Ask a public-health/nutrition student

[Aractus]

Health beliefs are much like religious beliefs. Many people feel that they have an exclusive right to know the "truth"; and you always hear claims from people selling "miracle products" about how they know something that the mainstream establishment doesn't (just like religious leaders have knowledge about humanity that secular anthropologists, historians, and scholars can't possibly know).

What irks me, and has done for many years, is the terrible shit that gets advertised on TV. Whether its diets, or "nutrition" products, or pharmaceutical medicine, it has no place on TV. With so much misinformation out there it can be difficult for consumers to find the valid information (that is the information supported by evidence).

There are a number of organised groups that actively promote misinformation. I often target the Vegan and specifically 80/10/10 crowd, but the pro-ana, or the anti-medicine (e.g. Scientology or Jehovah's Witnesses or Anti-vax). A lot of the time these groups simply capitalise on common misconceptions, or ambiguous data from a Journal that doesn't mean anything significant.

Individuals can be duped by misleading information, and then become stubborn in their defence of their "knowledge" - I know I'm guilty of this.

Here's an example of misinformation...

    Consider this page that I found claiming "gluten confirmed to cause weight gain". Read it if you like. Notice how they don't even provide an actual link to the Journal article (Soares, et al., 2013). On the web page this sentence is bolded "The 'wheat belly' syndrome and how it leads to other health issues was the purpose of their research." but nowhere in the journal article itself does it ever say "wheat belly". And as it's not open-access how is anyone supposed to know that? Furthermore Soares, et al. found that "the gluten-free diet slowed body weight gain", they didn't make the finding that gluten caused it in the first place as claimed by the website.

    And this was in rats, not humans. A positive result in animals is meaningless when discussing possible dietary recommendation to be made to humans. All it means is that further research in humans might be a good idea. And even then you need a RCT (the minimum requirement) or a meta-analysis (preferred) to get enough evidence to make a dietary recommendation in humans.

    There are many many advantages to using animals first. Rats is how they isolated and identified what hormone was responsible for subduing hunger (Leptin) in the 90's, following decades of research. I imagine that if we didn't have animals to experiment on, that today we still wouldn't know what hormone tells the brain to stop eating. It takes a lot longer than animal experiments to determine a result from epidemiology, which is why animals are used to find areas for epidemiological study.

    "This study report, according to Sayer Ji proves that the major factor of obesity is gluten, not calories." Notice they're quoting a 3rd-party, they aren't even getting their information direct from the Journal. "Sayer Ji" has nothing to do with the research article. Soares, et al. do not make the claim that gluten is "the major factor of obesity", this is the claim they make (which itself is far too strong a claim to be making from an animal study): "Our data support the beneficial effects of gluten exclusion in reducing body weight and adiposity gain, inflammation and insulin resistance."

That's just one example that I recently found. A website quoting some other unqualified person explaining what a journal article says, all the while failing to explain that this was only in rats. Often times things have been discovered in animals that made scientists excited, only to find out that humans are different.

Anyhow ask away, I will try to provide recent peer-review literature wherever possible.