Why studies linking diet to health are almost always flawed.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Whatever you’re worried about, there’s no shortage of diets or foods purported to help you. Linking dietary habits and individual foods to health factors is easy — ridiculously so — as you’ll soon see from the little experiment we conducted.

Our foray into nutrition science demonstrated that studies examining how foods influence health are inherently fraught. . .  nearly all nutrition studies rely on measures of food consumption that require people to remember and report what they ate. . .

The Food frequency questionnaire we used produced 1,066 variables, and the additional questions we asked sorted survey-takers according to 26 possible characteristics. . . This vast data set allowed us to do 27,716 regressions in just a few hours. Using a p-value of 0.05 or less as the metric for statistical significance (as is common) equates to an error rate of 5 percent. . . And with 27,716 regressions, that means we should expect about 1,386 false positives. . .

Nearly every nutrient you can think of has been linked to some health outcome in the peer-reviewed scientific literature using tools like the FFQ, said John Ioannidis, an expert on the reliability of research findings at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. . . . Some of those studies pointed to an increased risk of cancer, others suggested a decreased risk, but the size of the reported effects were “implausibly large,” Ioannidis said, while the evidence was weak. . .

So we’re left with our original question: What is a healthy diet? We know the basics — we need sufficient calories and protein to keep our bodies alive. We need nutrients like vitamin C and iron. Beyond that, we may be overthinking it. . .

Read full, original post: You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition

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