The science of obesity & how to improve nutritional epidemiology | David Allison, Ph.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is David Allison. David received his PhD from Hofstra University in 1990, and then he went on to complete his postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a second postdoctoral fellowship at the New York Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center. He's currently the Dean and Provost Professor at the Indiana University Bloomington School of Public Health. And prior to that, he was an endowed professor and a Director of an NIH funded Nutrition Organization Research Center at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. He's authored over 500 scientific publications and received many awards, including the following, the 2002 Lilly Scientific Achievement Award from the Obesity Society, the 2002 Andre Mayer Award from the International Association for the Study of Obesity, and the National Science Foundation administered 2006 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academies. He serves on or has served on many of the editorial boards and currently serves on as an Associate Editor or Statistical Editor for Obesity, the International Journal of Obesity, Nutrition Today, Obesity Reviews, Public Library of Science PLOS Genetics, Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases, and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
He is also the founding field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Genetics. David's research interests include obesity and nutrition, quantitative genetics, clinical trials, statistical and research methodology, and research rigor and integrity. I've known David Allison for probably about seven or eight years now. I have always found him to be one of the most insightful and thoughtful people on virtually any topic, and that means fly fishing and genetics, and you pick it. In this episode, of course, we don't talk about fly fishing. What we do talk about is obesity, and we spend a lot of time getting into what is known and what is not known about obesity, and also the science of obesity, in particular the science of nutrition and nutritional epidemiology. Let me talk about all these pitfalls, which for many of my listeners will be familiar. But what I really appreciate about David is the lens to which he brings a very unemotional and a very insightful and a very logical and thoughtful approach to how he thinks about the pitfalls within this space. There are parts of this discussion actually that are quite frustrating in the sense that David acknowledges, for example, that most of the measures that we have in place from a public health perspective are probably not founded in any scientific basis. We then talk a little bit about the reproducibility of science and we close with a discussion that for me personally was the most interesting, which was a very clear elucidation of the challenges that maybe science seems to be facing or maybe is not facing today as this kind of existential threat where science and scientists are often confounded, science and advocacy is often confounded.
And there seems to be a bit of a crisis around this. David offers his thoughts on that and whether or not there is a crisis or not. We close our discussion with, I think one of the most lucid explanations of something that I've been trying to wrap my head around for some time without much success. And that is the seeming lack of credibility that science has today. David is quick to point out that it's probably not science that is that which is being doubted. Certainly the scientific method is a means by which knowledge can be reliably and reproducibly gained. But rather it might be the confounding of science and advocacy. I won't try to reproduce what David said here because heck, he does a much better job than me. But I would encourage you to listen all the way through, even if at the outset you find the topic of obesity, not particularly to your interest. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with David Allison.