Episode 56 The Truth About Nutrition Science: is it influenced by Ideology?

Should you pay attention to the headlines about nutrition science?

In this episode I challenge popular misconceptions about nutrition and explain why you need to practice critical thinking about nutrition news and documentarys. How do you know when it is based on science or if the outcome has been decided first?

I also discuss the factors beyond diet that play a major role in overall health and longevity. Although nutrition is very important, It's not simply about what's on your plate.

Learn more about Fiona's speaking, radio and consultation services at Informed Health: https://informedhealth.com.au/

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Credit for the music used in this podcast:

The Beat of Nature

Music by Olexy from Pixabay

Transcript

Fiona Kane: 0:31

Hello and welcome to the Wellness Connection Podcast with Fiona Kane. I'm your host, Fiona Kane. Today I thought I'd talk to you a little bit about nutrition, in particular nutrition studies. So I know your eyes are probably glazing over already and that's probably what I wanted to address. So the very first thing I wanted to address is what I do know that happens is nutrition studies come up with all sorts of big sort of headlining type conclusions which the media then go ahead and use, including me. I'm part of the media and I use some of these headlines as well, so guilty as charged. Right, that's just, that's how it works. That's how you get eyes on what you do, right?

Fiona Kane: 1:15

The problem with this is that the public, I think, just start to go. You know, yesterday coffee caused cancer. Today coffee cures cancer. You know, yesterday broccoli was a super food, today it's not, or whatever. You know, I think people just get over it, right? So I want to just reiterate what I always say, which is, I think, if you stick to the nutrition basics, you're doing fine, and that generally means protein with every meal. My preference is animal protein, but whatever works for your body and loads and loads of colorful veggies, some fruit, nuts, seeds, eggs, good quality fats like avocado and olive oil, but don't be afraid also of things like real butter, just the real hard stuff, and the fat that comes in, like fish or chicken or any of that kind of stuff. Essentially, if your great-great-grandmother used to eat it and it's real food it's probably fine. It's just about the balance and how it works for your body. So just reiterating, just eat real food, I think, is a really, really good starting point.

Fiona Kane: 2:33

On the other hand, nutrition studies can be useful, but that's one of the reasons I talk about them is I think it's actually good to just give people what I see is the truth in them. In saying that again, though, everybody has a different opinion about nutrition. So what I see is the truth and somebody else sees that can differ. Sometimes there's some absolute facts and there's other things that differ based on ideology, because if you really want something to be true, you will believe it is, even if it's not so much. So some of the challenges with nutrition guidelines and studies are exactly that ideology right. What happens is we go into a study or into into a process of looking at nutrition already in our minds of what we want to find from it.

Fiona Kane: 3:30

So I'll give you an example too of some of the you know movies and things that over the years I can't remember what they've all been called now, but I know there was in particular a few vegan-style movies in the last few years that maybe Cowspiracy was one of them. There's been a few of them and when you looked at it I think one of them in particular they kind of said, oh, we're going into this sort of neutral and we're going to look to see what we can prove. You know, and they were diehard vegan activists that had been so for 20, 30 years. They were not going into it, neutral, right, and then they just unfolded all of these things. I think they said something one of these films. They said that eating an egg's equivalent to five cigarettes. On what planet? There's, absolutely there's. That's just so untrue that it's just so. I don't even know what the justification that's, just oh, anyway, it's just so bad that it's. But people believed it and people sort of freaked out and stopped eating eggs.

Fiona Kane: 4:38

So understand that if you are watching something or reading something, what is the motivation of the person has, who's writing it? And, unfortunately, if you have an ideal ideological attachment to the data or the attachment to the data or the science in inverted commas for those who can't see me then that's not necessarily going to be accurate and not going to be accurate at all and unfortunately that's what's happened in our, especially in our world. It's always been the case, but more and more so in our modern world, is that our ideology is what decides what science we find. And when you look at how and I'm not picking on all scientists, and I think that most scientists are well-intentioned and they do their best, right. So it's not, this isn't a have-a-go-at-scientist day, but if you have a look at how, if you have a look at how, how the system works, essentially, to be a scientist and to study, to be there in your lab and do the studies or be there at university and run the studies, you need funding. You either need funding, so you either need the university to fund you. At the moment, the universities will only fund anyone who attaches something to climate change. If you can say that you can just make up anything, vitamin K levels related to climate change is not a thing, but you can just pretend it's a thing and you get funding. So then in your output you've got to still say a few words about climate change to just justify the funding that you got right. The same thing happens, though, if you're getting outside funding. So if you're getting funding to do a study about meat or about dairy, are you being funded by the dairy company or are you being funded by the meat company or are you being funded by Beyond Meats or the nut milk companies? Right, whoever it is. So it's kind of looking at who's funding it.

