If you’re already drowning in the new year's diet culture and wellness industry noise, I’m here to answer your SOS! Dr. Emma Beckett, an expert food and nutrition scientist and author of You Are More Than What You Eat teaches us what filters to apply when sifting through nutrition information. We dig into the overwhelming health advice on TikTok and social media in general and talk about simple ways to figure out what you can believe.

Nutrition science can feel overwhelming, but Dr. Beckett breaks it down, showing how studies are often misunderstood and why understanding our unique contexts are key. We cover everything from menopause symptoms to protein needs, including the risks of one-size-fits-all advice. You’ll also learn how to stay informed and avoid misleading or outdated recommendations.

✨Sign Up for the  Non-Diet Resolution Challenge✨https://www.menopausenutritionist.ca/nondietresolution

Links Mentioned:
EP 123: You Are More Than What You Eat with Dr. Emma Beckett

Connect with Emma: 

The Website: www.dremmabeckett-foodnutritionscientist.com 
Instagram: @dremmabeckett

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TRANSCRIPT

Jenn Salib Huber: 0:01

Hi and welcome to the Midlife Feast, the podcast for women who are hungry for more in this season of life. I'm your host, Dr Jenn Salib-Huber. I'm an intuitive eating dietitian and naturopathic doctor, and I help women manage menopause without dieting and food rules. Come to my table, listen and learn from me trusted guest experts in women's health and interviews with women just like you. Each episode brings to the table juicy conversations designed to help you feast on midlife. And if you're looking for more information about menopause, nutrition and intuitive eating, check out the Midlife Feast Community, my monthly membership that combines my no-nonsense approach that you all love to nutrition with community, so that you can learn from me and others who can relate to the cheers and challenges of midlife.

The Problem with Misinformation on TikTok 

Jenn Salib Huber: 0:50

Here's a shocking statistic for you A survey of 67,000 videos on TikTok found that only 2% of them provided accurate information, and that's a problem that we need to talk about, because misinformation isn't benign.

Jenn Salib Huber: 1:05

It can not only cause real harm, but it actually can move you further away from the exact thing that you're trying to do, Because if the information that you're working with or making decisions based on is wrong, then you're not going to get anywhere really. So that's why I invited Dr Emma Beckett back on the podcast, who is a food and nutrition scientist from Australia and author of the book. Who is a food and nutrition scientist from Australia and author of the book you Are More Than what you Eat, which is one of my favorite books to recommend, because it's full of actionable, easy to understand information about getting out of diet culture. 

So that's why Dr Emma was the perfect guest for week two of this year's non-diet resolution challenge. There's still time to save your spot for the live training which is happening at the end of January, so make sure to check the show notes or the comment section on YouTube and save your spot, because spots are going very quickly. Now let's dive into this misinformation, but welcome back, Emma.

Emma Beckett: 2:00

Hi, thank you for having me again.

Jenn Salib Huber: 2:03

So listeners might recognize you because you were on the podcast last fall and we were talking about your book, which is, for anybody who's watching the video of this Emma has a dress with her book cover on it, which is you are more than what you eat, which is an amazing book, and we were talking, you know, about some of the things in the book, obviously, but we're really talking about the undieting. I said like this was one of the best undieting books that I'd ever read, just helping people to break down maybe some of the beliefs that they have about food and health and diets. 

And since it's January and all around the world, diet culture and wellness culture is ready to pounce to sell you solutions to all your problems, I wanted to invite you back on the podcast. So thank you for accepting my invitation to talk a little bit about how people can add a filter to their toolbox in understanding some of the research and I'm going to start by saying research in air quotes that might be used to persuade you to start a diet or to follow a set of rules or to cut something out, so that you can just feel a little bit more supported.

Jenn Salib Huber: 3:24

So what's January like in Australia? Because you're in Australia. I haven't, I've never been there, but what's January like in Australia?

Emma Beckett: 3:31

No, it's exactly the same, I think, everywhere in the world in terms of New Year's resolutions and fresh starts, and suddenly everything will be different because the calendar has changed and it's actually a really depressing time of year when you pay attention to what's going on in the marketing and the women's magazines and everything else, because it's all the same formula every single year, but for some reason, we think every year it's going to be different and yeah, it's quite, quite challenging.

Jenn Salib Huber: 4:02

Yeah, I think the thing that has always made me so mad is that it really preys on our vulnerabilities. That can show up at this time of year, you know, depending on where you are in the world. Probably not for you, but for a lot of us it's dark, it's cold, it's not the nicest time of year, the holidays aren't always joyful, and so a lot of people, I think, just have that natural inclination to want to do something, and so diet, culture and wellness, culture are waiting to take advantage of that. 

