Comment Re:How do you determine healthy food? (Score 1) 455
It's amazing that on a site like Slashdot, when it comes to anything else, peer reviewed publishing of scientific study is the gold standard. But when it comes to food, nutrition, or exercise, it's all conspiracy, self-published videos/books, and Whole Foods organic new-age mantras.
Observing what another culture eats ("The China 'Study'"), and their corresponding rates of various diseases (which is what the summary seems to loosely claim) without considering or eliminating other variables is all but useless. It's like saying elevators make people because they're empty when the doors close, and then more people come out the next time the doors open. It's certainly a reasonable hypothesis based on available evidence, but closer inspection is warranted before, e.g., installing an elevator because you want more people in your club.
I'm not sure where you got "self-published" and "new-age mantras" from. I think a 30-year long medical study, multiple publications in nutrition, epidemiology and other medical journals and a collaboration between Cornell University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences qualifies as peer reviewed science. The same goes for a Johns Hopkins anthropologist's life work researching the sugar trade and its consequences.
Now I would readily agree that no study is without its flaws. Similarly, no model of scientific inquiry is without its flaws. One of the troubles with almost all medical studies of nutrition is that isolating a variable is quite difficult. Having been a research scientist at the Salk Institute, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the idealized model of science we have from billiard ball physics, in which isolating the variable is paramount, doesn't really work well for studies at this physical scale of research. Human organisms and human nutrition are complex systems; complex stochastic methods are probably the best methods to study something as nebulous as human health at an organismic (or cultural) level.
In the end, however, I'd concede the result is usually of the variety that science has shown that "eating your vegetables" is good for you. And eating too much sugar is bad for you. In other words, common-sensical. Don't know about yours but my mother's advice about eating right was the same, and she was no new-ager.