#448: Prof. Norman Temple – Can Science Answer Diet-Health Questions?
Sigma Nutrition Radio
Danny Lennon
4.8 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2022
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While we've never known more about diet and health, there remain many unanswered questions in nutrition science. However, there is often disagreements on how best to answer these questions, particularly in relation to informing practical diet advise that meaningfully improves health.
Prof. Norman Temple is one academic who has written on a number of these issues. One issue he highlights is the large discrepency in the practical value we have attained from cohort studies and RCTs, relative to mechanistic research. Another is the limitations of RCTs for nutrition-specific research questions.
In this episode, Prof. Temple discusses these issues, as well as what strategies can actually improve population diet, and thus health.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. |
| 0:18.0 | I am your host, Danny Lennon. You are very welcome. This is episode 448 of the podcast. |
| 0:25.8 | And today I'm going to be talking with Professor Norman Temple. And this is off the back of some |
| 0:33.1 | interesting work of Professor Temples that I've read over time that relate to a couple of |
| 0:38.5 | core issues that we've discussed in various different ways across some of our previous podcast |
| 0:43.8 | episode. And so while it's true that we've never known more about diet and health, there are, of |
| 0:50.2 | course, many unanswered questions in nutrition science. And it's quite common to see the |
| 0:55.8 | disagreements that come up relating to how best to go about and answer these questions, |
| 1:01.9 | particularly in relation to informing practical diet advice that meaningfully improves health. |
| 1:06.8 | And so this is something, for example, we discussed in our conversations related to |
| 1:11.0 | nutrition epidemiology, where you have some people saying, this is basically a waste of time. |
| 1:15.9 | And on the other side, we could say, actually, this might be best suited to a number of |
| 1:19.8 | nutrition science questions. And so I wanted to talk to Professor Temple about some of his |
| 1:24.5 | ideas that he's written about. Professor Temple is a professor of nutrition at Athabasca University in Canada currently, |
| 1:33.3 | and he has published in the area of nutrition as it relates to health for many, many years. |
| 1:38.3 | He originally studied in the UK getting his PhD in biochemistry. |
| 1:42.3 | He did some research there initially at the University of |
| 1:46.0 | Surrey. He's also then done work abroad in Puerto Rico and then led him to Canada where he is |
| 1:51.9 | currently based. And then much of his research there was ended up looking at cohorts in both Canada |
| 1:57.1 | and South Africa in the area of diet and health. And so I will link to more of his research |
| 2:02.5 | within the show notes page, but there's certainly a lot to discuss on a number of these topics |
| 2:08.6 | that I hope you enjoy. The show notes are going to be available at sigmautrition.com |
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