Carnivore Doctors Call Nutrition Studies “Garbage” (Sometimes)
Dr. Matthew Nagra, ND
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#carnivore #nutrition #keto
Full Transcript
Questioning Real-World Relevance of Studies 0:00
Well, if you're not actually treating patients, how the hell do you know? You don't know. It's all theoretical. You know, oh, but I have a study. Fuck your study, I don' give a shit. Because I actually see real people in real life. For one, this idea that studies are not real-life is just bizarre. There are indeed real People in these studies and often dozens to hundreds to Hundreds of thousands depending on the study design, which is far more than you would typically see in your clinical practice.
It's also interesting that many carnivore diet proponents will just toss out the science when it doesn't suit their narrative, claiming that they don't care about the studies or that the study are biased, but then they're also often pretty quick to cite research when they do think it suits their bias. There are studies showing that in human athletes, we have carb-fueled athletes and keto athletes.
Selective Use and Dismissal of Research 0:44
The ketogenic athletes the fat- fuelled athletes replenish their muscle and liver glycogen faster So it really makes you wonder, does he truly believe that nutrition research is just garbage and he's only citing research here to try to impress his followers, or does actually think that nutritional research can be valuable and just uses this excuse that studies are garbage as a means to dismiss research without actually critically evaluating it? Which does take a lot more time and expertise. And this isn't the only example, I saw similar things in my debate with him.
I think all studies have inherent flaws. The point is that there's mixed literature and none of these studies are really all that great because a lot of them have all these confounding factors. And to be clear, he's the one that cited the study we were discussing. I was just about to push back on some of the claims that he made about the studies, and I asked him if he thought it was a good study, assuming that did because he cited it in the first place. But you saw his response. So why even cite it if you're just going to throw it out once I start digging into the details?
Claims About Reading Nutrition Studies 1:44
And he is not the only person that seems to flip-flop between whether studies are even worth discussing or not. What the average person who's not a nutritionist, who is not nerd like you and me, yeah, whose reading 10 or 20 nutrition studies a day. So on the one hand, he says that he reads 10 to 20 Nutrition Studies a Day, which is quite the commitment. But then he later says this. It's the laughing stock of scientific research because it's just so uncontrollable. And when you find a tiny benefit or tiny detriment, then you write up a paper and then that becomes, oh, look, there's 21 trials that all show the same thing.
yeah okay i can see you're right that's what the modern nutrition research shows i could not imagine dedicating the time needed to read 10 to 20 studies front to back every day while thinking that the field as a whole is garbage in fairness he does mention that there are certain studies he thinks are of
Critique of Anti-Science Reasoning 2:34
quality but 10-20 a day just seems quite unlikely based on his commentary So this is another example of, yes, I read lots of studies, but also nutrition studies are trash. But the response from Dr. Gill of Nutrition Made Simple, great YouTube channel by the way, is just amazing. You don't think that if the problem was low quality, we would see a scatter. And when we see trials comparing eggs to oats, and we have at least three or four or five of these that I've seen, all funded by the egg board, then we don' see blood pressure go up on oats in one of the trials, you don''t think it's strange to hold the belief that oats will definitely raise our blood pressures, definitely, even though we do not have a single trial that will support that.
When it's put that way, these comments from the carnivores just sound incredibly anti-science. But I want to hear from you. Do you actually think that they believe that nutrition science is just garbage and they only cite research to maybe try to sound impressive to their followers? Or do they actually believe science's important and just use that as a cheap cop-out to dismiss research they don't like? or perhaps something else I'm not thinking of? Let me know in the comments below.
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