Chapter 1 — Exercises
Work through what you can. Part C is the one that actually changes how you read things.
Difficulty legend: ⭐ basic recall · ⭐⭐ applied · ⭐⭐⭐ synthesis and judgment · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ extension
Selected answers are in Appendix J.
Part A — Conceptual Understanding ⭐
A1. List the five reasons this chapter gives for why nutrition is confusing. For each, write one sentence in your own words — not the chapter's phrasing.
A2. Explain, in two or three sentences, why you cannot run a randomized controlled trial to determine whether red meat causes heart disease. Name at least three of the five "walls."
A3. What is a food frequency questionnaire, and what is it used for?
A4. The chapter says FFQ errors are "systematic, not random." Explain the difference, and say why it matters for whether large sample sizes fix the problem.
A5. Name the five steps of the pipeline that turns a research finding into a viral claim. At which step does the first outright false statement typically appear?
A6. What is meant by "the substitution question"? Give an example of a nutrition claim that becomes unanswerable without it.
A7. The chapter names six recurring "shapes" that sticky myths take. List them, and give one real-world example of each that you have personally encountered.
A8. Explain the difference between the three things people can mean when they say "experts keep changing their minds." Which of the three is the most damaging conclusion, and why?
A9. What are the "three bins," and roughly how big is each?
A10. The chapter argues that both the food industry and the wellness industry have incentives misaligned with your health. State each industry's incentive in one sentence, and explain how they are connected to each other.
Part B — Applied Analysis ⭐⭐
B1. A headline reads: "Study Finds People Who Drink Green Tea Daily Have 23% Lower Risk of Stroke." List four questions you would need answered before you'd change anything about your own tea consumption.
B2. Your uncle says: "They said margarine was healthier than butter, then they said margarine was killing us. That's why I ignore all of it and eat what I want." Using §1.7, write a response of three to four sentences that takes his complaint seriously and still disagrees with his conclusion.
B3. Below are four claims. For each, identify which myth shape (or shapes) from §1.6 it uses. Note that identifying the shape does not tell you whether the claim is true.
- a) "Our grandparents never had these diseases because they ate real food."
- b) "There's one common ingredient in 80% of packaged foods that's causing your fatigue."
- c) "The reason you haven't heard about this is that there's no money in it."
- d) "I cut out dairy for thirty days and I've never felt better."
B4. A supplement company publishes a study, in a real peer-reviewed journal, showing their product improves a marker of joint comfort in adults over 50. The study is randomized and placebo- controlled. Using §1.5, list three things you would want to know before treating this as evidence — and say why the fact that it's randomized and placebo-controlled is not sufficient on its own.
B5. Reread the pipeline in §1.4. Identify the step at which each of the following was lost: the species (mice), the dose, the distinction between a marker and a disease, and the authors' own stated caveats.
B6. Theo's folder contained pairs of contradictory headlines from credible sources. Pick one pair from the chapter and write two sentences explaining how both articles could be accurate reports of different underlying studies without either one being dishonest.
B7. The chapter claims the food industry and the wellness industry are in a symbiotic relationship rather than an adversarial one. Explain the mechanism. Then name one way this relationship could show up in your own social media feed this week.
B8. Consider this statement: "The Sugar Research Foundation episode proves that everything we were told about saturated fat was industry propaganda." Using the 🔬 verdict in §1.5, identify exactly where this argument overreaches, and write a version of the claim that the evidence does support.
Part C — Skills & Practice ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐
C1. Trace a claim to its source. Find a nutrition claim in your own social media feed, or in a message someone has sent you, from the last month. Work backwards as far as you can:
- Who made the claim, and what do they sell?
- Do they cite a study? Can you find it?
- If you find it: what species? what sample size? what design? what was actually measured — a disease outcome, or a marker?
- Where along the five-step pipeline did the version you saw sit?
Write half a page. If you hit a dead end — the trail vanishes at an aggregator with no source — say so, because that's a finding. A claim with no traceable origin is itself information.
C2. Rewrite a headline honestly. Find a real nutrition headline from a mainstream outlet. Rewrite it so that it accurately reflects what the study actually established, including species, design, and whether the outcome was a marker or a disease. Then answer: would you have clicked on your version?
C3. The four questions. Take three nutrition claims you currently believe (steal them from your Belief Inventory) and run each through the four questions from the Chapter Summary:
- Compared to what?
- In whom?
- How was diet measured?
- Who benefits if I believe this?
For at least one of the three, you should find that you cannot answer question 1 at all. That's the exercise working.
