Nick’s List of Nutritional Fallacies

Anyone who has started to read into some of the controversies of nutrition will quickly find that there’s a lot we don’t know. Answering questions that appear to be trivial can end up taking 40 years and costing billions of dollars… and somehow we still don’t have an answer. Why?

A trivial example: If you take fat out of your diet by cutting out one hamburger, you may have added extra veggies or chicken or candy to your diet. Suddenly, simply determining what happens when you remove one serving of red meat from your diet becomes a multivariate matrix of macronutrients, micronutrients, fiber, and other strange considerations. And then you can repeat this for every feasible item in the grocery store and realize how futile your quest to answer simple dietary questions has become.

Beyond the universal understanding that “less processed is more better” we are left without a lot of understanding about nutrition, and for good reason: it is impossible to say definitively whether a vegan diet is more healthful overall than a ketogenic diet or vice versa.

Nevertheless, there are some basic considerations to which we can apply fairly straightforward logic. What follows are just a few of the examples of false nutritional hypotheses and general stupidity that I will address in kind. Continue reading Nick’s List of Nutritional Fallacies