EDWARD ARCHER: An Indictment of Federally-Funded Nutrition Research.

Recently, I was the lead author on a paper demonstrating that about 40 years and many millions of dollars of US nutritional surveillance data were fatally flawed. . . . There is a large body of evidence demonstrating that the systematic misreporting of energy and macronutrient intake renders the results and conclusions of the vast majority of federally funded nutrition studies invalid. . . .

The responsibility for this unfortunate state of affairs rests squarely on the leaders of nutrition research. Rather than training graduate students in the scientific method, and allowing their research to serve the needs of society, the field’s leaders choose to train their mentees to serve only their own professional needs—namely, to obtain grant funding and publish their research. I have experienced these practices myself as I transitioned from student to graduate research assistant to research fellow, and colleagues continue to emphasize that this is how it must be, lest they fail to get funding and ‘feed’ their graduate students and families. But by not training mentees in the basics of science and skepticism, the nutrition field has fostered the use of measures that are so profoundly dissonant with scientific principles that they will never yield a definitive conclusion. As such, we now have multiple generations of nutrition researchers who dominate federal nutrition research and the peer review of that work, but lack the critical thinking skills necessary to critique or conduct sound scientific research.