If you have a real scientific background and real engineering background you are way more likely to do a proper job.
It frustrates me that people think nutritional "science" is a serious scientific field. And that the "nutritional scientist" is somehow better equipped - they have barely done any real science a single day in their life.
If you can't, or won't, it is not a scientific field.
Unfortunately, like most fields it’s the junk you read about because rigor is difficult/expensive and therefore less common than BS. Just look at say fusion research and all it’s seriously flawed experiments.
Sure, human biology is (hundreds of) orders of magnitude more complicated than say going to the moon.
But at this point in 2024 we “know” a lot more about physics than we do about nutrition.
And maybe that’s because physicists, when faced with contradictory data, keep digging until they figure out the basics once and for all.
The problem is that the public doesn't want to hear it, so the media keeps running articles that make it simple like "nobody knows anything". Which is just plain false.
About the only things I see as generally accepted are to eat a varied diet (whatever that means), keep total consumed caloric content near the amount expended, eat at least the RDA of micronutrients, and drink enough water to avoid overt dehydration.
But generally - yes, afaik there's mostly a consensus that total caloric intake is the driver of amount of adiposity, that maintaining a 10%-20% body fat percentage (for men) is optimal for long term health, that most diets are close from a health and fat-loss perspective - meaning, amount of adiposity is the main driver of long-term bad health, especially as compared to individual ingredients. There are some things that are known to be specifically problematic, e.g. trans-fats, at any amounts. And there are healthier and less healthy foods, some of which we know - but total caloric intake is the only driver of body composition, and a bigger driver of body health.
Most of this is basic - probably because, as I said, I'm not a nutrition scientist myself so only understand the basics myself.
That said, a large part of the population doesn't even understand these basics either, preferring to constantly talk about and argue about specific diets, keto vs. vegan vs. whatever. And science mostly has that question covered, as far as we can tell right now.
For a more in-depth take on this from someone who actually is an expert, I recommend videos by Mike Israetel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FM9VAH_EXw&list=PLyqKj7LwU2...
There is a long list of things that cannot be synthesized by people and must be consumed. (Elements like Potassium as well as specific nutrients like Vitamin C and Thiamine being well known.) There’s a longer list of things than can be synthesized but should largely be consumed ex:
Linoleic acid (LA), an omega-6 fatty acid, and α-linolenic acid (ALA), an omega-3 fatty acid, are considered essential fatty acids because they cannot be synthesized by humans.
The long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), can be synthesized from ALA, but due to low conversion efficiency, it is recommended to consume foods rich in EPA and DHA.
There’s also a lot of basic facts that get complicated when you dig into them. For example calories produced by burning foods isn’t 1:1 with the calories available to people. Cellulose for example burns but is effectively indigestible. One way to investigate this is to have some eat something and then burn their poop, followed by many studies that do so for various reasons.
There’s also a lot of nutrition science that straddles the line with medicine. Thus there exists many specialized diets for various conditions etc.
I also tend to think there’s real nutritional science but it’s being drowned out by all the snake oil.
It reminds me of the studies they've done in Canada and the US about how natives (American Indians) die a lot of the time in the ER because they're immediately written off as alcoholics or drug-addicts, and so their complaints are evaluated through the lens of "this person just wants opiates."
This is underscored by frequently cited articles, like: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", in which math is treated as separate, but intimately related, to natural philosophy.
I think you can do math without science, but you can't do science without math.
While a scientific or engineering background might demonstrate capability to understand another scientific field, that doesn’t replace the near decade of education people in that field have.
A dedicated physicist who self-taught medicine would allow hoofs to be zebras, not horses, some % of the time.
Doctors need practice in the hospital and do an excruciating amount of rounds surrounded by senior experts.
Nutritionists? No.
Given a nutritionist who has studied the books and gotten a degree and a physicist who has studied the books and hasn't gotten the degree I would be hard pressed to choose the nutritionist
I would absolutely trust a physicist (who has done actual empirical lab work) who has deeply studied a problem in the nutrition space over someone conventionally trained in nutrition.
You may be stunned to see how little numerical sense so many in the medical field have. And as someone who grows medicinal plants and follows that literature closely, I read tons of papers in that space. It is full of experimental design flaws and dubious correlations.
I have worked on a medical device that went through clinical trials.
Cause from where I'm sitting, nutritional scientists do plenty of real science - studying a very complex problem that poses a lot of challenges to experiments, and still coming up with a lot of great results that teach us tons about nutrition.
Most people that criticize the field do so because they read a bunch of articles. Or because they're in the world of hard sciences, and are simply arrogant enough to think they know better than everyone else, even in fields they've never studied.
Titles don't help. An "environmental engineer" might not have sufficient knowledge about zoology or bridges to support whatever they are talking about, but a layperson might not realize that.
