I had a prof - lovely person - who acknowledged that his lab was disappointed when leptin was discovered & everyone thought it would mean the "end" of obesity. They had just applied for a grant that promised would also lead to a similar discoveey. 1/n https://twitter.com/ahhite/status/1307355930636562434

Universities run on grant money. 50% or more of every grant goes to pay "overhead" to a uni. That's why unis hire profs who reel in grant money. Prof often also have to pay their own salaries from grants. 2/n

That why it is important to do "research" that *won't* find answers that will dramatically change the status quo. Small answers that only lead to more questions (i.e. research) are best. 3/n

Another prof with close ties to the T2DM advocacy community, when asked (not by me) why the Diabetes Prevention Program didn't test a low carb diet: "Well, we can't test EVERY diet." 4/n

Nutritional epi studies from existing datasets are relatively inexpensive, infinitely "fishable," & guaranteed to produce expected outcomes. (And if you do find an unexpected outcome, dataset owners can prevent you from publishing it.) 5/n

Every article published in the last decade that has W. Willett's name on it & addresses diet-chronic disease relationships finds that - shazam! - all the foods we told people were "healthy" actually turned out to be, without fail, associated with some marker that = "health." 6/n

How weird is that? Nutritional epi studies feed the publish/perish beast with exactly no new information added to the evidence base. Perfect.

Is there more? Of course. But back to your regularly scheduled Twitter feed with @WeDietitians 7/7