Fiona Kane: 6:43

So when you see studies come out, often it's just the one line that people sort of say. I remember a study came out, years ago actually, that said that they'd done a study about saturated fat and found that it was bad and unhealthy. You know and it's quite interesting because when I read it because there's been a lot of studies the last few years to say, actually quite the opposite, I'm not concerned about saturated fat at all, because so many studies have come out just to say it's fine again, everything is about balance of what you eat. But what we've done is we've uh, we've, we've demonized a lot of real foods, uh and um, and put on a pedestal lots of not real foods. So we've demonized a lot of real foods and put on a pedestal lots of not real foods. So we've demonized the saturated fat that comes in chicken skin and we're sort of saying, oh, but eat your what are they called fruit loops or whatever it is? Or if we say, like the healthy version, it's sort of I don't know one of those special K or whatever it is.

Fiona Kane: 7:42

They're all cereals and we weren't born to have cereal for breakfast. It's just not normal. Even actually the term breakfast food, the term breakfast food, was actually created by cereal companies, yes, or by a dietician who was working for the cereal companies back in about 1917. So she was working for john harvey, kellogg and and the sanitarium and those groups and they came up with the term breakfast, breakfast food. Around the world there's no such thing as breakfast food. They you will notice that if you go to asia or, I'm sure, other parts of the world, you see it, the, I'm sure the same in parts of africa, whatever. People eat the same thing for breakfast that they eat throughout the day. But we created breakfast food and that apparently is a bowl of cereal because your body is made and primed so you can get up in the morning and hunt and gather a bowl of cereal.

Fiona Kane: 8:34

So, yes, it's not natural and it's not normal, but we've demonized real food and we've put these foods up a pedestal and say how wonderful they are, and so that's a manipulating of health news, of health education, and that has gone all the way through to all of our recommendations and things. So, unfortunately, the nutrition field is fraught with ideology and so there are still some really good people doing some really good studies. And again, I always go back to the basics. Are true, you know, meat-free veg, different kinds of veg, colorful veg, good quality fats. You know, don't be afraid of eggs, that kind of thing. Whatever your great-great-grandmother used to eat is probably a really good idea. And things like bread, you know't be afraid of eggs, that kind of thing. Whatever your great great grandmother used to eat is probably a really good idea. And things like bread, yeah, you know, can be fine. They can be fine for some people and not for others. But it shouldn't be your whole, the basis for your whole diet. It should be maybe a small part of it, but not the whole thing, right?

Fiona Kane: 9:37

So with nutrition studies, that we we do see these issues and that I was talking about that saturated fat study, and it was really quite interesting because when I had a read of it, the study actually said we can find no proof that saturated fat leads to heart disease none at all, right. So there's just no evidence, right. And I think it was one of those meta studies, which is the one where they look at lots of studies. So they're actually quite good studies because they look at all of the studies and go, okay, well, there's no evidence, or there is evidence or whatever. So in this case they said there's no evidence, right. But then what they did at the very end, I saw what they said. They, they, in their conclusions they said something along the lines of well, we found no evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease. However, we probably still should recommend you don't have too much, because it's bad, isn't it? Isn't it bad? I thought it was bad, I thought we decided it was bad.

Fiona Kane: 10:35

So it's this kind of thing where it's oh well, isn't this something we all believe? It's kind of like what do we believe at the moment? Lick your finger, test the wind. What do we believe? We all believe it's kind of like what do we believe at the moment? You know, look your finger, test the wind. What do we believe? Do we believe it's bad. Okay, it's bad, right, and that's what you see, a lot of it's like. Well, I think we have to say it's bad. So even when they do studies to say that it's not, they still say, well, there's no evidence that it causes any of these problems. But oh, it's bad, isn't it? We better say it's bad, okay, we better say it's bad, okay. So we'll say it's bad. And then when you read the news reports about it, the news reports will often say studies said saturated fat was bad. No, studies said actually, there's no evidence that it's bad at all. But we better say it's bad because, because, because, isn't that what we're supposed to say, right? So unfortunately, that's how some of the studies work.

