Nita Forouhi, expresses no caution about […]

It’s a popular cause. Red meat production is a problem for the climate. Add that to ethical concerns some people have about consuming meat, and the push to reduce red meat consumption makes total sense. But when people start spinning misleading narratives about observational research and using them to promote this otherwise worthy idea, they’re […]

“Yes, not all types of food processing are bad and not all UPF are equally bad,” writes Carlos Monteiro. He’s commenting on a new study of ultra-processed foods in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Because he is the author and a big promoter of the NOVA UPF classification scheme, his comments are notable. But the […]

The Nutrition Source at Harvard makes one thing clear enough. Potatoes are a problem. They can give you obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Skip across town and you’ll get a very different story from Boston University. “Nutrient-rich potatoes can be part of a healthy diet in young girls.” This kind of whiplash tells us that, […]

A new study in the September issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition asks an important question. Are Americans eating more junk food? Cutting right to the chase, the answer is no. Adults actually report eating less in 2018 than they did in 2011. Children haven’t changed their habits. Adults are getting 13 percent […]

SF Eater tells us that 13 bakeries in San Francisco have “killer croissants.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution tells us that croissants, along with white bread, tie us to an early death. Their source for this epidemiological wisdom is the BMJ. That treasure trove of epidemiology – the PURE study – has yielded another publication. This […]

One of the biggest surprises in this COVID-19 pandemic has been intense interest in vitamin D. Earlier this month, readers swarmed around an item we wrote about it. Now, a month later, the interest persists. Some people seem to be looking for magic for COVID from vitamin D. Others are finding issues. We advise sensible […]

Is nutritional epidemiology suffering from overexposure? A study of veggies and COVID-19 mortality prompts this question. This exercise in nutrition correlation comes from a pre-print. So we can’t blame lax peer reviewers for this one. But the manuscript does make some remarkable claims: For each g/day increase in the average national consumption of some of […]