“For instance, a 2013 study found that people who ate three servings of nuts per week had a nearly 40 percent reduction in mortality risk . If nibbling nuts really cut the risk of dying by 40 percent, it would be revolutionary, but the figure is almost certainly an overstatement, Ioannidis told me. It’s also meaningless without context. Can a 90-year-old get the same benefits as a 60-year-old? How many days or years must you spend eating nuts for the benefits to kick in, and how long does the effect last? These are the questions that people really want answers to. But as our experiment demonstrated, it’s easy to use nutrition surveys to link foods to outcomes, yet it’s difficult to know what these connections mean.” When we question what the connections mean, for example whether these findings would generalize to people of different ages, we are questioning the