I weighed in with some initial thoughts on Gary Taubes and Peter Attia's new venture NuSI here. Yeah, I'm going all wet blanket on this deal, but for good reasons grounded in reality in my opinion. I'll leave it to all the others to get all excited about this venture and all the "real science" we'll see come from it. As Gary says of NuSI:
Its purpose is to facilitate and fund rigorous, well-controlled experiments targeted at resolving unambiguously many of the outstanding nutrition controversies — to answer the question definitively of what constitutes a healthy diet.
A bar too high?
What would constitute a rigorous, well-controlled experiment? Well, as I pointed out in my last post, the biggest "knocks" the NuSI gang make on existing research are not really with experimental design per se, but rather with practical limitations in doing human clinical trials. These are:
- The inherent lack of compliance control in free-living studies.
- The monetary and logistics obstacles inherent in metabolic ward studies resulting in studies that of necessity involve smaller sample sizes and/or shorter durations than might be desired.
