Just a quick note, I’ve been playing around with some ways to track publication counts over a number of different research areas within nutritional science to attempt to quantify trends. What I have so far is posted here: http://nutsci.org/nutrition-research-trends/

It uses NCBI E-Utilities, javascript, and Google Spreadsheets to automate tracking of paper count in the pubmed database for a number of search terms. Right now I have embedded on the page 4 spreadsheets, which show the following:

1. Number of papers so far in 2012 for 50 random terms compared to 2011 on the same day (uses the current date). With this we can see the change in % difference between the two years each day (it refreshes daily).
2. This one is a publicly editable spreadsheet that is the same setup as (1) but anyone can enter their own search terms.
3. The same idea as (2) but searchable by author.
4. The last uses the same 50 random terms as (1) and calculates the slope and R^2 values of the linear regression of the paper counts over 6 years (2005-2011).

This is very much in the early stages, but hopefully it will become more useful in the future. Let me know if you have any requests/ideas in the comments here or on that page.

Like 2010 and 2009, here is my annual list of favorite personal posts, blogs, and twitter people. I hope it can help others discover new sources of information.

This year I changed the blog domain to nutsci.org and hope to continue highlighting interesting research as I have time.

Favorite Post Topics

I didn’t write as many posts this year, choosing to transition to more in depth posts instead of on single studies. Here are my favorites:

Continue reading →

Last year around this time I put up a survey to learn more about reader demographics to this blog and posted some of the results here. It proved interesting so I’ve decided to do it again this year using the same questions to see if there are any differences.

Here is the link to the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NWCBW8Y

If you have a few minutes of time I would greatly appreciate any feedback you can give- none of the questions have required answers so you can answer 1 or all of them. There are 10 questions. I’ll leave it run for 1 month and put up some of the (anonymous) results.

Thank you!

Yesterday and today I re-posted articles I wrote last year on Thanksgiving and overall holiday period weight gain, but for some reason they didn’t propagate through the RSS feed. Here is a link to both:

Thanksgiving and weight gain: trivial or not, and riskier for the overweight?

Holidays & weight gain: what the science suggests

Thanks for reading, and happy Thanksgiving!

After nearly 2 years of blogging and nearly 2 years of planning the blog’s name change, I finally got to it this weekend. Nutritional Blogma (recomp.com/blogma) is now nutsci.org.  If you have a moment, please click through and let me know if anything doesn’t work properly.

Why?

Short and easier to remember, more relevant to my broad interests in nutritional science.

If you for chance link to me in a blogroll please update at your convenience, though I will be leaving the redirect up from the old domain for a long time so existing links to individual articles will automatically redirect to their new page.  Thanks!

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.

Continue reading →

About a month ago I put up a link to a short, 10 question survey.  I let it run for a month and received 22 responses.  Thanks to everyone who filled it out- I honestly did not expect that many.

While this data may not be representative of all readership, there were some interesting results which I think are important enough to report and maybe encourage other bloggers to do similar surveys.

Continue reading →

2010 is over, so here is my annual list of favorite research that has been published over the year.

Last year’s list was large as I was able to drag/drop references from Mendeley where I save papers, but for whatever reason it is not letting me do that this year.  So this time I had to link to things I blogged about or do it all manually (which might take until 2012!).

My favorite post topics this year:

As always, I am overwhelmed by so many things to read and write about, but here are some of the things I was most interested in:

• Holidays & weight gain: what the science suggests.  I went through all of the holiday research that I could find and described and summarized them.
• The Incredible Egg.  Probably the post I am most proud of to this point (but I will rewrite and update it a bit this year); a summary of the majority of research on eggs.  The research does not suggest they are harmful because of the large amounts of cholesterol, and if anything are probably beneficial on cardiovascular health.  I went through more than 20 papers and think it is one of the best articles on the web on eggs (I was motivated to write it because of so much misinformation).
• The caffeine content in coffee can vary significantly, even with the same brand.  Buyer beware!
• Coffee has soluble fiber, and this fiber influences neuroimmunity.
• Nitrate.  This year brought about more research on nitrate and exercise performance and an important animal study showing it ameliorates metabolic syndrome.  See them here.
• I wrote a few posts about fruit, polyphenols, and antioxidants in 2010.  More this year.
• Evidence for paternally influenced epigenetic fetal programming?  Not very convincing, but will be interesting to see what follows up.
• Organic labeling seems to influence food and exercise choices.  Environmental factors influence our food intake.
• I critized the ADA for partnering with Hershey, with a bit of evidence-based reasoning.  See these posts.
• The lipidome can be measured.
• An increasing number of researchers seem to be promoting the focus on foods instead of nutrients, which makes sense as research on individual nutrients is so difficult to do with so many variables and debate rages especially on what macronutrients are idea.
• A mechanism for muscle memory: myonuclei
• Something(s) about ageing per se influence physiological responses to certain nutrients or milieu
• Does nutrition need a new research paradigm?  New ‘omics’ technologies are adding to nutritional insight.  More this year on this topic.
• I wrote several organic v. conventional posts this year.  We can’t label organic farming as blanketly superior (or maybe rarely is it ever) than conventional farming.  The most effective techniques should be merged and the battle between the 2 should be dropped.
• A preference for sugar can be formed in animals even if they can’t taste it.
• I had over half a million SNPs tested by 23andme this year and explored a few of my health related traits here.
• UVB may have important immunoregulatory effects independent of stimulating vitamin D production.
• For all of 2010′s posts, click here.

