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michael_b comments on LW's take on nutrition? - Less Wrong
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I produce for you a book written by a relevant expert with ~2.5 times as many references as The China Study (2034 vs 758) who advocates eating an ancestral diet (lean unprocessed meat/fish, fruit, nuts, vegetables/root vegatables) (1). A list of individuals with relevant graduate degrees who more-or-less agree with him can be found in this list of speakers at a paleo conference he spoke at. His recommendations are at least as similar to the recommendations the Mayo clinic returned for me as Campbell's.
That is, I can make a symmetrical argument for a significantly different diet (2), complete with experts and evidence and stuff.
So, to address your questions directly: you should believe that nutrition is a young and complex field, and therefore shouldn't have everything all figured out; my take is that you may do well to replace grains with root vegetables, since that's something everyone agrees is good (plus they're really tasty!); this isn't good enough to inform your dietary choices because I just used a symmetrical argument for a diet that has nonnegligible discrepancies with the diet Campbell recommends; and I don't know how to dig out a signal that experts, to my knowledge, haven't managed to dig out without becoming an expert.
(FWIW, I spent about 5 years as a vegetarian, followed by 1.5 years doing the paleo thing, and now subsist entirely off DIY soylent, which combines the virtues of deriving all its protein from animal sources and being processed.)
(1) Interestingly, Campbell's and Lindeberg's diets can be eaten simultaneously, and this intersection is 100% in-line with what the Mayo clinic recommended me. The difference is that Campbell allows grains and beans, and Lindeberg allows (unprocessed) lean meats, fish, and eggs.
(2) Again, there's substantial overlap, but also substantial disagreement: Lindeberg, for instance, observe the Inuit derive something like 98% of their calories from animal sources and are virtually untouched by Western disease, and concludes that very high consumption of (unprocessed) animals is perfectly fine, whereas Campbell claims that humans should eat minimal amounts of animal.
I'm specifically trying to avoid weighing the actual science or studies myself, because I don't think nutrition is linear enough for me to just dive in and read contradictory studies and start making informed decisions about my diet. So, all I'm really electing to do here is try to valuate experts. In that vein...
According to Wikipedia the author of that book, Staffan Lindeberg, is "M.D., Ph.D., (born 1950) is Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the Department of Medicine, University of Lund, Sweden. He is a practicing GP at St Lars Primary Health Care Center, Lund, Sweden."
I agree he's a health expert. I even agree he's more qualified to judge nutrition science than me. But shouldn't a nutrition scientist like Campbell be even more qualified to evaluate nutrition literature than a professor of Family Medicine?
He may be right, and Campbell completely wrong but I don't see a good way to figure this out for myself unless, say, someone can make an extremely good case that Campbell is either a rogue in nutrition science, or that nutrition science shouldn't be trusted. Getting to your next point...
Why wouldn't nutrition scientists studying nutrition come to a similar conclusion about how young, murky, and complicated nutrition is? Shouldn't they on average know this better than anyone and only make very careful and strongly supported recommendations?
If you can't trust nutrition scientists to judge the literature properly, why should you trust scientists outside of the field or layman attempting to dive into the field would be better?
They have very strong incentives (ie earning money and building a career and having patients) to pretend to be certain. People don't want to pay for honest but vague guesses.
You shouldn't really trust scientists outside the field to talk about the entire field of nutrition but insofar as experts in older and more reliable fields like chemistry or biology disagree with specific nutritional claims you should probably agree with the actual scientists.
I would expect consensus (or the lack thereof) is an important signaler for exposing this kind of bias?
Maybe? It's a lot safer to be certain if you're saying the same thing as the consensus. Then at worst you can say you had the same opinion as a lot of other providers.
Lindeberg is a nutrition researcher (conducts studies, co-authors papers) coming from a medical background, which makes him just as much an expert as a nutrition researcher coming from a biochemistry background.
We can measure how much a field has progressed by its predictive power, and nutrition is already making concrete predictions with high confidence. Not a lot, not with the confidence of, say, Newtonian mechanics but, given how very much literature there is and how very complicated things are, the level of consensus across researchers who are coming at the problem from disparate-but-legitimate approaches (e.g. biochemical, evolutionary) is sufficiently impressive that I do trust them to judge the literature properly. Humans are biased, so it's unsurprising that we don't yet have a consensus as broad as, say, existence of the golgi apparatus, but the world looks exactly as we'd expect it if nutrition scientists were doing good work in a complicated field.
To summarize: Lindeberg, like Campbell, is an experienced nutrition researcher with impressive and relevant credentials. Nutrition is a young and complex field, so there's no broad consensus about everything—although there is broad consensus about some things—but nutrition scientists are doing a decent enough job of figuring things out that I trust them to judge the literature properly.
Am I asking for too much by insisting on a nutrition researcher from a biochemistry background to refute Campbell? Or are you saying they can both be right within the framework of their fields?
I am moved enough by your insight and your persistence to give Lindeberg's book a read. :)