Author of Rethinking Diabetes, The Case Against Sugar, Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories
This is a post I’ve wanted to write for years. We read about scientific misconduct regularly. Fraud is news. Institutions investigate it. The media covers it.
But garden-variety bad science is the far more insidious problem. There is no institutional immune response. No one investigates, nothing is exposed. Bad science can persist indefinitely, infecting entire disciplines. My latest post is a brief primer.
When nutritional epidemiologists conclude (as they always do) that some item of our diet or lifestyle associates with chronic disease, it’s inevitably news. Not so when methodologists point out potential, if not very disturbing problems with the epidemiology itself. This research has enormous influence on our conceptions of a healthy diet and yet the media tends to universally ignore its many problems.
Maybe this will help: welcome to the metaverse problem in nutritional epidemiology.
My latest post on substack is about another reason (as if we needed one) to be skeptical of this research.
by GT
When Nina Teicholz and I were discussing working together on a Substack newsletter, I suggested a name for it that I’d always joked I’d someday use: “Let’s Pretend This Is Science….” Let’s just say, wiser heads prevailed. Still, that’s the phrase that comes to mind when I write about some of the research in the field, most recently the studies that try to determine what foods make mice fat.
This week’s contribution is a paper in the journal Obesity suggesting that mice get fat eating high-fat diets because they shift into what the authors call hedonic overdrive. In short, the mice eat for the pleasure of it not to maintain energy balance and so a healthy weight. My latest newsletter discusses many of the obvious issues with this research, none more important than the question in the title: do we care why mice get fat?
Here’s my latest Unsettled Science Substack article
