Misinformation about Nutrients

Misinformation about Nutrients

Producer Potts  0:13  

The iron and spinach cancels out the calcium in cheese. Blending dairy products with berries blocks the absorption of the phytonutrients in the berries. Eating more calcium helps reduce the harmful oxalates in spinach, but we shouldn’t be eating spinach or dairy or making smoothies, in any case, every single day. On social media, I see more and more statements about these specific nutrients in foods, and it just feels impossible to know what to eat. Aside from asking you to break down all of these, which we won’t complain if you do, can you give us some simple guidelines that we can use on social media to avoid falling into the trap of overthinking our day to day food choices?

Dr. Sarah  0:57  

That is such a great question. So you know, just to take a quick myth busting moment, most of the information about foods and like food combinations or foods that should never be eaten together, most of that is complete bunk. It is taking one small fact and running like 17,000 marathons with it, like it is not. It’s extrapolating far beyond what that seed of truth actually is, right? So, yes, there’s some nutrients that work really well together, that work synergistically, that help each other be absorbed or utilized. And there’s some other nutrients that compete for absorption, so they, you know, having one with the other can block some of the absorption. But like, it’s not that there’s very rarely things that are, like, black and white. When it comes to biology, I was gonna say nutrition, but like, actually, like, all of the things that make us alive, there’s very rarely, like things that are like, it’s on or it’s off, right? Most things have this full range between zero and 100% to explore. So, so yes, there’s, there’s sometimes there’s nutrients, energy. Sometimes there’s nutrient competition. Sometimes this thing will block the absorption of this thing, but not block it completely, partially. It inhibits it, it lowers it. So all of these things that are fear mongering, right, to get to the real part of this question is, I think the number one thing to do is look for the sales pitch. That is why fear based marketing is a very effective strategy. Make you afraid here, identify the problem, sell the solution, right? Make you afraid of the problem. Make you vulnerable to buying my solution. And so my first suggestion when it comes to identifying misinformation, especially related to our, you know, personal choices on the internet, is to not to look for the credentials, not to look for the acronyms at the end of the name. You know, not, not, I mean, not even to like, run to your trusted source, although like that. We’ll talk about that. But look for, look for the sales pitch. What is this person selling? Me now, selling something, having a paid partnership with a brand, having a book, having a, even a, you know, a supplement line, right? Like that, doesn’t automatically mean that that information is bad. I have a book, and I am incredibly cautious to make sure that all of the information that I put out is scientifically accurate and balanced and also communicated with integrity and compassion and calming effect, rather than fear, right like and so as an example, the presence of me having a book for sale does not mean that my information is bad, but I hope you would look for that first. That first, right? If I’m giving you information. Okay, well, what is she selling me? Yep, I’m selling you a book. Okay, that’s step one. So step one is, what is this person selling me? If they are selling you, um, the alternative to the theory thing that you’re supposed to be afraid of, that should, that should get the little, the little like skepticism antenna going right? Like, oh yeah, let’s, let’s dig this deeper. So the next thing to look for is Sources and Citations. Now, some i. So pseudoscience peddlers will give you Sources and Citations, and sometimes they will believe that they’re giving you accurate citations and accurate readings of the science, and sometimes they will be intentionally obfuscating the science so intentionally giving you a paper with a lot of technical words in it so that they know that you’re not gonna be able to understand it and that you will have to trust them. So the presence of citations and sources doesn’t automatically mean that this is good information, but if there isn’t any that gets the skepticism antenna going again, right? We’re like, they’re trying to sell me something, and they’re not giving me citations for where this information comes from. So trying to sell me something, and they’re not citing their work. They’re not showing where their numbers come from. They’re not showing where this has been shown in the scientific evidence. Okay, so those would be two things to look at. So the next thing is how they respond to questions. So hey, I’d love to know the study this comes from. Are they belittling? Are they shutting you down? Are they providing a citation with lots of technical terms that there’s no way that you’re going to be able to understand unless you have a PhD in whatever that field is, right? Are they ignoring you? Are they blocking you? Right? Those are, those are ways to maybe get a gauge of the value of this person’s