Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

When I think of the paleo diet, I think of Christianity - many variations built off of the same basic tenets. With Paleo, you've got avoidance of grains and dairy, and from there you get a lot of variation - whether modern oils are allowed is questionable, many don't consume but some are okay with legumes, some avoid nightshade vegetables, some worry about lectins, some worry about high PUFA intake, some worry about phytates, some eat high carb foods like tubers. Given this variability, Paleo falls into a feelings pool where most fad diets for me fall - it's a religion, not a prescription. This variability in dietary trials of the Paleolithic diet was pointed out by Alan Aragon in his NSCA presentation on the topic : As Alan notes, for a diet that claims superiority due to its removal of grains and dairy, no study has really isolated these factors. I was particularly surprised to see a recent meta-analysis of the Paleo diet in AJCN this upcoming issue. The meta-an...

Wide generalizations are being made in the media lately, regarding nutrition and obesity researchers and where they get their funding. Often, these get to levels of insulting comparisons accusing researchers of being just like big tobacco scientists. The most recent article trending in the NYT discusses the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN) and a few of its top researchers, like Jim Hill and Steven Blair ( not surprisingly, names that are too big in nutrition are left out - Arne Astrupp is the Vice President of the European branch but his name wasn't implicated as being bought out in the article ). The issue with the researchers is that they've taken money from Coke for their research, that their research pushes exercise over dietary intake as a cause of obesity (IMO, it's pretty weak data- their one paper on the topic relies heavily on 'we can't trust NHANES') and they pretty stupidly didn't disclose the funding on their webpage until it was pointed ...

I've talked before about how there are a number of models within pharmacology/toxicology, that extend beyond just a linear dose-response relationship. One of the (arguably) more nuanced perspectives linking doses to outcomes is the hormetic dose response curve - that is, lower quantities of a compound exhibit greater bioactivity/effect than higher quantities of the same compound.           This goes against the way we typically think, where we imagine there is some linear/threshold model (we need a certain amount of a compound and more increases the effect until it plateaus or hits a ceiling). In a world where we have the ridiculousness of homeopathic dilutions, it's not always our first thought to consider that 'less' might be better. For nutritional scientists, we generally work with 'U' shaped curves, where there is an intake that leads to deficiency, and an intake that leads to an excess. That is, low iron intake might lead to iron def...