How do you make informed decisions about nutrition?

April 9, 10:22 AMSacramento Nutrition ExaminerAnne Hart

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 How do you decide and what tools do you use when it comes to choosing what to eat that’s good for you? And where can you go for information if your doctor hasn’t been trained in nutrition or isn’t up to the current findings of experts in the field of nutrition, genetics, and biochemistry? Listen to my audio lecture on Internet Archive on nutrigenomics, "How Nutrigenomics Fights Childhood Type 2 Diabetes & Weight Issues."

Why is the most important issue in nutrition today the lack of nutrition knowledge resulting in obesity? People lacking knowledge that what's on food labels doesn't reveal the whole story may want to blame the food service industry, food manufacturers, and even agriculture. 

It's not so much about self control and eating less as it is about reading labels because when a label says no transfats it really means it's okay to add up to 500 mg of transfats and not show what's in the food on the label. When a label reads, "natural seasonings," or "natural spices" and you don't know what's in the jar of food, it's trouble.

Natural seasonings can refer to MSG, to which a sizable percentage of the population is allergic.  And with one out of 20 people carrying a variant of a gene that makes the kidneys sensitive to salt, where can you eat without a cook dumping salt into food during cooking, not realizing that one out of five people have high blood pressure because they are sensitive to salt due to this kidney gene variation. People that are not salt resistant would prefer to salt or not salt their own food and not have it salted for them.

How do you achieve balance and find the foods right for your unique body at the atomic, chemical, or molecular levels? Should you and can you afford to take enough medical and genetic tests to determine what foods are healing tools for you?

What are the foods that slow down aging in your unique body and which foods are dangerous, or age you faster—even beginning in childhood? Where do you go to find this information in print? How do you interpret what you find? Who can you consult to find out what foods are best for your health or your child’s well-being?

What are the current most critical debates about nutrition issues and controversies? Are the most critical debates about hunger versus safer food or food misinformation versus obesity? Let’s look at the debates, theories, and ever-evolving scientific research on health and nutrition at all ages.

You ant zero-risk food? Great. You know the cost of food will rise. Most people are worried that the rise will be disproportionate to the worth and longevity of the food. Extend this thinking to the rest of the world, and the cost of the zero-risk food will not spare lives in other areas of the globe. Someday, in the far-off future, improvements in nutrition will result in immortality. But that day is in the future. The present problem is about dealing with hunger. Starvation is a problem there, and dangerous eating is a problem here.

If lack of nutrition knowledge by consumers could be the most important issue, then food misinformation also could be the next most important current controversy in the field of nutrition. Childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes are big nutrition issues in the news. What’s a big nutrition controversy? It’s the debate about whether technology works for or against nature. The average consumer is told most often in the media that science (or technology) versus nature. Then there’s the debate between nutrition and advertising.

Nutrition and advertising have an inverse relationship. Processed food, such as sugary cold cereals that register high on the glycemic index, and heat-popped snacks are advertised, but not unprocessed raw foods, except on a few satellite stations that cost money for subscription.

Advertising in the mainstream media features drug benefits and side effects rather than food and vitamin or mineral-based health benefits of vegetables and fruits or wild fish from less contaminated waters containing the health benefits Omega 3 fatty acids. Are consumers being informed of what else is important in addition to knowing the glycemic index of foods and an individual’s metabolic body type or response of the genes to food and how to tailor food to the genes and/or metabolic body type?

The problem is, when fresh wild fish costs $16 per pound, people are going to buy canned wild fish for $2 or $3 not knowing whether the fish in the can contains more or less of toxins such as PCBs and mercury than the fresh wild fish on display in the upscale food store. Consumers want to know whether paying less money in a chain-store supermarket or paying more money in an upscale food store will result in products that affect human health differently?

Up for debate, for example, is the controversy over where you buy your wild fish versus farmed fish and how much you pay. Are you paying more money for food with fewer toxins? Is eating wild fish better for your health than eating farmed fish? Why or why not? These are current nutrition controversies up for debate.

