Almost every day, I get notifications from Medscape about a variety of medical topics. There are more and more links to articles on diet and exercise, responding to a growing interest among physicians about these subjects. Here is a recent article with a startling title:

    Why this title? Well, researchers investigating the role of nutrition and health must gather information about diet. However, methods to do this, such as food diaries or questionnaires, are not accurate. For example, I can tell you what I ate for breakfast last week because I always eat the same thing for breakfast. I don’t remember lunch or dinner.

    To quote the article:

Feces don't lie. In reconstructing someone's diet, people either forget what they ate, fudge the truth, or can't be bothered to keep track. "Patients report the fruit they ate yesterday but not the M&Ms," said Neil Stollman, MD …

    People also remember their meals but not their snacks.

    The Medscape article describes the work of Dr. Lawrence David, who is analyzing DNA in feces to find out what people actually ate. His methods may lead to better-quality research about the connections between diet and health.

    This is the kind of thing I find interesting in the scientific literature – though maybe not something I would bring up to discuss over dinner.