In the years after I published Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), I would frequently get emails from readers saying, in effect, “now that you’ve taken on nutrition science, would you look into climate change?” I never did and, I would reply, I almost assuredly never would. That’s still true, but this week I took the…
Substack 8: How do you stop bad scientists? Hope they committed fraud.
This is a post I’ve wanted to write for years. We read about scientific misconduct regularly. Fraud is news. Institutions investigate it. The media covers it. But garden-variety bad science is the far more insidious problem. There is no institutional immune response. No one investigates, nothing is exposed. Bad science can persist indefinitely, infecting entire…
Substack 7: Nutrition has a Metaverse Problem
When nutritional epidemiologists conclude (as they always do) that some item of our diet or lifestyle associates with chronic disease, it’s inevitably news. Not so when methodologists point out potential, if not very disturbing problems with the epidemiology itself. This research has enormous influence on our conceptions of a healthy diet and yet the media…