somebody sent me this story that's going viral about this guy who decided to try to lose weight
by eating all of his meals at McDonald's. so for a hundred days he ate every single meal at
McDonald's. three times a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner. but what he did was, he ate nothing
else. so no snacks in between, nothing outside of McDonald's. and every McDonald's meal he got,
he ate half of it and he dumped the other half. so half of a burger, half of the fries
Etc. so he's going on TV shows and there's a small media storm around it and he says he
lost almost 60 pounds and he feels amazing (his own words) and he says his pre-diabetes is gone,
his triglycerides dropped over 200 points and his cholesterol dropped 65 points. so this is a bit
of media fireworks but I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss a very common question
which is the power of antidotes to captivate our minds. I get this question all the time,
in comments and messages: "hey, I saw your video with the 20 randomized trials
but what about this guy over at tik tok who is eating XYZ and he seems to be doing great,
he's ripped to shreds and he jumps over buildings or whatever, doesn't that invalidate all of
science?". or another common one: "hey, have you seen this Facebook group, they're all doing diet
XYZ and they say they're doing great, how do you explain that?". the reality is that anecdotes are
very very limited in the type of information they can provide us, our McDonald's friend for example,
he clearly lost a lot of weight, in all likelihood because he reduced the number of calories he's
eating, and most if not all of his blood work changes can be explained by the weight loss as
well, but the weight loss and the feeling amazing and even the blood work improvements he reports
don't necessarily mean that his diet of McDonald's three times a day is healthy in the long run
or that we should be recommending it to people, it's entirely possible that despite
the weight loss and despite probably being better off than he was before,
this diet could have detrimental effects in the long haul. whether it's all the refined
carbohydrates or all the sodium or all the saturated fat or something else,
it could gradually over the years raise risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative
disease or a million other things. not to mention, anecdotes don't tell us how many people fail on a
diet, we can see a very impressive anecdote or 10 anecdotes or a hundred anecdotes and not see
a thousand cases of people who failed the same diet or whose health got wrecked on that diet,
and that would paint a very different picture. another great example of this disconnect between
short-term improvements and overall health value of a diet is the famous rice diet. starting in the
1930s, Dr Walter Kempner took patients that were obese, with very high blood pressure,
with retinal issues, with vision impairment, and he put them on the rice diet, where they ate
nothing but rice, sugar, fruit and fruit juice, with a total of about 25 grams of protein a day
and 90 to 95 percent of calories coming from carbohydrate, much of it refined carbohydrate,
not even whole. other Foods were sometimes added at a later stage. and Dr Kempner reported dramatic
weight loss in a number of his patients, with blood pressure improving dramatically as well,
their glucose dropping down to normal range, some even regaining their eyesight,
kidney disease improving, normalization of heart function etc etc. and unlike the McDonald's diet,
Kempner actually published some of these cases in medical journals, and there are even several
impressive before and after pictures pretty similar to what we see people post nowadays
on social media. and yet, despite all of this, virtually nobody would suggest that this diet of
mostly white rice and sugar, where protein is less than half of the RDA, is a healthy diet overall,
or that it should be recommended widely for people to eat long-term. everyone understands
this right away if we're talking about the rice diet or the McDonald's diet, there's no conflict,
there's no contradiction, there's no resistance. but try to explain this concept to someone raving
about their own anecdote on social media, how the raw vegan diet or eating nothing but meat
and salt all day or the macrobiotic diet helped them lose 100 pounds and how they
feel like they're 20 again. you can't get them to see the caveats when it's their own situation
at stake. it's impossible. why is that? why is it so effortless to see this logic with a diet that
we have no emotional attachment to but we become instantly blinded when it's something that we hold
dear? humans are not naturally wired to think in terms of bar graphs and p-values, it's not how our
minds work. the emotional power of experiencing something, of seeing something with your own eyes,
usually trumps any amount of evidence that you can show somebody. we naturally connect
with things that we've felt and with stories from Individual people, not with Statistics,
and this can sometimes create a rift between scientists and the public because scientists tend
to talk in terms of probabilities and risk factors and they tend to downplay isolated stories,
but those are exactly the things that impact the public the most. now, even scientists can fall for
this tendency for storytelling, and we see this on social media because it's very incentivized there,
so it takes a lot of training and vigilance and practice to constantly put things in perspective
and look at the big picture and not be swept away by a compelling story or a personal experience.
anecdotes are not irrelevant and if we ignored all anecdotes that would be a big mistake. if
I experience an allergic reaction after I eat some peanuts, that's important information,
for me at least. also, anecdotes can be hypothesis-generating, they can suggest ideas
that can then be tested in well-designed studies, but they never replace stronger evidence, putting
anecdotes on a pedestal and ignoring everything else is a massive mistake because anecdotes have
a lot of blind spots. so yes, we should learn from our experiences and those of others without
letting them tie our hands. our McDonald's friend for example seems to do really well with portion
control, he has the discipline to eat only half of his meals and to not snack in between,
that's huge, he can take that with him and use it while at the same time improving his dietary
pattern overall and working on the weaknesses of his McDonald's regime. just because he lost
the weight on McDonald's doesn't mean he needs to keep eating McDonald's for the rest of his
life. his anecdote doesn't mean that McDonald's is a superfood after all and scientists have been
lying to us all along and unfairly demonizing fast food. right? all of these logical leaps we see on
social media all the time. by the same token, if a given diet or method helped us, we can keep the
lessons we learned while still patching up the shortcomings of any diet to maximize long-term
health. I hope that all helps, I know this is a very emotional, very visceral topic, so let me
know your questions below, any comments you have, take care, I'll see you guys next week, bye-bye