My favorite quote from Ioannidis:<p>“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-da...</a>
As someone with a degree in Nutritional Science who has since left the field for actual science (Biochemistry), I couldn't agree more. It was reasons like this that I left.<p>The field was corrupted early on by the sugar lobby and it took an immense amount of effort to simply make it ok to admit saturated fats weren't bad for you again. Some 50 years of research negated by a deal that went down with a very small subset of people.<p>The Academy of Nutritionists and Dietetics is a complete and total waste of human effort. I've never encountered a more useless amalgamation of self-serving pretend professionals in one organization. Everything they do is to protect their organization and reduce entry. To even become a dietitian, after graduating from a didactic pathway you must do a 1-2 year paid internship. And by paid, I mean it costs you $20,000-$40,0000, you work 40+ hours a week, including unsupervised work, which makes the legality dubious, and in exchange you sometimes (but no always) get to take a few credits of useless grad level classes that won't get you any further to a master's degree. And then when you finally get certified, after an $80,000 degree and $40,000 internship, you get to start a job that pays about $55,000/year peak, assuming you aren't some world renowned specialist.<p>The people involved are just the worst. All play professionals who obsess over trivial details like professional attire and pointless faux psychology, like learning and motivational theory. They treat everyone like stupid children and design the absolute worst literature and outreach, catering to the lowest possible denominator with patronizing and condescending advice and horrible rap songs designed to get children to eat vegetables. Meanwhile this has left a vacuum of knowledge for anyone with two brain cells to rub together, and so any reasonably intelligent adult instead gets sucked in by even worse pseudo-science blogs, a phenomenon that was created and enabled by the Academy.<p>The kicker for me was when I took a community nutrition class that the majority of my classmates revealed that they believed in "health at every size" and that a registered dietitians primary function is respectful communication, (read: participating in the delusions of patients) not communicating important information and truths that could impact the patients health.<p>That's not even getting into the absolute sham that is most nutrition research and how much of it is funded by organizations who have a predetermined outcome and just need to find a way to fit the facts to what they want. Nutrition research is absolutely rampant with activist organizations trying to coopt the field to further their related agendas.
Nutrition Science, ah yes. What would your reaction would be if I told you that we claim that the interaction of seven billion human beings to many thousands of previously living organisms will be the same for each of those human beings? That's obviously nonsense. In other words, you can't just say consuming eggs does X to everyone. You need to partition foodstuff AND partition humans, the partitioning likely based on genetics but also probably other factors as well and then you can describe how each partition reacts. Those other factors likely include previous reaction of food intake... It's a gigantic mess. Until we know a lot more, I will take every nutrition advice as if a dead cat wrote them. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_with_fraudulent_diplomas#Henrietta" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_with_fraudulen...</a>
About time. This is the type of crap that gave us "eggs are the equivalent of smoking cigarettes", "red meat causes cancer", "Coconut oil is pure poison" and many more...
I do believe that many of the findings of nutrition science are half baked, provably contradictory, and ignore a plethora of factors that play a role in the interaction between food and health.<p>But there's another bazooka in the room: the contemporary erosion of trust in authority, in this case scientific authority. Ionannidis' remarks are for the best, I think, but will add to the confusion of not only what knowledge can the public trust but who is more apt to produce that knowledge.<p>Before things get better, this will inevitably widen the door not only for old bad science in new clothes, or in the form of professional, corporation funded research that resorts to p-hacking and such methods, but also to the further discredit of science in general in the general population.<p>Having said this, I do not believe Ioannidis' work (or Ben Goldacre's for that matter) is a tool of such agents.<p>Edit: After reading some comments in this thread, I have to say in all honesty that I suspect that the ACSH's interest in Ioannidis work is disingenuous, without putting into question the validity of his work.