Nobody Likes Serious Research, People Like Easy Rules

I read this article on The Guardian these days:

A big, juicy burger to anyone who knows what healthy eating is any more

The article is about how there are many contradictory recommendations about what constitutes a healthy diet. The article is not very good and does not have many useful information. It is another of those thousands of articles trying to sound smart and sarcastic and achieving very little. Too bad too many people love this kind of article.

Anyway, what bothered me more was one of the comments of some readers saying that more 'serious research' on the subject was needed. Let me state something concerning this: the general public don't like serious research. The one thing that people want is someone to tell them rules like 'you have to eat six tomatoes per day' or 'never eat sugar'.

Serious research will not give you those rules because they simply do not exist. It is not difficult to understand that the amount of nutrients one should or should not eat depends heavily on a huge number of variables. It depends on genetics, health conditions, on how much exercise you do and even on the weather features of the place you live. All of that can affect the way your body metabolizes food and how much of each nutrient is needed.

All those articles that you see in the news about correlations between a certain amount of food and healthy problems are interesting, but their limitations should be considered. Usually they only represent correlations, not cause and effect. They are also difficult to analyse because many variables, which are themselves hard to control, might be affecting the results. Also, samples are usually small, which does not help in the statistical analysis, especially when they rely on wrong techniques.

The reason we have lots of this kind of articles with great repercussion is because that's exactly what people want. If there is one thing that I've learned in my academic career is that people do not want to support serious research, they want to support research that have a 'clear conclusion', that is fast and that will give them a rule they can follow and then blame others if it doesn't work. That is, surely, not serious research.

That's, unfortunately, how most research today works. It's not the scientist's fault. A scientist has to survive and has to do whatever there is money to do. We live in a world in which people don't mind lending their money for free to bankers and at the same time think that scientists are robbing society's money when they try to understand something deeply.

If you really want to understand what constitutes 'healthy eating' you should be prepared to support research that will probably take decades and will not result in a recipe book. For most things in life there are no simple rules.