Overwhelm and Conflicting Advice Part 1
June 20th, 2024 by admin
If you've been feeling more burnt out and overwhelmed around health and nutrition lately, you're not alone.
I'm hearing it from clients, friends, and colleagues: our unparalleled access to information is both exciting - so much to learn! - and often, overwhelming, particularly when so much of it seems to be contradictory and in constant conflict.
Part of this is an expectation issue. We want nutrition and health to be simple, and completely generalizable. It's not really our fault - it's a pretty human desire to want to simplify things, and every headline, diet book, and viral reel TELLS us it can be simple - just try this and transform your life and health!
Let me just go ahead and burst your bubble - there will ALWAYS be conflicting advice.
But just being aware of the WHY can help with that feeling of overwhelm it causes, and can help us to learn how to better filter information to pick and choose what serves us, and what doesn't.
In Part 1 of this video, explaining those WHY's, I cover 2 points:
- Nutrition science is messy. Science, for all its objectivity, is still being practiced by fallible humans. Humans with ideological agendas and financial incentives, prone to all kinds of cherry-picking, funding bias, and over-extrapolating (coming to conclusions that aren't actually supported by the data).
- Nutrition in general is a difficult thing to study. We can't lock people in a lab like mice to completely control their environment and diet (and even if we could, how well would those results translate to the real world?). So, much of nutrition advice is based on observational studies. But no control = LOTS of confounding variables. Is it the food having the effect, or something else the person is doing, or something else in their environment? See: the Blue Zones.
And in Part 2, we'll talk about the biggest reason for why we'll never have consensus on what's the "best" diet or "healthiest" way to live…BIO INDIVIDUALITY…
Posted in: Health and Nutrition