Nutrition science and its application to our diet can be long and complex. It often seems like what we believe today will be contradicted tomorrow and it can leave many feeling confused and frustrated. This past week, a new study on diets was released that seemed to be another reason to throw your hands in the air. But don’t worry, look past the trees and see the forest.
Simplify The Diet Science
A study in the news last week campared the efficacy of three major carbohydrate controlled diets including Atkins, Weight Watchers, and Zone. The conclusion was that these diets, in spite of their different approaches, are all roughly the same at delivering results. (1) This is on top of a similar study in September which concluded that there is little difference between low carb and low fat diets. Both approaches lead to weight loss. (2) In short, the implication is that it does not matter what diet you are on, they all produce about the same results.
You have probably been exposed to a lof the science behind each of these diets. Finding out that they are all in fact about the same might leave you wondering what to do. The thing to remember is that the science is not as important as the behavior. Diets all have one thing in common; they attempt to modify your eating in some way. We love to delve into the scientific detail of why any given approach is effective, but in the end it comes down to how well it gets you to execute. Diets like Atkins, Weight Watchers, or Zone get you to behave differently, and that has an effect. As Lindsay Malone, a dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic put it, “…in general when people follow a specific plan and have a support system and guidelines that pull them away from their normal everyday behavior, I would expect to see weight loss.” (3) So, the most successful approach that I have personally observed is to not fret so much about the details and rather focus on the execution. You know what foods belong in the healthy category and what in the unhealthy, you just have to take the first step today. (If you have specific dietary needs, such as diabetes, or food alergies, etc. then you may want to seekk out the help of a nutrition expert.)
Vitamins and the Case of Scurvy
Nutrition is very science heavy these days, but much of that is being used for marketing, and marketing can be very distracting. We need to remember that nutrition is enormously complex. There are so many different elements interacting with each other that it can be extremely difficult to determine what is actually responsible for any given process in the body. I love to think about vitamins and the case of Scurvy as a great illustration. In 1754 James Lind performed what may have been one of the world’s first controlled clinical trials on board the HMS Salisbury. He tested twelve people with scurvy and discovered that oranges and lemons cured the ailment. This was 150 years before the discovery of vitamins however, so his analysis of why it worked was way off base. He jumped to conclusions based on the information he had and concluded that lemon juice cleaned toxic particles from the body. (4) Later, with the discovery of vitamins we came to understand diseases of defficiency and realized that scurvy was one of them. This kicked of a revolution in medicine which would evolove into the vitamin craze that gave birth to the vitamin supplement industry that we know today.
The latest twist to the story though (and to the science) has been the discovery of phytochemicals. These are structurally smaller than vitamins and are found especially in vegetables. They appear to be vital in bringing about many of the benefits that we have associated with vitamins up until this point. It is unclear what the relationship is, but it may be a very close one and change our understanding of vitamins at a core level.
The point is that with nutrition sometimes the science can’t tell you the whole picture. In our analysis we get sidetracked into believing that there are all kinds of fancy tricks and we jump to conclusions about discoveries. This is then heavily used in marketing which sometimes gets us doing or buying things we don’t need when the fact is, at the end of the day we all generally know what things need to be in a healthy diet. It is fine to follow the science, and fine to try a diet based on a scientific explanation if it gets you to modify your behavior in a positive way. However, the science is never giong to change the fact that broccoli is something you should probably eat more of and ice-cream is something you should have less of.
A REAL LIFE EXAMPLE
Check out the class action lawsuit against Vitamin Water. It is currently on its way to a huge settlement.
www.vitaminwaterclassactionsettlement.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/22/vitaminwater-settlement_n_6029474.html
REFERENCES:
1 – http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/diet-brands-matter-article-1.2008328
2 – http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0GX2GU20140902?irpc=932
3 – http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0GX2GU20140902?irpc=932
4 – Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. New York, NY; W.W. Norton & Company, 1997
PHOTO – Ed Schipul, Nutrition On Sale. License
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