Fiona Kane: 11:20

The other thing that you'll see there was one, I remember there was one. It was hilarious. It was about the paleo diet and it was saying how bad the paleo diet is. Right, and you know the paleo diet is not bad and what's bad or good depends on what works for you, but certainly not bad. But anyway that when they and it was down on mice, rats, mice, it was on a rodent study and I looked through and read what they fed the mice. And they fed the mice vegetable oil and glucose or some sort of sugar right Now, if you know anything about the paleo diet, there are two things that are absolutely banned in the paleo diet.

Fiona Kane: 12:02

So absolutely no vegetable oils. And vegetable oils aren't made from vegetables. They're made from seeds. They're very highly processed seed oils, so they're things like canola oil and cottonseed oil, that sort of thing. They're not good quality oils and I do not recommend them. They are really poor quality, cheap oils and they're heated up over and over and over again, which has a tendency to make oils rancid and not good for you at all, in fact bad for you.

Fiona Kane: 12:32

And sugar is by no means the only sugar you'll find in a paleo diet. Might be they might add something like a little bit of honey, or I think they do that sometimes. Or they might add sort of say, fruit, so it might be the sugar from banana or something, or dates, but certainly there's no added glucose or whatever. So anyway, the whole diet they gave the mice was opposite of a paleo diet, but then they said it was a paleo diet and then they said the paleo diet is bad right. So there's those sorts of things that happen all the time too. So the first thing I do is look at, well, who funded the study? And when they say this diet's bad, what did they actually feed the mice? And then you look at what they feed the mice and you think, okay, that doesn't make sense. So, unfortunately, you can't always believe what you read and what you see. You just can't Look.

Fiona Kane: 13:22

The other thing, too, is most nutrition studies are done. There's a couple of other things you need to know. So if it's a population study where a population are reporting their diet, sometimes once a year, they're filling in a food diary Once a year. They're filling in a food diary to say what they ate. All year. I don't remember what I had last week, do you? Or might not even remember what you had last night. So you're doing a year's worth in one sitting. Some of them they're checking in with them once every 10 years and they get a rough idea. So you don't really get a good idea of someone's diet through that.

Fiona Kane: 13:56

The other thing that they do is and the other thing to consider is, there's a million things that will affect your health. So nutrition is one of them and it's very important and of course, I'm always going to acknowledge that because I am a nutritionist and I think nutrition is vitally important. However, it's nutrition plus, and I've talked about it here before. It's all the things we feed ourselves. So are we feeding ourselves? Are we listening to books or looking at art or experiencing culture or things that are helping us bloom and that are helping us grow, that are helping our mental health, our physical health? Are all those things that we're exposing ourselves to quite the opposite and damaging to us.

Fiona Kane: 14:43

It depends on the individual what that might look like. Do we have a support network around us? Do we have friends? Does someone have our back? Because we know the longest study done and the study was about longevity and it was about what ultimately created longevity, and it was not your cholesterol number, it was whether or not someone had your back right, so whether or not you had a supportive relationship and supportive relationships. So, do you have supportive relationships? Are you part of a community? Are you involved in your community? Are you moving your body and Are you involved in your community? Are you moving your body and are you wanted or needed somewhere? All of those things are equally as important as the diet.

Fiona Kane: 15:28

So, unfortunately, when you look at a population study and say, well, all the people who ate I don't know chicken these people did well and these people didn't it might have nothing to do with the chicken and have everything to do with all of the other aspects or what they ate the chicken with. So one person they're having their chicken as part of a bucket that they got from KFC, with their Coke and chips. The other one's having it with all of their colorful vegetables. Very different outcomes, right? So you've got to understand this. The other thing that you see is when they do studies on things like meat, they lump it all in together so they don't say, okay, so people who eat meat good quality meat, again, with all the different colored vegetables and olive oils, and they have a really lovely balanced diet and they move their body in and they do all these other things they do really, really well because, generally speaking, all those things would go together. The person who's going to have the really good quality diet would probably be moving their body, probably have an awareness around their mental health and just have, overall, a lot of those things in check, whereas the people who are eating the meat that comes in the drive-through the drive-through or at the servo that's Australian lingo, australian language for service station, gas station call it in places like the States, but we call it the servo. So the thing that you pick up in the servo on the way home or the drive-through on the way home again, it's going to come with your Coke and your fries and your Mars bar and whatever other crap that you're eating and probably not going to be supporting a healthy lifestyle.

Fiona Kane: 17:06

So when you say that people who ate meat sort of all died or had this or had that, they're not differentiating between those two groups of people, and they're two very different groups of people. The other thing they do is they do association. So association is that you kind of look at all of the things. So you might say, in this group of 100,000 people, that X amount of them died under the age of whatever, or X amount of them had heart attack, and then what you do is you look at all of the things that they all had in common. So all the people who had a heart attack, what did they all have in common? And what they could have had in common is they all have I don't know, they all have blue heeler dogs or they all have Labradors, right? So do you say then that Labradors cause heart attacks? No, you don't right. So they, but they kind of do that. So they do the same thing with nutrition.

