Why Nutrition Research Is Failing Us — And How to Fix It

A huge new paper just dropped, and it could be the earthquake that crumbles the nutritional industrial complex. It could shake the foundations of modern nutrition science and expose why we keep getting diet advice that harms rather than helps us, or at least keeps missing the mark. I know, those are strong opening claims. But I want you to appreciate the gravity of what I'm about to share, because this is not your average science YouTube video. Rather, it's a measured and warranted assault on something truly wrong with nutrition research and the management of federal research dollars for science. Let me explain the problem starting with an analogy. Imagine you're conducting a scientific study with sedentary overweight adults who are randomized to either an exercise treatment for a week including intense physical training with daily hard runs, weightlifting, and a full marathon on top of it on day 7 to boot, versus a couch potato protocol consisting of eating potato chips and binge-watching Friends for 26.2 hours. Which, for your information, is 30% of the total Friends episodes. Anyway, after a week, you can understand the exercise group would feel sore and tired. They're not used to exercise. And if pitted head-to-head against the couch potato group in a foot race after their week of intense training, they would probably lose. But can we conclude from that that physical activity is bad for fitness? Of course not. We just didn't provide the exercise group enough time to properly adapt. Now, nutrition research has the same flaw. Short-term trials can be misleading, what some researchers have called— It's worse than useless because it's misleading. And yet we've spent millions on these sorts of studies, and we're about to spend millions more. Specifically, a national trial, uh, plans to spend $170 million of taxpayer dollars on something called the Nutrition Program for Precision Health. To share just one example of how misleading these studies can be, take a study published in 2021 where 20 people ate a low-carb, high-fat diet for 2 weeks and a high-carb, low-fat diet for 2 weeks. Each person ate both diets, and at the end, the researchers looked at whether people ate more on the low-carb or the low-fat diet. And they found that people ate less on the low-fat diet and concluded therefore, "Oh, the low-fat diet," in this case a low-fat plant-based diet, "was better than the low-carb diet for weight management." Kind of sounds reasonable, maybe, right? But the study's conclusions were were entirely wrong, in fact inverted, because they didn't account for metabolic adaptations. When the people were put on the low-carb diet, they were gradually adapting to low-carb in a way that led to eating less. In statistics, this is called a wash-in period, but you can think of it simply as metabolic adaptation. There is no debate metabolic adaptation takes time, and it wasn't accounted for in the study. Now, in this trial, when participants were switched from the low-carb diet after some adaptation to the low-fat diet, the adaptations to the low-carb diet persisted while they were eating low-fat. This is called the washout period or a carryover effect. So when the people ate low-carb and then immediately swapped to low-fat, the beneficial metabolic adaptations that were recruited during the low-carb phase were falsely attributed to the low-fat diet. And the opposite was also true. When the low-fat diet came first, its adaptations unfairly made the subsequent diet, the low-carb diet, look worse. The real result: the study was worse than useless because it was misleading. And a total waste of money. Quoting from this new paper in the British Medical Journal and the author's assessment of the studies, the author's right, the apparent superiority from the low-fat diet derived entirely from data in the invalid treatment period related to the presence of a massive carryover effect, which was initially overlooked when this study was published in Nature Medicine. Now inserting my opinion, that Nature Medicine paper published in 2021 and those like it should have been retracted when the reality came to light. This is not the way science should be done, at the very least. And I'm trying to be diplomatic with my wording here. And quoting from the first author of this new BMJ study, these trials are not only inconclusive but also potentially misleading. By making a healthy diet look bad and making an unhealthy diet look good. We must do better. This is not a small flaw. It is a fundamental failure. And let me reinforce, this is not a one-off. It's just an example. This flawed approach is baked in and being amplified into the biggest publicly funded nutrition study in years. And this doesn't just affect academic journals. It affects advice your doctor gives you, the guidelines in public schools, and even what's in your grocery store. Now, let's talk a little bit more about research funding for nutrition. Researchers really rely on government funding, which can provide massive public health benefits if allocated correctly, as we've seen from the successes of publicly funded research into smoking-related diseases, deadly infectious diseases and birth defects. Because where Big Pharma can easily raise a billion dollars or more to develop new drugs, no big company profits from preventing disease or treating disease through proper human nutrition. So government funding is needed to fill this research gap. And with recent budget cuts, every research dollar must count.