Everything We Know About Obesity and Nutrition May Be Wrong

In 2018 a Huffington Post article, Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong, went viral, debunking myths about obesity and weight loss. It argued that the “war against obesity” has really been a war against obese people, fostering a culture that encourages fat shaming and alienates overweight people.

2 Slices of Bacon Daily Shortens Life by a Decade?

An article by Stanford’s John Ioannidis, which called for radical reform of nutritional research and went viral in research circles, argues that most studies tying nutrients to health outcomes are bunk. Ioannidis illustrates his point by describing the real-life implications were we to assume studies of individual foods are legit:

...eating 12 hazelnuts daily would prolong life by 12 years (ie, 1 year per hazelnut), drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve a gain of 12 years, and eating a single mandarin orange daily would add 5 years of life. Conversely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expectancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon daily would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than smoking. Could these results possibly be true?

Ioannidis blames researchers' failure to properly account for confounding factors:

Relatively uncommon chemicals within food...may be influential. Risk-conferring nutritional combinations may vary by an individual's genetic background, metabolic profile, age, or environmental exposures. Disentangling the potential influence on health outcomes of a single dietary component from these other variables is challenging, if not impossible.

He also blames selective publication of studies that proclaim a correlation between a food and a health outcome over studies that show no correlation. And he throws shade on nutrition advocates...

Expert-driven guidelines shaped by advocates dictate what primary studies should report.

The Good News

But there's a valuable learning -- making this Number 9 on my list of Top 10 Wellness Stories of the year -- we can take from all these stories. The lessons from Ioannidis’ article and Huffpo's obesity article are essentially the same.

Pursuit of continuous improvement in the promotion of employee well-being demands skepticism.

We have to maintain idealism to believe we can do better. My New Year's resolution is to cultivate even more optimism in the pursuit of measurable progress, knowledge, and improvement. Join me?

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