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Diet Research Is Deeply Flawed. Here’s What You Should Know to Eat Healthy.
Elemental asks nutrition expert Dr. David Ludwig why there’s so much confusion around what’s good for you and what’s not
It seems like every other week a new study comes out questioning long-held wisdom about food and nutrition. First fat was vilified; now it’s considered a part of a healthy diet. Eggs used to be off-limits for people with heart problems due to the high amount of cholesterol, but that’s no longer the case.
Dr. David Ludwig is a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of the number one New York Times bestseller Always Hungry?, a book that explores the dietary drivers of hunger, obesity, and metabolic disease. In a new “Viewpoint” paper published in August in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Ludwig and his co-authors explain the problems with current approaches to dietary research and why this leads to so much nutrition confusion.
Here, Elemental asks Ludwig to elaborate on some of these problematic approaches and to share advice for people who feel conflicted about what and how to eat.
