Why does nutrition research continue to contradict each other?

“Eggs are good for you” and “Eggs are bad for you.” “Wine is good for you” and “Wine is bad for you.” While coffee is a superfood, it is also a health hazard. “You should never eat saturated fat,” but “according to science, it’s actually not that bad.”

Nutritional research always seems to contradict each other. At one moment we hear that certain types of food are bad when they are good, unhealthy when they are healthy. This trend occurred both across foods and food groups. Like the low-fat craze in America in the ’80s, some flawed studies in the ’40s that correlated low-fat diets with lower heart disease risk morphed into a health-promoting dietary ideology. . the media, the food industry, and the U.S. government. However, this significant reduction in fat intake actually resulted in an increase in diabetes. Not to mention nutritional deficiencies from not eating entire food groups.

Accurate nutritional information is essential to influencing our nation’s food policy, marketing, and education. After all, it is thanks to nutritional science that many of us were forced to change the concept of healthy eating from pyramids to plates (because the government did not know that no one eats in pyramids) ). This pervasive contradiction therefore becomes concerning and frustrating for people who want to take better care of themselves through food.

One reason for nutritional uncertainty is design flaws in nutritional studies. First, nutrition research is often underfunded, so small sample sizes can produce results that are not generalizable to the broader population. Most studies tracking dietary behavior rely on self-report. For example, you must report everything you eat during the day, including the exact amount and exact time. The problem is that most people don’t remember what they ate in the long term (I don’t even remember what I ate this morning). It is unrealistic to measure every meal with scientific precision. Additionally, randomized controlled trials, the gold standard in dietary research, divide samples into different dietary treatments over an extended period of time. However, people are notoriously bad at sticking to diets (this is why 95% of diets fail). Finally, nutritional research is never conducted in a vacuum (which would make the situation quite uncomfortable for the participants), and it is important to note that nutritional research is never conducted in a vacuum (which would make the situation quite uncomfortable for the participants), and that factors such as activity level, access to food, religion, income, etc. We cannot control for major confounding variables.

But a more sinister problem stems from bias in nutrition reporting and publications. Because most people learn science from the media rather than academia, journalistic headlines must rely on bold rhetoric to grab the audience’s attention. This often means these headlines are polarizing, often at the expense of factual reporting. After all, headlines like “Coconut oil contains some nutrients, but it can also cause adverse effects when consumed in large amounts” are similar to “Coconut oil has never been healthy” Much less interesting than the headline (for which my entire South Indian family punches the wall in unison).

At the heart of this issue is the idea that food needs to be moralized, that we need to have a definitive position on whether it is “good” or “bad”, whether we should eat it or not. think. But what if food had no such moral value and was just… food? What if all foods had pros and cons and “healthy” looked different to different people? For example: What if an apple was viewed with the same moral value as chocolate cake, bacon, or soup, and the food you consumed had no bearing on your moral worth as a person?

This neutral philosophy of food is a fundamental tenet of intuitive eating and eating disorder care, but it seems radical in contrast to modern views of food as a dogmatic ideology. Is it any wonder that for the millions of people who suffer from eating disorders and disordered eating, it is so difficult to internalize a guilt-focused spirituality that underlies behaviors such as restrictive eating and bulimia? there is no. Because such moral rhetoric is all around us – on magazine covers, in dinner table conversations, even in bakery names like “Sinful Sweets”…it’s not like the devil wants you to know that Because I’m watching you eat chocolate covered strawberries.

Furthermore, as the effects of climate change increase and information on forced labor and animal welfare becomes more widely available, it is clearly unfair to view food completely in isolation and neutrally. Eating does not take place in a vacuum. Again, it gets really claustrophobic. Given the nature of our nation’s food system, many of the foods we choose are likely to be causing unintended harm in some way, an unsettling reality to deal with. Our food choices do have political power, but the political climate inevitably influences our food choices. Especially since college students rely on Monopoly money (also known as food points) to get through the day.