"Evidence-Based Nutrition"
Randomized controlled trials are considered the gold standard of scientific evidence.
Half get the active treatment, half get a sugar pill---
works great for evaluating new drugs, but a concern is that evidence-based medicine
has made a leap from considering randomized controlled trials
to be a high standard to being the only standard.
Consider this review of dietary interventions for multiple sclerosis
by the esteemed Cochrane Collaboration.
They basically concluded that there's not much diet can do.
But what about Dr. Swank's success in treating MS with a low saturated fat diet,
the most effective treatment ever reported,
published in some of the world's most prestigious journals?
Of course, they knew about his work, but the study didn't fit the inclusion
criteria considered for the review, because it was not a controlled trial.
Demanding randomized trials makes sense for drugs.
Look, they're expensive; they're risky,
killing off more than a 100,000 Americans every year.
But a healthy diet has no downsides, just good side effects, so we shouldn't
have to wait on randomized controlled trials to start saving peoples lives.
Consider smoking. It took more than 7,000 studies and the deaths
of countless habitual smokers before a consensus was reached
in the medical community regarding the causal link between smoking and
lung cancer, and still without a single randomized controlled trial.
One has to wonder how many people are currently suffering needlessly
while they wait for a randomized controlled trial
to confirm the results found by other kinds of strong studies?
In fact, a famous statistician, Ronald Fisher, railed against what he called propaganda
to convince the public that cigarette smoking was dangerous.
Since they cannot produce evidence from randomized controlled trials,
like a 1,000 kids banned from smoking;
you put another 1,000 kids forced to smoke at least a pack and a half a day.
Now if you did that kind of experiment, then there would be no difficulty.
Maybe instead of smoking causing lung cancer, lung cancer causes smoking.
In its earliest stages lung cancer may cause inflammation,
and so anyone suffering from chronic inflammation
is going to want to smoke a cigarette to make themselves feel better
and it's kind of comfort that might be a real solace
to anyone in the 15 years of approaching lung cancer.
And to take the poor chap's cigarettes away from him
will be rather like taking a white stick from a blind man.
It would make an already unhappy person a little more unhappy than he need be.
Fisher made invaluable contributions to the field of statistics,
but his analysis of lung cancer and smoking was flawed
by an unwillingness to examine the entire body of data available.
His smokescreen may have been because he was a paid consultant
to the tobacco industry, but also because he was himself a smoker.
Part of his resistance to seeing the association
may have been rooted in his own fondness for smoking,
which makes me wonder about the some of the foods
many nutrition researchers may be fond of as well.
A famous paper in the British Medical Journal lampooned this insistence
on randomized controlled trials as the only legitimate evidence.
"Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge:
a systematic review of randomized controlled trials."
Ah, they didn't find any.
Sure parachutes appear to reduce the risk of injury after "gravitational challenge."
We can observe that people who fall out of planes without them
do tend die a bit more than those with parachutes,
but their effectiveness has not been proved with randomized controlled trials.
Advocates of evidence-based medicine have criticized the adoption
of interventions evaluated by using only observational data.
We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists
of this evidence-based medicine organized and participated
in a double blind, randomized, placebo- controlled trial of the parachute.
In other words, individuals who insist that all interventions need to be validated
by a randomized controlled trial data need to come down to earth with a bump.