A great book that teaches you how to understand nutrition research, and what it says about how healthy or helpful to weight loss the foods you eat are.

I picked up this (audio)book a few weeks ago, and while I finished it inside of a week through listening over my workouts and on my commute, I feel like I can't let it pass without a strong recommendation to this subreddit. Because, if you're like me and have been trying for a long time to find out what the science actually says about how (un)healthy certain foods are, but get confused when studies seem to contradict one another, I feel like this book may help with that.

The book is called The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully by Dr. Aaron Carroll, who you may have heard of through his hosting of the Healthcare Triage YouTube channel. Dr. Carroll is a pediatrician, professor of Pediatrics at the University of Indiana, as well as the Director of the Centre for Heath Policy and Research Outcomes. He also regularly writes nutrition columns for the New York Times. If I were to summarize his wide talents with one speciality though, it's that Carroll is excellent at surveying scientific research and communicating what conclusions we can meaningfully draw from them. And, as we're all hear trying to lose weight (or at least improve our diets), I figure I'd like to tell you why I find this book so useful in that goal.

Part of makes the Bad Food Bible so great is that, as the foreword notes, "Carroll doesn't just cite research, he ranks it according to its value." Not all scientific studies are created equal (which you may know if you've ever seen a study with a small sample size), but Carroll goes into a fair bit more detail on how nutrition research can be biased, and which types of research are worth considering in your health choices. For instance, how a cross-sectional study is nowhere near as useful as a randomized controlled trial in determining whether a food causes cancer, or the difference between observational and prospective research.

Using this, the book very effectively knocks down myths surrounding controversial foods, in the form of one per chapter. Among other things, Carroll tackles the idea that things like artificial sweeteners, butter, meat, GMOs and salt are bad for you, or at least, they're no worse for you than any of their substitutes. He does so using the single most accessible and entertaining framing of a statistical research class I've ever heard, and it's all in service to let his readers know what the science actually says. He brings the strongest forms of research available to support his positions, and points out weak research in the positions he opposes.

But the fundamental message of the book is a fairly modest one: that you should not feel bad or even worry too much about what you're eating (even if it is actually bad for you) as long as it's in moderation. You shouldn't be beating yourself up over having dessert here and there, and choosing the tenderloin over the salad when you're out to dinner with your family and friends once a month is a perfectly fine choice. Put simply: Carroll argues that focusing obsessively on what is good or bad for you, and whether you're "allowed" to eat it, may be depriving you of one of the greatest pleasures of life (taste), especially when what's "bad" for you might not actually be that bad. So long as you don't overdo it.

I found this book really helpful in teaching me how to determine which scientific studies I could factor into my health choices, and I'd recommend it (and his YouTube channel) to anyone. I hope you get the same out of it as I did!

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