Experimental evidence? It’s one thing to precisely control the diet of rats and other captive animals over an appropriately long time period; but for obvious reasons it’s another thing to get people to willingly participate in such an experiment. While the media frequently implies or even claims outright that such research happens, it is invariably the case that the evidence comes from self reporting, a notoriously unreliable type of evidence. The much touted Harvard study of the diets of 80,000 nurses over 20 years nicely illustrates the problem. Nurses answered an annual questionnaire that asked them on average how much of each of 61 foods they consumed. Lots of us can’t even remember what we ate yesterday, never mind calculating an average of each for a whole year.

What about correlating such an average for whole countries e.g. the Mediterranean diet? Can an average national diet actually be calculated? What about genetic differences thought to correlated with heart disease? 

Let’s be honest about what we eat. We love to talk about the pros and cons about what we eat, and we get  most of our information from the media who never has a problem getting experts to tout whatever diet is the current rage. But I’ll follow the standard advice from the mouths of those with actual experience: chances are that eating what mom served up minus the processed foods she started serving in the 1950s is a good bet. Let the dietary experts who feed our journalists who in turn feed us more misinformation about our diets rattle on. There’s no stopping their steady flow of useless dietary advice because it contributes mightily to circulation and helps increase GDP. 

But in the end, most of our moms learned from THEIR moms who in turn learned from THEIR ….. what worked remarkably well. Liver – I always hated liver day. But using a bit of common sense to modify some of choices, she didn’t do to badly!