About

Who am I?
I am a 38 year old Dutch man with a lifelong interest in the role of diet & supplements for prevention/progression of various (chronic) diseases. Currently I am a 3rd year student "Nutrition and Dietetics". I started following education again since reading about healthy foods became a serious hobby.

The reason for this blog.
Media publish completely random information about the role of diet in the prevention and "treatment" of disease. Advisory committees worldwide give contradictory advices regarding healthy diets. Including different amounts of food groups to eat and different amounts of vitamins and minerals to use.

The reason for this contradictory advice is the fact that each advisory committee uses it's own apparently randomly collected stack of scientific literature to base the conclusions on. Just put the different reference lists next to each other and see for yourself.

Systematic reviews of the literature should include all studies on a given subject, according to a specified study design. If the study design eliminates certain weaknesses it is considered clinically relevant to humans. These types of studies include randomized trials and prospective (cohort) studies. Few long term randomized trials were done relating foods to certain health outcomes. Therefore, effects on major chronic diseases are mostly based on results from the 2nd best line of evidence: prospective studies.
For this reason, available systematic reviews of prospective studies should always be considered giving dietary advices. On another site of mine, I published my own systematic reviews relating dietary variables to major chronic disease: http://canceranddiet.nl/ . I wrote these reviews, because existing reviews did not give me the detailed answers I was looking for. Such as:

• What specific food items are responsible for the described effects from the food groups?
• How much do I have to consume to find a described effect? Is there evidence for an effect at intermediate levels of consumption?
• Can effects be found among different effect modifiers (e.g., sex, BMI, smoking status)?

My reviews are very extensive. And people are unable to give me direct feedback. This blog was created to summarize results from extensive systematic reviews without losing relevant information in the process.

Contact: rhoenselaar@hotmail.com