Hello there.

This is Monica Rineagle of the Nutrition Diva podcast with a little quick take bonus episode for you.

A listener recent wrote to me about something that she'd come across in a book called

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, the Harvard Medical School Guide to Eating by Walter Willett and Patrick

Scarrett. And the passage that she was writing about says, in a pooled analysis of cohort studies,

my colleagues and I saw a modest increase in pancreatic cancer among people consuming brussels

three times a week. And they go on to say, if you think about the unusual shape of the Brussels

sprout, the tight package of leaves that we eat emerge from the stalk, which would normally

be covered with bark or spines for protection.

And the fragile sprouts don't have anything like that, so they turn to a different defense

mechanism, chemical warfare. And given what we found, it makes sense to eat this vegetable

not more than once a week while we wait for more data.

So my listener found this advice pretty surprising, and she wanted to know whether I thought

the strength of the research warranted such a cautious recommendation.

And you know what?

I do not.

Of all the things that we could worry about, developing pancreatic cancer due to

excessive Brussels sprout intake strikes me as being pretty low on the list. Willett and

company are a well-regarded and the generally reliable source. But nutritional epidemiology is the lens

through which they view the world. And this is a great example of how this approach

can be taken to ridiculous extremes. So when you correlate every food in the food supply with every known disease outcome,

you are bound to come up with some findings, and not all of them, in my opinion,

...