There was a much-ballyhooed study published in Nature (arguably THE science journal, with a huge amount of importance) on mice fed a “paleo” diet (A low-carbohydrate high-fat diet increases weight gain and does not improve glucose tolerance, insulin secretion or β-cell mass in NZO mice). And guess what? This study meant a flurry of blog posts and articles. Many, like this one on the popular site Mashable say that this study means that the Paleo Diet is “bad for you”. Unfortunately, that’s…kinda (really) wrong. That’s not what the study says. Like many (if not most) popular science articles on nutrition, it oversimplifies the study and it overgeneralizes the results.

Image courtesy Wikimedia.  Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1777620

For starters, it was a study on mice. While animal research provides a great deal of vital information, there’s a very good reason that you can’t release a drug after only animal trials. “Are you man or mouse?” isn’t just a rhetorical question here. While animal trials can be compelling and provide a good foundation for further exploration, we’re not mice. So, right there you can say that while the study provides interesting evidence, you can’t conclusively say that it means that the “paleo diet is bad”. And a lot of paleo blogs are attacking the study, as you’d expect. While I’m not a proponent of the paleo diet, I do agree with some of the criticism of the study, e.g. the type of fats and protein used. (I won’t bore you with the Science Wonk about why I agree with that criticism, but let’s just say that I’d like to see the mouse study done with different sources for fats, carbs, and protein.)

But, really, both the blog post and the article on Mashable have lots of flaws. The Mashable article overgeneralizes. The blog post combines some valid (in my eyes) criticism with “anecdata”. In other words, both of them aren’t great, and both of them seem to have their own biases, implicit or otherwise.

The simple fact is, human nutrition is complicated, people are different than mice, and it’s really, really, really hard to write a popular science article about nutrition without oversimplifying to the point of inaccuracy.

The take home message? Never rely on a single article or blog post as the final word in nutrition. And that includes this blog!