I've written several posts critical of the companies allowed to become partners with/sponsors of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND or formerly the American Dietetics Association or ADA). Companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Hershey, etc seem like odd choices to give positive press messages or lead moderation campaigns using RD credentials to sell product, as just a couple examples. Especially when the scientific evidence supporting the link between some of their products and negative health Read more [...]

Last month I posted about @ScholarlyBot, a bot I wrote that checks for full texts on Google Scholar through twitter. If you use Mendeley, thanks to their great example client, I was able to add the ability to push papers from links to your Mendeley library. This can make for a nice to-read list in Mendeley, or enable you add things if you don't have Mendeley installed. To do so, first you must authorize @ScholarlyBot to access your library. Follow these steps (you only need to do this once): Follow Read more [...]

I am trying to improve my coding skills, so I pieced together a python script that sarcastically replied to people to wrote "Dr Oz" and "great" in a tweet. That account was quickly suspended, so I made something a little more useful- one that checks for full texts of research papers indexed by Google Scholar using twitter as the interaction medium, through the account @ScholarlyBot. It does 2 3 4 5 things: You can @ it a Google Scholar query and it will check if the first result has an Read more [...]

Several weeks ago I came across a troubling article in Forbes titled "Is the American Dietetic Association Attempting to Limit Market Competition in Nutrition Counseling?" by Michael Ellsberg. It intends to put forth a case against legislation that restricts nutrition assessment and counseling (medical nutrition provisions) to practitioners licensed by the American Dietetic Association/Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (ADA/AND) (e.g. RDs) and legislation trying to restrict the term "nutritionist," Read more [...]

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: Number Read more [...]

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: Evidence that paternal diet can influence offspring Read more [...]

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. Read more [...]

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! Read more [...]

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 Read more [...]

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, Read more [...]