So some of the things that we're going to talk about today yeah, and I think that's a universal thing, unfortunately, um, but some of the things that we're going to talk about today are how do we start to filter some of that information that comes our way, and so we're going to kind of go over five, five tips. I guess you could say just kind of five areas to focus on. So let's talk about the first one what is the difference between a recommendation versus evidence?

Understanding Recommendations vs. Evidence in Nutrition 

Emma Beckett: 5:10

So this, I think, if you do not listen to anything else I say today, this is the most important thing, because we have these snippets of information that come to us in media and in recommendations from friends and in social media, and we take each of these snippets of data or snippets of information as a recommendation. But when we make recommendations properly, when we make them from a public health perspective, when we make them from a clinical perspective, we need a whole bunch of evidence before we can make a recommendation.

So this works both ways. We need a bunch of studies on one thing, which putting that together is the body of evidence. We never make a decision just on one study. But also, before someone can give you a recommendation, they need lots of information about you.

Emma Beckett: 6:04

And people all the time on the internet say to me Dr Emma, what would you recommend for this? And I have to say I can't give you recommendations because I don't know enough about you, your context, your situation, to be able to do that. And to do that I would have to be in a professional relationship with you, and so people who don't have that information cannot give you a recommendation. But every time we hear a headline, every time we hear. Study shows this. Evidence shows this our little simple human brains.

Because our brains love to take shortcuts, our brains go. They're recommending that to me. I should do that. So even when people aren't our fast-acting brains which they do it to protect us they jump straight to. They're telling me I should do this and we really need to stop and go. Is that actually for me or is that just another piece of information, another data set that doesn't really apply?

Jenn Salib Huber: 7:01

And I just want to reinforce what you're saying doesn't really apply. And I just want to reinforce what you're saying, that a recommendation for what someone should do can't be based on a study. The information in the study can be used with your healthcare professional, whoever that is, to decide what you should try on. But when it comes to food, there's never going to be a one fits all answer and of course it would be great maybe if there was, because that would make life a lot easier. But I think this distinction between what an individual should do versus what the evidence is is really key. So I see this show up a lot in, you know, with symptoms. So menopause symptoms obviously eat this, and they and they will use this study and they'll kind of pull that and say, look, look at this, don't eat carbs, eat more protein, only eat at this certain time of day. But that I mean I don't think there's great evidence for any of those.

Jenn Salib Huber: 7:59

But you know when we're talking about evidence even isn't going to be the kind of evidence you were talking about at the beginning, which is on a lot of people you know to be able to say that, yes, this is a recommendation that applies to everyone in this life stage, and maybe we can give an example from pregnancy, for example, because that is, you know, pregnancy and, let's say, folic acid. So that is a recommendation based on evidence, based on studying large amounts of people in a particular life stage, so we can say with a reasonable amount of certainty and safety that this recommendation is safe for all people, most people in this stage, but there really isn't a lot of I can't think of other examples from nutrition and life stages where we can make that kind of blanket recommendation.

Emma Beckett: 8:52

Am I right in that the blanket recommendations we can make are nutritional recommendations, so basic recommendations. Like everyone should drink some water, that's pretty solid and we can say it. But regardless of how solid it is as a recommendation, it can still change. Recommendations are never set in stone, so your context might change or the evidence might change and we might see in now. I'm not saying this to scare people about folate, because I'm just making this up as an example. But in 20, 30, 40 years, when we can measure more things, the advice for folate might change because we might be going okay, we're preventing neural tube defects now, but we might be causing another problem down the track that we don't even realize we're doing. And so as we get better at measuring things, we change our recommendations because the evidence changes and that very well could happen.

Emma Beckett: 9:50

Definitely not saying that's real. For folate, completely made up as an example, still follow the current recommendations. But things do change and when you think you know, look at things like eggs and cholesterol. We used to tell people not to eat eggs because too many eggs, because they had cholesterol in them, and we know now that's absolutely not true, because we know more about cholesterol biology and we know more about what actually causes high cholesterol. So remember, evidence can still change.

Jenn Salib Huber: 10:16

Yeah, and I think that's a great example. And another one that's really relevant to the midlife and menopause conversation is protein. There are a lot of claims being made, and supported by quote unquote evidence, for women to double, triple, quadruple their protein intake, and it has created a lot of fear and misinformation and I think, has really had a negative impact on people's relationship with food. That being said, I'm the first to say that I think there is a trend in the evidence that in 5, 10, 15 years, we may change our recommendations. They're still not going to be the crazy amounts that the internet is telling people to eat, but we can look at that as kind of like a forecast and say, okay, I'm just going to keep my eye on this, but I don't need to devote all of my time and energy into trying to do this. One thing that the internet is telling me is the most important thing for me to do.

