[firmgently]

I think the problem with it (as with a lot of science) is that control is very difficult. The more you want a controlled experiment, the more abstract and unrealistic you have to be. Eg. (completely made-up illustration) eggs might be good for you if you eat a lot of tomatoes, bad for you if you don't eat a lot of tomatoes, better if you eat tomatoes a couple of hours before the eggs rather than afterwards. Maybe if you have curly hair the rules are reversed... but not if it's red curly hair.

To get any consistency in results you have to control things to a point of being unrealistic, and then the results aren't very useful because nobody's real diet and genetic makeup fits with the fake abstract setting of the experiment.

Then results get simplified and abstracted even more to make easily understandable conclusions... like maybe for 78% of people cacao is good, but for 0.3% of people it doubles the risk of stroke (although this bit doesn't get studied because it wasn't in the initial hypothesis). Results are reduced to "cacao is good for you"... but you might not part of the 78%. Maybe you're in the 0.3%.

I'm not trying to say that science is useless, just that applying it isn't as simple as people like to make out (and a lot of people don't want to accept that life may not be as methodical and predictable as they want it to be). Nuance is too hard.

[cies]

Well said. This is exactly the problem with nutrition science. Just makes it a bit hard, but not at all impossible.