How can you tell whether I am as trustworthy as a guy on the bus on matters of software engineering? I am a high school dropout. Likewise, I'm no medical doctor, but knowledge is a spectrum, and I believe I know more than the average Joe on matters of nutrition because it is something that fascinates me and I've read and researched a lot about.
Given that I've read and heard about Taubes for 15 years, it is simplistic to say the least that he doesn't know anything because he's got a physics background.
tl;dr: the Gell-Mann effect only makes sense in a vacuum and if you really want to believe that having a degree automatically makes you an expert with worthwhile ideas.
I’m also underqualified for my position and am wary of credentialism. But if I’m looking at a topic I don’t know well — e.g. seismic building codes- I have to start somewhere.
Software engineering is thankfully a field that is particularly accessible to people without formal training. Demand is high, functional skills can be proven on the spot, and employers are (usually) not in a position where their hiring decisions have potential legal consequences.
No one has any idea which diet (if any) is best, or the connection between insulin and obesity, or if fats are good or not, etc. All hunches. Carbs have been falling out of favor for a while now but obesity getting worse.
Anecdotally, my wife went onto a low-carb diet 18 months ago. She likes low carb food, and isn't a huge fan of bread, potatoes etc anyway, so it was easy. She's not total though, still eats a rusk at breakfast, and has a (home made) pizza once a week. She also started exercising a lot more, and found a sustainable rhythm for that. She's lost 50 lbs. (Around 25kg).
Interestingly, her blood sugar levels have not dropped significantly, but they did drop a bit.
I sporadically do low-carb, and always lose weight doing so. I like bread, potato's, rice though so my diet is much less obsessive. My results are more fluctuating but slowly trending down. I'm in no rush, but eould like to drop around 15 lbs this year. I lose about 1lb per week if I'm "fairly strict" - exercise levels don't change (I exercise a reasonable amount.)
Incidentally, I've found that just slowly reducing quantity has helped as well. Eating from small bowls and plates has helped me.
None of this is data. And I still "cheat" (I'll happily eat normal in social situations, and often on weekends etc) but I seem to have found a pattern I can maintain long term. It's a "diet" in the sense there's good and bad, but its also "lifestyle" in the sense that I try to be "moderate" with the bad.
So his claims really dont seem to fall short in my own experience and the experience of people I know.
All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences. I have seen far too much sloppy and motivated reasoning in the soft sciences to trust anything that comes from people that exclusively live in that world. I am sure there are proper scientists in those fields doing good work, but that isn’t the average.
I don’t know anything about this particular case, but it is much easier for someone with mastery of the hard sciences to become fluent in the soft sciences out of interest than vice versa. It may not be fair but I have seen so many real world examples of this, where hard science/engineering experts became recognized experts in softer science fields entirely out of interest, but never in the reverse, that it is difficult to ignore.
I'm not sure that's justified, at all. The domains are harder to experiment in - so the standards are more fitting for their domain. That doesn't make them better or worse, just different.
> All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences.
You are, IMO, too dismissive in your language about entire professions. "Shallow, soft sciences".
I get where you're coming from - I'm more of a CS/Math/Physics person myself. But I think "our" side of hard sciences is far more dismissive than it should be - leading to implicitly trusting people who wave the right "hard science" credentials around instead of people working on the field for many years.
Not taking sides here, but I want to point out that there is a distinction between rigor in reasoning and diligence in testing (given feasibility constraints). The true answer need not be in the space of hypotheses that's feasible to test [1]. It's crucial that scientists appreciate that; sloppy reasoning tends to make strong conclusions from weak tests because there's a desire (bias) to emphatically drive outcomes even from weak conclusions.
Over time I've mentally recategorized entire parts of medical science into what I would say is non-science, or at least, a very different approach to science. In particular, nutrition, and many other areas, take extremely limited amounts of data and extrapolate it, making conclusions that far exceed what the data actually supports. And the folks publishing it got really good at convincing the larger press/medical world that they knew what they were talking about, which has led to all sorts of trends.
I would love to see more translation of quantitative physics into the medical sciences, but it's truly a challenging problem, especially because we (for good reasons) don't run the sorts of trials that would provide truly convincing evidence for causal mechanims related to disease, or whatever area of biology you care about.
> perhaps because of his serious and scientific background – he has a physics degree from Harvard and studied aerospace engineering at Stanford [...]
Which, for the thing he's doing now, is not a serious background! Knowledge isn't transferrable and there are plenty examples of people who transfer fields with unwarranted confidence and make totally bogus claims (see the Nobel disease [1]). I wish we would stop claiming the opposite, because especially in a field like nutritional sciences you can find some "evidence" for any theory (see eg. the Chemical Hunger drama [2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...