is everyone biased in some way? or is it possible to be 100% unbiased? is that even a
useful question to focus on? it's obvious that the concept of bias is on the minds of people trying
to make sense of all the contradictory information on nutrition. we see it all over social media and
we see it here in the comments as well. depending on the viewer, we're either meat shills or
anti-meat, members of the carnist cult or vegan propaganda, biased in favor of eggs or against them,
and we're funded by dairy, in the pocket of big pharma and sponsored by the fishing industry
apparently we're getting checks from everybody. i should be taping this on my private jet
the truth is we actually decline all commercial partnerships and deals but that's not the point
first let me say these reactions are actually a good sign as far as i'm concerned
that some people care enough about nutrition to have strong feelings about it. disagreement
is good. our enemy is indifference. the fact that most westerners are on what dolly parton calls
the seefood diet: i see food and i eat it. and to be completely honest most viewers seem to think we're
unbiased. of course that could just mean they have the same bias as me so they see me as unbiased. so
if this bias thing is so subjective, so in the eye of the beholder, is it even useful? does it
even help us figure things out? and is there a more powerful tool we can use? i remember when i first
started trying to figure out nutrition, the effect of different foods on health. back then a lot of
the youtube channels and podcasts weren't around yet so in a way my job was easier. less noise.
so i did the only thing i knew how to do: i started reading studies. about a month in, i thought i had
it all figured out, because everything seemed so clear, so black and white. they have a name for that:
dunning-kruger. and at that time, whenever i heard somebody say something that didn't align with the
little evidence i had seen, i remember thinking, "how can this person say this? the evidence is so clear.
maybe this person is just biased." then something really interesting happened. as i kept learning
and reading more, sometimes i would find evidence to support some of those views
i had labeled as biased. and i realized "oh, that guy three months ago was actually right".
not always. sometimes people are just plain wrong and there's a lot of confusion on the internet
but sometimes that happened, and i had a light bulb moment, that when i wrote somebody off as
biased, oftentimes there was more reflection of my bias than theirs. as a result of that experience,
two things happened. first, i instituted a rule for myself. that if somebody makes a claim i disagree
with and if they show evidence for it, like actual robust evidence, a peer-reviewed study,
if i'm not familiar with the study, i have to read it. i've kept that up for years. anytime
somebody tweets a study at me or even here on the comments, i don't see every comment unfortunately,
but if i happen to catch it and if there's a study that i'm not familiar with i make sure
i open a tab on the browser, sometimes that means i have 40 tabs open on my browser
and it feels like i'm never going to get to it but eventually i do get to it and i look at them all
that rule has been an enormous pain in my butt but it has taught me immensely. now, sometimes
the study is not robust or sometimes i'm familiar with it already, sometimes the person
misunderstood it, but sometimes it's a strong study that changes my perspective and i adapt
my views based on it. that's happened many times over the years. and the second
thing that happened was that because i forced myself to look at the evidence
and because that process a lot of times threw in my face that the bias was actually mine,
i naturally stopped labeling people as biased and unbiased. i didn't realize this at the time, but
recently going through the comments and thinking about this, i realized that type of categorization
is not even part of my internal dialogue anymore. in fact, if you go through the videos where we fact
check somebody, we've made a couple of those over the years, i'm pretty sure i never called
somebody biased, and i certainly never dismissed a view or a claim strictly based on a bias or
on what the person eats or where they get their funding from. not once. and we've looked at some
outlandish claims. i don't even remember using the word bias ever on this channel before today
i could be wrong but i don't remember using it once in like 130 videos that we've published
it's just not something that guides my thinking anymore. what replaced it was the concept
of totality of evidence. and in fact if you go through those fact checks,
you'll see that what we try to do consistently is compare the claims made to the available evidence
now i know some of you are throwing yourselves in the air and saying "ah, but you can find a study to
support any view you want, and it's in choosing the studies, that's where the bias comes in". well, that's
why we don't talk only about showing some evidence but rather about totality of evidence or at least
balance of evidence. crucial distinction. i know this can sound slippery and kind of subjective
but it's a lot less than it seems so here are some real world examples. one obvious one is
painting an entire category of foods with a broad stroke. for example, all fat is bad.
