You can’t believe the nutrition you read
At the beginning of S’s New Year, millions of people vowed to shape their eating habits. This usually involves classifying food into moral categories: good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, nutritious/incontinent, weight loss/weight gain – but which foods belong to you depends on whom you ask.
In the U.S. dietary guidelines advisory committee released its latest guide, it defines a healthy diet as emphasizes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low-fat or nonfat dairy products, seafood, beans and nuts, and less red meat and processed meat, refined grains, sugary food and drinks. Some cardiologists recommend an olive oil rich Mediterranean diet, the American diabetes association agrees on a low-carb and low-fat diet, and doctors are responsible for the medical committee’s vegetarian diet. Ask a robust CrossFit enthusiast who might support the Paleo diet based on what our paleolithic ancestors (allegedly) ate. My colleague Walt Hickey swore to keto.
Who’s right? It’s hard to say. Everyone has a problem with nutrition. No one is closed. The problem began with a lack of consensus on diet. Aim to slim you down? Build muscle? Keep your bones strong? Or heart disease or cancer, or alzheimer’s disease? No matter what you are worried about, there is no shortage of food or food to help you. The link between eating habits and personal food and health factors is simple – it’s absurd – as you’ll soon see in our little experiment.
Basically fill. To tell you why, we’ll take you behind the scenes and see how the research is done. First, you need to know is that nutrition researchers are studying an incredibly difficult problem, because there is no lock them in a room, all food after careful consideration, it is difficult to know exactly what people eat. So almost all nutrition studies rely on measurement of food consumption, which requires people to remember and report what they eat. The most common are food diaries, recall surveys and food frequency questionnaires, or FFQ.
There are several versions of FFQ, but they all use a similar technique: asking people how often they eat certain foods and how much they usually eat. But remember everything you eat, even what you ate yesterday is not easy. People tend to underestimate what they consume, they may not eat certain foods, or they may miscalculate their portions.
His mother Gladys Block, a pioneer in the field, began developing the food frequency questionnaire at the national cancer institute. “You can’t get rid of this problem — it involves mistakes,” he said. Still, there is a complete pecking order. A food diary ranking, the 24-hour food recall, in the process, the management has guided the topic down to interviews and will consume all the contents listed in the catalog in the past 24 hours. But, brock says, “you really need to do more than one management to assess someone’s long-term dietary intake.” For research purposes, researchers don’t usually focus on what they ate yesterday or the day before, but what they ate regularly. Studies using 24-hour memory tend to underestimate or overestimate what people don’t eat on a daily basis because they record only a few potentially unrepresentative snapshots.
When I try to keep a food diary for seven days, I found how to correctly – when you collect Block is only a few days to data, capture records reflect the normal diet model is very difficult. I happened to be at a meeting during my diary week, so the snacks and restaurants I ate were very different from what I usually eat. My diary shows that I only ate one doughnut and two snacks the day before dinner. What did I have for dinner? I can tell you it’s a delicious Indonesian seafood curry, but I can’t start listing all the ingredients.
When I knew I had to write it, I will pay more attention to what I eat thing, sometimes it means that I choose not to eat, because I’m too lazy to write it down or realize it, no, really want to the second donuts (or don’t want to admit it).
It is not easy to avoid the human instinct to hide what we eat, but FFQ aims to overcome the unrepresentativeness of the short-term food record by assessing what people eat over the long term. When you read the headline “blueberries prevent memory loss,” the evidence usually comes from certain versions of FFQ. The questionnaire usually asks participants for the last three, six, twelve months.
In order to understand the way of investigation, as well as the reliability of the survey, we hired a Block to manage his company for a period of six months FFQ, my colleague Anna Barry – Jester and Walt Hickey volunteers with a group of readers. 2
Some questions – how often do you drink coffee? – simple. Others are bothering us. Tomatoes. I often eat in six months? In September, when my garden was full, I ate cherry tomatoes and candy like a child. I can also eat two or three large crape myrtle every day with balm and olive oil. But I can go from November to July without eating fresh tomatoes. So how do I answer that question?
Part of the problem with size bothers all of us. In some cases, the survey provides a strange but useful guide – for example, it depicts images of half a cup, one or two cups of yogurt looking like a bowl filled with sawdust. Other questions seem absurd. “Who on this planet knows what salmon or two ribs look like?” ‘asked walter.
