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...

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...

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 ...

A recent study published in the open-access journal, African Journal of Biotechnology, entitled " Addressing the issue of horizontal gene transfer from a diet containing genetically modified components into rat tissues " has been making the rounds on social media and throughout the anti-GMO community. Before we break down the study, it's important to note that it follows up on a 2013 study by Spisak, et al, in PloS One (1), that caused some controversy, because it's results suggested that whole plant genes crosse from the digestive tract into the human blood stream. These findings were immediately jumped upon by the typical anti- GMO media (Natural News, Collective Evolution, etc etc  here ,  here ,  here ,  here ) where the story incited fear that trans-genes in plants could be floating around in our blood stream. The actual study wasn't specific to GMOs; actually, GMOs are only briefly mentioned. The findings were controversial because the idea that whole g...

I've seen a meme shared on social media multiple times this week, asserting that our foods contain paint thinners in the form of Trisodium Phosphate (TSP). The image below was shared on a FaceBook page called "Organic Health" with the caption "It's right in our faces... Just mocking us. Can you believe there is paint thinner in cereal?"   : from Organic Health, link here The meme links to an article over at naturalcuresnotmedicine ( here ). The article contains very little scientific material and quite obviously is written to scare people out of buying foods with TSP, not present an objective viewpoint on it. The article states that TSP is something that developers and construction workers should be familiar with, not people buying food (a pretty pointless comparison). The authors of the natural cures article go so far to even say that inorganic phosphate can be detrimental to our health: there is no citation for this claim, which is a rather ludicrou...