I read an interesting article recently entitled “Why Nutrition Science is So Confusing”. I could not have agreed more with the title of it so it caught my eye right away. Ever flipped through any news stand “fitness” magazine and read about this months new-fad diet? Ya, actually neither have I but I have seen the covers of them sitting there haha. We are constantly bombarded with the next “great thing” in nutrition. In our ever-on social media age (read the last blog if you have not already!), its all too easy for an “expert” to throw out their amazingly new knowledge-bomb for the world to see.
I most certainly do not claim to be any kind of expert on nutrition. Quite frankly, it just isn’t a passion of mine so I haven’t spent a whole lot of time on the subject. I do, however, like to keep things very simple when it comes to areas I don’t know a lot about. Here are some very simple facts presented in the article I read. Firstly, nutrition science is very much in it’s infancy compared to any other sciences. For example, somewhere before 1200 BC metals were first recorded and manipulated. Around 430 BC, the Greeks philosophers proposed the idea of the atom. These dates can be repeated for a lot of other forms of science. Nutrition and studying the effects what we eat has on our health has only been around for 200 years or so (in any real capacity). If we apply the field of nutrition to exercise and optimizing human performance, we can shorten that window even more; to say the past 50 or 60 years.
How many dollars do you think have been given to cancer research? A real quick google search gave me the figure of $2 Billion dollars. Every year! While another $1.3 Billion is requested for treatments. On a side note, the same article gave a figure of $232 Million for prevention and control. More on this right away. Even with all these billions and billions of dollars, cancer has no cure. The amount of money given to nutrition research in the past few decades is a small percentage of what has been given to cancer. The article suggested a figure of a mere $500,000 USD was spent on optimal nutrition. Most researchers would rather ask “How can we end this epidemic?” and not “how can we prevent an epidemic?”.
The other thing we have to ask when reading or listening to studies on nutrition is their source. This seems to be a huge problem in the industry. There are huge, world dominant name brands directly or indirectly most food studies. The purpose of these studies? To prove their foods are not harmful. Sugary drinks for example. Studies that sugary drinks cause weight gain are biased to sway results 80% when these companies directly or indirectly fund the study. Go figure.
Getting back to that “keeping it simple” thing I mentioned earlier. Humans have been around for a couple hundred thousands of years. We have done alright for ourselves so far. We are the dominant species on our planet. Like we said before, nutrition has only began to be studied in any depth in the last couple hundred years and with any real effectiveness in the past 60 years we’ll call it. That represents 0.0003% of our existence. We’ve been doing alright for ourselves for a long time. How? By eating how humans are supposed to eat. Luckily for us, our ancestors figured most of it out for us. Dirt doesn’t really do anything for us. Bright coloured fruits hanging on a tree or a nice piece of meat however...now we’re talking. There were exactly zero processed foods before the industrial revolution and appearance of huge processing factories. We can say these have been around for 100 years. The appearance of chronic disease, obesity, illness and sickness have also grown exponentially in that same time frame. Coincidence? I’ll just leave that there for you.
Once again, I am by no means an expert on nutrition but the facts are very much laid out for us. Without any more knowledge than chronic disease and illness numbers skyrocketing and the constant availability of highly processed, cheap food; we can draw some pretty rock-solid conclusions. Our ancestors had it right. Eat food. Real food. Food that is or was alive, growing, walking, breathing, etc. Not something that comes out of a gigantic factory designed and engineered to “make food.”
With all this nutrition science flooding into the public eye, remember simple Coach TJ. Start there and keep it just that.