diabetes, what causes insulin resistance, we are failing to go back to ask the most fundamental and basic questions,” Attia said.
One reason for this failure is because the science of nutrition is so hard. How is it, Attia asks, that two people could literally eat the same thing every day—and one turns into a blimp while the other remains rail-thin? It’s an important question to answer. Another big reason for the collective failure of nutrition science, he adds, is that there are huge market incentives to skip over the fundamental questions—and get to the stuff that sells.
In the statement announcing the creation of NuSi, Kevin Schulman, director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute and the Center for Clinical and Genetic Economics at Duke University, said, “The largest public health crisis in the United States is being addressed with the type of data that we reject in every other field of medicine: observational studies subject to selection bias and small scale, short-term clinical studies which can’t offer definitive results.”
So Taubes and Attia want to cut through the ball of confusion by funding scientifically rigorous research in nutrition and obesity, done by independent scientists with divergent backgrounds and beliefs.
Attia says the kind of research they want to do also will require some unusual scientific equipment.
“The type of facilities that are necessary to do the kind of science that we’re talking about requires something called a metabolic chamber,” Attia said. “It’s a pretty ominous sounding thing. It’s a room that has to be exactly 30,000 liters worth of air. It’s about a 13-foot by 13-foot room, and it has to have the most precise CO2 (carbon dioxide) and O2 (oxygen) measuring sensors imaginable.
“People have to live in these rooms, and you have to be able to measure within 1 percent their RQ—respiratory co-efficient. Only when you do that can you calculate a human being’s total energy expenditure in the face of changing macro-nutrients.”
Attia says such metabolic chambers are an absolute necessity in nutrition science, but the equipment is expensive and difficult to get.
“So here’s an idea,” Attia says. “How much does it cost to build eight of these things in one setting? That would allow you to run 24 patients simultaneously around the clock, and by the way, why don’t we make them like hotel rooms so that they’re actually pleasant to be in. A novel idea, right?
“That’s the kind of stuff that NuSi wants to do,” Attia says.
