The Credibility Issue in Nutrition Science Is a Sign for All of Higher Ed

In recent years, psychology has dealt with a legitimacy crisis. Many influential psychological studies could not be reproduced by other psychologists, discrediting some key insights and weakening academic faith in the entire field.

Nutrition science has a similar problem.

The loudest critics argue that the methodologies relied on by researchers give bad data that are meaningless at best. Others worry that funding gives undue influence to the federal government, big business, or influential nonprofit associations. And some critics think nutrition science focuses on the wrong questions entirely about nutrition.

Defenders of the field say that the research methods used are reliable and improving with trial and error. They also argue that funding sources don’t have as much influence as critics fear.

Critics and defenders, however, both agree that nutrition science is an extremely challenging field for getting good data. It’s more like a social science than a hard science in that respect. The challenge for its defenders is building credibility. Whether they can also has implications for higher education research. Billions of dollars in taxpayer money go to colleges for research purposes, but the information that’s produced might not be socially useful.

To collect data, nutrition researchers often use observational studies. Those studies rely on participants self-reporting their eating habits, usually by completing a survey or keeping a food journal. The problem is that people can misremember what they ate. Even tracking what someone ate for a week is hard because people might forget a snack or change their eating habits because they’re being monitored.

Thus, with inaccurate survey data, what researchers tell the public to eat or to avoid can go back and forth. Eggs, for instance, have been healthy and unhealthy and healthy again. Fat has gone through something similar.

“The reason we know so little about what to eat despite decades of research is that our tools are woefully inadequate. Lately, as scientists try, and fail, to reproduce results, all of science is taking a hard look at funding biases, statistical shenanigans and groupthink. All that criticism, and then some, applies to nutrition,” Tamar Haspel, a food columnist for The Washington Post, wrote.

Other critics are more blunt.

“This data is meaningless,” Edward Archer, the chief science officer at EvolvingFX and former NIH research fellow and formerly at the Nutrition and Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said of observational studies. Archer doesn’t think those “memory-based methods” of research are helpful and prefers a different scientific approach in nutrition. “Replication…doesn’t help us,” he said. Rather than asking whether scientists can do the same work and get the same results, Archer wants researchers to focus on falsification instead. A scientific approach based on falsification would require trying to prove previous results wrong.

Changing the scientific paradigm, though, is a tall order. The U.S. Department of Agriculture. Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health spend about $5 billion annually on nutrition science research, Archer noted. If a researcher would publicly criticize the status quo, they could lose funding. As journalist Patrick Clinton wrote for The New Food Economy,

What happens if survey-based data suddenly become unacceptable? A lot of nutrition researchers will quickly discover it’s a lot harder to find funding, conduct studies, and publish the kinds of articles that provide tenure, job security, and prestige. And these endangered scholars are the peers who pass judgment on the articles that appear in peer-reviewed journals. They have a powerful incentive not to rock the boat.

But defenders of the status quo aren’t so radical about the need for change.

“There have been success stories, that seem to sometimes be overlooked with the ‘drama’ in the nutrition field,” Brenda Davy, a nutrition scientist at Virginia Tech, said in an email to the Martin Center. Memory can be fickle, but tracking behavior can be reliable, Davy wrote in a 2015 paper. The point isn’t to over-rely on one research approach, but to improve them.

Howard Bauchner, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), argued that nutrition science academics are aware of the field’s problems and actively work to improve it. “Research methods in general have improved tremendously over the last 20 years,” he said. The quality of the data researchers use has improved, along with their research methods, such as controlling for confounding variables and bias.

Davy argued that good nutrition science can be extremely challenging, but wrote: “Evidence-based nutrition is best served by considering the totality of evidence across multiple study types including nutritional epidemiological studies, randomized controlled trials of behavioral interventions, and controlled feeding studies.”

Not every problem in nutrition science is unique to it.
High-quality research methods aren’t the only areas of concern. The funding sources for research worries nutrition scientists and others. Marion Nestle, a nutrition scientist at New York University, is wary of any research funded by food companies, calling this research “marketing, not science” in an email to the Martin Center. Bauchner is less suspicious so long as academic independence is protected. “I genuinely believe there’s a way in which industry can fund nutrition research and that one can believe the science. I do think that there needs to be checks and balances,” he said.

