The Hunger for Clarity Regarding Nutrition

Among our daily choices, few things impact our health, well-being, and emotions more than food. Whether it’s the pleasure of eating a piece of chocolate cake or the anxiety of figuring out if salt is good or bad for you, food plays a vital role in how we feel. With so much nutrition advice available, it can be overwhelming to sort out what’s accurate, how to apply it, and what will truly benefit us.

The confusion is multifaceted, Dr. Vanita Rahman, a board-certified internal and lifestyle medicine physician and certified nutritionist, told The Epoch Times. Access to limitless information via the Internet, countless blogs, and scientific journals can lead to information overload—and plenty of contradictory facts and opinions.

To top it off, doctors may not be able to help us resolve lingering questions, even when the research is clear.

“Most physicians really don’t get much education in nutrition—very little, in fact—is provided during their medical education or training,” said Rahman. “There’s this huge knowledge gap between what the research shows and what the average health care provider knows.”

In addition, experts and influencers often clash over their preferred diets, making it difficult to have a productive discussion about nutrition unless you are in a group with similar views.

Nutrition science is equally confusing with ongoing debates about red meat, saturated fats, carbohydrate-to-fat ratios, and so on.
The food industry also plays a role, exerting its influence on what we buy via marketing campaigns with budgets that can reach to more than $500 million. This constant influx of conflicting information makes the nutrition landscape challenging for those seeking guidance on making healthier choices.

Clarity Amid Confusion

Cutting through all the noise is vital as our overall health is declining, life expectancy is the lowest it has been in two decades, at 76.4 years, and illnesses that were once thought only to affect older adults are now being diagnosed in younger and younger people. 
Life expectancy has steadily increased since 1900 (when it was 47 years), climbing to almost 79 years in 2019. However, in 2020, it dropped to 77, then to just over 76 a year later in 2021—the most significant drop over two years since 1921–1923.
At their annual conference in May, the American Gastroenterological Association announced that a new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data found that in the two decades between 1999 and 2020, rates of colorectal cancer grew 500 percent among children aged 10–14, 333 percent among teens 15–19, and 185 percent among young adults aged 20–24.
Colon cancer typically affects adults over 50, but there has been an increase in diagnoses in younger people over the last fifteen years. Some of the risk factors are lifestyle choices like smoking, alcohol, being sedentary, obesity, and a diet that contains excessive red and processed meats, says the Cleveland Clinic.

Obesity rates have soared in Western countries, creating a sharp contrast to the struggles faced by many developing nations, where the challenge is often not having enough food rather than too much.

For example, obesity rates for U.S. adults reached 41.9 percent in 2023, according to the CDC. The rates for children and adolescents are also on the rise and have reached nearly 20 percent for those aged 2-19, accounting for almost 15 million young people, according to NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) data collected between 2017 and 2020. These rates have increased more than threefold since the 1970s.

Contributing to the obesity crisis are factors such as the prevalence of ultra-processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutrition, our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, stress, and growing dependence on technology.

Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and a prize-winning author, told The Epoch Times that nutrition is confusing because people eat extremely complicated diets.

“And you can’t lock people up in metabolic wards for 40 years and feed them different kinds of diets and see what effects they have,” she said.

Nestle says conducting experimental research isn’t feasible, making what’s out there purely observational. In other words, instead of experimenting on human participants directly, researchers glean insights by collecting data via observation of study participants.

Observational and preclinical research using animal models or cells often faces criticism. Conducting controlled nutrition studies on humans is virtually impossible—except for very short-term experiments.

The confusion increases with the growing number of diets promoted by nutrition gurus and influencers, who claim that their favored diet can fix a multitude of health problems.

Perhaps what we eat is more about personal choice than just the health implications. Enjoyment, too, is often overlooked in discussions on nutrition.

“It is a very personal issue for everyone because we are all heavily invested in food,” Rahman said.

“I think it’s not a matter of whether each person needs a unique diet, she said. It’s more a matter of, within these foods that have been proven to be helpful, in what shape or form would you enjoy consuming them? What would taste good to you? What would be doable for you? What would be something you could see yourself enjoying?” she added.

Nestle shares her insight regarding the often contradictory advice of influencers and the diets they follow.

