alt Hacker NewsJust a couple of days ago, I wrote I automatically flag any submission with any kind of "dietary" studies. I'm not saying there is no one study well done, but doing it well, is just (almost) impracticable. Not only the people have literally no idea what they eat, they forget and misreport, also a human living normal life in the society has just TOO MANY variables. There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
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> There is no way to keep the other variables like, sport, social interaction, stress and such out of the study.
Sure, but with sufficiently many people, these effects will usually average out. I'm not saying the situation is great, but it's still an important field of study and we need to make progress in some way.
We decided that our analytic tech was good enough to figure out that smoking and pollution were bad for us despite infinite confounders.
Most people dismiss dietary research because it simply condemns their favorite foods. They accept causal inferences made from epidemiology everywhere else.
I have long said there are two kinds of diet studies: those that don't apply to you because you are not confined to a hospital bed or prison cell; and those that conclude despite our best effort we couldn't get people to eat their assigned diet.