Archer is more concerned about government funding, given the amount of money and influence the USDA and NIH have. “Being in that network means you get more money,” he said. The “academic industry-public policy network” can silence researchers who want to prove previous scientific findings wrong.

Not every problem in nutrition science is unique to it. Research methods across the social sciences suffer from the same credibility problems. Publishing pressures affect almost all researchers. And peer review is a weak point as well.

“I’m not sure this is a problem in my field that is any greater than other science fields,” Davy said. “Researchers are expected to publish in order to advance their careers (promotion, tenure), and to show that their research has impacts on the field. Publishing research, and obtaining grant funding, can be very competitive processes. It is also true that it can be more difficult to publish studies with negative findings, and that can lead to publication bias.”

Specialization also makes peer review difficult. Davy mentioned how hard it can be to find a few professors to review an article; they may not have the time or expertise to provide an academic journal with the skeptic eye it needs.

“I think that academia in general is in trouble,” Edward Archer said.

Paying academics for peer review could make them prioritize the work. Currently, peer review is done for free as part of a professor’s “service” commitment. Raising the standards for published research could also cause a change. Patrick Clinton has written about making p-values, a shorthand for how likely it is the result is a chance occurrence, more rigorous. John Ioannidis, a nutrition scientist at Stanford University, has argued for stronger standards along similar lines. JAMA has been willing to publish some strong critiques of nutrition science as a field (though not to the extent that Archer would like). Building public confidence could require more influential journals to embrace the critics and calls for radical change.

Nutrition science highlights a larger problem in higher education. If billions of dollars in funding haven’t promoted high-quality research, then the modern research university could have quality-control issues. Research methods can improve, but the pressure to publish and biases within academic publishing hurts all academics. Nutrition science might be a field with more difficulties than most, but university departments of all stripes could have a (taxpayer-funded) replication crisis on their hands.

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Mass: Dead mice, crumbling concrete: Education reform won’t fix the sorry state of some schools

LYNN — Step into Kaitlyn Lausier’s basement classroom, and years of financial neglect in this once-prospering city can be seen everywhere: the long fluorescent tube lights, the bare brick walls, the flaking radiator that warns in English and Spanish not to touch its scorching sides.

Students have been burned by these iron-ribbed heaters at Pickering Middle School, where cramped underground quarters like Lausier’s have been pressed into service to relieve overcrowding.

Gateway cities like Lynn, midsize urban centers whose lower property values are a draw for lower-income households, are slated to be among the big winners in the sweeping school-funding reform bill signed into law last week by Governor Charlie Baker. Such districts are expected to see millions in fresh spending from the new law — a down payment meant to reverse yawning student achievement gaps fueled by years of underinvestment.

But Lausier’s basement classroom alone shows just how far Lynn has fallen behind. And even as city officials celebrate passage of a law that will dramatically increase spending on students, they must face a sobering truth: The extra money will probably do little to address Lynn’s tumbledown schools, complicating efforts to improve services to its surging ranks of low-income students.

One of Lausier’s most pressing concerns, for instance, emanates from an adjoining room that she said houses the century-old school’s ductwork.  “I would like to have that room cleaned out so it doesn’t smell like dead mouse in here all the time,” she said.

Hailed as a transformational overhaul of the state’s outmoded school-funding formula, the so-called Student Opportunity Act is poised to pump an additional $1.5 billion into school districts across Massachusetts over the next seven years. It specifically targets disadvantaged students in poorer urban districts like Lynn’s.

“This legislation is about making sure that every kid in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, regardless of where they live, where they go to school . . . has the opportunity to get the education they need to be great,” Baker said when he signed the bill at English High School in Boston.

While legislators have so far declined to estimate the projected increases for individual districts, state Senator Jason M. Lewis said the law would likely double per-pupil spending in many Gateway cities, a majority of which spend less per pupil than the state average. He added that Lynn’s spending is likely to increase from around $13,000 today to roughly $26,000 per student when the law is fully implemented.

The increase “is going to be much greater for districts with large numbers of low-income students and English learners,” said the Winchester Democrat, who helped craft the legislation. “Lynn is going to receive tens of millions of dollars more.”

