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News Flash: Don't Chew Asbestos!

March 1, 2008

There are two main differences between "practical" and "impractical" science: (1) Practical science gets more publicity because it's easier to explain in 2 minutes, and (2) Practical science is only useful if people use it and listen to it, while impractical science just has to promise to be useful somewhere down the road. You can make a list of which fields are practical and which are not, but allow me to start you off.

Nutrition and Food Science is a prime example of practical science. It's easy to explain, it makes good fodder for early-morning news shows, and it applies to everyone in the world because everyone in the world eats something at least once in their lives. Studying food is a wonderful thing to do.

There seems to be one minor snag in the food science field, a snag which was totally unexpected: sometimes an entire field can get stuck in a creative rut.

For example, take a top article posted on the NIH website. It describes the result of a decade's worth of work, interviewing thousands of people and studying their health and food intake. They found that there were certain foods that contributed to a vague, newly-named state called "metabolic syndrome." Ever heard of it? Probably not, because it's just a phrase describing a mixture of problems, like hypertension, diabetes, and other risk factors for stroke and heart attack. Guess what they found? Fast foods and foods high in fat and cholesterol, were positively correlated with metabollic syndrome, whereas fruits, breads, and nuts were not correlated.

Stop the presses! This is going to be HUGE! (And so are we!)

The problem with nutrition scientists is that once they explained to us fifty years ago that good foods made us healthy and bad foods made us die, they really didn't have much else to say. They could get into the physical relationship we have with food, but then they'd have to become biochemists and doctors, and there's no way that they could afford the re-training on their salaries. So the only thing that they have to do is to repeatedly find new ways of describing the effects of cholesterol on our hardened arteries. It has to be hard on them.

But here's the caveat: as described above, the people of the United States generally haven't listened to nutritionists, and so obesity, diabetes, stroke and heart disease are prevalent and on the rise. The second rule of practicality has been broken. Herein lies the true mission of a food scientist: not to find something new, but to find the same thing as everyone else, only LOUDER.

I admit that I could be wrong about this. Perhaps there are some venues to nutrition that have yet to be explored. I haven't been reading the weekly diet advice that I see in supermarket magazines, so I don't know if they're saying anything staggering. And I'll grant that the whole "bean sprouts are bad" thing threw me for a loop, as did the whole "the antioxidants in wine may overcome the fact that it is also a long-term liver toxin" news. It's too bad there aren't any studies on second-hand eating, because that could break the field wide open. (Second hand eating is when you have to repeatedly ride in a car that smells thickly of McDonalds' french fries).

I therefore salute and simultaneously pity the brave men and women of nutrition science, who have so little left to contribute but so much that needs to be repeated. Unlike other fields, there's no hope of going back and finding something that "makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about ______". That's not how science was meant to be.