It goes off the rails when he gets around to discussing the science of obesity.

Consider this the Satiety Problem Problem. Another learning experience (we didn’t need) on how science and science journalism fail us when it comes to obesity.

I never did and, I would reply, I almost assuredly never would. That’s still true, but this week I took the opportunity to point out a phenomenon the two research disciplines share and it’s a worrisome one.

The scientist activist problem

But garden-variety bad science is the far more insidious problem. There is no institutional immune response. No one investigates, nothing is exposed. Bad science can persist indefinitely, infecting entire disciplines. My latest post is a brief primer.

Maybe this will help: welcome to the metaverse problem in nutritional epidemiology.

My latest post on substack is about another reason (as if we needed one) to be skeptical of this research.

https://open.substack.com/pub/unsettledscience/p/no-end-to-parallel-universes-in-nutrition?r=7dnq6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

When Nina Teicholz and I were discussing working together on a Substack newsletter, I suggested a name for it that I’d always joked I’d someday use: “Let’s Pretend This Is Science….” Let’s just say, wiser heads prevailed. Still, that’s the phrase that comes to mind when I write about some of the research in the field, most recently the studies that try to determine what foods make mice fat.

This week’s contribution is a paper in the journal Obesity suggesting that mice get fat eating high-fat diets because they shift into what the authors call hedonic overdrive. In short, the mice eat for the pleasure of it not to maintain energy balance and so a healthy weight. My latest newsletter discusses many of the obvious issues with this research, none more important than the question in the title: do we care why mice get fat?

Here’s my latest Unsettled Science Substack article

We all want to eat healthy (I assume), but do we have to embrace credulity to know how to do it?

Here’s my latest Unsettled Science Substack article

Somebody has to be wrong; someone is misinterpreting what they’re seeing. Let’s work this out.

Here’s my latest Unsettled Science substack article: https://unsettledscience.substack.com/p/nutrition-researchers-say-its-the

The numbers are hard to ignore. One in every four dollars spent on healthcare in the United States goes to treating diabetes and its complications. The cost to society is estimated at over $400 billion a year, more than $1 billion every day. Over $300 billion are in direct medical costs, covering the care for the 30 million Americans who have been diagnosed with diabetes. Another 8 to 9 million have diabetes but have yet to be diagnosed and don’t yet know it.

A disease that was vanishingly rare in the 19th Century now afflicts one in every nine Americans.

Diabetes therapies are better than ever. Diabetes is less of a burden for the patients who suffer from it than ever before, and yet it’s still considered a chronic, progressive disease that will require more and better drugs or higher doses as time goes on. Half of all patients with diabetes are failing to meet the relatively liberal blood sugar goals of the American Diabetes Association.

Obvious questions: how did this happen and is anyone responsible? Are these problems that can really be solved by yet more (expensive) drugs and better devices? Were mistakes made in how we think about this disease and how we treat it?

My new book, Rethinking Diabetes, addresses all of this and it’s out today.

I have a Q&A on the Unsettled Science substack addressing these questions and others.

Please read, comment, pass along, and share. I look forward to hearing what you think.