The Nutrition in Crisis Substack: The science and the real world

This Substack follows from the book Nutrition in Crisis. Intended to be a biochemist’s view of nutritional science, the emphasis was on translational science as it’s usually called. The fundamental microscopic ideas, the interaction of chemical compounds are elaborated to explain phenomena in the real world, in this case, what you should eat. The pleasure comes from seeing the connection between the science and its application. Nutrition in Crisis had both basic biochemistry and results of nutritional experiments. But it was a book and I knew few people would want to start from scratch at the level of atoms and molecules. At least without knowing how many pages (and chemical reactions) before they found out what they really wanted to know: what should I eat? The free form of Substack and social media makes it easy for us to start at the beginning and in the middle (although it was always possible to turn pages back and forth). So, among other posts, I will provide essentially a course on chemistry, biochemistry and nutrition starting from scratch. Those will be among the initial posts.

There is the application to nutrition. We are part of the golden age of biology. What we know is still less than what we don’t know, but our understanding of the working of the living cell has insights beyond what we would have dared to promise in a National Institutes of Health grant application. We have great knowledge and some clear applications. And there is optimism even where we confront the big challenges, such as cancer, diabetes, even mental illness.  

Yet something is wrong. The closer we move toward medical nutrition, the odder the science. Not just the facts but the interpretation, the quality of the scientific thinking. There is a lack of simple logic, and there is blatant prejudice. The history of science is full of controversy but there has always been the idea that we are all working to get at the truth. In the current state of nutritional research, the politics has become overwhelming. The party line is tied into government and private agencies. That’s the crisis. It may be getting worse.  I will discuss these issues. The Nutrition in Crisis Substack will show you how we got it wrong. Posts will describe how bias and misunderstanding of statistics and even poor scientific strategy is keeping the crisis going.

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