Jenn Salib Huber: 11:13

I think that's kind of my take home with people is yeah, the evidence changes. I mean, I've been in practice. I've been studying nutrition now for 30 years. I've been in practice for 25 years. I've literally seen every diet come and go at least twice and I've seen the recommendations change. We talked a little bit about this on the first podcast. So much based on new evidence, so understanding that I guess the take home from this point is just because there is evidence doesn't mean it applies to you and doesn't mean that it's good evidence yet.

Emma Beckett: 11:42

Yeah, we can cherry pick evidence till the cows come home, like that's how you win at debating, right? And you know, there are some people who are really good at picking a piece of evidence to make it sound like they're making an evidence-based argument. But we've got to think about this, the whole picture.

Jenn Salib Huber: 11:59

Okay, so let's talk about the next one, which is very relevant to that who? Because we often hear about, well, who paid for the study? Who conducted the study? But it's much more nuanced than just looking to see if you know if it was funded by someone, right? So what should people be thinking about when they're looking at who is involved in the study?

The Impact of Funding Sources on Nutrition Studies

Emma Beckett: 13:15

Yeah, so often we talk about, you know, watch out for industry-based research because it will be biased, and there is always that potential. But when that message gets oversimplified, we accidentally end up implying that if it's not funded by industry, it isn't biased. And that's where the influencers kind of sneak in because they go, oh, you know big industry, they want you to do this. Or you know small producers sneak in and say the big guys will tell you this, but I'm here with the truth. And so we don't want to lump all industry and all not industry into their own baskets, because it's never that simple. 

And also, when people talk about industry like the food industry is so broad, it's so diverse. The food industry includes the people who make, you know, produce our fruits and vegetables, as well as the people who produce our discretionary foods. And so, yeah, I always get concerned when we focus on the who, when we focus on industry, we're oversimplifying, creating a new problem. People will say that I say that because I have done industry research, I've done industry-supported research, and so people will say that I have that view because I'm bought by big industry.

It's good to have that healthy level of scepticism, but instead of just not believing what someone says because of who funded it, still go through the steps of the fact checking and the wondering what could influence them, and even wonder that, regardless of the funding source because there's also these sneaky kind of like institutes and they'll be called institutes, and institute sounds formal and it sounds, you know, respectable and academic, but then you get these weird ones that are, or centers is another example. 

You get these weird ones where like, okay, I hope I don't get sued for saying this, but the garlic and the garlic center. The garlic center did the study that showed that garlic reduced the duration and severity of colds.

Emma Beckett: 15:17

The garlic Center is just one man. It's not an actual place, it's not an actual Institute. There's no oversight, there's no board of directors, it's just one guy who owns a company that sells garlic supplements, and so just having a fancy-looking name or being that one step away from industry is not necessarily enough. Another example is the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. Actually, those ones might actually sue me. It's called Gatorade Sports Science Institute. It's not a sports science institute. It's a group that funds research to show that Gatorade is good for you, and so they do a lot of electrolyte research. But they don't do sports science research. They just do electrolytes research, but they put that big sports science name on it, because then it sounds official and important and reasonable.

Jenn Salib Huber: 16:08

But then it gets even more complicated. I had not heard that before.

Emma Beckett: 16:14

And they did most of the research on electrolytes and why people should drink sports drinks, and that's where that evidence comes from, and not saying that evidence is bad because it came from them. Because we don't have enough funding from independent sources to do this research and electrolytes isn't important enough for the big government bodies to fund, and so it doesn't get researched. So of course someone has to fill the gaps. So we have this other problem where in academia there's people who are under this pressure of like crazy kpis, where they've got to publish a certain number of papers to be deemed successful and stay in institutions and get promotions, and that results in bad data as well. So it's all problematic. And then we end up with the next layer of who's sharing the evidence. So who's saying this research study tells you to do this thing or buy this thing, and what investment does that person have in it? Do they have a monetary investment in it or a reason to say it to you financially, or do they just have their own internal biases that are making them say it?

Emma Beckett: 17:15

And now I want to be really, really clear. I've made this sound like everyone is corrupt and everyone in line to you, and it's definitely not the case. But what I'm saying is, when you look at the who, don't just let it wash over you because you trust them or because they sound trustworthy. Actually, stop and think, don't go down the opposite path and go everything's a conspiracy, everything's messed up.

