http://www.care2.com/greenliving/a-study-in-confustion.html
A Study In Confusion
By Catherine Guthrie, Experience Life
The answer to the question “what to eat?” should be stress-free, especially for well-educated, logical, health-conscious consumers who follow all the latest nutrition studies. But nutrition studies are rife with problems of their own. Remember when fat-free diets were supposed to be healthy — until they weren’t? Or when margarine was a healthy substitute for butter — until it wasn’t?As much as people want nutrition research to be a simple, straightforward plotting from point A to point B, “the rhythm is more of a cha-cha — two steps forward and one step back,” explains Walter Willett, MD, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, in his book, Eat, Drink and Be Healthy (Free Press, 2005). Watching the dance is confusing, but steering your palate by it is crazy-making and might even be detrimental to your health.
Fending Off Food Angst
No one thought much about how food affected people’s health until the early 20th century, when scientists first broke food down into its basic building blocks: vitamins, amino acids, minerals and fats. Early nutrition advice focused on treating diseases of malnutrition, but by mid-century, rickets and scurvy were being replaced by diseases of dietary excess.
Americans today are nothing if not well fed. You know the score: More than 66 percent of us are overweight or obese. But do you know that four of the top 10 killers — coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes — are directly related to eating too much of the wrong foods?
How can something that should be intuitive go so wrong? Mark Hyman, MD, editor-in-chief of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine and author of UltraMetabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss (Scribner, 2006), thinks the misalignment stems from people’s bewilderment about what to eat. “There is considerable consensus on what constitutes good nutrition among scientists,” he says, “but somehow it gets confused, complicated and overinterpreted.”
Did someone say overinterpreted? Enter the media. Doctors were once the de facto source of health information, but now it’s journalists — and they have a voracious appetite for diet studies.
But not all nutrition studies are meant for prime time. Animal studies, for instance, are designed to generate conversation among researchers, not lead the evening news. And even the best human diet studies can be convoluted when squeezed into a few column inches or a 30-second news bite.
Recently, researchers reviewed more than 200 medical-news stories on the benefits and risks of three medications used to prevent major diseases and concluded that 40 percent were potentially misleading. So what’s a media-savvy, nutrition-conscious person to do? The first step is to understand the drawbacks of diet studies.
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14 comments
add your comment »THANK YOU FOR INFO I HAVE READ HERE TODAY, I AGREE WITH KATIE G. ... IF YOU CAN'T PRONOUNCE IT, DON'T EAT IT !!
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I think we need to all stop looking for a magic pill or a magic diet. We need to stop looking outside of ourselves for help with ourselves. Get back to natural as best you can and get up and move our bodies in ways that are enjoyable to us. Too many of us (myself including) spend way too much time worrying about what other people think about us and if we measure up to what they call "beauty". We need to take control and learn to enjoy ourselves for who we are.
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I've heard "if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it!" before and I agree. I have a hard time believing that people are really at a loss of what they should consume. It has ALWAYS been said to eat more fruits and veggies, lay off the meat, sugar, processed foods, etc. When did people start thinking something created in a lab was healthier than an apple? I'm a raw foodist, and it may not be for everyone, but if you want a great way to get more veggies, pick up a raw cookbook. I make some to-die-for recipes that my meat eating friends go crazy for. And it's easier, faster and much more simple than making a cooked meal.
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Dear Megan, dear all,
Thank you for another of Catherine Guthrie’s articles - always in-depth, versatile, informative and thought-provoking. Here is a short interview that I came upon recently summing a lot of basics on the why-s and what-s of what we do to our bodies in terms of a ‘diet’, the ‘best’ one... : ) Enjoy!
With my best wishes to all,
Namaste
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH9B29_pOGk&feature=related
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After reading your article I am now more confused than ever on what to eat and what to believe.
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worrying about it all will make you sick.
I just read Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" which opened with a study of Italian immigrants in a community in PA that had vastly lower rates of heart attacks, etc. They had switched from olive oil to lard for cooking. I guess they ate a lot of garden produce, but they also had a great sense of community.
Live well. Be happy. Love.
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It is important to find what works for you! There are many different genetic variables as well as environmental factors - including stress levels, happiness, variations in physical health and fitness, etc. (even within one person's lifetime) which greatly effect how foods are processed in the body. That's why there are no hard fast rules and very few constants that work for everyone all the time. For example, sometimes I can handle more caffeine, other times it does not work well in my system. Sometimes I love dairy products, other times they feel too rich and heavy to me, but these are not absolutes, like saying to myself, "No dairy, no caffeine!" I used to waffle back and forth with all this info and drive myself crazy and put lot's of rules and regulations on my diet, now I have relaxed a bit about it. I eat a mostly organic diet with lot's of fruits and veggies in it, end of story.
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Don't eat animal products. Period. A balanced plant-based diet, excercise, and all the rest mentioned above and you've got yourself a healthy body, mind, soul, and planet. Try it. I dare ya!
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take a smaller plate!!~
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That was a great article. You have be careful about what you read and not trust everyone. My mom taught me that you stay healthy when you know from whom you purchased your foods. You need to know the practices and reputation of who you buy from. This is true about how you eat and how you live. Always listen to your mothers and learn what is true and not true. Everyone needs to make his or her own choices.
Thank you for educating us about food choices.
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