[hattmall]

Kind of questionable perhaps, but a good place to do these studies would be on prisoners. You could potentially do it by simply monitoring their intake and not actually changing anything in the offering. It should be fairly reasonable to get a reliable intake report.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Proposal and other issues aside, I’m not sure you rely on food served to be food consumed. Prisons in most places still buy food at commissary.

But I’ll agree that you might be able to quantitative compare prison A vs prison B if you can get a control prison and account for differences. Just a diet of 20% more carbs between A/B would be interesting.

I imagine someone has “done science” on prisons in other areas already. Way more ethical than the typical proposals I see for prisoners/prisons on the internet.

[superqd]

Every time I've considered how to really do nutrition research, it essentially amounts to a prison, even if voluntary. You would need to be able to lock different populations away from any source of food than what you provide, and control their daily activities, etc, for at least 2 years, though you could likely get some results after only 6 months.

[superqd]

Yeah, the ethics would be tough, but essentially to really do nutrition research, you MUST control the food intake. Control for age, weight, calories and activity, and vary only the dietary makeup to varying degrees, etc.

[flukus]

> Yeah, the ethics would be tough

What sort of ethical issues are you thinking? I would have thought higher grade meals than you'd find in a standard prison would entice all the volunteers you could want. There's probably other groups were some good quality meals would be just as enticing, like college students.

A bigger practical issue in prisons would be things like the high prevalence of hepatitis and drug use along with all the confounding factors (like poverty) that lead them to end up in prison.

[ghancock]

In the US, federally funded research institutions have to follow certain rules when doing human subjects research. When I was a researcher the training I took said prisoners generally could not be used as subjects just because they were convenient, and that the two situations where they could typically be studied were cases where prisons, crime, or something else that was inherently specific to prisoners was being studied and cases where some condition very highly over represented among prisoners was what was being studied (the example given was HIV).

[superqd]

I just don't know how ethical it would be to force a particular diet that might affect someone's life expectancy without their consent. I mean, I suppose you could get volunteers...

[gremlinsinc]

Why not self-imposed prisoners... like at a rehab-type facility. You can leave whenever you want but you don't get paid...then pay them like $5k for 1 month, or 5k/month for however long the study goes... Then it's not prison -- it's controlled but "at will"