Emma Beckett: 17:39

That's also not going to get us very far, but people trust people and people trust institutions and sometimes we let our minds get away with us on that. So, even if you trust me, even if people trust you, jen, we definitely want people to say, hmm, why might they want me to believe that? And you know we can say well, I just believe in you know goodness and rightness and I care about this, and that's probably a very you know, genuine motivator for people like you and me. But it's also not enough. Like we do need to have ways of showing people that what we do is trustworthy as well, which is doing things like including references or being open to questions or sharing information about where, where we get our funding and you know what we do with that.

Jenn Salib Huber: 18:30

No, I and I love all of that and I think that that is so important to talk about, because you know we do in. I mean, I am not an academic and I don't pretend to be, which is why I talk to people like you, but I do know that we have to have relationships between industry and academia, and that really is how many industries and fields of research advance. Is that partnership between the science and the business, and that's a reality. We're never going to have complete separation of that, because I don't think that's the world we live in. But understanding a little bit more about why someone might want to pay for a study, what their motivations are, is important.

Jenn Salib Huber: 19:18

And one of my favorite kind of sayings I have no idea who said it, but I use it all the time is just because you believe it doesn't mean it's true. And so when people are trying to sell you something they can I mean their sales pitch might be coming from their heart they may believe it to be true for them, you know, and they're willing to die on that hill, and so, because they believe it so strongly, they find research that supports their beliefs and it sounds very credible, and that is. I think the danger is that when people are sharing their lived experience as their proof and they don't have the kind of background to be able to really say like it sounds true, but is it true? Is it true for everyone? Is it always true? Is it never true? You know, that's kind of where that's where things just get really, really crappy in the world of nutrition.

Jenn Salib Huber: 20:13

And for those of us who are fielding these questions, hey, my so and so said, my best friend is doing my mother's you know, neighbor's cousin's friend is taking the supplement and they, they really do wholeheartedly believe in it. So, okay, so that's great. So now let's talk a little bit about study design. So, because people who and a lot of people, I think are genuinely interested in trying to understand a little bit more about research and so one of the things that they may hear or read or see is that, oh well, this was a randomized, controlled trial, so it means that the results are true. It means that this was the best gold standard study. So tell us a little bit about kind of high level, how studies are designed and how that influences what we can do with the results.

Why Study Design Matters in Nutrition Research

Emma Beckett: 21:07

So you do hear this a lot, where people play the RCT trump card and they'll either say, well, I don't believe that because there's no RCT to show it, or they'll say, well, I've got an RCT, can't argue with me. And it doesn't work that way for a number of reasons. Because you could do two RCTs, two randomized control trials, and they could both have completely different results because they're done in different people, at different times, in different places, with different doses. So many reasons people at different times, in different places, with different doses. 

So many reasons. But rcts the reason why we love rcts and the reason why they get called the gold standard is they're the only type of study from which we can claim causation in humans. So this thing has been shown to cause this thing in humans. Otherwise we're making inferences from observational studies. So we're making inferences for the causation, or we're making inferences into humans from cell culture studies or mouse or other animal studies. And so you have to assume humans are a bit like the animal you're testing in or a bit like the cell you're testing in. And so RCTs are the only kind of study where we can do them.

Emma Beckett: 22:22

An RCT it's called an RCT, randomized controlled trial, because it's randomized. We put people randomly into the test group or the control group. The control group often get given what we call a placebo, and a placebo means people think they're getting a treatment but they're not, and that takes out the psychological trick of thinking you got a treatment and that changing how you feel. And it's controlled because it's compared to something controlled. That sounds good and a great way to prove that something does cause something else and a great way to prove that something does cause something else. But it can't be done for everything we're interested in in nutrition. So you can't say over a lifetime, this diet would be better than that diet and do an RCT, because that would be ethically unsound, it would be expensive, it would be very difficult to do feasibly, and so we rely on long-term observational studies to get that long-term data.

Emma Beckett: 23:22

So what we look for when we're setting recommendations at a population or individual level is a suite of evidence that joins up together. Do we have the long-term evidence from the prospective cohort studies coupled with the evidence from the RCTs, coupled with the evidence from the animal and cell culture models? Can that show some biological plausibility? There's other types of studies that are less high on the hierarchy. 

 Things like cross-sectional studies where it's just like a snapshot in time If we ask these people, do they eat? And then we look at what their health is, what's the relationship. Those are not studies we want to make decisions about what to do based on, but they are studies that we might use to decide that we should finance the big RCT or the big randomized control trial, the big prospective cohort study, and so we need all of those studies. We just want to be careful not to over recommend or over commit based on any single one of them, because they need to be interconnected together.

