‘You nutritionists are always changing your mind about what we should and shouldn’t eat’

If I had a £1 for every time someone said that to me that I’d be a very rich women. The truth is that the basic principles of what we should and shouldn’t eat to stay fit and healthy have remained the same ever since I started to study the subject and long before that too.

What has changed in recent years is the focus of nutrition. When I went to University, which was over 30 years ago now, we were taught, for instance, that Vitamin C was needed to prevent scurvy. While this is indeed true, we now know that Vitamin C actually does much more than this.

In recent years, the focus of nutrition research has shifted from what we need to eat for adequate nutrition towards what we need to eat for optimal nutrition. In addition to guarding against deficiency diseases the right diet can offer protection against heart disease, cancer, cataracts, osteoporosis, dementia and many other such diseases, it can improve physical and mental performance and influence the way we age.

What has also changed in recent years is our interest in the subject and this is reflected in the amount of research into the effect of diet on all aspects of health and performance and also in the space dedicated to the topic on the internet, in newspapers, magazines and on TV and the radio. In some respects this heightened media attention is a good thing because knowledge is power and it allows us to take responsibility for our own health.

The problem is that in the UK nutrition stories in the media are frequently poorly researched, sensationalised, distorted, unrealistic in terms of the advice they give, inaccurate and misleading.

In an article titled ‘The mass media and other channels for communication nutrition information’ published in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, Michael Turner reminds us that ‘The mass media is not an extension of the education system; their role is to entertain not to educate. They are commercial organisations whose primary aim is to make money.’ He then goes on to say that ‘In media reporting there is often a lack of objectivity. Information is often selected to support preconceived ideas that reflect the prejudices of the journalist or producer…Publicity is given to the faddist, fashionable theories linking diet and disease with little apparent concern for the quantity or quality of the evidence behind them. Journalists are too ready to give publicity to cranky, unorthodox ideas or to concepts that conform to their own prejudices.’ The paper, from which I’m quoting, was published in 1984 but sadly, in my opinion, little has changed in 2013.

So how do we keep abreast of the latest research and thoughts on diet? Well, while there’s a truly scary amount of rubbish out there on the World Wide Web there is also some very useful, well researched, evidenced based stuff. So, if you are interesting in reading more on the subject, I thought I would share with you my top 3 must-read web sites and blogs.

www.gibneyonfood.blogspot.co.uk

www.foodpolitics.com

www.scepticalnutritionist.com.au

Of course there are many more so if have a favourite site that you would like to recommend please let me know, I’ll have a look at it and if I think it’s a good one I’ll post the link on this site.