Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinegel and today

I want to talk about why nothing matters. Most nutrition research studies are designed

to see what will happen if we change something. What happens to muscle synthesis if we add

more protein to the diet? What happens to cholesterol levels if we increase vitamin E intake?

What happens to blood sugar levels if we decrease carbohydrate intake or what happens to our

immune function if we add more vitamin D? Well sometimes of course we run these experiments

and nothing happens and we often refer to that as a null result. Now it's easy to see that

as a failed experiment but actually it's not. Joining me today to talk about null results

is Greg Lopez. Greg is the lead scientific editor at examin.com where he and his team collect

assess and summarize a staggering amount of nutrition research. Welcome back to the podcast.

Greg. Thanks for having me back. Greg I find the work that you do at examin.com extraordinarily

helpful and it's one of my go to resources and not long ago I noticed that you added a new

section to the nutrition examination research digest affectionately known to us as nerd and this

section is dedicated to reporting null results or research where nothing happens. Why did you feel

that this was important to shine a light on? Well I think the first reason to shine a light on it

is just to bring more attention to null results more generally. A lot of people and a lot of buzz on

social media and stuff in the world of nutrition focuses on what is happening, what people are seeing,

what effects are and what we want to do is just kind of bring attention to the idea that

null results are out there and also we wanted to help people more subtly learn how to interpret

these because they are a bit tricky. Our nerd nulls are just basics bullet point summaries of

null results but we have a final bullet point that asks how null the result was and that's where

some of our interpretation comes in and by repeating that and having readers repeatedly read it

...