Jan 8, 2024 This Week in Nutrition: When Dietary Change Can Help... And When It Can't

This week had the unintentional theme of unpacking "diets" in all their forms - dietary advice, popular diets, diet rankings - no topic escapes scrutiny in 2024.

First, Catch Up

If there's a chance you'd like to catch up on the scientific debate on, say, every controversy in nutrition over the past 10 years, there is a podcast for that.

Check out this "best of 2023" episode of The Proof, created and hosted by Simon Hill. Not only does it cover a breadth of nutrition topics, Hill interviews an impressive roster of experts, getting nutrition science directly from the source. I am clearly late to the game, but this podcast has some great episodes, so search around and see what grabs your interest.

Are we over diet advice?

Two great posts this week tackle different aspects of our relationship with diet advice. One asks if we are finally over seeing the rankings of "best" and "worst" diets year after year. The second asks, are there measurable effects of poor dietary advice?

Check out the always relevant ConscienHealth on our growing disinterest in "diets."

Then read the Stephen Guyenet, PhD's piece on the possible impact of bad dietary advice.

New Papers

A paper recently published in JAMA (abstract linked here) examined what happened with patients with Type II Diabetes were enrolled in a lifestyle management program called a "Food-As-Medicine" program. After six months of intervention, there was no significant difference in the HbA1c of the treatment group compared to the controls.

Reexamining the impacts of intermittent fasting: A new systematic review compares the outcomes found in mouse studies of intermittent fasting vs. those in humans.