Fortunately, more Americans than ever are paying attention to nutrition. Unfortunately, there are thousands of unqualified individuals and organizations spewing nutrition misinformation on the internet, in your local bookstore, and even in the offices of well-meaning health care providers.
At the very least, nutrition misinformation confuses people and separates them from their hard-earned money. At the worst, it can actually make people sick. Among those with the most to lose are pregnant and nursing women, whose nutrition choices affect not only themselves, but their babies as well. So how do you separate the good nutrition information from the bad?
Learn to recognize these signs of nutrition misinformation:
1. They tell you to eliminate or drastically cut certain nutrients or food groups from your diet. There are very few reasons why you would ever need to eliminate any particular nutrient or food group. The best weight loss diet is one that is balanced in all nutrients and food groups. Carbohydrate is not responsible for the obesity epidemic, any more than fat is. Neither are dairy products, meats, or any other food group. The only thing that causes weight gain is eating more calories than you burn off in the course of the day. In fact, eliminating nutrients and food groups from your diet is a sure recipe for dieting failure. You will quickly become bored with your diet, or when you go back to eating the “normal” way, you will gain back all the weight.
2. It sounds too good to be true. For example, a diet that promises quick results. Keep in mind that if you lose more than 2 pounds per week, your body will think you are starving, and will compensate by slowing down your metabolism in order to save energy. Then, when you reach your weight loss goal and go off your “diet”, you will end up gaining back all the weight you lost. Or maybe they say a certain food or product is a “best-kept secret”, or will cure you of a disease. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t really be a secret. It would have been reported in every major newspaper and TV news program on the planet.
3. It uses buzz words like “natural”, “detoxify”, “purify”, “cleanse”, “rejuvenate”, etc. Just because something is “natural” does not make it harmless. For example, St. John’s Wort is a natural remedy commonly used for depression. However, some studies have suggested that St. John’s Wort may contribute to complications for pregnant women and their babies, like uterine contractions and low birth weight infants. As for words like “detoxify”, “purify”, “cleanse”, and “rejuvenate”, those are claims that are difficult to prove or disprove. Since the supplement industry can’t get away with using terms like “cure”, they often substitute these terms instead. And these words are sometimes associated with so-called remedies that can cause great harm to your digestive system and your health overall –including electrolyte imbalances that can lead to death.
4. They claim that the soil is depleted, and therefore vitamins and minerals are missing or depleted from our food. But like most life forms on earth, plants don’t waste precious energy making stuff they don’t need. If a plant contains a certain vitamin or mineral, it’s because the plant needs it in order to survive. If the plant was missing that vitamin or mineral, it would simply fail to grow. The fact that you are looking at a plant means that it contains the vitamins and minerals it’s supposed to contain. This claim is often used to promote the sale of supplements, which leads me to #5.
5. They have something to sell. They might be pushing weight loss pills, supplements or herbal remedies, diet books or DVDs, expensive seminars, or any number of creative ways to separate you from your money, to the benefit of the person dispensing the nutrition advice. Be aware that just because something is advertised on TV or the internet, or endorsed by a celebrity, does not mean that it is good for you or based in sound evidence. Although not all pills, supplements, books and seminars are useless, a Registered Dietitian can help steer you away from the scams. Which leads me to #6.
6. They tell you that Registered Dietitians, and the rest of the medical “establishment”, are not “progressive” enough and are part of the big “conspiracy” of “conventional” medicine. You can find or invent a “study” to prove almost anything you want, but that doesn’t make it a good study. Registered Dietitians dispense advice based on well-designed studies that offer strong evidence (this is called evidence-based practice) and that are as free as possible from conflicts of interest. One danger in recommending something that is not backed by sound evidence is that a study may come along later which shows that it actually causes harm. For example, a quality study called the ATBC study was designed to see whether beta-carotene supplements would help reduce the risk of developing lung cancer. Instead, it showed that taking beta-carotene supplements actually increased the incidence of lung cancer in smoking men. That’s why I’m not necessarily going to change how I counsel my patients based on a few small studies that seem to support someone’s favorite nutrition theory. To learn more about Registered Dietitians and the extensive training that makes us the nutrition experts, visit this link: http://www.eatright.org/HealthProfessionals/content.aspx?id=6857
For pregnant and nursing women and their babies, the stakes are too high to trust just any bit of nutrition advice that you hear. Articles, books, and TV segments by Registered Dietitians are trustworthy sources of information. You can’t be sure how much nutrition training your personal trainer, your health foods store clerk, or even your medical doctor has received, but it’s almost certainly much less than that of an R.D.
In my next blog post, I will address the topic of supplements and herbal remedies in more detail. Meanwhile, for many more details on how to spot nutrition misinformation, visit this article online:
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/spotquack.html
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