Most people like to look at a nutrition time line to see at a glance what nutrition controversies entailed in the past, present, and what will be the next controversy or issue hot for debate by scientists, the media, and the public. You’ll find books touting the Paleolithic Diet and other books cheering the vegetable, fruit, nut, and grain-based Neolithic Diet.

Medical articles warning of the dangers of homogenized milk available after 1920. And you’ll find articles comparing whole fruit to sugary fruit juices. How do you make informed decisions about all the issues and controversies in the field of nutrition today?

Whether you are a parent, teacher, librarian, newspaper reporter, or student at any level looking for hot debates on nutrition issues about which to write, you begin with the basic controversy in nutrition. It’s the competition between science and nature.  

The issue is whether nature is better than science and technology. Is technology an overwhelming improvement to health and nature in general? Are chemical solutions to moral problems also an issue? Can science be separated from technology when it comes to food production and distribution? Should it be? Why or why not?

Underneath the umbrella of science is technology. Scientific research needs to be funded by big business and/or the government in order for scientific research to be done on a scale that earns it credibility in the medical journals that have the respect of other scientists and the credible media. Technology is the method by which science applies findings to production of food products for the public.

Food Misinformation is the Hottest Nutrition Controversy Debate

What does the average person do when a new study comes out saying that a food has specific health benefits, but then soon after, another study is released noting that the same food has negative health consequences? This type of debate has opened the field of nutrition to debate. What health issues surround studies of soy products, homogenized milk, and margarine?

 How does the average consumer with no science training make informed decisions about what foods are healthy for each person or for all individuals? Would the average consumer benefit by a costly test to determine whether one’s genetic signature is helped or harmed by ingestion of a specific food or medicine? Are those tests accurate? Such topics are ripe for debate.

 The hottest controversy in nutrition today is food misinformation appearing in various popular media—newspapers, general consumer magazines, and the tabloid press. However, three equally important controversies in nutrition actually are science versus nature, childhood obesity, and the ever-increasing type 2 diabetes epidemic in children and adults.

According to the International Food Information Council (IFIC) nutrition/food safety staff, while there are nutrition controversies almost too numerous to mention, a couple stand out – food ‘myths’ (or misinformation) concerning the safety/health benefits of consuming fish and seafood, especially canned tuna; and continuing misinformation about the safety of low-calorie sweeteners, such as Aspartame. 

On the site you can click on links to several IFIC-produced resources examining these controversies in greater depth. If you’re a journalist or other media representative, the current IFIC Foundation Media Guide on Food Safety and Nutrition is available free to credentialed journalists (members of the media). It contains valuable material on the history of nutrition and is a comprehensive resource on a variety of food safety and nutrition topics.

The print edition contains backgrounders; contact information for almost 300 independent, scientific experts; and links to reference materials found on IFIC's site. The new edition brings together, in an easy-to-use reference guide, information journalists need to sort out increasingly complex food safety and nutrition issues.

People vary in responses to food. What can scientists and researchers tell most family members about "healing nutrition" information to combat childhood type-2 diabetes or weight issues?

How do you explain individualized, tailored, and customized nutrition in plain language to parents, children, and food retailers and to your own healthcare practitioner?

Is it a scientific fact, metabolic reality, common sense, or cultural practice that reports of eating a lot of meat by a metabolic-typed carbohydrate type person might turn to fat, whereas eating mostly vegetables and fruits by a protein-type person might turn to fat because the carbohydrate-type person may be a slow oxidizer of sugar but the protein-type person may be a fast oxider of sugar? (Sugar perhaps would hit the bloodstream faster, causing spikes in insulin due to possible insulin resistance.) Tests can determine how you metabolize foods.

Would a nutrigenomics-oriented genetic test of specific markers give clues? Or would measuring the insulin response after eating sweets reveal sugar spikes that a fasting glucose blood test might not show on paper?

What's out there to learn about dangerous eating, food misinformation, and healing foods? Is it true that one person's dangerous foods are another person's healing foods based on metabolic and genetic body types? Is it true that specific foods turn into fuel for one person but become fat for another individual? Listen to one of my audio lectures on how nutrigenomics fights childhood type 2 diabetes and weight issues.