But read the article anyway. Meh.

MASSRUNNER_FRANK wrote: »

I don’t need to read the article to know any food you DON’T eat will automatically reduce belly fat. 😆😆

My thoughts exactly.

The foods are nice foods like Avocados, Fish and more. Visceral fat isn't good but I agree with Steve-O that there may be little to no evidence that any specific foods are proven to reduce visceral fat. Having said that I like the foods mentioned. They are fine dietary choices.

As a scientist I am a devout skeptic by nature.

@misterhub Thank you for taking the time to answer your own question! Pseudoscience, in these instances, is often related to some ridiculous extrapolation.

Blueberries are "good-foods" because their fruit, and have various natural vitamins, fiber, "natural" sugars, etc. Blueberries, in particular, are relatively high in a class of compounds called flavonoids.

As one example of my call out of "pseudoscience," there was a study in the British Medical Journal (https://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i17) that used large sets of population data to ultimately show that "increased consumption of most flavonoid subclasses was associated with less weight gain among men and women aged 27-65 followed for up to 24 years." They then go on to note that the "magnitudes of these associations were small, less than a pound (<0.5 kg) per increased daily standard deviation."

To translate, there is an association of increased flavonoid intake (often from blueberries) with less weight gain as compared to those who had less flavonoid intake.

This is correlative study, not a causative one. One could reinterpret the causal direction to say that those who gain weight more slowly then others also like blueberries more, or gaining weight more slowly causes a preference for blueberries.

To jump from studies like this to an article that says "blueberries help you reduce belly fat" is an awfully large leap!

As you may recall, GOAD is not a place for pseudoscience. It gets called out. It should get called out. We should not be spreading "fake diet news" here.

Of course, all of this is IMHO!

Steve makes good points. Correlation (association) is not the same thing as causation. It is more than difficult and extraordinarily expensive to lock folks up in a room like a laboratory rat for days on end and measure all their intake and outputs including exhaled gasses as well as poop/pee and blood products. We don't make great laboratory models.
Human dietary studies are amongst the most difficult type of studies to do.