Jenn Salib Huber: 24:31

That's a great overview, thank you. One of the other things that I think gets missed so much when people are talking about results of studies is we need to be able to compare the conditions especially with nutrition and food under which the study was conducted, and are those results generalizable to people who live in the community? So if a study is looking at a dietary intervention and that study came with the support of a dietician three times a week and a grocery list and a meal plan and a phone call to check in on how they're doing, and sometimes they even have text-based support and group meetings, that is a level of support that most people will not be able to access, either financially or practically, in the real world.

And so when I'm looking as a clinician at new data, you know a new study comes out saying somebody should do this or somebody should do that I'm always looking to see okay, how was this actually done? You know, did they just give them the information? Because that's how most people receive nutrition information.

Jenn Salib Huber: 25:39

Their first point of contact with a health professional is often a here's a book, here's a website, here's a handout. Were they just given that information? Or were they given this really high level of support, because most people aren't going to be able to replicate study conditions that way. And so that's the other, I think, especially important piece. When we're talking about food um, not necessarily like nutrients, but you know food, eat this so many times a week. How is that done?

Emma Beckett: 26:06

and some rcts are super hectic, right?

Jenn Salib Huber: 26:10

yeah, sorry there's a lag, so I keep interrupting you some rcts are super hectic.

Emma Beckett: 26:16

Where they're like it's really hard for the participant to stay on it because it's so restrictive and you can prove that absolutely. If you only eat this one thing for breakfast every day for six weeks, your cholesterol levels change. But how realistic is that in a person's life? And will they keep that up when they're not getting the incentive of whatever it is they're getting as their reward for participating? Because most people are getting something for participating in these studies, which then has a whole extra set of bias, because the people who volunteer for these studies generally do it because they need whatever the reward is, whether it's gift vouchers or the free food, or whatever the reward is whether it's gift vouchers or the free food or whatever else it is.

Jenn Salib Huber: 27:01

And thank you for bringing that up, because that leads to a point about dropout rates.

Jenn Salib Huber: 27:06

And so, especially when you're looking at when, if anybody claims X percent success rate with whatever the diet of the day is looking at, the dropout rate is a very telltale sign, because usually those results are being presented on the percentage of people who finished, not the percentage of people who started, and so diet studies especially have a notoriously high dropout rate, because it's very hard for people to just take a whole new way of eating or change their routine and do it for long enough in order for the results of the study to be what we call robust enough to be able to say, hey, this might actually be a thing.

And so I think people just understanding that a lot of the dropout rate, I think can be a really helpful um tool for anybody who's reading this. I don't think, and you don't think I think, that people need to be reading studies. That is not the job of the general, I think public. But that to me is always a big red flag is if there's a really high dropout rate.

Emma Beckett: 28:12

This matters in real life too, because when people are telling us, oh, me and all my friends are doing this diet and we're all feeling great, we're all losing weight, we go, oh yeah, cool, they're all doing it, they're all losing weight, but we're not hearing from the people who did the diet and it really sucked for them. And so we're getting this kind of survivor bias in our reporting as well, not just in our research, and so you can apply these same kind of principles to your just filtering of information regularly. 

 But absolutely it's not on everyone listening to go out and upskill as a food and nutrition scientist so they can read the primary literature, but it is on the people who report on the primary literature to be able to answer these questions. So if someone's saying my diet's the best diet and they say, yeah, there was a study on that, ask them some questions. It'll become real clear real quick if they actually understood the study or if they're just repeating a key message they've heard of someone else.

Jenn Salib Huber: 29:10

Yeah, absolutely, and I always tell people, ask me If I say something, ask me for the evidence. I'm happy to talk about it and I'm happy to change my mind in the light of new evidence. I am not going to die on any hill as a as an evidence based practitioner, because it's not my opinion that matters, and I think that's kind of another kind of filter. Is somebody willing to change their mind? Because if they're not, then that's a big red flag for me too. Okay, so now let's talk about the emotional factors, because, especially in January, as we talked about at the beginning, diet culture, wellness culture is ready to pounce on our vulnerabilities, and you mentioned something called rage bait. So how does rage bait get us when it comes to diet and nutrition claims?

Emotional Manipulation in Diet Culture: Spotting Rage Bait

Emma Beckett: 30:06

Yeah. So we all know about clickbait, right when they make it sound better than it is. Too good to be true, too exciting, make us click on it clickbait that makes sense to all of us. But then we've got rage bait. And rage bait is about over-sensationalizing the really awful things that someone thinks are happening. And so rage bait's about keeping people angry, because if people are angry, people will buy into things, and this is kind of where the conspiracy theory of the you know anti-big whatever movement happens, and then people leverage that to sell their thing.

