Cultivating Neurons.

: to prepare and use (soil) for growing plants

: to grow and care for (plants)

: to grow or raise (something) under conditions that you can control

I’m not about to go into gory detail about how to literally cultivate neurons, that’s a topic for another day.  But I am going to help you to figuratively cultivate some neurons today by explaining a bit about what “THEY SAY”.

Who are “THEY”?  You know who they are… THEY are the researchers, scientists, and academics that we opt to put our trust in, because it’s not our job to do what they do. How the heck could we possibly know enough to evaluate their science?

THEY are the people who brought us such common knowledge / blanket statements as:

• ‘saturated fat causes heart disease’
• ‘keep your cholesterol below 200’
• ‘eggs are bad’ or ‘eggs are good’
• ‘GMO’s are not harmful to humans’
• ‘you have to eat 1200 calories a day to lose weight’
• ‘meat is unhealthy’
• ‘dairy causes cancer’
• ‘low-fat products are healthy’
• ‘artificial sweeteners are zero calories and therefore are better than sugar’

etc…

Fundamentally, these claims are damn near impossible to support.  The first and foremost reason is that you can’t isolate one particular food or random isolated food element (cholesterol, calories) as being a cause for disease when we don’t live in a bubble. Our individual risk tolerance is dependent on everything from how healthy your grandma was to how active, non-toxic, rested, content, and mindful that you are today.

In fact, it is difficult to do nutrition research and draw meaningful conclusions at all, unless you do experimental studies.  These don’t happen too often, because that would require human guinea pigs.

We CAN get some IDEAS by looking at correlations in large populations.  This has been the standard for nutrition study.  There are some high profile studies out there, that you may know of, things like ‘The China Study‘  & ‘The Nurses Health Study‘ & ‘The Framingham Heart Study‘.  These studies are what is known as ‘observational’ studies, where data is collected from large groups of people, people are given questionnaires to assess their lifestyles, and are asked yearly or so to recount their diets over the past year.  And then the statistician comes in to find correlations in those groups. Things like ‘red meat is correlated to colon cancer’ pop out.

The problem with these studies, is that correlation can not prove causation. Here’s what I mean. Umbrella use is correlated with rain.  Makes sense, right? We tend to use them more often when it is raining.  But do umbrellas CAUSE rain?  Nope.  This same logic applies to observational studies.  Here’s a fun look at some other interesting correlations.

Not that all observational studies are a waste of time of course, you CAN make statistically significant correlations.  But, you can’t prove causation.  You’ll see words like ‘likely’ or ‘linked to’ in the conclusions.

That said – you DO have it in you to question and evaluate these claims further for yourself – and I’m going to give you a quick primer on just what to look for in the ‘science’.

Step 1: Read the claim.  If you come across an article that claims that eggs are unhealthy for you, like I just did, read it through with an open mind, as opposed to simply disagreeing with it right off the bat because you have some dogmatic view of what is the right food for humans.  I run across this a lot in my line of work.  There are a lot of emotions tied to food.

Step 2: Seek the references.  If you read an unreferenced claim, you have no way to know what sort of data the claim was based on.  You might consider googling this claim to see what references are out there – if you’re really interested.  If there are references attached to the claim then it’s time to locate them to see if they support the claim.  A lot of information is made available to the public online, in some cases, you’d benefit from having access to a University library system.  Pub-med is a great place to search – also Google Scholar.

Step 3: Identify what kind of study it is.  Is it an observational study or an experimental study ?… Note the size of the study – what is the data pool… and also if anyone has access to the data.  The China Study (which concludes that animal protein causes cancer) cited above, is an observational study of enormous proportions – they made the data public, so that anyone who was interested could evaluate it for themselves.  Others have, and have drawn different conclusions.

Step 4: Identify who funded the study.  Or do the authors have any affiliations that could create a bias?  This is important, because if – for example – a study is released that says ‘Nutrasweet is health promoting’ and the makers of Nutrasweet funded the study… then you might question whether or not the data was cherry picked to support the most favorable outcome.  Horrible yes, but this happens.

SO, yeah.  This health stuff, it’s hard to know what to believe – but be skeptical of health claims about individual foods, or food groups.  There’s not a lot we know for sure, and there’s a whole lot that we have yet to discover. My approach is to go back to basics, eat real, whole food raised/grown naturally… to listen to your body, to realize that anything can be toxic to your body if you eat too much of it, and to opt-out of our modern day science experiment.  It’s working for me.

Let me know if you’re in.