Last fall I was invited to do a podcast from Travis Saunders and (now Dr.) Peter Janiszewski who blog at Obesity Panacea.  We touched briefly on clinical assessment capacities (stemming from more complex research assessments), and corporate food sponsorships.  We also talked about social media but Travis edited out those parts which may end up in a different podcast.

Being the first time I have done something like this, I was pretty nervous and had some troubles stumbling through my thoughts, and want to add some more here in writing (things I wish I would have said).  Ironically, this is one big reason why I blog; I am sometimes a poor oral communicator and I like writing to organize my thoughts.  But, the podcast is worth listening to at least for Travis and Peter’s perspectives.  As I stated in the podcast I enjoy blogging as an outlet, but to add to this, this outlet is mainly against news by press release in major media reporting which generally lacks context and methodology of the study being covered.  I also want to highlight interesting research that I think should be news (though of course everyones’ interests are slightly different and not everything can be reported).  Nutrition tends to be a messy science and many fallacious dogmas have been established in the popular culture, and this is apparent when reading deep into almost any area of nutrition/health research.  I am frustrated that so few people bring these issues to light, and this is a main reason why I love the potential of blogs.  The double edged sword is that anyone can blog, so finding objective sources is not always easy.  My hope, along with Peter and Travis with their other project Science of Blogging, is that more scientists will find their way to blogging and critically discuss issues in their fields in public.  I will wait to further expand on social media topics for a later time.

One correction: Around minute 11 when we talked about the ADA and food company sponsorships, I said “an additional 41 dollars per year…” I meant an additional 41 dollars per ADA member per year is all it would take to make up the monetary contributions from food company sponsorships.  I also noticed that I appeared to backtrack a little on my confidence on this issue, which I didn’t mean to do.

Here is the link to Travis’ post, and the podcast here:

Further Reading

As I briefly summarized my positions on some things, here are links to articles that were brought up:

• Does nutrition need a new research paradigm?
• The complex lipidome quantified
• Articles on the ADA and corporate sponsorships (including recent Hershey partnership)
• How strong is the HDL-cardiovascular disease hypothesis? In the podcast, I should have noted that from what I have read, LDL also seems to be a weak predictor per se (though I am no expert here).
• Lipoprotein particle size was brought up in the podcast, this was discovered by Dr. Ronald Krauss and colleagues in the late ’80s.  I have written about how eggs favorably modulate particle size here, and highlighted one of Krauss’ recent meta-analyses that suggests saturated fat is not associated with CHD/CVD here.