Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 343 of the podcast. My name is Danny Lennon. And in another one of these in-house

Sigma Nutrition episodes, I'm going to be here alongside my co-host, Alan Flanagan. So if you've

caught some of our previous episodes of this nature, We've covered things like diet and heart disease

risk, diet inflammation, diet and immunity. And most recently, we looked at vegan diets and their

impacts for human health. And that was in our last episode. And so turning to today's particular

episode, the focus this time is going to be more on a meta topic

and really how we can understand some of the core fundamental principles of nutritional science.

And these become very important when we're trying to accurately, critically appraise research,

be able to pick out which studies are well done, which ones are not, which ones can be informative,

which studies are able to tell us something, but more than that, what can they specifically tell us

and understand what is the exact question that a study may or may not be answering, and then

some of the nuances around that. And specifically, we decided a topic to focus in on was around the issue of causality,

as that pertains to nutritional science.

And this encapsulates a number of different ideas which we'll get into.

We're not only thinking about cause-effect relationships between diet and certain disease outcomes,

but we're also looking at how do we demonstrate causality from a purely biomedical model perspective.

How can we potentially infer causality when we don't have maybe, say, rigorous RCTs on a certain topic?

And then broader questions like, do we need to get to that point of demonstrable causality

for actually making real-world decisions around diet?

And then that gives us these bigger topics we'll discuss around evidence and proof

and the differences between those.

So there's a lot within this episode.

...