In the subscriber newsletter, I suggested that I occasionally post a link to a longer discussion paper. Some topics I suggested were:
· Dietary advice. Where it is on solid ground, where it is not, and how to tell the two apart.
· Predicted lifespan after a serious diagnosis. When a patient with cancer or another serious condition is given a number of months or years, where does that number come from? And what does it mean for one person?
· Living longer versus living well. Much of medicine aims at more years. Not all of it aims at better ones. When the two pull apart, the claims get hard to read.
A large proportion of the small but growing subscriber list supported the list and suggested additional topics. I will respond in the next subscriber newsletter.
Here is the first of the series. It asks what dietary research has settled, what it has not, and what survives of the common advice. There will be more of these.
We have all been told to cut fat, cut salt, take fish oil, eat five a day and eat plants instead of meat. I went through the studies behind seventeen of the most common recommendations and read each one with the six faults in mind.
The first thing to say is that dietary research is hard. People cannot remember what they ate, the people who eat well also live well in other ways, and a trial that could settle the question would take decades. Some of the research was sound, and it helped people who already had something wrong. But most of the recent claims rest on faulty research and are overblown. That does not make them false. It makes them unproven.
The paper ends with what anthropology adds. The populations that stayed free of heart disease ate a variety of plants and some meat, and stayed active. That is where the evidence leaves us.
The paper is on the site: A Healthy Skeptic Looks at Diet Research