For a baseline life expectancy of 80 years:
- Eating 12 hazelnuts daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (ie, 1 year per hazelnut)
- Drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve a similar gain of 12 extra years
- Eating a single mandarin orange daily (80 g) would add 5 years of life.
Conversely:
- consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expectancy by 6 years
- eating 2 slices of bacon (30 g) daily would shorten life by a decade (an effect worse than smoking).
Well these are all taken from John Ioannadis’ article in JAMA. He asks : “Could these results possibly be true?”
The great financial crash led to some (but not enough) soul-searching about the state of academic economics and, in turn, the academy. Whole swathes of the modern research university are geared to the production of unreliable knowledge. There is money in it. Without wishing to understate in any way Ioannadis’ major contributions, we have known that there are fundamental methodological flaws in much of observational epidemiology for a long time (for instance see the late Alvan Feinstein’s article in Science). A must read.
(The Challenge of Reforming Nutritional Epidemiologic Research John P. A. Ioannidis, AMA. Published online August 23, 2018. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.11025)