THis news is all over my social news feeds this morning. Scientific research shows that fad diets are clearly deadly. Specifically, one study found that calorie restriction, also known as intermittent fasting, was associated with a 91% risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

However, scientific studies say no such thing. Not only should you not worry about this study, you should not waste your brain glucose thinking about it. It pained me to even include the 91% number, which you probably remember, because I don’t think this result should be remembered.

The study, a type of nutritional research, is notoriously fragile and is currently only being published as a press release. With so many news articles about this study, it’s not clear whether reporters actually saw the data that will be presented at an upcoming research conference held by the American Heart Association.

So how can I, as a science journalist, confidently dismiss this study? It is based on observational research, and one of the lessons from over 20 years of health and medical reporting is that observations This means you should be very skeptical of research, especially when it comes to nutrition.

In this case, the researchers used a very useful research tool as a starting point: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), an annual survey of 5,000 people on diet and eating habits. These data were linked by the researchers to another mortality database. Both surveillance and death databases are maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Such databases allow researchers to quickly see whether dietary choices are associated with health problems. This is great because it helps scientists set the direction for more rigorous research that can take years. However, the answers obtained are not always reliable.

Part of the problem, the obvious part, is that people who answer surveys aren’t always completely honest. More than that, especially when it comes to food, we often misremember what and how much we ate. For example, we may think we’ve followed our diet, but completely forget when we failed.

But the bigger problem is that people who choose to go on a diet, or stay on a diet, may be fundamentally different from those who don’t in ways we can’t measure. Perhaps people go on time-restricted diets because they are concerned about their health. Perhaps the bodies of people who follow such diets work differently than those who cannot fast for such long periods of time. Perhaps, for some reason, people who were on a diet were different from those who were simply not by chance.

Researchers are trying to counter these possibilities by “controlling” for known risk factors, such as body weight, biological sex, gender, and age. The problem, however, is that researchers can only control factors that they can identify.

Let’s look at an example where these phenomena are involved. It’s a decades-old story about whether red wine protects against heart attacks. Initially, researchers claimed a “French paradox” – they predicted that if Parisians drank red wine, they would eat more croissants, foie gras, boeuf bourguignon, raclette, and mussel frites. It wasn’t supposed to cause a heart attack. At the time, it was believed that high-fat diets increased the risk of heart attack. Heart disease. This eventually gave way to the idea that very moderate drinking (up to one glass of wine a day) had a beneficial effect on heart disease.

Except recently, some researchers have argued that this clear advantage does not exist. It only appeared that way because moderate drinkers were healthier than others in ways that were difficult for researchers to measure.

The only way to know for sure is to take a large group of people and randomly assign them to, say, drink one glass of red wine a day or become abstainers. Then you’ll see that the two groups of people are probably the same, and if they follow your instructions, you’ll see how red wine makes a difference. Ideally, give fake wine (placebo) or real wine so that even participants don’t know what they’re drinking.

This is called a blinded randomized controlled trial, and it often evaporates the “so-and-so” stories scientists tell themselves. For example, there was an amazing story about how the Inuit people ate a lot of fish, so they didn’t get heart disease from a high-fat diet. This has led to many studies, including randomized trials, that appear to show that taking fish oil supplements reduces heart disease. However, higher quality randomized studies did not show this effect until prescriptions containing highly refined fish oils were successful. However, some researchers doubted the study because the placebo the scientists used may have caused the heart attacks. Yes, this is confusing, but that’s the point. When it comes to nutrition, we need to be very careful about all the things we don’t know.

According to a summary of the new study provided to me by the American Heart Association, which hosts the conference where the results will be presented, the researchers do not appear to have asked people whether they were on a time-restricted diet. What they did was look for people who only ate for a short time during the day, based on his two reports to the survey about what he ate.

“While this study is informative, it should be considered exploratory,” said Harlan Krumholz, a leading expert on health policy improvement science at Yale University. “We are still learning about how people can optimize their diets. This study is not so much a scaremonger for people who think dietary restriction is a useful strategy as it is an invitation for further research. It’s a calling.”

My own conclusion is that this study means daily calorie restriction should be studied more, but I knew that. I don’t think this tells us anything else about these diets. It just shows how much we don’t know about biology. Some articles hypothesize that dieting this way may cause further loss of muscle mass. Indeed, that may be the case.

But my other concern is that studies like this, and the press about them, can make people even more skeptical of what medicine knows. People tend to think of science as the process by which scientists conduct research and discover truth. But it’s more accurate to say that each study helps us be a little less wrong and a little more certain of what the truth is. We live in a vast realm of darkness, among which are scattered gems of truth.

This was a great discovery that should tell people working in the field of nutrition to consider this topic more seriously. For others, there’s really nothing to say.