Huh?
This piece is hard to read. The author talks about why they’ve been taken in by esoteric fads in nutrition. They then, at the very end of the piece, reference a long blog post about how nutrition papers are bad. Then there’s a two sentence paragraph stating that glycine inhibits methionine’s effect on a particular signal pathway and wondering if any particular supplement we take is acting as a methionine. What?
The seemingly random dive into the weeds threw me.
If this were a publication about nutrition science, I’d write this off as standard inside baseball that just wasn’t meant for me. But it doesn’t seem to be.
The seemingly random and obscure gesture towards interactions between amino acids right at the end of the piece that primarily focused on how the author has misled themselves before feels ironic.
This section, in particular, stands out when reading the near final paragraph questioning amino acid interactions:
“I just treasured the esoteric dietary knowledge, like a kind of modern-day druid. This blinded me to the fact that a big share of my research was confirmation bias.”
This piece didn’t affect my opinion on supplements at all. It primarily made me question the author’s ability to objectively evaluate information and then present it clearly.
I have no strong opinion on supplements at the moment fwiw.