This year i’ll also add some of my favorite bloggers and people on twitter, in no particular order.

Favorite Bloggers of 2010:

• Travis and Peter at Obesity Panacea continue to set a great example of how scientists can effectively translate research findings to the public.  They also started Science of Blogging which is already becoming a great resource for why blogging can be great.
• Yoni at Weighty Matters sees right through food companies and holds nothing back against food absurdities.
• James at Weightology clearly has read a ton of research on weight and organizes his thoughts very clearly.  I especially like how he recognizes logical fallacies and points out poor reasoning by what seems like most people in the fitness/weight loss industry.
• CarbSanity- my new favorite (anonymous) blogger, very intelligently tackles low carb science.  She is one of the few taking on the abuse of science by most low-carb promoters, including Gary Taubes.
• Larry Parnell’s blog Variable Genome is a constant inspiration for me to learn more about nutrigenomics.
• Keith Grimaldi’s Eurogene blog is great for history and context of nutrition and genetics, and keeping up with changing regulations and perspectives in nutrigenetics.
• Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, invaluable for the political happenings related to food around the globe.
• SweatScience by Alex Hutchinson, who keeps up with important fitness/nutrition research.
• Biofortified, a group blog started by Karl Haro von Mogel and Anastasia Bodnar.  A great agriculture resource!
• Tidbits on Health by David Despain- great science journalism on interesting topics.

Favorite Twitter-ers of 2010:

@TravisSaunders, @sweatscience, @geneticmaize, @YoniFreedhoff, @DrSharma, @daviddespain, @pvanbaarlen, @larry_parnell, @marionnestle, @nutrigenomics, @eurogene, @PMJaniszewski, @stevemagness, @k_hettinga, @Weightology

I can’t thank all of these people (and those who I inevitably forgot to list) enough for using social media and sharing all the important information that they do!

Greetings,

I started this blog a little over a year ago with no expectations or real direction.  It was meant first and foremost as a personal journey to organize my thoughts as I dig deep into various areas of nutrition research, and second as an outlet against what is a frustrating system of mainstream media reporting on how research contributes to our understanding of nutritional topics.

71 posts later, I see consistent traffic to the blog, but still don’t get many comments.  I have a decent sense what articles are most read, where visitors come from, and so on.  I’m still experimenting and developing writing styles, and I don’t pretend to be exceptional at writing.  I do it because I find the subject matter extremely interesting and know that some others out there probably do as well.  I never intended to cater to lay readers or dramatically alter my writing in response to readership.  But without many comments, I am left wondering who are the people regularly coming back, and why do they?  And, are there reasons why I am getting little response to posts?  Is it that jumping around on topics so much may not be an ideal way to attract regular readers who tend to be more focused on select areas of research?  Should I write better summaries of each post for those who aren’t as interested in the details?

So, if I could ask for a minute of your time to fill out this very short survey to give me a better sense of who you are, and/or let me know in the comments below what you think of the blog or anything in specific, I would greatly appreciate the feedback.  None of the questions have required answers so you can answer 1 or all of them.  The survey link is here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WXZ6Z3C

I have a couple more posts lined up before the new year: 1 summarizing all of the studies on holidays and weight gain, and my annual “favorite studies of the year” post.  As always, thanks for stopping by my little corner of the internet.

-Colby

As 2009 comes to an end, it is time to reflect on some of this year’s scientific advancements.

Please comment here, by email, or twitter on how I am doing with the blog so far.  Though I only started it a few months ago in September, I hope it has been a benefit to at least a few people.  I am very detail oriented, so posts will roll out slowly, and with over 40 topics already in draft, 2010 will be a busy year!

Happy new year!

Here are short comments on some of my favorite studies of this year.

Continue reading →