Practical guidance on evaluating sources and tips to help you navigate misinformation.
Practical guidance on evaluating sources and tips to help you navigate misinformation.
Nutrition Diva archives:
https://nutrition-diva.simplecast.com/episodes
Research Tools:
PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Cochrane Library
https://www.cochranelibrary.com
Examine.com
https://examine.com
Balanced, Reliable Sources for Health Information:
Mayo Clinic Health Information
https://www.mayoclinic.org
Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials
https://health.clevelandclinic.org
Nutrition Source – Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/
Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I’m your host, Monica Reinagel, and for the last 16 years, my goal in this podcast is to be a reliable source of factual and balanced information about food and nutrition. There’s a lot of news and noise out there and sometimes it’s hard to know what to pay attention to and what believe. That’s always been the case. But perhaps never more so than the current moment.
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Melanie, who is concerned about whether our current government officials and agencies can still be relied upon to give truthful and accurate information about food and nutrition. She asked if I had any recommendations for reliable sources.
In the past, I have relied on (and referred people to) resources provided by the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the United States Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control, all of whom maintained large databases of useful and up-to-date information on things like nutritional supplements, alternative and complementary therapies, health and nutrition research, food safety, dietary guidelines.
Of course, no agency or individual gets everything right, and I often supplemented these with other sources of information. But I took for granted the existence–and reliability–of well-funded government agencies staffed by serious scientists and competent administrators and largely protected from political winds and whims. Priorities and points of view might shift or evolve, but the basic mandate and function of these institutions were basically stable and solid.
Regardless of your political views, I think we can all agree that many things about our government and its functions that we have taken for granted for generations are no longer assured. Funding and staffing are being decimated; important resources and information are being removed from public websites. And so, Melanie’s question is an important one. How do we identify factual, reliable sources about food, nutrition and health? How do we evaluate the information we are being given?
Although this question may feel like it has taken on new importance lately, it’s not an entirely new problem. Mistrust in authority, conspiracy theories, shaky science and snake oil salesmen have always been part of the landscape. Some have long harbored deep suspicions about the scientists, institutions, and agencies that most of us regarded as perhaps flawed but basically trustworthy and authoritative. And, to be sure, a certain amount of skepticism is healthy.
But I also want to say that, for those who believe in the basic tenets of science (namely, careful observation, testable hypotheses, plausibility, reproducibility, and so on) there are limits to our credulity. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., although the arc of science may be long and often wobbly, I believe that it generally bends towards truth.
However, I did want to offer some practical suggestions for those of you feeling the way Melanie does.
Tip #1: Education and Credentials
First, what is the educational background and credentials of your source? There are a lot of self-taught nutrition experts out there. I know, because I used to be one. As some of you know, I originally studied music and started my career as a professional opera singer. Like most young opera singers, I supported myself with various day jobs and one year, I got a job with a publishing company in the research department of their health division.
It was a great job; I loved reading about health and nutrition and already knew a fair amount about it. Before long, I was writing short features and fillers for the publications. Within a few years, I had a pretty solid career going as a freelance health writer. I felt like quite the expert.
Until I went back to school to earn a graduate degree in nutrition. That’s when I realized the difference between someone who learns about health and nutrition by reading popular books and browsing the Internet and someone who has had a formal education in the subject.
I’m not saying that people with initials after their names are always right or that you need to have an advanced degree to know what you’re talking about. But it helps. All that anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, statistics, and research methodology they make you slog through really gives you an edge when it comes to spotting inconsistencies, fallacies, and errors in very scientific-sounding explanations.
This background also helps you put the facts into perspective. Many nutrition myths have their basis in something that’s actually true, but the facts have been misconstrued, misinterpreted, or simply misapplied. Something can be true without being particularly meaningful or relevant.
For example, it’s true that caffeine is a diuretic, meaning that it increases your urine output. However, it’s not true that coffee is dehydrating, because it contains more water than the caffeine causes you to lose. It’s also true that you’ll burn more fat while exercising on an empty stomach but that won’t necessarily help you lose more body fat in the long term.
