Why Nutrition is such a hard science.

published on 26 August 2024

Sometimes even more than medicine itself, I consider nutrition to require a particularly tough mix between art and science.

Here’s why.

☝🏽 The person must do the work.

There is no way around it. The person has to change, daily, consistently, performing most of the job, not the professional.

Either they get educated and act upon it or it is not sustainable. You can’t just give a pill to achieve a healthy and balanced diet.

💊 You can’t get away without understanding dose.

The dose makes the poison. - this is fundamental, for almost everything you eat, every time.

👤 It deals with people.

People are very complex, with an array of beliefs, social environments, cognitive and financial capacities, with tribal behaviours, different food availability and traditions.

And lot of what we are is genetics and environment. Some of these aren’t even modifiable.

😓 A perfect prescription doesn’t mean a great result.

The Nutritionist can put all the effort into the perfectly adjusted diet prescription, give all the best advice regarding the client’s revealed preferences and informed by the best available science: BUT it can be useless if the person alone doesn’t execute on anything.

It requires being extremely well versed in behaviour change abilities and empathy.

⏩ You can’t quickly measure gains or losses.

Losing body fat, gaining muscle mass, body recomposition, etc, don’t happen overnight.

🥕 It’s a biological science with harder details.

One food has thousands of components, they interact, have low magnitude of impact and you can’t really isolate them.

Blinding studies is hard:

How will you give a 🥕 to a person without them knowing it is a 🥕 or fool them that it is (not)?

🏋🏽 Scientific evidence for individualization is not great.

For the general population and some groups of people (i.e. diseases) there are well studied principles.

However specifically for individuals (specially outliers, athletes) there is very little robust science for nutritionists to guide their practice.

🤡 Very prone to pseudoscience.

Everyone eats, so they often assume they understand nutrition (Dunning-Kruger effect). This leads to errors, like using intermediate markers to draw false conclusions. Example:

Food A increases Marker BMarker B is linked to less Disease C.

⇒ Food A reduces Disease C ❌ (false conclusion!)

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