Will Eating Two Slices of Bacon a Day Really Cause It to Fall Off? The Problem With Observational Studies.
The title is click bait, as are all titles about nutrition.
Oh, the title is a play on the John Loannidis quote about eating two slices of bacon a day taking a decade off your life. It won't, and we have no evidence of anything dropping off anyone. The only articles about bacon and erectile dysfunction were written by Bacon and talking about smoking being bad for your performance. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16753404
"Eggs kill you!" "Eggs make the blind see!" "Tofu kills you!" "Tofu cures cancer!"
I could find research articles that might support any of those claims, but I can only make one claim about nutrition and health:
"We don't know!"
Why? Because you can't put all the residents of Nebraska in little cages and control everything they eat or do. So you can't be sure that the eggs or bacon or tofu they eat does anything at all. It might be the twenty hours of horror movies that they watch every week that are raising their blood pressure. Or they might be getting too excited about politics. The eggs or tofu or bacon can get blamed for something else entirely. Think for a minute about any nutritional study being done in Flint, Michigan. I'm sure beer drinkers outperformed water drinkers on various health markers, but it has nothing to do with the health effects of the beer, just the bad effects of drinking bad water.
What we're left with is the reality that nutrition is miserably complex in a world where people want definitive answers. The right answer is that you have to find your way to the best diet for you.
So maybe all those people aren't wasting their time on diet books. Trying different diets until you find one you like, that you can live with for the rest of your life, may be a very useful way to spend your money. But letting diet gurus run your life, chasing the "lose twenty pounds in twenty minutes" headlines, is just a recipe for misery.
Believe me, I've read my share of persuasive diet writers. I went through three perfect diets today. The trouble is that none of them agreed. Put all three of those authors in the same room, and they'd probably try to stab each other with spoons. So remember the next time you're reading a headline, it's interesting to think that yak butter is full of vitamins, but don't bet your life on it.
What we're left with is the reality that nutrition is miserably complex in a world where people want definitive answers. The right answer is that you have to find your way to the best diet for you.
So maybe all those people aren't wasting their time on diet books. Trying different diets until you find one you like, that you can live with for the rest of your life, may be a very useful way to spend your money. But letting diet gurus run your life, chasing the "lose twenty pounds in twenty minutes" headlines, is just a recipe for misery.
Believe me, I've read my share of persuasive diet writers. I went through three perfect diets today. The trouble is that none of them agreed. Put all three of those authors in the same room, and they'd probably try to stab each other with spoons. So remember the next time you're reading a headline, it's interesting to think that yak butter is full of vitamins, but don't bet your life on it.
But instead of saying we don't know, we get caught into saying things like this is bad, this is good, when the reality is that nutrition isn't black and white. A stressed-out vegan may not live longer than a relaxed couch potato. It's a matter of moderation and an individual working toward his or her best health.
That message doesn't translate, and the hyperbole of black-and-white thinking wins the day. We've seen it recently with the major study on alcohol, which I already went through at length. Vox does a good job of bringing together several experts who came to basically the same conclusions I did.
Oh, the title is a play on the John Loannidis quote about eating two slices of bacon a day taking a decade off your life. It won't, and we have no evidence of anything dropping off anyone. The only articles about bacon and erectile dysfunction were written by Bacon and talking about smoking being bad for your performance. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16753404
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