Statistics are notoriously slippery. If I told you that using a random number selector instead of playing your mother’s birthday would make you a hundred times more likely to win the lottery you might be pretty excited, unless I also told you that you’d still be much more likely to be hit by lightening—twice—than you are to win the lottery. A lot of nutrition advice is based on exactly these sorts of statistics.
Tip #2: Call for Backup
A well-referenced argument is always more credible than one with no backup. But don’t be overly dazzled by footnotes. I’ve seen nutrition articles online studded with tiny numbers after every sentence and pages upon pages of references at the end. But a closer look reveals that most of the references are websites, magazine articles, and other sources that present the same arguments, also without citing any solid evidence. That is the equivalent of “hearsay” in a court of law, and we all know that hearsay is not good evidence.
I’ve also checked references and I found that the cited materials didn’t actually support the argument the author was making. It makes me wonder whether the author actually read them.
It gets very circular. There is a lot of nutrition lore that’s never been proven or even tested in any serious way— such as the idea that eating protein and carbs at the same meal somehow impairs your ability to digest them. It’s simply been repeated over and over again—until many believe it to be true.
Even worse, there is nutrition lore that’s been definitely disproven—like the idea that cooking foods in the microwave destroys all the nutrients, or that acidic foods make your blood more acidic and harm your health. And yet these ideas continue to be repeated (and believed). I’m constantly doing shows on stuff like this and you can find them all in the episode archives (I’ll include a link to the archives in the shownotes, along with a list of trusted resources that I use to research health and nutrition topics).
Tip #3: Check Both Sides of the Story
If you’re looking for a reliable source of nutrition information, you want someone who is willing to do their own primary research, with an open mind. That means checking the scientific literature directly, and reporting all that they find there. It’s not fair to cite the one study that supports their view and not mention the 75 that refute it. They don’t need to detail all 76 studies, but they do need to give an accurate representation of what’s out there.
In short, you want someone who will give you the facts, tell you where they got the facts, and then be very clear when they start giving you their opinion and interpretation of those facts.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the limits of scientific knowledge. What we know--or think we know--about health and nutrition is constantly evolving. As we get more information and do more research, we sometimes have to revise our positions. That said, basing treatment on the existing scientific evidence, rather than personal experience, hunches, or conventional wisdom, is called evidence-based medicine and it’s the gold-standard for the practice of nutrition, as well.
Keep in mind, however, that evidence-based medicine is grounded in statistics. The more data points we’ve gathered, the more confidently we feel we can predict what will happen. But we can’t guarantee something that was true for 99% of the population will be true for you. And that’s why even though research shows that eating every three hours is statistically unlikely to affect your metabolic rate, you still might find that eating more often makes it easier for you to lose weight. You could be the statistical anomaly. Or, more likely, it might be that eating every three hours doesn’t affect your metabolism at all but perhaps helps you control your appetite better.
If you’ve already found what works for you, then all the statistics in the world don’t matter. If you haven’t, it makes sense to start with the approach most likely to produce good results. And that’s why I encourage you to look beyond compelling narratives, pseudo-scientific jargon, and personal testimonials when shopping for health information and look for the type of things I’ve mentioned here.
As I wrote to Melanie, although some of the institutions we have trusted in the past may not currently be as reliable as they once were, I think the people you have trusted in the past are still doing their best to push back against misinformation and serve as credible resources. I hope you'll count me among them!
If you have a question you'd like me to answer, you can email me at nutrition@quickanddirtytips.com. And if you’d like to find out about having me speak at your next live or virtual event, you can learn more at wellnessworkshere.com
Nutrition Diva is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Steve Riekeberg is our audio engineer, Brannan Goetschius provides script editing. Holly Hutchings is the Digital Operations Specialist and Morgan Christianson heads up Podcast Operations & Advertising. Davina Tomlin is in charge of Marketing and Publicity and we also get indispensable support from NatNate Hoopes. Thanks to all of them and thanks to you for listening!