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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