Have you ever wondered why a lot of nutrition advice out there is confusing or contradictory? Well, there are many reasons, and I will cover three of them in this article. Let's get straight into it. If you prefer to listen to the article, click here.
Reason number 1: Human beings like quick fixes, and quick fixes typically come along with misleading health claims.
Human beings like quick fixes. Or rather, we like to follow the path of least resistance whenever possible. This is true not just for dietary habits, but for life in general. Yet, we know that optimal development in any arena typically does not take place without long-term, time- and energy- intensive investments. To get a decent paying job, you have to spend months or years in training. To become a world-class ballerina, you can expect to bust a toe or two along the way. The same applies to weight loss, unfortunately. No matter how many magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle proclaim that you can lose 2 pounds a day, losing excess body weight can take months or years if you want to do it sustainably and without harming yourself.
The fundamentals of diet and exercise are and have always been the best way to get long-term results - everything else is likely just a money grab.
Nevertheless, we are all attracted to quick fixes as birds are to shiny objects. This is why fad diets have been so successful throughout history, and with fad diets comes misleading claims about the nutritional quality and health impact of foods and supplements.
If we could time travel to Ancient Greece, we would see people eating wheat germ and okra to get rid of high blood sugar. During the Victorian era, the first diet book was published by William Banting, an undertaker from England. It was titled “Letter on Corpulence,” and it promoted a low-starch, low-sugar way of eating for weight loss. Religion-backed eating practices, which encouraged people to abstain from meat and white bread and to consume mostly raw plant foods, were promoted by minister Sylvester Graham and physician John Harvey Kellogg. While their approach may have been nontraditional and highly focused on reducing people’s sex drives, I will say that they were undeniably on the right track to figuring out what a healthy diet should look like. Furthermore, their influence remains in the present day: Graham is the namesake of the Graham cracker, and Kellogg became famous for – you guessed it – Kellogg’s Cornflakes.
Graham was a major proponent of eating whole, minimally processed foods as a way to cast out "impure thoughts"of masturbation. Modern commercial Graham crackers would probably make him shudder.
In the modern day, we have our own fad diets which also come with the promise of rapid health improvements. We have slim teas, extremely low-carb diets, carnivore diets, and meal replacement shakes. There are a few major problems associated with these fad diets. For one, they do not help with proper, sustained fat loss; they are usually diuretics or laxatives which force your body to eliminate large amounts of liquid in a short amount of time. So, in effect, you do lose weight by using these products, but only as a consequence of dehydration, not a reduction in fat mass. Another concern if the safety of these products; supplements are not subject to safety and effectiveness testing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), so you can never be 100% certain of what you are getting.
Matcha? Dirt? We will never know - unless someone gets sick from it.
A third concern is the poor longevity of the results that these products promise to give you. In my practice, I have had clients share wonderful stories of losing 10-20 pounds by following the keto diet, only to regain that weight - and then some - months later. This does not mean that they didn’t try hard. It means that this way of eating, for most people, is simply unsustainable.
If you are considering following a diet that does not allow you to eat any of your favorite foods - not the low-fat version, or the sugar-free version, but the real thing - then odds are that you will not be following that diet for long. Balance really is key for finding an eating pattern that works for you.
Because food and supplement manufacturers know that humans will always gravitate towards solutions that require minimal effort, these fad diets – and the false nutrition information used to sell them to you – will likely be with us forever.
Reason number 2: Food companies use nutrient-focused claims to sell products, ignoring the overall nutritional quality of their products.
As modern humans, we have come to a point where it is normal and acceptable to constantly be on the receiving end of advertisements. Ads on social media, billboards, and radio are coming at us incessantly, and they are all trying to persuade you of something and/or push you to buy a product or a service. In the food industry, persuasive claims often have to do with the particular health benefits that a food may offer.
The FDA reviews these health claims to make sure that they are backed by scientific evidence. This regulation came about in 1990 with the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act and was meant to ensure that health claims on food could be trusted by the public. However, human beings are clever, and we always find ways to jump over the hurdles that we ourselves put into place.
Food companies when the FDA makes a new safety regulation:
One way that food companies manage to make perfectly legal, yet not-quite-true health claims is by focusing on single nutrients or ingredients rather than the whole food. Take for example a popular drink like Sunny D. If you go to their website, you will see that Sunny D is advertised as having 60 calories or less and 100% of your daily needs of vitamin C per serving. So right away, it seems like this is a low-calorie beverage that is great to have if you are trying not to consume excess calories, and that has the added benefit of being rich in antioxidants. But then, when you scroll down to the ingredients list, you will see that the first two ingredients are water and high fructose corn syrup. Lower down on the list you will find Yellow #5 and Yellow #6. Sunny D contains only a small percentage of orange juice. None of the information posted on the front of the bottle is false, but the front label hardly tells the whole story.
