Too much news can be bad for your diet

We’re drowning in information. Information overload is especially troublesome when interferes with our ability to make good decisions.

No, this isn’t about the current state of political discourse.

What I’m talking about is diet news, where contradictory information and the sheer abundance of material flowing from news media, social media and well meaning people you know makes your head spin.

Media messages about diet and food not only confuse, they erode people’s trust the in system altogether. And this nutritional backlash can develop into nihilism and rejection of even the most fundamental and agreed upon nutrition recommendations, as in, if they can’t agree about cholesterol why should I eat my vegetables? Why should I believe anything I read?

Too much information

A new study in Public Health Nutrition looks at how contradictory diet information affects attitudes and leads to negative outcomes.

The researchers picked a nutrition issue that’s been hotly debated for decades: the low-fat vs. low-carb diet for weight loss.

About 900 volunteers were randomized to different exposures to news. While all the participants read two news articles, the articles differed. The articles included in the study were actual news reports of scientific studies, edited so that the length and format were uniform, with the publication and author names omitted.

One group was exposed to contradictory information: one article about the disadvantages of a low-carbohydrate diet and one article about the disadvantages of a low-fat diet in different order. The second and third groups read convergent information. One group read one article about the disadvantage of a low carb diet, and another article on the ineffectiveness of a low-carb diet. Similarly, the third group read two articles that point to the same conclusion: one article about the disadvantage of a low fat diet, and another on the ineffectiveness of a low-fat diet.

The other groups were controls: They either read two articles that had nothing to do with nutrition (one about avoiding smoking, the other about the dangers of excessive sun exposure) or nothing at all.

Not surprisingly, the people exposed to the contradictory information expressed more confusion about what they should eat than those that read the convergent articles or the controls.

Confusion and distrust

Confusion, however, wasn’t the only result.

The people who read the contradictory articles expressed nutritional backlash, i.e., negative feelings towards dietary recommendations, and were more likely to express skepticism about nutrition advice altogether. Interestingly, those who were shown the convergent articles also experienced nutritional backlash and trusted nutrition recommendations less than the controls.

The authors conclude that:

“Exposure to any information about diet – whether contradictory or convergent – led to greater backlash than exposure to established health recommendations unrelated to diet or no articles at all. This again suggests that mere attention to these topics in the news media has potential to undermine public confidence in nutritional recommendations more broadly, a concerning finding since reports of dietary studies are commonplace in the news media cycle.”

Could reading lots of nutrition news inadvertently lead to missing out on health-promoting advice?

Previous studies have shown that dietary information overload has unfortunate results, with people ignoring everything experts say, including health recommendations that are completely established, such as the benefits of exercise or of eating vegetables.

But we can’t stop the flow of news, and nutrition research is popular: We all eat, and we’d all like to know which foods to eat for optimal health, weight and fitness.

So what should we do?

The first principle is to distinguish between guidelines and interesting studies.

Findings vs. guidelines

Guidelines are developed using a mass of scientific studies, the findings of which are weighed and considered according to the quality of the research; when the evidence is strong enough experts in the field issue a recommendation.

Study results should never be taken as actionable advice.

Acting on an isolated study is like looking at the weather in Phoenix Arizona at 11:15 am on December 24 2019 and concluding that Arizona’s climate calls for umbrella and coat.

Interesting studies, especially studies showing new or contradictory results, are followed by repeated and methodologically superior ones. Scientists and people in the field are used to evidence that leads in different directions and raises new question – scientific discovery is incremental and takes a very long time.

Science is the search for truth – it’s a constant pursuit – and nutrition study is inherently hard. Isolating the effect of diet on health is very difficult because we eat all sorts of foods over a lifetime, each of us is unique, and we live in different types of environments. Nutrition research’s end result is a statistical answer, telling us what’s likely. There are no certainties.

Nevertheless, when the evidence of trials is weighed together, and further, better studies are preformed, scientists can arrive at a consensus, a guideline, which is the best advice that can be given at this time.

The constant drip of information, sometimes also mixed in with misinformation, shouldn’t erode your trust in science; we actually do know quite a lot about how to stay healthy.

Dr. Ayala

“The first principle is to distinguish between guidelines and interesting studies”