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Introduction
While we’ve never known more about diet and health, there remain many unanswered questions in nutrition science. However, there are often disagreements on how best to answer these questions, particularly in relation to informing practical diet advice that meaningfully improves health.
Prof. Norman Temple is one academic who has written on a number of these issues. One issue he highlights is the large discrepency in the practical value we have attained from cohort studies and RCTs, relative to mechanistic research. Another is the limitations of RCTs for nutrition-specific research questions.
In this episode, Prof. Temple discusses these issues, as well as what strategies can actually improve population diet, and thus health.
Related resources
Discussed articles:
- Nutrition Research and Human Disease: A Critical Appraisal of Mechanistic Research, Cohort Studies, and Randomized Trials
- How reliable are randomised controlled trials for studying the relationship between diet and disease? A narrative review
- A Comparison of Strategies to Improve Population Diets: Government Policy versus Education and Advice
- Research on cancer: Why we need to switch the focus from mechanistic research to epidemiology and randomized trials
Related episodes:
- Nutrition Research and Human Disease
- Why mechanistic studies won’t be able to answer the questions we care about
- How reliable are randomized controlled trials for studying the relationship between diet and disease?
- Possible limitations of randomized controlled trials in nutrition
- Why are findings from RCT often contradicted by the results of cohort studies?
Guest Information
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Norman J. Temple is a professor of nutrition at Athabasca University and has published in the area of nutrition as it relates to health. A number of his reviews and opinion papers discuss aspects of nutrition research, such as the pitfalls of focusing on mechanistic research.
Prof. Temple studied in the UK, receiving a PhD in biochemistry. After his time in reseach in the UK, he went on to work in Puerto Rico and then Canada, where he is currently based. In addition to teaching nutrition courses at the university, he carries out research (both in Canada and South Africa) in the general area of diet and health. Prof. Temple has also published more than a dozen books.
Danny Lennon has a master’s degree (MSc.) in Nutritional Sciences from University College Cork, and he is the founder of Sigma Nutrition.
Danny is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Sports Nutrition Association, the global regulatory body responsible for the standardisation of best practice in the sports nutrition profession.
Introduction to this Episode
While weʼve never known more about diet and health, there remain many unanswered questions in nutrition science. However, there are o en disagreements on how best to answer these questions, particularly in relation to informing practical diet advice that meaningfully improves health.
Prof. Norman Temple is one academic who has written on a number of these issues. One issue he highlights is the large discrepancy in the practical value we have attained from cohort studies and RCTs, relative to mechanistic research. Another is the limitations of RCTs for nutrition-specific research questions.
In this episode, Prof. Temple discusses these issues, as well as what strategies can actually improve population diet, and thus health.
Connection to Previous Episodes
- In episode 428, we discuss food environments and potential interventions for public health improvement
- In episode 363 there was a discussion of public health policy, including the evidence on taxes, nudges and other government actions.
- In episode 403 David Jacobs discussed the concept of “Food Synergy” & a ʻtop-downʼ approach to nutrition research.
- In episode 386, Dr. Deirdre Tobias discussed important aspects of study design, diet collection methods and nutrition epidemiology.
- In episode 378 Danny and Alan discuss some critical aspects to understand about nutritional epidemiology, in order to evaluate diet-disease relationships appropriately.
Nutrition Research and Human Disease
In a 2015 piece in the Journal of Nutrition and Health Sciences, Dr. Norman Temple outlined a view that “most of our information of practical value in the area of nutrition in relation to health and disease has come from cohort studies and RCTs. By contrast, relatively little of it has come from mechanistic research.” (Temple 2015).
The central ideas can be thought of as:
- Early nutrition science looking at single nutrient deficiencies or the role of certain vitamins, could be informed by mechanistic work.
- Additionally, mechanistic work can be useful to learn a er-the-fact, why a certain intervention produces a known outcome.
- However, for actually answering the diet-health questions we most care about in the modern day, not only are cohort studies and RCTs best able to do this, they have a track record of already producing the most important and useful information.