Diet and Nutrition – Clarifying the Advice about a Healthy Diet.
Every day the mainstream media carries headlines about health, diet and nutrition issues. How is the average person to know if they’re killing themselves or doing the right thing to maintain a long and healthy life? We aim to clarify matters wherever possible.
Diet and nutrition confusion.
We’ve been given guidelines on the consumption of fat, tea, coffee, fruit, vegetables, nutrients and just about anything else you can eat in a healthy diet.
Living in an age where there’s an overwhelming stream of information it’s easy to get confused and give up trying to fathom out what’s going on. This is especially difficult when there is so much hype and sales promotion. After all, the diet and nutrition market is gigantic.
What is diet and nutrition?
Put simply, diet is what you eat and nutrition is, loosely speaking, an assessment of the actual requirements and the value, to the body, of what you do eat.
Our diet has been shaped by the availability and advertising of foodstuff we haven’t evolved to consume. These factors in combination with the hectic pace of real life, have led us into bad ways. For the hardpressed consumer diet or nutrition are the last things on their minds – they just want something to eat. If some diet guru was on the news or in the newspaper headlines suggesting pastry was a “superfood” that might stir something in the mind and send them dashing to the (in)appropriate store! It’s most likely they’ll forget nutritient values and grab something tasty and filling.
What about the diet and nutrition experts?
Compounding the problem is the surfeit of “health gurus” who have set themselves up as “experts” often with dubious “qualifications”. Make no mistake, these people aim to get the highest profile in the media and are to be found presenting TV programs or appearing in news programs as experts. They sometimes gain cult status and make a fortune selling supplements etc. Does their advice help or hinder your attempts to maintain good health? Therein lies the problem: who knows?
Nutrition is a current buzzword and forms the wheels of the bandwagon that’s making fortunes for many. Unfortunately, it’s an inexact science and and so it’s easy to sound as though you know what you’re talking about. This enables people to set themselves up as bona fide experts on various aspects of diet and nutition with no real scientific knowledge of the subject. Frankly, most of them recycle articles that appear on other websites about diet and nutrition with sometimes dangerous and often laughable results! Regrettably, it’s a case of “in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king”.
You may say “But surely my doctor knows about these matters?”. Again, why should he? Doctors only know what they have been taught, sometimes many years ago. Certainly most try to keep abreast of developments and new findings. Unfortunately, they are, to some extent. under the same handicap as consumers. They obtain their information from government guidelines which is assembled from input by quasi-autonomous, non-governmental organisations – the infamous “Quangos”. They in turn, obtain data from research papers usually financed by the food giants and pharmaceutical companies. The other diet and nutrition information comes from pharmaceutical and food manufacturers who cleverly publish information sheets and leaflets for patients, usually extolling the virtues of their cholesterol-lowering spreads and suchlike.
Yes, the whole area of health, alternative medicine, diet and nutrition is awash with hype, danger and misinformation which we will try to clarify.