In many areas of medicine, the randomized controlled trial is considered the gold standard for evidence. ![]() 1) It's not practical to run randomized trials for most big nutrition questions To get a sense for how difficult it is to study nutrition, I spoke to eight health researchers over the past several months. It's also part of why researchers can't seem to agree on whether tomatoes cause or protect against cancer, or whether alcohol is good for you or not, and so on, and why journalists so badly muck up reporting on food and health. The messiness of this field is a big reason why nutrition advice can be confusing. It's filled with contradictory studies that are each rife with flaws and limitations. Nutrition science has to be a lot more imprecise. It involves looking holistically at diets and other lifestyle behaviors, trying to tease out the risk factors that lead to illness. And fixing them isn't just a question of adding an occasional orange to someone's diet. ![]() They don't appear overnight they develop over a lifetime. ![]() Unlike scurvy, these illnesses are much harder to get a handle on. People are consuming too many calories and too much low-quality food, bringing on chronic diseases like cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Today, our greatest health problems relate to overeating. In developed countries, these scourges are no longer an issue for most people. By the 20th century, medicine had mostly fixed scurvy and goiter and other diseases of deficiency. Unfortunately, studying nutrition is no longer that simple. Doctors could develop hypotheses and run experiments until they figured out what was missing in people's foods. Many of troubling diseases of the day, such as scurvy, pellagra, anemia, and goiter, were due to some sort of deficiency in the diet. This sort of nutritional puzzle solving was common in the pre-industrial era. The men who ate oranges and lemons eventually recovered - a striking result that pointed to vitamin C deficiency as the culprit. The sailors were divided into six groups, each given a different treatment. So Lind took 12 scurvy patients and ran the first modern clinical trial. In 1747, a Scottish doctor named James Lind wanted to figure out why so many sailors got scurvy, a disease that leaves sufferers exhausted and anemic, with bloody gums and missing teeth. She serves on public health advisory and journal editorial boards and consults with WHO, International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), among other international organizations.There was a time, in the distant past, when studying nutrition was a relatively simple science. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she worked for over ten years with UN agencies and non-governmental organizations on nutrition and food security programming and policy. Iannotti received her doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Master of Arts degree in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. She is founder and director of the E3 Nutrition Lab, working to identifyĮvolutionarily appropriate nutrition solutions globally. Iannotti leads projects in Haiti, Ecuador, and East Africa where she collaborates with local partners to test innovative, transdisciplinary approaches using animal source foods and small livestock and fisheries development. ![]() She applies epidemiological methods to investigate interventions aimed at reducing stunted growth and development. Lora Iannotti has expertise in maternal and young child nutrition and nutrient deficiencies (zinc, iron, vitamin A, B12, choline, and fatty acids) related to poverty and infectious diseases. Teaching Professors, Senior Lecturers & Scholars.
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