Emma Beckett: 30:46

And so raging about the food industry, for example, when big food wants you to buy their processed stuff. But also I would like to sell you this supplement that is absolutely a processed product, but I'm not one of them. So your rage, I've turned it around into my sale. And that's the kind of thing that we fall for over and over again in our echo chambers of the internet. And I know I've done it, and my younger sister told me I was a rageaholic and that I was addicted to being outraged about the terrible things that people were sharing, and I realized that even when you're trying to share credible information, you can get sucked in to this rage bait and that keeps us distracted from the actual conversations we really want to be having?

Jenn Salib Huber: 31:34

Yeah, absolutely.

Jenn Salib Huber: 31:36

And another saying that has stuck with me is you know, don't spend energy trying to change the minds of people who are committed to misunderstanding you, and some people just don't want to hear the truth, and so they want you to get mad because they want to keep the conversation going so they can keep talking about their side of things.

Jenn Salib Huber: 31:58

But you're never going to change their mind, and so you know, understanding that you can have a boundary of. You know, this comes up a lot in my community with people who maybe have family members who are still very much in diet culture, who always want to talk about how great their diet is, even though they've had to start it 26 times in the last three years, and this time is going to be different, and this time they found the answer and they don't want you to be right. They want to be right and they are committed to being right and they're committed to you being wrong. They want to be right and they are committed to being right and they're committed to you being wrong. And so that's where I think a lot of the rage bait can be so toxic is that those people aren't ever actually interested in having that conversation.

Emma Beckett: 32:38

No, and while they've got you angry, they've got you having their conversation and playing.

Jenn Salib Huber: 32:42

Yes. So we don't want to do that. So understanding that, like a lot of these emotional, emotionally manipulative, really is what they are. Headlines are designed to evoke an emotion because marketers will tell you that if you can connect to a person's emotions, they are more likely to notice, pay attention and buy. So when you know companies that are selling you diets, supplements, making these claims and they're trying to get you riled up, they're doing that intentionally.

Emma Beckett: 33:18

It's usually not coming from the goodness of their heart absolutely, and we we do focus on that a lot, but we've got to remember, too, to turn that that lens inside, because we say what's their motivation, what emotions are they trying to invoke, but we also need to stop and go. Oh, what emotions am I having? Oh, what biases are causing me to have those emotions. And I need to do this a lot. As a woman who lives in a larger body, I am a fat girl, and so when I read research that is about people being overweight or obese and that having health impacts my brain instantly goes well, what's going to be wrong with this? What's the explanatory factor?

Emma Beckett: 34:03

Because I don't believe this and despite all the research I've done and all the education I've got, I do need to constantly question myself is this just me trying to make myself feel better in my body, or is this my authentic interpretation of this? And the only way we can do that is by constantly challenging ourselves and constantly being challenged. And it's going back to what I said before about how our brains like to skip a step and get straight to the decision making and straight to the recommendation. If we skip straight to, okay, I believe that from and and just let the thoughts and feelings meld with that. We're very easily misled. But if we stop and okay that one is a conscious analysis and that one is a quick feeling and separate those out, that makes it a lot easier not to get taken for granted.

Jenn Salib Huber: 34:59

That's an excellent point and a great way to bring attunement actually into this whole conversation, which we talk about in Included Eating all the time, but just kind of focusing on how is this information making me feel and why am I feeling this way and how do I think it may or may not help me to feel better. I think that that's important for sure, and I mean we all have biases. We talk about biases as a negative thing and they often do have negative consequences, but as humans we have biases, conscious and unconscious. We can't completely filter them out. With some observation, I think we can notice them. We can see how they're showing up in our decision-making process, but you can't turn them all off because it's just how we're built. But being able to notice them is definitely a key step.

How Bias and Personal Experience Influence Health Advice

Emma Beckett: 35:50

And you know, asking yourself how does this make me feel? Does it serve me? Is it improving my being, is not the same as saying do I desperately want to believe this, because I would rather stick my head in the sand. And I think sometimes, when people criticize intuitive eating, they think that's what we're doing, we're just going. Oh well, what will make me feel better? What will make me? What will make me, you know, be safe in my own feelings? And it's more than that it's about. It's about being safe in your feelings as you process them and then using those feelings in service of you along the way. I think, rather than just you know, I would feel better if I could believe that climate change isn't real, but that would be a really difficult thing for me to reconcile with the scientific evidence. But I would feel a lot better if that was imaginary.

