John Ioannidis: The role of bias in nutritional research

John P.A. Ioannidis, C.F. Rehnborg Professor in Disease Prevention in the School of Medicine, and Professor, by Courtesy, of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, presented "The role of bias in nutritional research" at the Swiss Re Institute's "Food for thought: The science and politics of nutrition" conference on 14 - 15 June 2018 in Rüschlikon.¨

*Swiss Re*
The Swiss Re Group is one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, insurance and other forms of insurance-based risk transfer, working to make the world more resilient. It anticipates and manages risk – from natural catastrophes to climate change, from ageing populations to cyber crime. The aim of the Swiss Re Group is to enable society to thrive and progress, creating new opportunities and solutions for its clients. Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, where it was founded in 1863, the Swiss Re Group operates through a network of around 80 offices globally.

[teddayer]

This man should receive the Nobel prize. It’s ridiculous how researchers (which I was) are so touchy about their work. Especially once it’s published. Publication and peer review is NOT a guarantee of correctness.

[Max]

Professor Ioannidis .Your are courageous and passionate about spreading the message of good nutrition .I want to express my gratitude to you and hundreds of visionaries for using your scientific knowledge that is available today in the field of nutrition .And the recent Covid Pandemic

[teddayer]

Prof. Ioannidis, my Dr colleagues start to wake up thanks to you.

[reinerwilhelms-tricarico]

Professor Ioonnadis should write a health cook book merely based on what he can believe is healthy - and make it public domain. I trust he would avoid most known mistakes.

[bjornfly]

Unfortunately I also have the same impression, that its more or less impossible to get any meaningfull data out of our current research. Me personally think that if the scientist could answer a single key questions, it would be enough. How to eat if you have insulin resistance would be that key question. If this question could be answered, and people followed the advise, decieses such as diabeted, overweight, heart and arteries decies and altzheimer would also go away, since they have all been shown to depend on insulin resistance.

[larisaconstantinou]

It sounds like situation in nutrition science is doom and gloom.

[alansyoutubechanneluk]

"We need more data sharing", "Studies are not published", This surely is criminal that we don't share everything. I thought that was the whole point of the scientific method?

[GiannisLok]

Ioannidis is in the top 10 scientists in the world

[HeyYall]

Love this! Thank you dear for sharing.

[Caladcholg]

Really top-roped that last question asker, didn't he.

[nicmart]

I wonder why debunkers don't take on the absurdities of psychiatry. There's not a single psychiatric diagnosis that can be validate by an anatomical or physiochemical test, yet it's still accepted as a science. Frankly, it does no better than chiropractic. I'm afraid that faith in the religion of mental health is so strong that barely anyone gives it a second thought. At best they ask, "Do antidepressant drugs work?" But what is depression?

[hazynpeterson]

at red meat, eggs, cheese. No bread, pasta, potatoes, oxalate heavy vegetables ( spinache ) SUGAR, , SEED OILS . Humans do not need carbohydrates

[IronJohn]

The biggest problem with nutritional research is the need for "science" meaning randomized control studies, etc. The effects of food on health take too long to manifest, and nobody will follow the design of the study. Most published papers on nutrition are too narrowly-focused and amount to the 5 blind men groping at an elephant.
A perfect example is the role of insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes. Is it caused by some mysterious process like "adipose inflammation"? Is it caused by excess glucose in the bloodstream? It's a very simple question to answer - it's caused by dietary fat clogging the endothelium. But the interests vitiating against a criticism of dietary fat (ie the meat & dairy lobbies and people who love to eat fried chicken) make sure to never ask the question.
There are three tools we have to figure out what to eat: 1) epidemiology - what are the outcomes in large, stable groups of people with different cultural dietary trends? 2) Comparative anatomy - looking at what apes and other animals eat in the wild and trying to draw some conclusions about the ideal human diet. 3) Anthropology - what did people eat in the past?

You really don't have to be a genius to determine that humans are designed to eat plants - primarily storage organs like tubers, roots, grains, legumes, seeds, etc. Meat is simply too hard to catch, to prone to spoilage, and too likely to cause death without the advantage of fairly modern technology, freezing cold climates, storage innovations like smoking, etc. We are not lions who can run down a gazelle and eat it before it gets colonized by parasites. Surely humans ate any meat they could find (turtles, crayfish, bugs, an occasional large mammal) but it is not a reliable survival strategy.
This observation is aligned with the epidemiology (ie the China Study), the comparative anatomy (chimps & gorillas are 95% frugivorous, and we have more amylase enzymes), and the anthropology (ie pre-Columbian native Americans primarily ate acorns, lotus seeds, wapato, goosefoot and other widely distributed plants.) It also elegantly explains every chronic disease (like the diabetes example above) as the result of eating a diet our body is not equipped to metabolize.
I'm glad Prof. Ioannidis even dared raise this question. The truth is obvious, but people prefer to hear good news about their bad habits.