re: What happened to this board?

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It seems like if we avoid nutrition talk this board can have good discussion. Nutrition threads always devolve into pissing matches

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This one is not just on this board, the internet (and before internet - magazines) are loaded with conflicting thoughts that have swung pretty violently in the past half century. Imagine if there were a handful of studies out in the world that weakly suggest running causes throat cancer due to extended periods of heavy breathing?

At the root of it, nutrition is harder to study than most of the general public realizes. Most long-term lifestyle data comes from surveys riddled with self-reporting biases. This is made even worse by inflating headlines and making broad asertations based on data that was always (and continues to be) weak.

Some subsets of nutrition are a bit easier to study, such as short term weight loss, because you CAN have people volunteer to stay on a site under complete observiation or trust that people can keep good records for short periods of time. But even these studies have ethical limitations, you can't put people on diets that are outside the norm in these types of studies.