Jenn Salib Huber: 36:39

Yeah, that's a great point. And so the fifth point, which I think we've kind of talked about through these different points, is understanding who and what was being studied. So we kind of hinted at the difference between, like research that's done in a Petri dish, that might just be done on cells versus animals, mice, rats versus people, so kind of how does? Why is it that we can't take a mouse which I think is whatever 90 some percent, you know shares 90 some percent of how does? Why is it that we can't take a mouse which I think is whatever 90 some percent, you know shares 90 some percent of our genetics, whatever it is? Why can't we take that data, those results, and say, oh, if it works for mice, it must be good enough for a human?

Applying Nutrition Research to Real Life: What Works?

Emma Beckett: 37:21

Hmm. So we can't. We can't apply directly. We can learn from and we can make inferences from, but we can't directly apply animal models or cell culture models to people because the context isn't the same. So even if genetically you know, we're genetically very similar to bananas as well we wouldn't say that bananas and we people need the same things to survive. And it's not just about genetics, it's about the context of environment and how long we live for and what else we're exposed to and what else we need to do in a day. And all of those things factor in. But that's not just the difference we need to think about from mice to people or petri dishes to people. That's the difference we need to think about from people to people to people.

Emma Beckett: 38:10

And sometimes you'll do a study in Australia and you'll get one result. And you'll do the same study, or seemingly the same study, in the USA and you'll get a different result. And then it's like well, who's right, who's wrong? Well, maybe no one, or maybe both, because in the US you have different political contexts, different healthcare systems, you have different amounts of UV exposure, you go to school at different times of the day, you have a different major source of sugars in your diet,

Like there's just so many things that would add up and interact that mean we're not the same. And then sometimes you'll see things like you know, if we give people the folate supplements going back to that example from earlier if we give people the folate supplements going back to that example from earlier in some studies giving people folate supplements didn't show any improvement Doesn't mean folate supplements doesn't improve risk for neural tube defects.

Emma Beckett: 39:00

What it means is if you give a supplement to someone who already has enough of something, you're not going to see a benefit. And so knowing what that background is and that background can vary is really important in decision-making. And so we often see studies done only in men, people trying to apply them to women and just going women, they're smaller men. Or doing them only in adults and then going well, we'll just cut that in half for children. 

 But children aren't just tiny adults, and so you know, all those differences just add up across our cultures and our society and our lifespan and our sexes, and then layering gender on top of sexes and all those other experiences, and it makes it really hard sometimes to generalize. And that doesn't mean nutrition research sucks and we shouldn't bother doing any of it, but it means we should be cautious about what we apply to which people.

Jenn Salib Huber: 39:58

Yeah, I mean that's all of that is so important, and especially about the age and the life stage.

Jenn Salib Huber: 40:04

And so we see this right now in menopause research we don't have a lot of data on people in menopause. We don't have a lot of data on people post-menopause, and if you see a nutrition intervention or some kind of claim around nutrition, and they only studied people who are still menstruating, that's a huge difference to people who are not menstruating anymore, who are not having ovulatory cycles. 

 That is a I call it a change in hormone soup, because really our body is operating in a completely different environment. And that's even true if people are taking menopausal hormone therapy, because menopausal hormone therapy isn't replacing levels to what they were premenopausally. It's just giving you enough to cool you down. So I think that, especially in the menopause world and right now menopause is still very much having its moment a lot of the research that we have there's not enough research. So a lot of the claims that are being made are based on studies on men or people who are still menstruating and ovulating.

Emma Beckett: 41:11

And that's a very different scenario.

Jenn Salib Huber: 41:13

Thank you for bringing that up too.

Emma Beckett: 41:15

Or it's based on really old women, because apparently we go invisible when menopause happens and then if we survive into the old age, then suddenly we're interesting. Then it's like how did these old ladies live? We better study them. But it's like this gap in the middle where apparently we don't exist or matter and so it's really challenging to try and make make those inferences. 

 But we also we also want to be careful that we don't we don't fall into the trap of going there's no evidence, therefore we don't fall into the trap of going there's no evidence, therefore we don't make any recommendations. Because not having evidence doesn't mean people just like is this whole generation of women going to wait while they get studied and then the next generation can know Like? We still need to make our best recommendations based on the available evidence, but we do need to remember that that can do harm on the way.

Jenn Salib Huber: 42:10

Yeah, that's a great reminder. So we've had a really, I think, in-depth discussion for anybody who is interested in this, and I hope that everybody has a little bit of interest in this, because I do think that being an informed consumer is a great tool in your toolbox being able to say, hey, wait a minute, I heard that this is good for me, and being able to even to read the newspaper article with a bit of, maybe a bit more critical eye. 

