More bad food science

The other day I was perusing Reddit and ran into an article in r/science talking about a “study” that compared people eating less meat and processed food to those eating a diet with more plants and such. This really should never have been called science in the first place, but the bigger issue of course is that the comments descended into chaos.

You see, if you’ve spent any time at all on the Internet looking at any site with a robust comments section (by which I mean active, not necessarily well-maintained or intelligent), anything that remotely touches on meat vs. non-meat will inevitably bring out a very vocal minority of vegan cultists who will brigade that comment section and turn it into their very own echo chamber, shouting down all other discussion.

Which is not to say vegans are cultists, but some of them obviously are. We’ve all either seen or interacted with that subset of absolute zealots. That minority goes out looking to either pick fights or gaslight the rest of us into believing the whole world is on a vegan train now and you’re crazy if you’re not already on board. I hate these people. You probably hate these people. Most vegans hate these people, especially for being tarnished by association.

So the topic at hand was an observational study, and of course a number of people in the comments pointed out, correctly, that observational studies are not science at all and can draw no meaningful conclusions; I was hardly first to the party but I was in full agreement. This of course angered the cultists, who came out in force to defend what they saw as something marginally in favor of their worldview, even though there was no science behind it. They of course were quick to downvote anyone saying this was junk science, even though those of us who said so would have been just as dismissive of a so-called study extolling the virtues of a carnivore diet.

Most of the cultists’ responses were incoherent messes, although there were a few who managed to string together enough words to say something along the lines of “You don’t know what you’re talking about; of course this is science!”

I’ve talked about this subject before. Nutrition, especially as it relates to outcomes like heart disease and cancer risk and whatnot, is not easily subject to scientific study, if it can even be studied according to the scientific method at all. You cannot control for a million confounding variables—most of them dealing with general lifestyle and also income level—and subjects don’t necessarily follow the diets they’re given strictly or honestly. So these “studies” count on people to self-report, and even the ones that try to look at other factors and account for them can only guess as to their impact. Even worse, some of this kind of thing involves simply looking at mass surveys of what people eat broken down by region or country, and try to draw broad conclusions based on comparing reported cases of various conditions.

Only one of the cultists actually bothered to respond intelligently, which was to say roughly this: “The criticisms of this approach are all valid, but since we can’t subject nutrition to better forms of science, what alternative do we have? We have to know what’s good or bad for us.”

My answer to that is that although we do indeed need to know more about nutrition, we cannot replace science with cargo-cult logic or medieval superstition, trying to hunt for truth in a sea of correlations, and still call it science. We can at best try to approach these things with whatever intellectual rigor we can, be extremely hesitant about drawing conclusions even when given literal decades of strong data from a huge pool, and most importantly stop posting these kinds of garbage articles to science magazines and sites. At a bare minimum, we need to come up with a label for this kind of thing that says it isn’t science but there’s been an honest attempt to apply whatever scientific principles we can.

I realize of course I’ve said plenty about the fact that carbs are worse for you and fats by and large are better, even though I’m no keto warrior. But there’s a long, long history of much better research saying so. That research is far older and far more robust than, say, comparing plants and meat, or comparing processed and non-processed foods. And even then you still have generations of doctors yapping about cholesterol as a cause rather than a symptom and advocating low-fat, high-carb diets, because some yahoo achieved celebrity status decades ago and bullied the establishment into adopting and defending his pet theory. This stuff is very hard, and it isn’t made any better when people’s egos end up in the mix.

Nutrition is in a special class of problems that science, as it stands, does not have the tools to solve. We have to acknowledge that and at least be honest enough to say that what we do know of nutrition, we can’t really call science. The truth is we’re looking at just one input into an extremely complex system, and usually those inputs correlate with one another way more than we’re willing to acknowledge.

Heck, call it debugging. We’re on hour 1 of a problem that’ll take weeks to solve, still throwing print statements into the code to see how far it’s getting and having to do a lot of run-throughs with very very limited debugging tools. And it wasn’t made any better by a few well-meaning idiots who got in on the project early and convinced management to waste resources trying to solve things the worst possible way.

What’s gonna solve this mess? Better debuggers. And more importantly, better science. Real science.

In the meantime, call out the cultists. I don’t just mean the hyper-obnoxious minority of vegans who do this. I mean also the hyper-obnoxious minority of adherents to any diet, and chances are if you know any moms on Facebook a few other groups come to mind. But more importantly, call out bad science for what it is. Call out journals for front-paging this BS and science sites for throwing out clickbait headlines. Demand better.