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Nutrition & Science

Everyone's an expert

There's a lot of nutrition advice available, literally at your fingertips.

As well as Instagram and TikTok, websites, newspapers, and glossy magazines give advice on how to lose weight, pursue 'clean' eating, or report on some superfood that is a cure for everything. Even reliable websites, such as government-funded or health charities, may contain out-of-date eating advice.

As mentioned before, systematic reviews[1] of online nutrition advice haven't had good results, with much of the available advice found to be mostly inaccurate or misleading, or of poor quality. Despite this, many are taking that advice and incorporating it into their weekly eating habits, according to a 2024 survey[2].

Nutrition can have a profound effect on our health, so here's a couple of tips to help you identify accurate information. Let's face it, eating well takes effort and wouldn't it be awful to put all your efforts into something that turns out to be untrue?

articleCheck the source

When checking the source of nutritional advice, ask the following questions:

  • Who wrote the article?
  • What are their qualifications?
  • Do they reference any evidence for their claims?
  • Are they unbiased or is there a vested interest?

biotechCheck the science

When a source references a clinical trial or review, here are a few things to look out for:

  • Was the trial on animals[3]?
  • How many people[4] were involved?
  • Do I fit the type of person chosen for the sample[5]?
  • How was the study funded[6]?

Need some help?

If the thought of checking the relevance and accuracy of nutritional advice is daunting, don't worry, I can help. My training (graduated 2024) was all based on the most recent science at the time, and included how to do the above - check the source and check the science. It helped me to know how to identify accurate information. I keep up by looking at new trials and reviews that are published in the scientific press, which are relevant to my practice. All nutrition advice we give you starts from there, so you can be confident all you'll be hearing is facts - not fads.

The benefit of having someone interpret it for you is that it is also personal to you. Just because a particular food or nutrient may be accurately reported and recommended, there may be reasons why it wouldn't suit you - perhaps it would adversely interact with your medication, like calcium with thyroid medication, or grapefruit with many heart medications. So we make sure that what we tell you is both accurate and will benefit you personally.

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Footnotes

  1. Denniss E, et al. Quality and accuracy of online nutrition-related information: a systematic review of content analysis studies. Public Health Nutr. 2023 Jul;26(7):1345-1357.(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​37138366/​)

  2. In 2024, myfitnesspal released a survey about TikTok as a source of nutritional advice. A report on the survey noted, "The MyFitnessPal survey found that 87% of Millennials and Gen Z TikTok users have turned to the platform for nutrition and health advice, while 57% report that they are influenced by or frequently adopt nutrition trends they've found on the platform. In fact, of those who are influenced by nutrition and health trends on TikTok, 67% report that they adopt at least one of these trends a few times a week."(https://www.prnewswire.com/​news-releases/​concerning-new-statistics-highlight-inaccurate-nutrition-trends-on-tiktok-302114407.html)

  3. Trials on animals may give an indication that a human study would be worthwhile, but our body chemistry is different to animals - so a proven nutritional benefit on animals shouldn't be automatically assumed to work the same in humans.

  4. Generally, the higher the number in the sample size, the more precise the result, with smaller margins of error and greater confidence in the findings.

  5. If a trial was specific in its cohort, for example on older people in Japan, and you're a young woman in the UK, your lifestyle and diet would likely be different, therefore the results may apply differently to you.

  6. If it was a study about sugar funded by the sugar industry, then there has to be an allowance for bias, whether consciously or subconsciously.