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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #157: The "expertise" that infuses food discussions

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As noted in recent emails, I recently listened to a thought-provoking podcast featuring Peter Attia, MD, interviewing David Allison, a long-time obesity researcher and currently the Dean of Indiana University’s School of Public Health. I highly recommend listening to the entire 140-minute interview.

In the passage below, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, Allison explains why it’s difficult to have thoughtful discussions about food. In short, everyone claims to be an expert on the topic, given their daily consumption patterns. (Allison doesn’t quote, but could have, the ideal rejoinder to declarations delivered by everyman experts: “The plural of anecdote is not data.”)

If you are at a cocktail party in your neighborhood and you say to somebody, “Well, I study diabetes, and here's what I think about the beta cell of the pancreas and how this might work,” unless that person also studies it, they're not going to challenge you. They probably don’t know what the beta cell of the pancreas is. They don't have strong feelings about it; they don't see it every day.

All of us eat every day. . . . Food is culture, it’s family, it’s love, it’s economy, it’s commerce, it’s political beliefs, it’s philosophical belief, it’s ethical beliefs about whether you’re vegetarian or not. It’s the sustainability of the environment. It’s so connected to so many emotional things, and we all have that everyday experience. And we have to make decisions every day . . . what to eat, what to feed our kids, whether to wear a seat belt or not. We make these decisions and then we may want to justify them. We may need to believe they’re good. We may mistake our experience for expertise.

And that’s why when you get into any fields where [there is] everyday experience – human sexuality, relationships, child rearing, TV watching, book-reading, music, eating – people have very strong feelings and often will opine, often quite aggressively, in the absence of data. . . . [or] in contrast to what the data show.