Researchers try to use statistics to control for some of these “confounding factors,” but it’s impossible to catch all of them. Do people who drink more red wine have lower rates of heart disease? Is meat associated with an early death?īecause these studies aren’t controlled like experiments, they can’t tell us whether one thing caused another thing to happen. Researchers track what large numbers of people eat over time and then look at their rates of disease, trying to tease out relationships in the data. The trouble is most of what we know about nutrition’s effects on chronic disease comes from observational data. It involves looking holistically at lifestyle behaviors, like diet and genetics, trying to tease out the risk factors that lead to illness. And fixing them isn’t just a question of adding an occasional orange to someone’s diet. They’re not usually related to one cause they’re caused by many lifestyle and genetic factors in concert. They don’t appear overnight but develop over years. These illnesses are much harder to get a handle on. People are consuming too many calories and too much low-quality food, bringing on chronic diseases like cancer, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. But today, our greatest health problems relate to overeating. Why the PREDIMED trial was such a big dealĪs I’ve reported, nutrition science has done a great job of finding ways to address diseases of nutrient deficiencies, like scurvy. This process should bring us a step closer to what really matters: informing people who want to know how to eat for a healthy life. It’s science working as it should, and the PREDIMED takedown is a wonderful example of that. Yes, studies with big flaws pass peer review and make it into high-impact journals, but the record can eventually be corrected because of skeptical researchers questioning things. (We’ve also learned about industry influence in the National Institutes of Health’s alcohol studies, and infighting that brought down what was supposed to be the “ Manhattan Project for nutrition.”)īut after spending several days talking with some of the brightest minds in nutrition research and epidemiology, I now feel the PREDIMED retraction is actually cause for hope - maybe even a new beginning for the field. There have been too many poorly executed and disappointing studies over the years, too many research dollars wasted. Yet it now appears to be horribly flawed.Īt first, I thought this could be the beginning of the end of nutrition science. PREDIMED was supposed to be an example of scientific excellence in a field filled with conflicted and flawed studies. It also republished a new version of PREDIMED, based on a reanalysis of the data that accounted for the missteps. Last June, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine pulled the original paper from the record, issuing a rare retraction. As Stanford University health researcher (and nutrition science critic) John Ioannidis put it: “It was the best. The study’s delicious conclusion was that eating as the Spanish, Italian, and Greeks do - dousing food in olive oil and loading up on fish, nuts, and fresh produce - cuts cardiovascular disease risk by a third. And in 2013, its scientific cred was secured with PREDIMED, one of the most important recent diet studies published. But in recent decades, one diet has attracted the lion’s share of research dollars and public attention: the Mediterranean way of eating. Researchers’ answers to this question have often been contradictory and confusing. The million-dollar question in nutrition science is this: What should we eat to live a long and healthy life?
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