In Case You Missed It #24 - Studying Studies

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Studying Studies

This one was FIRE! I absolutely exploded at the end in an epic rant that you don't want to miss! Click Here for the Full Episode

The Egg Study - Headlines vs. Data:

I debunked this ridiculous article about Eggs and Cardiovascular Disease being shared all over social media... let's outline the issues:

The Headline: “Three or more eggs a week increase your risk of heart disease and early death, study says."

  • This is a bald-faced lie, right off the bat!

  • This was a food-questionnaire study. Not a double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Therefore, it cannot prove causality. What the headline claims is literally impossible.

Zero Variables Controlled:

Oh, and ZERO other variables known to impact the risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality were controlled for… Such as smoking, exercise, alcohol consumption, sleep quality, metabolic health, the prior risk of cardiovascular disease, hydrogenated oil intake, sugar intake, cholesterol blood panels, occupation, and on and on and on. It’s one of the most laughable studies I’ve ever seen.

The Actual Findings of the Study (As written in the Conclusion of the Study Itself):

  • "The associations between egg consumption and incident CVD and all-cause mortality were no longer significant after adjusting for dietary cholesterol consumption. Those increases changing to -0.46% for CVD and 0.71% for all-cause mortality."

  • Yep, you read that correctly. The Study disproved the very findings plastered in the CNN headlines about the study.

  • Absolute INSANITY!

The Problem With Nutrition Science:

This process of collecting data using food questionnaires is not unique to this awful egg study. In fact, this is exactly how most nutrition studies are conducted!

And they are all wildly inaccurate! How inaccurate, you ask?!

A paper published in 2013 attempted to put a number on it.

They looked at almost four decades of results of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES)—the big U.S. government database on diet—and compared what people said they ate with how much they’d need to eat simply to stay alive.

Their findings: “Across the 39-year history of the NHANES, the energy intake data—how many calories were consumed] on the majority of respondents (67.3% of women and 58.7% of men) were not physiologically plausible.”

That is, if people ate what they said they ate, they would have starved to death.

In other words, after 4 decades of research… all of those studies are completely useless to us.

The History of Nutrition Studies:

This epic failure of science inspired me to dig deeper into the history of nutrition studies...

  • The first vitamin was isolated and chemically defined in 1926, less than 100 years ago...

  • Research on the role of nutrition in chronic diseases, such as is only about 3 decades old, significantly ramping up after the year 2,000.

  • The government’s low-fat guidelines were in place as early as the 1970s.

  • By 1992, the food pyramid was being taught in public schools all across America…

So, let’s stop and think about this…

My grandparents drank coca-cola, released in 1862, and ate mostly bread and grains during the great depression…

My parents ate horrific products like Maypo and Crisco for breakfast in the 1960s…

By the 1970s, even the Government was pushing low-fat high-grain consumption…

This made me think of something...

If we can all agree that the Standard American Diet is horrible for human health…

Then we must also agree that virtually all nutrition studies were performed on a sick population…

We took sick people, studied them, and then presented the data as “how to be healthy.”

This is astronomically dumb…

American Statistics:

  • 100 million diabetics or prediabetic

  • Over 70% overweight

  • Over 30% obese

  • One in two Americans has a chronic disease. A full 50% of citizens!

  • One in Four has multiple chronic diseases…

  • 27% of Children have at least one chronic disease…

Let’s just simplify that and say that mainstream dietary guidelines fail 70% of the time(and that’s being super generous!)

Let's put this in modern terms:

If Apple launched a New Press Release saying, “We have this amazing new electronic device! You’re going to love it! It only costs $1,000… and it completely fails 70% of the time!!"

Exactly Zero people with brains in their skulls would purchase that device… What would Apple do in response?

Would they “tweak” the phone, with tiny changes, trying to make it better? Like we do with the food pyramid and nutrition studies?

No, the CEO would scrap the project altogether, the product would never make it to market, and he would fire each and every person who had a hand in presenting such a piece of shit to the general public…

That … Ladies and Gentlemen, is what needs to happen with nutrition in America.

I’m not saying I’m an expert, I’m not saying I have all the answers, I’m saying… WE NEED TO START OVER!!!!

Why are we constantly building and building upon a foundation of horse shit?! It makes zero sense whatsoever!

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