Skip to main content

Introduction!

Welcome to this blog! 

If you've found your way here, I hope it's because you have an interest in the intersection between nutrition, physiology, metabolism and genetics/genomics!

I decided to start this blog for a couple reasons:

1. In the life of a grad student, you don't always get to study exactly what you want - I'm hoping this blog motivates me to stay grounded in my interests in nutrition and evolution, and gives me a venue to educate those who are interested, as well as myself (through my own research and your comments!)

2. There seems to be a lot of interest in the ideal human diet. With diets like Paleo having taken off, this concept of what is and is not ideal for human health, from an evolutionary perspective, has been wildly popular amongst the blog-o-sphere but seems to have gotten little attention from true academics. I loosely follow a few sites and often see huge perversions of the research. I'd like to provide an alternative viewpoint to some of these.

There's a littany of blogs out there addressing nutrition and health, and I strive to make this blog a bit different.  I hope that this can be a resource for interested Healthcare professionals and scientists, as well as the educated lay person - I plan on using, and to the best of my ability, explaining scientific concepts and their applications in research/health in scientific terms, aka you won't be seeing loose terms like enzymes and toxins thrown around without scientific names attached. I also plan to reference things as much as possible. (if you are interested, I have also begun covering nutrition topics in a more disseminat-able manner over at Registered Dietitian Zach Breeding's page, the-sage.org)

My goal is to begin with evolutionary theory and diet and work our way down to the biochemical and molecular aspects of nutrigenetics, while also addressing some pertinent debates in the realm of policy, public health and sustainable food systems.

Hope you Enjoy! I'd love for this to be a forum for peace discussion and scientific inquiry! Much of the research/topics that I will cover are new, contestable and/or can have multiple conclusions drawn - I would love to hear your opinions as well!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Beware the Meta-Analysis: Fat, Guidelines, and Biases

Headlines were abuzz this week, reporting that a new review of randomized controlled trials at the time of the low-fat guidelines didn't support their institution. Time , Business Insider , and The Verge all covered the topic with sensationalist headlines (e.g. 'We should never have told people to stop eating fat' #weneverdid). I won't spend every part of this blog picking apart the entire meta-analysis; you can read it over at the open access journal, BMJ Open Heart (1) -- (note, for myself, i'm adding an extra level of skepticism for anything that gets published in this journal). I'm also not going to defend low-fat diets either, but rather, use this meta-analysis to point out some critical shortcomings in nutritional sciences research, and note that we should be wary of meta-analyses when it comes to diet trials. First off, let's discuss randomized controlled trials (RCTs). They are considered the gold standard in biomedical research; in the hierarc

On PURE

The PURE macronutrients studies were published in the Lancet journals today and the headlines / commentaries are reminding us that everything we thought we think we were told we knew about nutrition is wrong/misguided, etc. Below is my non-epidemiologist's run down of what happened in PURE. A couple papers came out related to PURE, but the one causing the most buzz is the relationship of the macronutrients to mortality. With a median follow up of 7.4 years, 5796 people died and 4784 had a major cardiovascular event (stroke, MCI). The paper modeled the impacts of self reported dietary carbohydrate, total fat, protein, monounsaturated (MUFA), saturated (SFA), and polyunsaturated (PUFA) fatty acid intakes on cardiovascular (CVD), non-CVD and total mortality; all macros were represented as a percentage of total self reported energy intakes and reported/analyzed in quintiles (energy intakes between 500-5000kcals/day were considered plausible..). All dietary data was determined by a

Nutrition Recommendations Constantly Change...Don't They?

I was on Facebook the other day, and someone in a group I'm in made a statement about not being sure whether to eat dairy, because "one week its bad, and the next its good". This is something I hear all too often from people: nutrition is complex, confusing, and constantly changing. One week 'X' is bad, the next 'X' is good. From an outsider's perspective, nutrition seems like a battlefield - low fat vs low carb vs Mediterranean vs Paleo vs Veg*n. Google any of these diets and you'll find plenty of websites saying that the government advice is wrong and they've got the perfect diet, the solution to all of your chronic woes, guarantee'ing weight loss, muscle growth, longevity, etc. Basically, if you've got an ailment, 'X' diet is the cure. I can certainly see this as being overwhelming from a non-scientist/dietitian perspective. Nutrition is confusing...right? Screenshot, DGA: 1980, health.gov From an insider's pe