Page 12 - April 2022 Barbecue News Magazine

Meathead, AmazingRibs.com
For many of us food is a source of angst. We fear that some foods will shorten our time on earth. We think that others will lengthen it. So we are susceptible to a steady bombardment of news, myths, research, and pseudo research. Here is what I have learned about food and health:
Worrying about what you eat will kill you faster than anything you eat.
The problem is that dietary and nutritional science is barely science. Not like physics and chemistry, for example. Results of physics and chemistry research are often defini- tive. Research is done with strict adherence to the scientific method. Data are easy to repeat and test and once the re- sults are proven they are rarely overturned.
This is not true of dietary and nutrition science. Re- searchers can’t apply the scientific method. They can’t take 1,000 people, divide them into groups, feed them different diets for years, and see how it impacts their health and mortality. If they do an autopsy and see arteries clogged they don’t know for sure what caused it.
Most of the dietary studies we hear about are known as epidemiological or ob- servational studies. These are not lab studies where a hypothesis is stated, vari- ables are isolated, pristine conditions maintained, control groups studied, data collected, and ana- lyzed. Epidemiological studies are usually based on survey data. Re- searchers collect informa- tion from a group of subjects carefully chosen to represent a larger popu-
lation. They keep diaries and are asked a bunch of ques- tions, the data is punched into a computer, and the researchers look for correlations.
The problem is, and this is crucial to remember: Correla- tion is not causation!
An example: Researchers noticed that French people are not as obese as Americans, so they tried to find out why by studying their diets and other factors. It didn’t take long to notice that French people drink much more wine than Americans. Is wine the cure to obesity? The wine industry loved this hypothesis and dubbed it “The French Paradox” and it appeared in every newspaper and magazine. But French people also consume more animal fats than Ameri- cans. Is eating foie gras, full fat cheese, dark chocolate, and
butter the cure? This is called confounding data.
Here’s a chart from the fascinating website Spurious Corre- lations. It shows a remarkable correlation between the number of non-commercial space launches around the world and the number of sociology doctorates awarded in the US. Hmmmmm.
Another problem is that people fib on the surveys, giving answers they think the researchers want, or conveniently forgetting to record in their diaries the desserts they guiltily sneak.
BarbecueNews.com - 12
APRIL 2022
How Dietary Science Fails Us
That’s why health advice is a moving target.