[luketych]

Oh come on.. Nutrition is not that complicated. It only looks complicated because we are looking too closely at the details, resulting in myopia. We are overthinking it. For hundreds of thousands of years people didn't even know what a nutrient was, and yet they ate properly and never got any of these western problems.

Reminds me of how our western science has overcomplicated studies on meditation and we are only now learning the benefits of it because our tools are finally sharp enough to our liking (fMRI).

We are lazy. We don't want to actually meditate to learn if it works or not. We just want to strap somebody into a machine without having to do the hard work ourselves. Our nutritionists are lazy as well. Would rather fund all these ridiculous research studies than experiment on their own bodies. Pathetic example of over measuring. Reminds me of how if all you have is a hammer then everything will start to look like a nail.

[apathy]

> For hundreds of thousands of years people didn't even know what a nutrient was, and yet they ate properly and never got any of these western problems.

Part of the reason for this is that there was no surplus of cheap calories and many people died of trauma or infection prior to becoming susceptible to degenerative disease.

As recently as 1900, the primary cause of death in the United States was infectious diseases. All-cause age-adjusted mortality in the population has halved since then. I suppose we could reduce the role of degenerative and "Western" diseases rather dramatically by discontinuing antibiotics and sanitation, but recent trips to Cambodia and Zimbabwe have me wondering if that's really what you want.

> our tools are finally sharp enough to our liking (fMRI).

fMRI is a false positive generating machine. I've never seen shittier statistical analyses than I see in "neuroscience" (at least the mouse guys use controls).

[jcranmer]

The plural of anecdote is not data. Yes, it's a pithy saying, but it's completely true. Scientific validity requires changing one variable, and only one variable, and seeing if there is an observed effect. The real world is noisy, and anything involving biology incredibly so, which means you need larger sample sizes to distinguish signal from noise. We also know that there is some degree of mental control over physiology--see psychosomatic disorders and the placebo effect--but controlling for that is fiendishly difficult when you can't double-blind the study.

Given the baseline potential for high statistical noise, biological studies in general tend to have poor rigor. fMRI, which you've cited, is notorious for giving problematic results (see the dead salmon study).

[bobdole1234]

No, it really is that complicated.

There is also the fact that people in different stages of their health react to the same diet in different ways.

So, the diet that might be healthy at one point in your life, is what will sicken you at another.