 So, but if somebody wants to fact check I mean, as we said at some point, like we don't want people feeling like they need to become citizen scientists and be able to, you know, go to PubMed and find the study and to see all the, all the things that we've been talking about but how do they know what's credible? How do they? Where can they go? Who can they trust? How do, how do they filter that?

Final Thoughts and How to Become a More Informed Listener

Emma Beckett: 43:06

I love that you've loved this, because someone in a review of my book said that the chapter where I talk about study design was the most boring chapter and that normal people didn't care about study design.

Emma Beckett: 43:17

And I'm like guys if you care more about study design, then people wouldn't be able to trick us so much. And so, yeah, definitely don't go out and do a degree so that you can can do the checking, but knowing I think there's a few important things you can do to be able to avoid falling prey to misinformation and whether that's misinformation given to you deliberately or accidentally. And so the number one thing I would say is be active in your digestion of information, so not letting that fast brain make decisions and lock stuff away as fact, because we have biases about anchoring bias and the thing we heard first is the thing we're most likely to believe, or if we hear something more times, we're more likely to believe it. 

 And not just going oh yeah, I've heard, heard that, I will now repeat it and actually going, which part of my brain made that decision and did I really critically consider it? I think is really powerful because it just stops you accepting what you're told as fact routinely, like when you know how much misinformation is in the world. It's very unlikely all the things you get told in a day are true. So just pausing and going what do I think about that? I think super important.

Emma Beckett: 44:41

The other thing to do is know how to ask questions and definitely not saying like, we all need to be like and what about this, what about this and what about this? Every time someone posts online but saying, you know, what do we know about this study and who it applies to? Or what do we know about how this study was done and the timeframes, once you start asking those questions, it becomes very clear very quickly who is just sharing lines with you and who actually understood the study. 

Because if I'm talking about a study online and someone said to me, oh, what about the timeframes? I could definitely say you're absolutely correct, this was only a two-week study. However, we do know, based on this other long-term evidence, that if we put this and this and this together, it's a reasonable assumption that we would think this also happens over these timeframes as well. Or I could say you know, great point, this is actually just a two-week study and we need more research before we can know if we make it long-term.

Emma Beckett: 45:40

But, like you said before, if you ask someone those questions and they pull the well, I've got a PhD and you don't, or if they pull the facts of facts and you know, get your head out of the sand dummy if they pull any other kind of line, it's probably clear they're not genuine. That said, I will say sometimes people are really interested in studies that I talk about and they want to ask 400 questions and at some point I do need to go. 

Actually, I have a day job and work to do. Why don't you read the study and come back to me with some more informed questions? And trolls will do that to take up your time. They will just ask questions and they'll keep asking questions and they'll look like genuine engagers and they'll wait for you to snap. So it's not a perfect situation. You know we're not going to win just through asking questions. They're not going to win just through asking questions, but we do need to ask questions. I think is ask questions and keep our minds open and active, conscious are the most important things.

Jenn Salib Huber: 46:41

Absolutely, and I made a policy, probably two years ago, that I don't argue in anyone's comment section, especially my own. So if people want to ask questions, I welcome questions, I welcome discussion, but I do not argue with someone who is hell bent on just having their opinion and having that argument going.

Emma Beckett: 47:04

I use a three strikes rule because I really believe in the social aspect of social media and that the benefit of social media over broadcast media is that people can ask questions and that we can interact. But if I answer a question and then you know, something weird happens. And then something weird happens again, I'm like, okay, I gave you the benefit of the doubt, I've answered earnestly. This no longer feels like a genuine interaction. I'm off now.

Jenn Salib Huber: 47:32

Yeah, love it, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for your time, thank you for being so generous with it, thank you for explaining things the way that you do, and thank you for your book that you have put out into the world you Are More Than what you Eat, which we'll have the link to the show notes, and I definitely recommend reading it if anybody's interested in just understanding, I think, more about what we actually need to know about food and nutrition, and not the nutritionism that tends to dominate the internet conversations.

Emma Beckett: 48:08

And thank you for the opportunity to share and thank you for all you do in bringing sense to a very fraught conversation that is often filled with emotion.

Jenn Salib Huber: 48:18

Thanks for tuning in everyone. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Midlife Feast. For more non-diet, health, hormone and general midlife support, click the link in the show notes to learn how you can work and learn from me. And if you enjoyed this episode and found it helpful, please consider leaving a review or subscribing, because it helps other women just like you find us and feel supported in midlife.