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Nd Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, who explains physics, cosmology and astrobiology to general aud...

“In science, a single study is not what is true because it must be verified to affirm that. Because one study could have flaws and things. But does the press go to that one study and then they say, here's the new truth when the science is still not resolved? But they never report that it's not resolved.”

StarTalk Radio · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“In science, a single study is not what is true because it must be verified to affirm that. Because one study could have flaws and things. But does the press go to that one study and then they say, here's the new truth when the science is still not resolved? But they never report that it's not resolved.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk Radio

Context

The conversation had turned to nutrition advice that keeps flipping, such as the cholesterol debate. Tyson asks whether the whiplash comes from the press treating single unreplicated studies as settled truth.

Transcript

StarTalk Radio Around 40:44 into the episode
Neil deGrasse Tyson

brain thing. Yeah. So

Gary O'Reilly

that's eating for brain health. Eating for brain health. And then taking the age of the brain down. Yeah. Downwards.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Wait, wait, so what about that? Remember a few years back, some study showed, wait a minute, don't remove all the cholesterol from your life. Right, because your brain is made of cholesterol or something. Could you back us? I don't think the jury is, I don't think that I don't think anybody's definitively told us. Because it went from don't have eggs, just have the whites, now you got to have the yolk, that's where all the vitamins are, don't have any cholesterol at all. Hey, wait a minute, all plants are made of cholesterol. It's crazy. That's how fatty it is. Yeah. Not fatty. Fad D. Could it be that a study comes out, and in science, a single study is not what is true because it must be verified to affirm that? Because one study could have flaws and things. But does the press go to that one study and then they say, here's the new truth when the science is still not resolved? But they never report that it's not resolved. They just give the science study because it's science. It's sensational. The sensational. So then another study comes and buffers that. So is that what's happening…

Rhonda Patrick

I think all of the above.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

All of the above. There's a lot of

Rhonda Patrick

nuance in science, as obviously you know, Neil. And that is even more so in the case of nutrition because it's so complicated. And there's so individualized variation in terms of how we respond to foods. But to get to your question on cholesterol, we know that dietary cholesterol that we're…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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