The problem is not the scientific studies themselves, but their correct and serious interpretation.
Nowadays many people are already disgusted when they hear "a new scientific study has shown..." or "I have a scientific study to back it up..." and often immediately add sarcastically that nowadays you can find a scientific study for everything and for every (extreme and contradictory) claim in the field of nutrition, training or health. Therefore, some people prefer not to believe anything at all or even to dismiss scientific studies altogether. But this situation is not due to the scientific studies themselves, but first of all to the MEDIA, then to the SCAMMERS and fraudsters who abuse them, and thirdly to the fact that there are NO scientific studies as scientific studies.
Media
The huge problem is that in print and electronic media, of course, it's primarily about viewership and readership for advertisers. That's why every 14 days we can see massive tabloid headlines like "scientists have discovered a revolutionary diet, ...foods that will make you lose weight, etc." Unfortunately, it is not at all uncommon for these tabloid headlines and articles to be based on a given journalist reading the abstract of a study and taking a sentence (or one part of a sentence!) out of the context of the entire scientific study. Thus, in recent years we have repeatedly seen tabloid scaremongering, where suddenly some ingredient in the diet was a "killer and poison", and unfortunately on a global scale.
Charlatans And Scammers
They, in turn, are very fond of referring to scientific studies to give weight to their pseudo-scientific or extreme claims and to increase the impression of their expertise, and they deliberately "bend" the results to support their claims. This is because they are betting that 99% of people the people reading their claims will not go and read 40 pages of a study for a few hours to verify these claims. So it is not uncommon that the attached study many times does not actually support the claim, is not related to the claim and the topic at all, or even shows the opposite 🙂 Beware also of the so-called "cherry picking", when the claim is indeed in the study in a sentence, but at the same time in the next X paragraphs the context and limitations of these results are explained, which of course the charlatans do not mention anymore, because it does not "fit their agenda".
Not all scientific studies are of the same quality
In short, there is a big difference in the quality of the studies and the strength of the results, if a scientific study is done on animals and not on humans, if it is done on a group of 10 people or 1000 subjects, if it is done on healthy people and athletes or on sick patients, it depends of course on the methodology, the limitations of the study, the financial conflict of interest (who pays for the study), etc. The studies are of varying quality and the most prestigious scientific journals such as The Lancet, Nature only publish around 3% of the best quality scientific studies submitted. 97% are therefore rejected! In other words, just because a study is published (e.g. in a less prestigious journal) does not mean that the result is true.
The closest thing to what is actually true are meta-analyses and systematic reviews that take all existing studies from around the world done on a given topic (dozens or hundreds of studies) and analytically evaluate them - this scientific evidence then actually has the most power.
Whether one likes it or not, scientific studies are an essential part of evidence-based medicine and nutrition. However, we understand very well that referring the public and athletes to PubMed when asked about a topic in nutrition is not the best solution. Not everyone understands scientific research methodology and can properly search, read and interpret studies. After all, even in medical school there is a separate course on working with literature, where medics are just learning how to work with scientific studies.
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