A Fictional Discourse on Diet-Disease Relations

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #1

The Failure to Measure Dietary Intake Engendered a Fictional Discourse on Diet-Disease Relations

or

How tens of thousands of reports published in the past 60 years asserting that dietary intake was a major contributing factor to chronic non-communicable diseases despite the fact that epidemiologic methods do not measure dietary intake but instead millions of unverified verbal and textual reports of memories of perceptions of dietary intake.

Summary

Given that actual dietary intake and reported memories of perceptions of intake are not in the same ontological category, epidemiologists committed the logical fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. This error was exacerbated when the anecdotal (self-reported) data were impermissibly transformed (i.e., pseudo-quantified) into proxy-estimates of nutrient and caloric consumption via the assignment of “reference” values from databases of questionable validity and comprehensiveness. These errors were further compounded when statistical analyses of diet-disease relations were performed using the pseudo-quantified anecdotal data. These fatal measurement, analytic, and inferential flaws were obscured when epidemiologists failed to cite decades of research demonstrating that the proxy-estimates they created were often physiologically implausible (i.e., meaningless) and had no verifiable quantitative relation to the actual nutrient or caloric consumption of participants. In this critical analysis, we present substantial evidence to support our contention that current controversies and public confusion regarding diet-disease relations were generated by tens of thousands of deeply flawed, demonstrably misleading, and pseudoscientific epidemiologic reports. We challenge the field of nutrition to regain lost credibility by acknowledging the empirical and theoretical refutations of their memory-based methods and ensure that rigorous (objective) scientific methods are used to study the role of diet in chronic disease.

Conclusion

We challenge the field to acknowledge the inherent flaws and empirical and theoretical refutations of memory-based dietary assessment methods (M-BMs), and ensure that in the future, rigorous scientific methods, e.g. randomized control trials (RCTs) are used to study the role of diet in chronic disease.

Is there any negative effect of doing Keto long term?
Sugar in fruit juice may raise risk of cancer, study finds
(bulkbiker) #2

i.e. anything based on a FFQ is likely to be complete and utter garbage?

(Carl Keller) #3

I was recently watching a lecture by Nina Teicholz in which she said that between 0% and 20% of epidemiological studies stand up to rigorous RCTs. She was referencing two studies (of studies) in which one found 0% accuracy and another only 20%. Epidemiology should be used to form a hypothesis. Full stop.

#4

Nice. The title made me think you had taken a detour into creative writing, but the fact this is a published piece is even better!