the only way to eat healthy is a low-fat diet. i just saw that like two days ago on a website
so we could dismiss that as anti-fat bias but it doesn't tell us zilch because maybe i have a pro
fat bias and the website is actually right. we know that's incorrect because the balance of evidence
shows plenty of benefits of specific types of fat. nuts, seeds, fatty fish, avocado, olives
are some of the healthiest foods you can eat and they're pretty fatty, and yes, liquid vegetable oil
also overwhelmingly beneficial outcomes in the literature unlike what the internet will tell you
so saying that all fat is bad does not reflect the balance of evidence, not even close. that doesn't
mean you can't eat a low-fat diet if you want, of course you can, we'll come back to this in a second
but we need to be able to separate personal preference from scientific fact if we're
going to have any type of adult conversation about this. it's the exact same thing with "all
carbs are bad". some people still believe that, i still see that sometimes on social media
completely contradicted by the balance of evidence. whole carbohydrates and refined carbohydrates
have vastly different outcomes. another one: every time we make a video talking about meat or dairy
or eggs, somebody will complain that we're giving people license to eat toxic foods because all
animal foods are toxic. first of all, we're not the supreme court, discussing science is not
allowing or disallowing anything. now, regarding this idea that all animal products are toxic,
some people will dismiss that as vegan bias, and some people will hit back and say "no, actually
it's the carnist bias of our society that doesn't even allow us to see it", and we hit an impasse and
we've learned nothing about what is factual because obviously if we dismiss one person's
views on nutrition based on what they choose to eat the logical extension is we have to dismiss
everyone's views because everyone needs to make a dietary choice and that could be construed as some
kind of bias. unlike this slippery ambiguous stuff, the evidence is actually quite clear. again, we can
look, among many others, at the obvious example of fish. the outcome evidence on the health effects of
eating fish is overwhelmingly positive even when we compare it to other specific foods one-on-one
now, some people will argue, but the environmental impact of fishing and the ethics of fishing are
horrible. yeah, they are. we covered all of that in the Seaspiracy reaction video, we went over
the environmental issues, i even explained that i personally avoid fish and seafood mainly for that
sustainability aspect. so we can state things clearly. the health data shows positive outcomes
of fatty fish like salmon for example, a couple times a week. we don't need to shoehorn the science
to fit our personal views, it's not honest and it doesn't really work long term. okay, another
big one, fudging with risk factors. we see that a lot. that big risk factor over there that applies
to everybody, it doesn't apply to me. that same low-fat website i mentioned earlier claimed that
triglycerides don't matter, as long as you're on that low-fat diet and your cholesterol is really
low, you can let your triglycerides go sky high, doesn't matter. we could call that a low-fat bias
low-fat diets tend to lower cholesterol and can sometimes raise triglycerides
so it certainly sounds convenient that the risk factor they don't have is the important
one and the one they happen to have is the one we can ignore, but labeling something as biased
doesn't help me. maybe he's biased and right. or maybe i'm the one with the bias and i can't see
the low-fat truth. the reason that claim is wrong is because it's not supported by the evidence
we can have low cholesterol and still have residual risk. plenty of studies show that and
triglycerides can be a reflection of VLDLs which are a type of particle that is also
atherogenic, also raises cardiovascular risk. so ignoring sky-high triglycerides just because
our cholesterol is low is not a good idea. and the same with low carb, except it's usually
turned upside down, "as long as your trigs are low ignore your ldl-cholesterol". sometimes
they'll throw in hdl-cholesterol, "as long as your triglycerides are low and hdl-cholesterol is high
you can ignore your ldl-cholesterol". is that a bias? who cares. it's inaccurate because you can have low
triglycerides and high hdl-cholesterol and still be at higher risk. plenty of examples of that have
been shown in the literature, plus all of these metrics of lipids are indirect indicators anyway
we've covered all of that before in detail. so it's all about epistemological consistency. do we apply
the same rules across the board or do we set the bar really low for ideas we love and much higher
for ideas we don't like. we see this all the time. just last week we published a video on alcohol, the
conclusion could be seen as somewhat unpopular, the data indicated that any level of regular intake
could be harmful. but there was no resistance, everybody pretty much accepted the evidence
and the conclusion. and yet we make a video about cholesterol or apob and everybody throws
themselves in the air, everybody's outraged. and yet we have more evidence for apob than for alcohol
all right, let's wrap up with some actionable tips, how can you use all of this to protect
yourself and make sense of things? two levels, alright? two levels of investment. level one,
when you're sitting online looking at some content, it could be a blog, it could be a podcast, it
could be a YouTube video, look at their references. scroll down, pause the video. i do this all the time,
before i even watch the video i pause it, i go to the description and i check the references, because
it tells me more than 10 minutes of watching somebody talk. you don't even need to read the
studies, just click the links and take a quick look. first of all, does it have references? if it doesn't,
that's not a good start. you can't even begin the conversation. are the studies in humans or mice? are
the studies observational or interventional? you can tell often by the title, if not by that little
blurb in the beginning called the abstract. is it an isolated study or is it a meta-analysis that
looks at a body of evidence? that takes you less than 30 seconds and as you go through content
it will teach you so much you will go from "i'm watching a video by so-and-so where he's saying
xyz and i like it or not and i trust him or not and he seems biased or unbiased" to "this
person made this claim, he showed this piece of evidence and it supports his argument or not"
that is a colossal mindset shift, it instantly puts you in like the top one percent of people
watching this type of content and it immunizes you against misinformation and just general confusion
level two, for those who are a bit more gung-ho and want to invest a little bit more energy
it's basically my rule, every time you hear somebody make a claim that you disagree with,
look at their evidence, go through it in a bit more detail and make some brief notes, two or
three lines, maybe title of the paper, main findings, experimental approach. that's good for starters
this will seem like a huge drag, much more tempting to just apply that bias label and dismiss the view
with one word we get rid of it and we avoid all this work. plus we're always right. if somebody
disagrees with us, they're just biased, done. but by doing this, over time i promise you, you will
learn so much that in six months you'll look back, you'll be stunned how far you've come. what are
your thoughts on all this? do you agree, disagree or did you think the whole thing was biased maybe?
let me know your thoughts below, take care, see you next time, bye