Don’t Hire People Incentivised to Appear Smarter Than They Are
Or, the surprising power of common sense and research
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
For what it’s worth, I was reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb before writing this essay, and if you’ve read even one chapter from any of his book, you know how ballsy his tone is.
After reading the first draft of this essay I myself was surprised by how scathing I sounded. I’ve toned it down but if you still feel like I’m taking a dump on things I find foolish, you know why.
On to this week’s essay! It’s about ~1900 words.
Note: If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart below my name (above)? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍
Q: How to avoid harmful advice?
The other day I got into an argument with a friend who believed Diet Coke isn’t bad for health, i.e. it’s bad to drink normal Coca-Cola but completely fine to drink Diet Coke because it has “zero calories and zero sugar.”
While I was in a state of shock and struggled to find words to counter his claim, it was only when he said that even his fitness coach said it’s okay to drink Diet Coke that I completely lost it!
Today, let’s talk about nutrition. More precisely, let’s talk about why there are so many dumb samaritans — the so called nutritionists, dieticians, fitness coaches, and weight loss experts out there — spreading the word of the low-carb, low-calorie, low-whatever diet as the gospel truth without knowing what they are talking about.
I’m not a nutritionist, but I’ve read enough books (written by actual scientists and researchers, not by “nutritionists”) to know that if you are simply counting calories, if you are simply looking at your macros (carbohydrate, protein, fat) to design your diet, you are just plain lazy, or worse, plain stupid.
This essay isn’t really about nutrition. Like the title says, it’s more about using common sense and doing some research (i.e. reading books) instead of listening to an “advisor” who pretends to know more than they really know.
It’s common wisdom that you should fire your financial advisor. They have zero skin in the game and are seldom helpful. You are better off doing your own research and making your own decisions about how to deal with your own money.
Even if you don’t have a lot of knowhow (right now), you care about your money more than anyone else — certainly more than any financial advisor. And if you know how to use your brain, have common sense, and can manage your emotions, you’ll get by pretty well without a financial advisor if you ask me.
Similarly, you can get by pretty well without a nutritionist as well — no matter how many certifications they’ve got. If you really really need someone to tell you what you should eat, listen to your grandmother. She knows more than your nutritionist.
To illustrate my point, let me tell you a bit about peanuts.
Did you know that peanuts aren’t nuts? Technically, they’re legumes, but they’re often lumped together with true nuts in dietary surveys and studies, so it’s been hard to tease out their effects. When you hire a nutritionist, make sure to ask them if they know this. Don’t hire them (or fire them if you’ve already hired them) if they don’t.
Peanuts are truly great and you should have them everyday. A Harvard study has shown that women at high risk for heart disease who eat nuts or a tablespoon of peanut butter five or more days a week nearly halve their risk of suffering a heart attack compared to women who eat a serving or less per week.1
Another study shows that adolescent girls who consume just one or more servings of peanuts a week significantly lower their risk of developing lumpy breasts, which can be a marker for increased breast cancer risk.2
“But,” as your nutritionist would say, “nuts and nut butters are packed with calories. Just two tablespoons of a nut or seed butter have nearly two hundred calories.” And last time I checked, calories do make you put on weight!
If you think like a “nutritionist” and only look at the amount of carbs, proteins, and vitamins, you wouldn’t recommend eating a lot of peanuts.
But, if you listen to your grandmother and try to read about peanuts to verify, you’ll find that there have been about twenty clinical trials on nuts and weight, and not a single one showed the weight gain you might expect.
All the studies showed either less weight gain than predicted, no weight gain at all, or, get this…weight loss.3 Not only that, some studies have found that there’s reduced risk of abdominal obesity in those who ate more nuts.4 In conclusion, if you don’t want to get fat, eat peanuts! How cool is that!
But how is this possible? Nuts have calories and calories are units of energy. The first law of thermodynamics (that we had read in high school) states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This means calories can’t just disappear. So, where are they all going?
Let’s look at some more research.
In one trial, participants who ate up to 120 pistachios as an afternoon snack every day (keeping everything else the same) for three months didn’t appear to gain a pound.5 How could thirty thousand calories vanish into thin air?
Part of the reason is that nuts are so satiating and good at suppressing appetite that you end up eating less food overall. This explains why some studies found that people lost weight after eating nuts.
To test this idea, Harvard Medical School researchers gave two groups smoothies with the same number of calories, but one contained walnuts, and the other didn’t.
Despite drinking the same amount of calories, the placebo (nut-free) smoothie group reported feeling significantly less full than the walnut group.6 So, yes — it does seem that nuts can make you feel fuller faster than some other foods. And yes — it does also highlight the limits of calorie counting, something all nutritionists blindly rely on.
But there’s another reason — and this one is far more interesting. Nuts have the ability to boost metabolism. When you eat nuts, you burn more of your own fat. Researchers have found that while control-diet subjects were burning about twenty grams of fat within an eight-hour period, a group eating the same number of calories and fat, but with walnuts included in their diet, burned off more — about thirty-one grams of fat.7 Mind = blown!
The bottom line? Yes, nuts are high in calories, but due to a number of not-so-obvious reasons, nuts can be a lifeline without expanding your waistline.
