Nutrition’s Shaky Foundations
For decades, nutrition science has relied on a foundation that has at best been crumbling ever since: self-reported dietary intake combined with food composition tables. This approach works well for dietary patterns and food intake – but has severe flaws when trying to estimate intake of individual compounds such as vitamins, minerals or other compounds. And yet, it remains central to nutrition research and guidance. But we are building castles on sand.
There are two major problems—one is self-reporting, and I wrote about this before: it’s prone to recall bias, social desirability, and other problems. But there’s another, even more insidious problem—one that gets far less attention: we don’t actually know what’s in the food.
Even if we solved self-reporting with clever tools, gadgets, or digital tracking, we’d still be in trouble—because food isn’t chemically consistent.
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Originally published on Substack.