“Everybody eats. Everybody has personal experience. Everybody’s an expert. But, the conflicting advice is on the margins. The basic advice has never changed. The first dietary guidelines in 1980 said to avoid too much sugar, salt, and saturated fat. They’re still saying exactly the same thing,” she stated.

The Dietary Landscape

Over the past 50 years, the types of foods available to us have drastically changed. Today, many foods in grocery stores and restaurants are highly processed, containing ingredients our bodies have not encountered before. While scientists and consumers gradually unravel the health implications, one thing is evident. In much of the Western world, ultra-processed foods now dominate our diets, raising concerns about the future health of both ourselves and our children.
Ultra-processed foods often contain additives, including artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, emulsifiers, and high levels of sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats—all of which can wreak havoc on our health. They also often have low nutritional value despite being high in calories and are engineered to be highly addictive—which keeps us coming back for more.
In an article published in The American Journal of Medicine, doctors from Florida Atlantic University Schmidt College of Medicine suggest that the rise in ultra-processed food consumption may be a significant factor in increasing illness and death rates and shortening lifespans.
A growing body of research shows that ultra-processed foods play a role in our increasing rates of weight gain, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and all-cause mortality.
Ultra-processed food consumption is on the rise worldwide. In the United States, ultra-processed food now accounts for 57 percent of daily energy intake for adults, increasing to 67 percent in young people, according to a study published in the BMJ in 2024 and based on NHANES survey data.
Processed meats such as hot dogs, bacon, sausages, and lunch meats are also a growing concern as research suggests their consumption leads to increasing rates of stomach and colorectal cancer. More concerning is that these foods are heavily marketed to children in restaurants and grocery stores and are a staple of school lunches across the country.
In 2016, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer released a report categorizing processed meats (ham, sausage, bacon, and hot dogs) as Group 1 carcinogens–or carcinogenic to humans. Other members of group one carcinogens include tobacco and alcohol.
Another player in the nutrition landscape is the food industry, which creates many foods found on supermarket shelves and markets them with billion-dollar budgets. According to the University of Connecticut (UCONN) Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health, the food industry spends $14 billion annually on advertising—based on a report released in 2017.

“More than 80% of this food advertising promotes fast food, sugary drinks, candy, and unhealthy snacks, dwarfing the entire $1 billion budget for all chronic disease prevention and health,” according to the UCONN Rudd Center.

“Food marketing negatively affects children’s and teens’ diets and health. It increases calories consumed, preferences for unhealthy product categories, and perceptions of product healthfulness,” it added.

However, food companies have multiple stakeholders, including shareholders. That means their interests are not solely the health of the consumers who buy their products.

Nestle takes a starker view and suggests we see their efforts through a financial lens.

“The food industry is not a social service agency. It’s not a public health agency. Its job is to make money for stockholders, period, end of story. And once you understand that, everything they do makes sense,” she said.

Nutrition Advice, Made Simple

Although there is much chatter about what diet is best, some simple practices can help us make better choices.
Rahman has some suggestions to help you on the path to healthful eating, keeping in mind that enjoyment is vital and the choices are ultimately up to us.
  • Add more vegetables, with the goal of eating a couple every day.
  • Try to eat a few fruits daily, and pick whatever appeals to you without worrying if it is organic. In other words, eating fruit that’s not organic is okay.
  • Include whole grains in your diet (for example, instead of white pasta, try whole wheat—you may not even taste the difference).
  • Avoid sugar-sweetened beverages like soda, juice, and alcoholic drinks, aiming for water or sparkling water instead.
  • Minimize eating out. Restaurant foods are often high in sodium, sugar, and added fats and lack optimal fiber. Cooking and eating at home is healthier and more economical.
Rahman shared a 2020 study from the Journal of Nutrition that found only 1 in 1,000 restaurant meals met nutrition standards.

Finally, she strongly recommends eating without distractions and focusing on our meals, reflecting on where they came from and how they make us feel. She notes this practice can be a powerful way to tune into our body’s signals of hunger and satiety.

Nestle concurs, saying our decisions about what to eat don’t need to be complicated and are so simple that Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author, can fit them politely into seven words:

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

In a complex world, simplicity is a beautiful thing.

Reposted from: https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/the-hunger-for-clarity-regarding-nutrition-5713179

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