> , if I'm not mistaken, there is some/strong? evidence linking blood cholesterol to heart disease

Cholesterol is ultimately used (and therefore made) by the body in an attempt to heal conditions that cause heart disease (The main use is for making vitamin D, whose other ingredient -- sunlight -- is in short supply for most people in the western civilization).

Thus, cholesterol is a good marker for pending problems, but is not itself the problem.

Analogy: People who take an advil are likely to report a headache 1 minute after taking it. Therefore, seeing someone take an advil is a good indication for a headache. But it is not the cause of the headache - and in fact, banishing all advil will not make anything better. But somehow, people think that banishing cholesterol will -- despite evidence to the contrary.

(Yes, statins do decrease heart disease, but they increase all cause mortality. And there have so far been many cholesterol-decreasing drugs developed - but none other than statins have decreased heart disease)

> It's best to assume all nutritional claims are bogus, because the vast majority of them probably are, and there is no way for us to tell which at this point.

"I don't know anything about ____. Therefore all these claims the so-called experts are making about ____ are clearly bogus!" This kind of dismissive line of thought (there are some variations on the theme - many people don't like to admit that they don't know something) pops up in a lot of areas and it is pretty embarrassing.

In the real world when I meet people with attitudes like this, it invariably says a lot more about the person than the supposed inscrutability of the topic under discussion. The narcissism to dismiss entire lines of study and the lack of curiousness of someone who hasn't bothered to form an opinion on which ideas are better than the others... even when you hang out with a community of avowed skeptics, these attitudes really help separate the wheat from the chaff.

That's nice. Read the thread. TL;DR: It's been proven (though some dispute it) that almost all nutritional research is false. That research's validity is pretty close to that of homeopathy.

It's peculiar that you cite Ioannidis's work as having "proven" your utterly defeatist position. Your point is that there's no way anything could be learned with nutrition studies, his point is that there's very much a correct way to learn things with nutrition studies and a method for evaluating the quality of such studies to make sure they're doing it right.

He doesn't advocate that we give up, crawl into the fetal position, and stop trying to understand the world any more than any of the other popular statistics skeptics do.

Neither does prom advocate that. He just said existing research is mostly wrong. That's not defeatist, that's realist.

That's not actually what he said.

I maintain that there's a meaningful difference between "often wrong" and "almost all" wrong and "assume all claims are bogus" and "view claims skeptically." One approach is a license to intellectual laziness (defeatist) and the other requires effort but can reap benefits.