C4. Design the impossible study. Return to the 🧩 productive-struggle prompt in §1.2. Now that you've read the section, write a genuinely serious study design for the red-meat question — one that accepts the constraints rather than wishing them away. What is the best achievable design? What would it be able to conclude, and what would it never be able to conclude? (This is harder than it looks and there is no clean answer. That's the point.)
C5. Follow the money in both directions. Pick one mainstream nutrition recommendation you believe, and one contrarian nutrition claim you find persuasive. For each, ask: who profits if this belief spreads? Be specific — name industries, product categories, business models. Notice whether the exercise felt equally easy in both directions. Most people find one side much easier, and which side that is tells you something about your own priors.
C6. Interview someone over sixty. Ask what they were told about eggs, fat, butter, salt, and margarine when they were thirty. Write down what they say, then compare it to current guidance. Identify which changes were reversals in evidence and which were reversals in narration.
Part D — Synthesis & Critical Thinking ⭐⭐⭐
D1. The chapter argues that "misleading-but-true is more dangerous than false." Defend this claim, then argue against it. Which position do you find more persuasive, and what would change your mind?
D2. If nutrition research is as compromised by measurement error and confounding as §1.2 and §1.3 argue, on what basis can the chapter also claim there's a stable body of settled knowledge? Isn't that inconsistent? Resolve the apparent contradiction in a paragraph. (This is the single most important question in Part I. If you can answer it well, Chapter 2 will be much easier.)
D3. The chapter is careful to present Coach Brandt as sincere rather than as a fraud. Is that generosity warranted, or is it letting influencers off the hook? Consider: does sincerity reduce moral responsibility when someone has two million followers and an affiliate code? Argue a position.
D4. A dietitian, a supplement seller, a food company, and a fitness influencer all have financial incentives connected to what you eat. Does that make them equally untrustworthy? If not, what distinguishes them — and can you articulate a principle that doesn't just amount to "I trust the ones I already agreed with"?
D5. The chapter claims the boring parts of nutrition are where the certainty lives, and that excitement is anti-correlated with reliability. If that's true, describe what a maximally useful nutrition news source would look like — and then explain why no such source is commercially viable.
Part M — Mixed & Interleaved Practice ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐
Chapter 1 is the first chapter, so there's nothing yet to interleave with. Instead, these questions plant seeds you'll return to — write your answers now and revisit them at the chapters named.
M1. (Revisit at Chapter 2.) Without knowing anything yet about study design, rank these four pieces of evidence from weakest to strongest as a basis for changing your diet: a friend's dramatic personal result; a study in rats; a survey of 50,000 people followed for 20 years; a 12-week randomized trial in 40 people. Then explain your ranking. Chapter 2 will tell you whether you were right — and the two you're most likely to misrank are the last two.
M2. (Revisit at Chapter 16.) Estimate what you currently spend per month on supplements, "functional" foods, specialty health products, and anything you buy primarily for a health claim rather than because you want to eat it. Multiply by twelve. Write the number down. Don't judge it yet.
M3. (Revisit at Chapter 17.) Which of your ten Belief Inventory entries do you think is most likely to turn out to be wrong? Write your prediction now, sealed with the inventory. Most readers guess wrong about which one — and the systematic direction of that error is itself interesting.
M4. (Revisit at Chapter 24.) Theo used the word failing to describe stopping a 75-day challenge on day 31. Write down your immediate reaction to that word choice. Chapter 24 will argue that this vocabulary is doing real damage; note now whether you agree.
M5. (Revisit at Chapter 37.) Write, in two sentences, what you currently think the correct answer to "what should I eat?" is. Seal it with the Belief Inventory. Chapter 37 gives the book's answer, and comparing the two is the most direct measure available of what these 38 chapters did.
Part E — Research & Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐
E1. Find the actual Dietary Guidelines for Americans document for any edition since 2010 (they're freely available from the USDA and HHS). Read the section on dietary cholesterol, or on saturated fat. Compare the document's actual language — including its hedges and its stated confidence levels — to how that same guidance was reported in the press at the time. Write a page on the gap between the two.
E2. Locate the published historical work on the Sugar Research Foundation documents. Read what the historians actually claim, and identify the boundary between their documented findings and the much broader claims commonly made in their name. This is an exercise in the difference between a real scandal and a real scandal being used as a universal solvent.
E3. Choose a nutrition topic where two credentialed experts publicly disagree. Read or watch both, and write a structured comparison: what evidence does each cite? What does each ignore? Are they disagreeing about facts, about interpretation, about values, or about what should be recommended given uncertainty? (Most public nutrition disagreements are the last one, disguised as the first.)