Navigating Nutrition News

It is a well-tread cliche that our understanding of what is healthy to eat and what is not changes almost daily. The way the joke is usually told goes something like this: "One day broccoli is good for you, the next it could kill you."

Sadly, we have all come to expect that newly released nutrition studies or meta-analyses with unexpected findings will be trumpeted in the mainstream media with provocative—and mostly misleading—headlines. This is likely a key contributor to why IFIC found that 80% of consumers agree or strongly agree that there is a lot of conflicting information about what foods they should eat or avoid.

That is why it was so refreshing to read this recent article by friend of Pulse, Samantha Cassetty, about the recent headlines concerning red meat, eggs and butter.

Not only does the article address the findings and put them into their proper context for readers, but it also highlights the challenges researchers face when studying nutrition and aims to provide the reader with knowledge and skills they can apply in the future when reading the latest nutrition news.

As Samantha writes:

"Nutrition is an imperfect science and there’s some discomfort in that. Because of the way we study diet patterns and health phenomena, we might not get the most conclusive info. But we can gather a lot of evidence that points us in a solid direction. Just about all of that evidence tells us that your overall dietary pattern matters more than one thing (like butter or red meat) on your plate."