Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

Recently, a small trial (1) testing the efficacy of nutrigenetics-based dietary advice for weight loss was published and made its way around twitter. I saw a number of people saying "weight loss is weight loss, you don't need special diets" or things of the sort, kind of downplaying the potential of nutrigenetics. I'm pretty realistic about nutrigenetic-based dietary counseling, if you've read my December post for Alan Aragon's Research Review . But I wanted to comment on this study since I found it pretty disappointing, and people's reactions toward it were pretty 'poo poo' -ey about nutrigenetics. In general, the consensus is that the science isn't there to support nutrigenetics-based dietary counseling (2). I'd argue that, for complex traits (eg prevention of chronic disease, weight loss) the science really really isn't there. Even for more deterministic polymorphisms in simpler pathways (eg. CYP1A2 variants affecting caffeine m...

Back when I began taking dietetics courses, I kinda glossed over the way dietary recommendations are set -they were just a bunch of acronyms to memorize. The older I've gotten and more i've been involved in the literature, the more I see them as some of the most critical things for clinicians to understand, because they're often misinterpreted (in ways that I have been equally guilty of). This has been happening a good bit in the literature recently, as it pertains to vitamin D. I'll specifically be referencing a paper and relevant letter (1,2) in the open-access journal, Nutrients ( from the same publishing group that allowed the Seneff glyphosate gish-gallop paper  to be a thing). Both this publication and the letter make 2 critical assumptions: In Veugelers publication, they state that the IOM made a critical error in their statistics, and set out to: " To illustrate the difference between the former and latter interpretation, we estimated how much vitamin ...

Of Mice and Food Additives was going to be the title of this post but I opted against it to keep with my 'Why's that in my food' series; but I thought I was clever so I'm writing it here now. Nature has had a couple papers lately related to nutrition...well, more food additives. I wasn't particularly impressed with either, both how they were presented and how their results were conveyed to the public. The first paper was on artificial sweeteners, that mostly focused on a couple mouse studies, observing the effect of artificial sweeteners on insulin sensitivity and the microbiome. The first part of the study just dosed mice with 5% sweetener solutions in their water, and noted that they saw impaired insulin sensitivity mostly in the saccharin group; they didn't control/account for body weight changes throughout this period, which is a pretty big confounding factor, as previous research has demonstrated that administration of saccharin leads to weight gain in ra...