Cognitive Bias and Pop Nutrition

Very science, much diagram.

Clay Jones muses regarding Alan Levinovitz's "The Gluten Lie"

"As humans, we are terrible at evaluating causal relationships. We are prey to a variety of placebo and nocebo affects. Our memories are highly unreliable. Confirmation bias and the avoidance of cognitive dissonance are powerful forces in all of our lives. And once a self-diagnosis is made, we are amazingly resistant to questioning it, likely because of the societal stigma against a psychological origin for symptoms."

I have not read the full book, but may yet. To think clearly about any difficult topic, one must put aside the voice in one's head that says "It's like this!" and go to the data. Nutrition is a difficult subject to study, because high-quality data is incredibly difficult to obtain. Enter various gurus, cranks, quacks and con artists who know the one true cause of your problems. Multiple double-blind placebo-controlled studies are your only protection.

Unfortunately science is hard, but we don't really have a choice; it is the only technique which can save us from mysticism and the dark ages of human thought.