Little Girl and Her Organic, Sprouting Sweet Potatoes

If you haven't seen the little girl's video that shows how 'alive' organic food is and how 'dead' conventionally grown food is, check it out: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/a-little-girls-experiment-will-change-the-way-you-think-about-food/

This situation is the perfect example of why dosage matters, and furthermore, why scientific education matters. As the little girl rightly points out (i'd like to know what adults used their child to push their unscientific agenda??), Chlorpropham, the chemical sprayed on conventional plants to prevent sprouting and extend shelf life, has been shown to be carcinogenic in animal models. But only in extreme doses never even close to being consumed by humans.

I talk a lot about dosage on this blog and how it's been removed from nutritional sciences ("eat as much as you want of these, never eat that"), but these same misunderstandings also apply to toxicology - this isn't to say there are no concerns over any pesticides and environmental/industrial chemicals in our foods, but those that are intentionally used go through a rigorous safety process.

For a great read on this issue, check out Joe Schwarcz's response on McGill's blog - this is a really important topic because we need to educate consumers on the use of chemicals and how safety levels are determined (hint: it's quite a rigorous progress!)

Always remember - drinking too much water can kill you, and everyone who drinks water dies! - it doesn't make water toxic! Dosage matters!

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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 ...

The Singling Out of Golden Rice

I saw earlier today that Steven Novella, MD, over at Neurlogica blog covered some controversy surrounding Golden Rice and it reminded me I had some thoughts to throw down about the GR issue. Dr Novella's post was in response to some of the claims made in a comment written on his post about a recent Nature Biotechnology paper on crop biofortification . This is an area I've seen a lot of commentary on, no doubt because Golden Rice is a transgenic crop. Dr Novella makes some good commentary in his post and I suggest reading it ( here ) before the rest of this post - it will contain some additional thoughts to Dr Novella's. Dr Novella did a great job fielding the opposition to Golden Rice, which is something I've always found rather odd - I guess if you're vehemently opposed to a technology that represents a diverse array of methods (there's not one way to genetically engineer a plant) and innumerable potential outcomes (plants can be engineered for any number ...

Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

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