Nick Szabo  🔑

Controlled for total calories?

Why? Causing you to eat more calories may be the main way that carbs kill you.

Certainly could be true but that’s a separate hypothesis

"More carbs = higher death rate". You're asking him to exclude what may be the main causal mechanism that makes that claim true.

I don’t know if we’re on the same page. There are separate studies about diet adherence, and they don’t necessarily find strong evidence that low carb diets have better adherence. There’s wide variability. What they do tend to show is whatever produces weight loss, yields benefit

You're insisting that nutrition studies be up to the rigors of physics, that if we don't isolate 1 cause to 1 effect ignore it. The biology is far too complex for that. If that's your standard there's no such thing as nutrition science & you should just eat what your grandpa ate.

BTW, scientific controls, while quite valuable for the science itself, are often abused in the reporting of science, here's a common way it is done: Study to show whether X causes Z via cause A, controlling for B,C,etc. Negative. Media reports as "study shows X doesn't cause Z."

I may have misused the term variable. What I was trying to say is, in order to understand the mechanism, we’d need to be able to tease out whether carbs -> overeating -> , or carbs-> X ->