Unscientific Beliefs about Scientific Topics in Nutrition
Humans interact with food daily. Such repeated exposure creates a widespread, superficial familiarity with nutrition. Personal familiarity with nutrition from individual and cultural perspectives may give rise to beliefs about food not grounded in scientific evidence. In this summary of the session...
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Published in | Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.) Vol. 5; no. 5; pp. 563 - 565 |
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Main Authors | , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Elsevier Inc
01.09.2014
American Society for Clinical Nutrition |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Humans interact with food daily. Such repeated exposure creates a widespread, superficial familiarity with nutrition. Personal familiarity with nutrition from individual and cultural perspectives may give rise to beliefs about food not grounded in scientific evidence. In this summary of the session entitled “Unscientific Beliefs about Scientific Topics in Nutrition,” we discuss accumulated work illustrating and quantifying potentially misleading practices in the conduct and, more so, reporting of nutrition science along with proposed approaches to amelioration. We begin by defining “unscientific beliefs” and from where such beliefs may come, followed by discussing how large bodies of nutritional epidemiologic observations not only create highly improbable patterns of association but implausible magnitudes of implied effect. Poor reporting practices, biases, and methodologic issues that have distorted scientific understandings of nutrition are presented, followed by potential influences of conflicts of interest that extend beyond financial considerations. We conclude with recommendations for improving the conduct, reporting, and communication of nutrition-related research to ground discussions in evidence rather than solely on beliefs. |
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Bibliography: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3945/an.114.006577 ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 2161-8313 2156-5376 2156-5376 |
DOI: | 10.3945/an.114.006577 |