The controversial Manhattan Project of Nutrition
Could the recently launched Nutrition Science Initiative – aka the “Manhattan Project of Nutrition” – be the solution to the obesity epidemic?
It has certainly gotten a lot of attention online. Most popular bloggers seem to be in favor of it while others are (predictably) more or less sceptical. Here are a few voices:
Personally I’m very much in favor of NuSI and I think it may accomplish great things. But instead of making the case for it myself I’ll do something better. I’ll let Peter Attia, the President of NuSI, explain this “Manhattan Project”. Nobody does it better.
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Humans will be humans and forever divided...but really do we need NuSI or any other initiative to rediscover/reinvent the wheel?
We need NuSI because humans, being humans, will spout empty platitudes like you just did until the cows come home. But those platitudes won't tell us how to reduce morbidity. Well-designed studies will.
Paleo nutrition does not need to test foods or look at any association between disease and diet because all this has laready been done before (although some of it is still on going) by our ancestors for 100s of 1000s of years.
What a pleasant fairy tale that we know everything about how they lived, that there is no disagreement on this, that they all lived the same way in every location and at every time in humanity's past, that they were all ideally healthy, that the foods they ate still exist and their lifestyles can be re-enacted, that 8 billion+ modern humans would be willing to re-enact their lives, and, if so, that the planet will support 8 billion+ modern humans living in a pre-agricultural manner.
OMFG, such nonsense.
Thanks to the modern forensic like techniques of anthropology and archaelogy we have a fair good idea of what our ancestors ate and it was natural food.
OMFG, such nonsense. There is no agreement, and there was no single mode of existence, nor any ideally healty population. And concepts like "natural food" are useless. Joel Fuhrman thinks a wheatgrass and soy smoothie is natural food.
There is not much money to be made on paleonutriotion (except for organic farmers and health food stores)
Ah -- there's not much money to be made, except where it's one of the most lucrative scams mankind has yet conceived. Thank you, Dr. Holmes!
it is about becoming food wise, buying natural foods and get cooking.
GIBBERISH! This doesn't MEAN ANYTHING. There is NOTHING ACTIONABLE in it.
big corporations are not interested.
OMFG, good luck finding a big food corporation that ISN'T interested in "organic." We are about five minutes from the advent of Paleo Froot Loops.
Well there is no key or secret. It is all out there in peer reviewed journals.
Wait -- if there's no key or secret, what's in the journals? Is it there or not?
There is little money in paleo even Boyd only managed one book and Cordain squeezed three just...but the pharma industry that looms quite prominently in and around NuSI (have a look at their board of directors and advisors) loves reductionism because it generates food fads and fobias that they can then appease offering food supplements and panaceas of all kinds.
There is little money in it? Or there is big-time drug money in it? Which one? Are you smearing NuSI as being too stupid to know that there's no money in it, or smearing them as tools of big business? And how come you're such an expert on this thing that doesn't exist yet?
You exhaust me. But your fuzzy thinking, personal attacks, appeals to authority and evocations of a cartoon Lion King past are emblematic of discussions on diet that I hope NuSI will end.
We need data on how and what modern humans need to eat of what's available in the modern era to maximize health and limit morbidity.
We've tried all the stupid platitudes. We've listened to the PhDs building careers extrapolating from inbred rodents being force-fed rat chow. They have made us fat, diabetic, and cancerous.
It's time for some data.
I personally think better of Taubes. More than I do of some of the "paleo" bloggers (and certainly more than I do of their anonymous followers.)
And I don't think Attia, or NiSi's directors, or advisors, or their funder, would get involved in a multimillion-dollar quest to vindicate "Good Calories, Bad Calories."
Jesus! Isn't it at least POSSIBLE that at least ONE PERSON cares about what diet makes people healthy?
In other words, isn't it at least POSSIBLE that at least ONE PERSON isn't an opportunistic, self-aggrandizing asshole?
Isn't it at least POSSIBLE that at least ONE PERSON wants to do something GREAT with their life? Something that MATTERS?
Dare to dream, people!