Fascinating blog post :
https://meaningness.com/nutrition
Here is a sample :
"Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing.2 After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.
Nutrition is now both scientism and pseudoscience. This is a somewhat rare combination; cognitive science is another example, as I pointed out in “Perfection Salad.” Scientism—the eternalistic distortion of science into an authoritative source of meaning—is most harmful when the science is bogus. Pseudoscience is most harmful when it gets the support of the state and other powerful institutions. Food and theories of the mind probably both strongly affect human well-being, so they are particularly bad subjects to have turned into scientism or pseudoscience.
My point is not that nutrition is bad science. Unquestionably, it is bad science; a competent statistician, looking at the design of most experiments, will immediately say “this is meaningless; you can’t learn anything this way.”
It’s worse than just incompetence, in two ways. First, as the “resignation letter” noted, even the best studies have been useless. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, such that doing the same sort of science better wouldn’t help.
The second, still worse implication is that worthless pseudoscience can get treated as authoritative for a century, and even now. This is partly due to rationalist eternalism, and partly due to institutional imperatives produced by malign social dynamics."
https://meaningness.com/nutrition
Here is a sample :
"Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing.2 After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.
Nutrition is now both scientism and pseudoscience. This is a somewhat rare combination; cognitive science is another example, as I pointed out in “Perfection Salad.” Scientism—the eternalistic distortion of science into an authoritative source of meaning—is most harmful when the science is bogus. Pseudoscience is most harmful when it gets the support of the state and other powerful institutions. Food and theories of the mind probably both strongly affect human well-being, so they are particularly bad subjects to have turned into scientism or pseudoscience.
My point is not that nutrition is bad science. Unquestionably, it is bad science; a competent statistician, looking at the design of most experiments, will immediately say “this is meaningless; you can’t learn anything this way.”
It’s worse than just incompetence, in two ways. First, as the “resignation letter” noted, even the best studies have been useless. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, such that doing the same sort of science better wouldn’t help.
The second, still worse implication is that worthless pseudoscience can get treated as authoritative for a century, and even now. This is partly due to rationalist eternalism, and partly due to institutional imperatives produced by malign social dynamics."