Fiona Kane: 18:04

So you'll say that all people that had heart attacks, uh, they all drank milk or something and they all ate meat. They also all ate broccoli. They had this, they had that, whatever, uh, and then we make an assumption that it was one of those things or two of those things and we blame those things. And I'm not saying that there's no truth in any of it, just saying that it's not quite. I think when people think of nutrition studies, they don't fully understand what they are and what they look like. So just clarifying for you that that's the kind of issues that you have around nutrition studies, which doesn't mean that they're not valid at all and they've got no use.

Fiona Kane: 18:45

However, it does mean that you can, kind of, when you hear a study, you don't have to immediately stop eating meat or immediately start eating something thing, but at the same time, just I think what I try and do is again, this is what I try and do on behalf of my clients is just keep a general kind of finger on the pulse, see what's going on, see what's coming through and some stuff comes through that's really useful and really helpful, and then we will help our clients with that and we will shout that from the rooftops and a lot of stuff comes through. That's just noise and we will identify that as well. So, um, so don't completely ignore nutrition, because sometimes when people hear, all hear this and have an awareness that, oh, they're all going on with all sorts of rubbish, they kind of it's a old-fashioned saying, you've probably heard me say it before throw the baby out with the bath water. My, my grandmother used to say it and there's value in the baby. You don't throw the baby out too, right? So you don't have to pay attention to every single nutrition study and have your eyes glued to it, but don't throw out the idea of nutrition as being important, because it is vitally important.

Fiona Kane: 19:57

And you may just want to choose who you listen to or where you get your nutrition information from, and narrow that down to a few quality sources and even potentially, sources. I certainly myself, when I'm looking at nutrition information or when I'm looking at experts talking about nutrition, I will listen to nutritionists who I agree with, and I'll listen to nutritionists who I agree with, and I'll listen to nutritionists who I don't agree with, because I think it is good to get a different point of view, and sometimes the ones I don't agree with they talk me around a bit and I think, okay, yeah, now you've got a point there. Sometimes they just help me understand that my point, or what I believe to be true, is actually true. But either way, it's actually really, really useful and I advise that, with anything, it's always be prepared to listen to the other side, be prepared to listen to a different opinion, and so I certainly do that when I'm paying attention to nutrition information as well.

Fiona Kane: 20:49

Anyway, I just thought that that would be useful for you to kind of know a little bit about nutrition studies and why you don't always have to take them completely seriously, but why it's also important to pay attention to nutrition though it is really important but maybe just to choose where you get your information from and don't go out and make big radical changes and completely stop a whole bunch of nutrition in your diet, because you saw one movie. A lot of movies at the moment are being funded by people who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in certain industries, particularly people who have invested it in things like Beyond Meat, right? So those people they go out and invest a couple of hundred million dollars in that they want a movie that's going to say that meat is bad and Beyond Meat is super healthy. That's what the outcome is going to be. Doesn't matter what happens, that's what the outcome is going to say, right? So just know that, because a lot of people are damaging their health by listening to a lot of these things, and a lot of these things are, like I said, they're about an ideology, and you can have your ideology, you can have your religions, you can have your beliefs totally up to you. But the way I see it, they are not science. Science and ideology are not the same thing. And when I talk about nutrition, I am talking from a point of view of science. That's my advice is around the science and what you do and don't do with the ideology, totally up to you.

Fiona Kane: 22:15

Anyway, I hope that was useful for you. Just to clarify a few things. The main thing is go back to basics and listen to get your nutrition advice from a place where you feel it is safe and good quality, and just don't listen to too much of the noise or clarify when you do step out and watch and listen to other things. Don't just suddenly stop or change your diet. Maybe get some advice first.

Fiona Kane: 22:39

Unless your diet's so ordinary and so bad and that's telling you to start eating some vegetables and eat some meat and have a healthy diet, then maybe that's a good idea. But certainly don't stop eating a whole bunch of nutrition just based on one movie, because it's not always as um, it's not always what it seems to be. It's very easy to use data to manipulate people into believing whatever it is that you want them to believe. Anyway, I hope you have a great week. Don't forget to on either side here for those who are watching, you can follow and you can watch another video. And please like and share and tell other people about this podcast. I'd really appreciate that and I'll see you all next week. Thank you, bye.