© STUDIOM1/ISTOCKPHOTO.COMThe media commonly reports on what appear to be shocking contradictions and reversals in studies of diet and health. One day oat bran works for lowering cholesterol, the next day it doesn’t. One day the perils of butter drive up sales of margarines, until the risks of trans fats in margarine swing sales back in the other direction. For decades “low-fat” was the public-health mantra for weight loss, until a series of studies seemed to indicate “low-carb” was at least as effective. In truth, the findings from these studies are rarely as diametrically opposed to one another as the media portrays in a bid to capture the attention of their audience.
The recipe for creating controversy is built into the complexities linking food and nutrition to health and disease. The main ingredients include the target population, the type of diet or food or nutrient of interest, the dose, the outcome, and the duration. The general public wants to know whether “oat bran” is “healthy” to eat. For the nutrition scientist, that practical question is too broad to be answered effectively. If a study on the topic is to be effectively designed, proposed, funded, conducted, and published, it would first go through an almost torturous process of trying to make the question “answerable,” and this would involve narrowing the question to a set of specifics.
Ultimately and ideally, the general question about the healthfulness of oat bran ...
