Why Nutrition Science is Often Confusing and Misleading [Infographic]
Nutrition science is often confusing and misleading
I subscribe to Precision Nutrition's newsletter and today, they sent me a whopper of an infographic.
It gives 9 reasons why nutrition science is often confusing and misleading. I'd post the infographic here, but for some reason, it's not rendering correctly on the page.
So here's a link.
9 reasons:
- Nutrition research is still in its infancy – vitamins were discovered just about a 100 years ago.
- Funding goes to disease treatment – prevention gets very little funding.
- Conflicts of interest – if a soda company does a study on sugar's effects on health, what do you think the outcome will be?
- Too many variables – the scientific method requires controlling all variables and making changes to just a few. There are thousands, maybe millions of variables and nearly none of them are controllable, or even known.
- Nutritional studies are observational – they rely on people remembering or describing accurately what they ate a week or two ago.
- Measurement tools have limitations – many food labels are wrong. So how do you know how many calories you consumed?
- What you eat doesn't affect you right away – it could take 30 years for a six-pack of beer a day habit to ruin your liver and jack up your metabolism.
- A study's findings may not apply to you – many studies rely on obese people, or extremely fit athletes – because they're available for studies. The findings may not apply to you if you're just 10 pounds overweight or lead a very sedentary lifestyle.
- Reporting a study's findings is very difficult – if you think the research is difficult, try summarizing the findings!
It's a great graphic that shows exactly why you and I are both often confused when we hear or read about the “latest & greatest” in nutrition information.
Remember when whole eggs were bad for you? Now, not so much.
Remember “paper or plastic” bags the grocer offered you? Now, they charge you a dime for a paper bag and plastic isn't even an option.
Remember when saturated fats were bad and polyunsaturated fats were good? Today, turn that upside down.
Crazy, right?
