Stub: Nutrition

by Jan Malakhovski, version 0.0.0, created , published

Mainstream nutrition claims that diets high in protein and red meat cause a bunch of metabolic issues, including kidney issues, type-2 diabetes, arteriosclerosis, and cancer. This article discusses the evidence for these claims and estimates probabilities of those claims being true by applying simple logic and Bayesian reasoning to relevant studies. The resulting analysis shows that, most likely, most of those claims are false. The only exception is the claim that smoked foods increase cancer risk, which is likely true. Which, when other relevant evidence is taken into account, points to a more general hypothesis of "ingesting products of combustion of organic matter, as part of smoked and/or deep fried foods, cigarette smoke, or anything else, increases cancer risks".

This article is going to use the contents of “Bayesian Reasoning” and “Bayesian Studies” notes extensively. If you want to understand the calculations here, you’ll probably want to work through those articles first. On the other hand, if you only care about the general shape of the arguments here, you can instead ignore all probability computations presented in this article and only refer to those two articles for general concepts, which will be linked in relevant places here, on-demand basis. Though, if you have no idea what any of “prior probability”, “sensitivity and specificity of a test”, “regression to the mean”, “p-value”, and “confidence interval” are, or why Carl Sagan’s principle of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is a trivial corollary of Bayes’ theorem, you should probably at least skim those two articles first.

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