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:

1. Nutrition research is still in its infancy – vitamins were discovered just about a 100 years ago.
2. Funding goes to disease treatment – prevention gets very little funding.
3. Conflicts of interest – if a soda company does a study on sugar’s effects on health, what do you think the outcome will be?
4. 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.
5. Nutritional studies are observational – they rely on people remembering or describing accurately what they ate a week or two ago.
6. Measurement tools have limitations – many food labels are wrong. So how do you know how many calories you consumed?
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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?