information. If you have the skills to fact check, there are some really good websites that can give you better information. I hope nutrivore.com is one of the places that you’ll go. But some other websites that I go to for good information, so I have a PhD in medical biophysics. So I can go straight to the medical research that’s usually what I do. I go to PubMed, which is our National Library of Medicine, a database for scientific studies. So that is one place that you can go if you feel comfortable going and looking at the scientific literature. The query is a lot better than it used to be. So you can start, you can kind of use it like Google. Now, in the olden days, you really had to know exactly your search terms to find the right papers, but now it’s a much smarter search, so you can really put in your question and be able to get some papers back if that’s something you feel comfortable with. Another really good resource is the Linus Pauling Institute. The articles are a little bit technical, but it’s really good nutrition information. So that is a place where I go for nutrition information that I super trust other like big like rigorous institutions like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Harvard health, they have really good information that can be a little bit more accessible, so that might be a good place to go and fact check, and if you have trusted people on the internet, so you have your go to science communicators, who you know are experts on that topic, like come and ask. You know, we answer questions all the time over here at nutrivore. So if you see something that you are, like, skeptical of, you were like, well, that person was trying to sell me something, and they didn’t provide citations. And I don’t feel like I have the skills to fact check this for myself. Feel free to ask me. I will save it for a video, maybe, or give you an answer right away, or maybe do both, but like, I’m happy to be the person. Be like, no, that’s not true. Or, actually, there’s a seed of truth. This is really interesting. This requires, like, a deeper discussion, because often the deeper discussion is actually the answer, the often it’s like a well for this person and this person, this thing, and this person and this person, this thing, right? That’s the very few, again, black and white things in Nutritional Sciences and biology in general. And then last, deepening our own knowledge base about a topic. The more we know about a topic, the less susceptible we are to misinformation about that topic. So engaging with good information online, learning more, learning about nutrients and what they do in the body, learning what foods have, what nutrients and how to combine different foods to get the full range of nutrients our bodies need, which is the educational resources that I’m creating with nutrivore that can help to increase our own knowledge base, so that when that piece of misinformation slides across our feed, telling us that we should never blend berries in a smoothie, we can view that with a knowledge base that contradicts that misinformation, that kind of immunizes us against that misinformation. So as a final note, also, we’re all susceptible to misinformation. That we’ve all fallen for some misinformation at some point or other. So even if you do all of those things and then realize later, oh man, they still got me like, don’t like, the guilt blame cycle here doesn’t help anything. What matters is not whether or not you fell for the misinformation, but what you did when you were presented with good facts that contradict the misinformation, and I think that being able to move forward with accurate information at that point is the right way to go. So I guess the biggest picture of this is anything

Dr. Sarah  10:35  

that’s getting you to like, be afraid of food, or to like, wait over think this mixed with this, or this mixed with this? The Nutritional Sciences show that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t, it doesn’t matter if you blend the berries in your smoothie. It matters that the berries are really health promoting food. It doesn’t matter that there’s some nutrient competition and some nutrient synergy, like, if we’re getting the full range of nutrients that our our bodies need, and we’re getting them in the right amounts, like our bodies can use them, like there’s, there’s no this erases this, or this negates this, like we just, we just don’t need to think about it that deeply, like we can eat a diversity of Whole Foods with lots of fruits and vegetables, and that’s it. That’s all. That’s really all we need to think about. We really don’t need to think about it in any more depth than that, and then I guess I hope that when you hit that misinformation online, and you identify maybe a sales pitch, maybe a lack of citations, and that gets The skepticism antennae going, I hope I’m one of your trusted sources. I hope I’m one of the places, whether it’s you coming and asking me on social media or joining my Patreon and putting the topic in the suggestion box, or coming to nutribure.com and exploring the site for yourself to find the answers. Like, I hope that I will be one of the places where you feel comfortable going to get good information whenever something does get those antennae going.