Unless your nutritionist is a nerd, they won’t know facts like this, and that’s the problem. I interviewed 29 nutritionists in the past couple of months, and not one could see much beyond calorie counting when it came to having a balanced diet. They see food in terms of its nutrients, and nothing else.
All nutritionists have chauffeur knowledge, not real knowledge.
But you don’t always need a nerd nutritionist (they are a dying breed). You can always pick up a “good” book (or read a journal if you’ve got the time) to find out what’s really going on.
If that is too much, use your common sense. Why on earth would Coca-Cola make something “healthy” for you? It’s just sugared water. If it’s Diet Coke, it’s still sugared water but with artificial sweeteners. If you look at the calorie content, it would be close to zero, but, like peanuts, you dunno what else is happening when it goes inside your body.
Ask your grandmother. No granny on earth would ever stop you from having peanuts everyday, and no granny would recommend you to have Coca-Cola on a daily basis either.
Wisdom you learn from your grandmother is vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a nutritionist (and, of course, considerably cheaper). It’s a shame that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.
People make money mistakes because of greed and fear. But if a nutritionist doesn’t have command on their subject, it’s due to sheer laziness or pure dumbness.
But why do people hire nutritionists (or any other middleman) in the first place?
Your see, nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious. So it falls upon the nutritionist to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. It suggests, in a quasireligious manner, that the visible world is not the one that really matters, implying the need for priesthood.
In a world where your dietary salvation depends on unseen nutrients, you need plenty of expert help. This is the age of “nutritionism” and nutritions are our food priests.
This is the same story in almost every field. Their whole “expert consultation” industry runs because of a perceived information gap.
But what you have to understand is that foods (fruit, vegetable, etc.) are a hell lot more than the sum of their nutrient parts. They do a whole lot more, most of which we aren’t even aware of.
But since nutritionists are focused so relentlessly on the nutrients they can measure, they have trouble discerning qualitative distinctions among foods. So fish, vegetables, chicken, fruits become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of different fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients happen to be on their scope.
This brings me to one of the most troubling features of nutritionism. When the emphasis is on quantifying the nutrients contained in foods (or to be precise, the recognised nutrients in foods), any qualitative distinction between whole foods and processed foods is apt to disappear.
If foods are understood only in terms of the various quantities of nutrients they contain, then even processed foods may be considered to be “healthier” for you than whole foods if they contain the appropriate quantities of some nutrients.
How stupid!
I can go on, but this isn’t an essay on nutrition, so I’ll stop. What I wanted to highlight (apart from sharing a bit of titbit about peanuts and stuff) is that it’s your health, your life, your money, your job, your family, and it is you who should own it.
Everybody is incentivised to appear smarter than they really are. All financial advisors, lawyers, career coaches, beauticians — everybody. Listen to them, take advice from them, but verify before acting on them. Make the final call on your own. It’s your job.
Most importantly, fire the middleman.
Timeless Insight
The characteristic feature of a loser is to bemoan mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality — without exploiting them for fun and profit. Don’t be a loser!
This frame of mind completely changes the nature of the game. It makes you go on offence instead of playing defence.
Now your goal is not only to bypass what might harm you (i.e. to avoid having a downside) but also to benefit from it. The question you have to ask is, “How do I exploit my fate, others’ bad behaviour, negative culture, etc. for my benefit?” and you’ll see all kinds of opportunities opening up.
What I’m Reading
Humans are uniquely adapted to learn and imitate complex behaviours whose function is difficult to ascertain. One way we do this is by overimitating—imitating behaviours that seem entirely unnecessary (unless you are an overconfident, ethnocentric European colonialist.
— Erez Yoeli, Moshe Hoffman, Hidden Games
Tiny Thought
Self-confidence — the sense that “I’m not afraid to confront this problem and I think I can solve it” — doesn’t come from abundant resources. Self-confidence comes from achieving something important when it’s hard (but not impossibly hard) to do.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, your favourite Netflix series. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
Li TY, Brennan AM, Wedick NM, Mantzoros C, Rifai N, Hu FB. Regular consumption of nuts is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease in women with type 2 diabetes. J Nutr. 2009;139(7):1333–8
Su X, Tamimi RM, Collins LC, et al. Intake of fibre and nuts during adolescence and incidence of proliferative benign breast disease. Cancer Causes Control. 2010;21(7):1033–46
Natoli S, McCoy P. A review of the evidence: nuts and body weight. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2007;16(4):588–97
Martínez-González MA, Bes-Rastrollo M. Nut consumption, weight gain and obesity: Epidemiological evidence. Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis. 2011;21 Suppl 1:S40–5
Wang X, Li Z, Liu Y, Lv X, Yang W. Effects of pistachios on body weight in Chinese subjects with metabolic syndrome. Nutr J. 2012;11:20.
Brennan AM, Sweeney LL, Liu X, Mantzoros CS. Walnut consumption increases satiation but has no effect on insulin resistance or the metabolic profile over a 4-day period. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2010;18(6):1176–82.
Tapsell L, Batterham M, Tan SY, Warensjö E. The effect of a calorie controlled diet containing walnuts on substrate oxidation during 8-hours in a room calorimeter. J Am Coll Nutr. 2009;28(5):611–7.