Lessons - PhD in Nutrition Says Almost Everything You Believe About Food Is Wrong | Dr. Layne Norton - Nutritional Scientist & Elite Powerlifter

In this lessons episode, discover why so many popular health headlines misrepresent scientific research. Understand how cherry-picked studies and media bias fuel misinformation. Explore how to separate credible evidence from sensational claims. And uncover why the full body of research matters more than any single study. What happens when you see in the news meat is carcinogenic or seed oils are bad for you or artificial sweeteners are bad for you? That's a super, super basic headline. Then all of a sudden, everyone's parents are stressed out or everybody's trying to throw out the Splenda from their house or everything like that, right? What happened here? What happened in the study? How did it get misinterpreted, misrepresented? Yeah. So keep in mind, first thing is that negative news sells way better than positive news. So for example, there's a company I work with, they're called ConsenSys. They're an AI powered research crawling tool basically. So you can go to ConsenSys and you can type in, does creatine build muscle? And it will not only like pull up all the relevant research studies, it will actually basically answer your question based on the consensus of the data in terms of yes, possibly no, right? So, and it will show, hey, 80% of studies show this, 10% show this, 10% show this, right? So they break down like what the actual distribution of the answers are. And then you can further like refine it based on like, okay, I just want the human trials or I just want randomized control trials. And when you go and you look at like, for example, does aspartame cause cancer? Actually, I think I had this just pulled up. Let me just see if I can find it. Let me just pull it up. Because these are the things that, you know, I hear all of these, you know, and these sort of these tropes. And I try and do my own research as well because I am somebody who would try and go into a PubMed study and see where this came from. But even for somebody that does the effort and does the cognitive work and goes in and tries to understand, you can still even find these PubMed studies that support one way or the other. And it gets very difficult. to understand what's correct and what... Because you don't... I'm not a researcher. I'm not a scientist. There's how many pages in this study, and you're just looking at the abstract, and you're hoping that the study was done right, and you're looking at the end results. But it gets very confusing. I can only imagine if somebody does not go to even that level how confusing some of these things could be. Oh, yeah. So basically, if I pull it up, so it's like, okay... So here's the results. If I use the phrasing, does consuming aspartame increase the risk of cancer? 14% say yes. 14% say possibly. 72% say no. Now, if you are the news, what's going to get you more clicks? Right. as aspartame not found to be associated with cancer in this cohort, or aspartame increases risk of whatever tumor by 15%, right? Well, of course, it's the negative headline. And that gets down to a more important aspect of cherry picking. So you can always, it doesn't matter what, what your belief is. You can always find a study to support whatever your belief is. Okay. Now, a lot of them are like, people will use like in vitro studies, which is basically a petri dish or animal studies. It's beautiful. But just to show how powerful cherry picking can be, I pulled up a, um, I actually did this because I did a big, long debunk of Paul Saladino's appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast a few years ago. So Paul is a carnivore diet advocate and basically says that fiber is useless, fruits or vegetables are bad for you and all kinds of crazy stuff. And just to give you an idea of how much it how much effort it takes to debunk nonsense versus saying it. His podcast is like just over three hours long. Probably took me 50 hours to do this breakdown. It was 48 pages in the Google Doc and it had 283 citations. It took me 10 hours just to listen to it because every time there was a claim, I had to write it down. And they'd go back and address it, right? And I had to cite the whole thing. But there were several times where he would cite a study, and I would, like, scream. I'm like, that's one study, and all the other studies showed something else, right? Like, you're picking one study. So just to make the point in that breakdown, I pulled up a research meta-analysis of the risk of smoking on adenocarcinoma, right? So if you look at the overall effect, I believe the effect of smoking on adenocarcinoma, when you compile all these studies, it's like a seven times risk increase, like a 700% increase in the relative risk of cancer. That's massive, right? And when you look at what they call a force plot, and a force plot is basically there's a center line, which basically means no effect. And then to one side, there's either a positive or to the other side, there's either a negative effect. And depending on how far it is to one side for each individual study, it shows you how powerful the effect was. Hopefully that makes sense. Well, if you look at the center line, virtually every study is like far to the right, showing increased risk of cancer. But there were two studies that were just a little bit left of that line. So if I wanted to make the argument that smoking did not increase the risk of adenocarcinoma and oh, by the way, might actually be protective. I could just highlight these two studies and completely omit the other 48 studies. And so that's why it's so important to, I mean, frankly, this is so hard for the, the average person because they don't have a research background. They don't know like, what to give more weight to, which is why I, again, I love that tool consensus.app because they, they, you could ask the question and it will kind of show you pretty quickly. And then there's search filters as well. Because it's so hard for the average person to like hear this stuff and, and, You know, and really feel like, oh, and then if it fits their bias, that's another thing. So let's say somebody doesn't really like eating vegetables. And here comes this expert with a medical degree. By the way, Paul's a psychiatrist. But here comes this expert with a medical degree. who says, oh no, you know, vegetables are actually not good for you because vegetables contain phytates and oxalates, which increase your risk of oxalate stones and can also bind to nutrients and reduce your nutrient absorption. Also, there's sulforaphane in broccoli. And look at this study showing when they gave sulforaphane, it increased the risk of cancer, you know. And it's like, so you can, and then when you look at the sulforaphane study, it was a crazy high dose and it was in rats. And you could find more studies showing that sulforaphane may actually have an inhibitory effect on cancer. But you can always find a specific compound in any food, man-made or natural, that if you fed it in a high enough dose would cause problems. I mean, you give people enough water, it'll kill them. Okay? So, unfortunately, people don't know how to unpack this stuff And again, you know, I'll kind of go to, yeah, but what actually happens with people who eat lots of fruits and vegetables? Because based on what you're saying, they should die earlier. Oh, oh, in studies where they look at people who eat lots of fruits and vegetables, they live significantly longer. So how does that, like, this is the direct question we're concerned about. So how do you reconcile your claim with the actual human outcome data? And so this is what's so hard for people to unpack. Well, it seems like it's sort of unfortunate that people are not fair with their representation of facts. Like an individual that goes that deep and does a three-hour podcast on a particular subject, you would think that they would look at all the data, right? But that's, I mean, this is probably why you're so fun at parties because… Because you're bringing up all the shit that they don't want to address. And you know that some of these people found these studies as well, but it doesn't fit the narrative. And then, like, let's say you're somebody who doesn't like eating vegetables, and you hear this guy saying, oh, vegetables are bad for you. It's not going to take that much evidence to convince you that, oh, yeah. Vegetables are not good for me. I'm not gonna eat vegetables. You're not looking it up. Right, exactly. I mean, same thing with like, you know, it's funny, like I, every once in a while, I'll smoke a cigar and I'll be like, I've been on social media and like had a cigar in a picture or whatever. And people will be like, so does that mean smoking isn't bad for you? And I'm like, no, it's bad for you. I just understand it's bad for me. And I am valuing the experience over the fact that, you know, this may, this one cigar, I doubt we'll increase my risk that much if I did it very regularly, it might. But I acknowledge it is definitely not the best thing I can do for myself. But I'm also not over here trying to convince myself that, you know, smoking actually isn't that bad. And, you know, actually, it's good for you, you know, because it lowers my stress. It lowers my stress and lower stress is associated with longer longevity. See, I can make any argument I want, you know, based on whatever it is I want. And so it's really important to just look at the human direct data with regards to that stuff. I mean, another great example is the artificial sweeteners. You know, like people are so scared of artificial sweeteners. And the research, like I said, 71% of the studies show that it doesn't cause cancer. But what gets focused on is the 14% that say it does. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.