Instead of focusing on nutrients, some companies take the approach of coming up with names and labeling patterns that make their products sound more nutritious than they actually are. Nutri-grain bars for instance have half of the word “nutrition” in them, so they conjure up an image of health. Yet, one bar contains 12 grams of added sugar, which is half the amount that a woman is recommended to limit herself to in a day. Additionally, there is just one gram of fiber per serving, despite all of the “invigorating whole grains” that it contains.
The FDA can't stop companies from using a farmhouse on their product label, even if every single ingredient in said product is worlds apart from something that would be considered farm fresh.
There are countless examples of this type of marketing, and unless you stop and read the label of each product, it can be easy to make sub-optimal nutrition choices. The simple rule of thumb to follow is to go for foods that have gone through the least amount of processing possible. Broccoli is not likely to deceive you, and apples don’t need a sticker saying, “made with real fruit.” For anything in a package, label reading is essential.
Reason number 3: The people giving nutrition advice are usually not the people trained to give it
The other day, I was walking through a Barnes and Noble and I went through the health aisle, just to see what I would see. The vast majority of the authors of all the nutrition and diet books that I saw were medical doctors (MDs). Now, MDs are trained to heal people, so it is only natural that people would want to hear what they have to say about disease prevention. However, MDs are not really trained in nutrition during medical school. They are the foremost experts at diagnosing and treating disease, but when it comes to nutrition, there is an entirely different professional that is dedicated to that - Registered Dietitians, or RDs.
Despite this reality, you almost never see an RD at the forefront of nutrition conversations. Popular doctors like Dr. Greger, Dr. Mike, Dr. Gundry, and Dr. Oz are in some cases household names, but if you were to ask a random person to name a well-known dietitian, well, you probably wouldn't get a name.
The other unfortunate aspect of this is that many of these doctors are being paid to sell you something, and therefore, the information that they deliver can at times be heavily biased. Dr. Oz is famous for this. Despite being a brilliant triple board certified cardiothoracic surgeon, he is well known for shunning scientific fact in favor of pseudoscience, which has made him a millionaire.
He knows the science - he just chooses to ignore it.
Aside from doctors, self-proclaimed nutrition experts abound online. While it’s great that nowadays pretty much anyone with a camera and internet access can share their ideas online, this means that the floodgates are open for any and everyone with a smartphone to share nutrition information that may not be well-researched and could potentially even be dangerous. While it seems obvious, we have to remind ourselves that just because a certain celebrity or influencer is trustworthy when it comes to makeup tips, it does not mean that we should trust their nutrition advice.
Conclusion
The main takeaways are to do your best to stay away from unsustainable diets, read nutrition labels so that you can know what you are really being sold, and practice getting your nutrition advice from reputable sources. That will help you to sift through 90% of the confusing nutrition advice being thrown around in the media. For more complex questions, it is best to consult a Registered Dietitian (such as yours truly) who can work with you directly and help you to find an eating pattern that works with your lifestyle and health goals.
If you learned anything new or think that someone you care about could benefit from this information, share this article, and subscribe to the blog for regular updates on commonly asked nutrition questions!
Enjoy today!
References:
Adams, K. M., Butsch, W. S., & Kohlmeier, M. (2015). The State of Nutrition Education at US Medical Schools. Journal of Biomedical Education, 2015, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/357627
American Heart Association. (2019). How much sugar is too much? https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/sugar/how-much-sugar-is-too-much
Banting, W. (1864). Letter on Corpulence. Harrison.
Butler, S. (2018, August 22). Graham and Kellogg: The Health-Crazed Men Behind Our Kitchen Favorites - HISTORY. www.history.com. https://www.history.com/news/graham-and-kellogg-the-health-crazed-men-behind-our-kitchen-favorites
Dell S. J. (2015). What's wrong with Dr. Oz?. Missouri medicine, 112(5), 332–333.
Food and Drug Administration. (2017). What You Need to Know about Dietary Supplements. fda.gov. https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/what-you-need-know-about-dietary-supplements
Kellogg’s® Nutri-Grain® Soft Baked Breakfast Bars Strawberry. (2021). Nutrigrain.com. https://www.nutrigrain.com/en_US/products/soft-baked-breakfast-bars/kellogg-s-nutri-grain-cereal-bars-strawberry-product.html
Kiple, K. F., & Ornelas, K. C. (2000). The Cambridge world history of food. Cambridge University Press.
Sunny Delight Beverages Co. (2022). Tangy Original. SunnyD. https://sunnyd.com/flavors/tangy-original/
US Food and Drug Administration Office of Regulatory Affairs. (2019). Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) Requirements Attachment 1. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/nutrition-labeling-and-education-act-nlea-requirements-attachment-1
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