More good news for blueberries and antioxidants in regards to brain health and Alzheimer’s , as the USDA news service reviews some recently published literature here.

The story brings to mind a regular frustration I run into as an anthropologist with interests in food and nutrition. Health and nutrition researchers seem to have an exceptionally well-developed reluctance to draw connections between specific, down scale research data and long-term health outcomes. In other words, they don’t like to ever tell people what to (and hence what not to) eat.

As illustrated by the hundreds, perhaps thousands of often contradictory books on dieting and healthy eating, each of which is often authored by a legitimate MD, there is little to no agreement within the research community about how food and diet relates to health, through nutrition.

The reason why research consistently falls short of making this connection, but MDs are not afraid to write books about their theories, is a question of perceptions of the validity of anecdotal versus experimental evidence. Research scientists think in terms of controlled experimental conditions, statistical relevance of sample size, etc. The costs associated with organizing such a large-scale epidemiological study that observes people over the course of their lifetime, in respect to controlled diets and health outcomes, would be astronomical. Bill Knowler at the National Insitute of Health is one of the few that has successfully pursued long-term controlled research into diet and health, and by his admission the costs of long-term research have severely limited the scope of their research questions.

MDs, on the other hand, through their careers, are often able to perceive tangible links between the research they read, their long-term hands-on expertise in a specialty (e.g. endocrinology), the nutritional programs they prescribe, and the health outcomes of their patients. Dr. Diana Schwarzbein, for example, author of The Schwarzbein Principle, is an endocrinologist, who through her specialized knowledge has compiled a compelling approach to long-term health through nutrition that balances fats and sugars in a way quite different than the ‘pyramid’ approach we’re all familiar with.Though all of the nutrition researchers I communicate with are as skeptical of the principles of her diet as they are of any other, her approach both makes sense, and has both a bounty of anecdotal evidence.

The question seems to be how can we build a stable bridge between these two worlds, or does such a bridge even matter? Doing so seems less and less important each day. What the research community has to say about nutrition doesn’t seem to come to bear much on what people are actually eating. In America, the Farm bill, through its food subsidies, has far more influence on what people eat than what the National Institute of Health has to say. And for that matter, people don’t seem to concerned themselves about the quality of the food they feed themselves and their children. I spend as little time as possible these days in the supermarket, for fear of losing my temper with some parents who have loaded their cart with chips and Cheetos and Lunchables and puddings and crackers and cookies and Hi-C and Capri Sun and Coca-Cola and Chef Boyardee.

Why, I ask you, isn’t feeding your child these things considered child abuse? And why aren’t more parents up in arms about the quality of food on the shelves? As I mentioned earlier, the worst foods are the cheapest foods, and the lowest income families are obviously stuck with fewer quality options. Michael Pollan’s favorite example compares a twinkie to a bag of carrots. A twinkie has over 20 ingredients and is truly a marvel of modern food production, yet costs pennies compared to a carrot. Why? Like I said earlier - our tax dollars subsidize the creation of the twinkie but not the carrot.

Is it just for lack of good information and surplus of bad? Indeed there is limited scientific evidence regarding danger in what is on the shelves of our grocery stores - just a nation full of anecdotal evidence. Researchers of today will never get the cash to do the kind of large-scale research that we need to understand the diet-nutrition-health nexus. But rather than leave it to the historians of tomorrow to determine why so many people ate themselves to death, perhaps we need to re-evaluate what we accept as legitimate scientific proof.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 11:19 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.