[glenstein]

I find takes like this to be true in the specific details but wildly wrong as a big picture takeaway. A lot of people are citing their favorite quotes here, so here's one of mine from the Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov:

>When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

So I think there's a relativity of wrong problem that you run into when suggesting it's all just so complex and leaving it at that.

I would nevertheless absolutely agree that nutrition science and communication around it has been disorganized, contradictory, and without much in the way of a north star or a reliable "vanguard" of communicators representing a firm consensus. I feel much better about public communication from, say, astrophysics, archeology, geology, etc. and I think there's a characteristic degree of stability of knowledge particular to each of those fields.

[throwup238]

> So I think there's a relativity of wrong problem that you run into when suggesting it's all just so complex and leaving it at that.

The problem with talking about human variability is that everyone can be equally wrong just due to the natural distribution.

What if a 30% of people have metabolisms that work better with low-fat/high-carbs, 30% high-fat/low-carbs, and 40% are kinda just in the middle and don't care as long as macros are balanced? Depending on how your sample breaks down (or which group has the most lobbying capital when the rules are made), your nutrition guidance can flip flop, especially if the effects are subtle except over the long term. Without the ability to group them a priori, the results will be all over the place and may even be unstable depending on whose thumb is on the scale.

Psychiatry faces this problem but much worse. Tons of drugs do work, we just don't know which ones will work for which people so both the treatment protocol and the clinical trials are a complete mess.

[hobobaggins]

Fundamentally, the human body seems to be an incredibly complex system that is far more dynamic, rapidly changing, and with far more unpredictable interactions than any of those other fields.

It's fascinating that, at least on some axes, we might know less about core processes in our own bodies than we probably have already ascertained about planetary motion or materials composition from millions of miles away.

[voisin]

Everything you’ve said is bang on. Future generations will look at our time and those that came before us as the nutritional dark ages where we tried to apply the same rules to everyone irrespective of whatever factors turn out to define an individual’s optimal nutrition protocol.

[ruszki]

I think we know that for decades. The problem is mainly cost. But of course, looking at how the past millennia is presented to us, you’re probably right.

[taskforcegemini]

>When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong.

yet earth is spherical, just not a perfect sphere.

[karmakurtisaani]

I think that's part of the point here.