But in the midst of an effort lauded by many as a once-in-a-generation push to close opportunity gaps that cleave the state’s poorer students from their more affluent peers, one glaring disparity has garnered scant attention: Gateway cities, home to many of the state’s poorest students, are significantly more likely to have very old schools, an enduring inequality in plain sight.

Statewide, fewer than 10 percent of schools are more than 100 years old, according to a 2016 survey. But that figure doubles to nearly 20 percent in Gateway cities.

The problem is even worse in Lynn, where roughly 40 percent of schools date from 1920 or before. Meanwhile, thousands of students have entered the district over the past decade — including more than 400 high-schoolers this year alone, according to school officials — pushing antique buildings to the breaking point.

Reports of execrable schools in Gateway cities are legion: mold and rodents in a New Bedford elementary school, classrooms with no windows in Holyoke. Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed this year alleged a host of other ills, including leaky roofs, faucets that tested positive for lead, and classrooms where the temperature can reach 90 degrees.

And that’s to say nothing of Boston Public Schools: A report found a majority of the city’s schools need substantial renovations or repairs.

But unlike in Boston, where enrollment has declined over the years, many of the Gateway districts have experienced dramatic student growth.

In Lynn, where overcrowding mixes with deplorable building conditions, kids are being placed in danger. City officials say crumbling bricks crashed to the ground near a play area at the 121-year-old Tracy Elementary. Someone attempted to mend a rusted chain-link fence with duct tape at the 122-year-old Aborn Elementary. A 1907 window at the Pickering simply “fell out” during the school day a few years ago. No one was injured, but documents filed with the state warned that “if a class had been in the room, the results would have been catastrophic.”

Lewis, who noted the law promises the largest increase in state spending on school facilities, acknowledged it won’t address all of the urgent building needs across the state’s roughly 300 districts.

“It’s going to help, but we know that’s not the sole answer,” he said. “There are challenges here . . . particularly for Gateway cities and their ability to fund their school building projects.”

The law will add $200 million to the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s annual spending cap. The authority helps finance everything from construction projects to roof repairs.

But with its previous cap of $600 million, it has lacked the capacity to meet the needs of the state’s roughly 1,800 public school buildings, approving just one-third of all applications in 2018. The law also calls for a reassessment of school construction financing, Lewis said.

“We know that there’s more of a need than we have the funds to remedy,’’ said the authority’s executive director, Jack McCarthy. “If we had unlimited amounts of money we could build all the new schools. But we don’t.”

In an era when school construction projects can exceed $300 million apiece, state aid goes only so far before municipalities must kick in a hefty contribution, usually via property tax hikes. That’s often a tough sell to voters, particularly in cash-strapped communities, which routinely strike down proposed projects.

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Co-ed vs  ‘education apartheid’

Many progressive advocates would welcome single-sex schools becoming extinct as alleged “educational apartheid.”

Nevertheless, Australia has a long tradition of high-achieving single-sex schools, in both the government and non-government sectors, and many parents still choose this option.

Proponents argue single-sex schools “…increase student confidence, provide a safe place for student to develop their identities and could be the answer to the gender gap in academic performance.”

It’s not a big deal for most Australian parents. Our recent research found a school being single-sex or co-educational was in the top two factors for just 5% of parents when choosing a school — but for some parents, it is a deal-breaker.

There is evidence students achieve better results in single-sex schools. Analysis of NAPLAN data by the Australian Council for Educational Research indicates girls’ schools and boys’ schools perform better on average in both literacy and numeracy than co-ed schools, even after taking into account student socioeconomic background (this particular analysis was a classic of the ‘we don’t like the results, so let’s not tell anyone until halfway through’ academic genre).

Overseas, some research has shown single-sex schools have significant positive effects on science and maths results for boys but not for girls, while other studies have found precisely the opposite (girls benefit but boys don’t), and other research suggests there is no significant effect for either boys or girls. OECD research suggests that in some countries there is a difference and in others there isn’t.

So the relationship between single-sex schooling and academic achievement isn’t entirely clear. But there isn’t any evidence that co-ed schools have non-academic benefits, such as better socialisation or preparation for post-school life.

Given the disagreement, the solution is more school choice, not less. Parents are in the best position to decide what is best for their child, and ideally should have single-sex and co-ed options across school sectors.

We don’t want to turn single-sex schooling into another culture war. Let parents make up their own minds.

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