Nutritional Geometry
The closest thing to a fundamental law in nutrition.
Nutrition science is a laughing stock.
In the book “Science Fictions”, Stuart Ritchie points out how bad the replication crisis is in the field of nutrition and how out of all of the fields of scientific investigation, nutrition is the worst of the lot. No shortage of studies come out every year directly refuting the findings of the last.
Rupert Sheldrake comically points out in some of his talks that if you ask a healthcare expert “Is an egg healthy?”, you will most likely watch them struggle with no idea how to answer the question. This has to be rock bottom for nutrition science. How are we supposed to build a framework of a healthy diet when the simplest of questions cannot be adequately answered (or worse, incorrectly answered as I’m sure would be the case for most people in healthcare)?
So, nutrition science is a joke. It genuinely cannot be trusted to inform us what we should eat. It is a rare time where I believe epidemiology actually provides the best guidance available. But the moment researchers (with funding from companies with vested interests) try and take the ideas from epidemiology and find the mechanism to explain the finding, all hell breaks loose.
“Nutrition science has been virtually devoid of theory… Despite all the experimental work, and many hypotheses, a conceptual framework has been singularly lacking.”
- Professor Stephen Simpson, The Age.
This is simply because nutrition science is so reductionistic and funded almost solely by vested interests. No genuine understanding can be uncovered with the methods of investigation that are commonly used. Rodent models are very limited (and probably misleading) and the ‘feed’ they get is synthetic and not representative of their wild diets.1 They do not get exposure to natural light, let alone light/dark cycles (this is a whole other topic that requires its own post). So monitoring outcomes in these models is far from translatable to humans.
The rodent “Home Cage” from https://researchdiets.com/
“This is a serious problem. It’s not about mice,… it’s a general, systemic failure of reason.”
- Bret Weinstein
So we find ourselves in a situation where, generally speaking, the ‘science’ suggests fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds are correlated to the best health outcomes. This is supported by mechanistic data suggesting fibre, polyphenols and low saturated fat diets promote health.
But then we find ourselves looking at the places with the best longevity records: Hong Kong; among the highest meat intake per-capita locations in the world.
Total Meat Intake is Associated with Life Expectancy: A Cross-Sectional Data Analysis of 175 Contemporary Populations.
There are also many studies showing increased longevity with increased meat intake.
So how can we explain these discrepancies?
Here’s where we need to try and find tools with which we can find more foundational and fundamental principles of nutrition. We need a tool to help us understand the epidemiological findings.
Enter the Protein Leverage Hypothesis and Nutritional Geometry.