You can’t trust nutrition reporting.
Every day a new article announces a new “superfood.”
Coffee. Red wine. Goji berries. Quinoa. Eggs. Steak. Ginger.
They’ll help you lose weight. Sleep better. Live longer. Reduce cholesterol. Increase heart health. Lower stress. Make you smarter. Boost antioxidants and omega 3s. Give you psychic powers and levitation.
Or maybe not. Every other day, a different article says they’re terrible.
They contain hormones and antibiotics. They’re bad for the planet. Disrupt sleep patterns. Increase cortisol. Make you fat. Reduce brain capacity. Make your earlobes stink. Have gluten and carbs and transfat and were made in a facility with nuts. If your kids eat them you’re feeding them poison and are the Worst! Parent! Ever!
You can’t trust nutrition reporting
How do you know what information’s reliable?
Simple: None of it.
You can’t trust nutrition reporting at all.
Journalist and molecular biologist John Bohannon demonstrated why in an experiment, described in this Gizmodo article.
He did a deliberately terrible study, to show how easy it was to trick news outlets into reporting nonsense.
Using a fake name and a made-up institute, he used a way-too-small small sample size while ignoring relevant factors. This let him lie with statistics to create phantom results saying chocolate would help you lose weight.
He submitted this to a journal with a legitimate-sounding name, which publishes any paper for a fee, without peer review.
Then he issued a press release that pre-wrote the news story, so reporters could copy-paste without doing any work. He counted on their laziness to not bother fact-checking.
The results were predictable. No publications bothered to examine the paper or run it by another scientist to find the huge problems with it. In fact, none even noticed the scientist and institute behind the study didn’t exist.
You can’t trust nutrition reporting even when there isn’t malice
This is an extreme case. The vast majority of scientists honestly try to do their best work.
But as Bohannon explains, they often accidentally make the same statistical mistakes he made intentionally. Especially for a field as complex, hard to test, and poorly understood as nutrition.
For example, a result is considered statistically significant if there’s a 5% or less probability you could have gotten a result by random chance. But if you test for 20 different things, or run the same experiment 20 times, you would expect one of them to show a significance that isn’t real, just by accident.
Then you write up a paper on the one exciting result, while not bothering to mention the 19 other experiments that didn’t show anything interesting. And you’ve just put some bogus information out into the world, which news outlets will eagerly pass on.
The problem of reporting
This problem is even worse, because anything you read about nutrition is filtered through reporters.
Reporters don’t know how to read scientific studies. They rely on press releases, blog posts, and articles in other news sources. They can’t tell the difference between a legitimate scientist explaining results from a well-designed study, a scientist idly speculating outside their area of expertise, or a complete crank making stuff up.
Reporters also sensationalize the news. Their job isn’t to inform you with the truth. It’s to attract eyeballs and clicks.
“Chocolate helps you lose weight!” gets attention, even if it’s not true. While no one wants to read an article saying, “Actually, chocolate is exactly as fattening as you’d expect.”
Even if reporters later issue a correction, few notice it. Millions are left with a completely false impression. So you’ll be reading nonsense about chocolate helping weight loss in blog posts, diet books, and “eat this not that” guides for decades.
There are no superfoods or cheats
This same pattern plays out with all sorts of “superfoods.” And people eat it up, figuratively and literally.
Everyone wants to believe you can make yourself healthier by eating something delicious.
Or if it’s gross, eating something icky is still a lot easier than a lifetime of sensible food choices and exercise.
But the truth is, you can’t trust nutrition reporting on any of this.
There are no superfoods.
No ways to lose weight in the long term other than consuming fewer calories or exercising more.
No hacks to losing weight and keeping it off long term, other than methods that make it easier to consume fewer calories or exercise more.
I spent half my life obese. I tried the tricks, cheats, and superfoods. They don’t work.
You can’t trust nutrition reporting selling the dream that any particular food is going to take the weight away.
The only real way to lose weight
Ultimately, long-term weight loss comes down to shoving less food in your mouth.
You knew that already. It’s just common sense.
The hard part is figuring out how to consume less food.
After spending my childhood and early 20s fat, I lost 30% of my body weight and have kept it off for 20 years.
I did it by finding ways to make it less challenging for myself to build the habit of eating less food.
I wrote a book about this, giving strategies to make it easier to build the habit of eating less food. Strategies simple, convenient, and painless enough that real people who struggle with weight can realistically follow them for their entire lives.
Losing weight doesn’t have to be as hard as you think. But let’s be real. It’s not going to be easy as eating chocolate.
And you can’t trust nutrition reporting claiming some superfood is going to magically make you healthy.
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