A person’s nutrition and exercise have a direct impact on his or her health and well-being [1]. In addition to improving infant and child health, improving immune systems, and reducing not only the risk of pregnancy complications but also the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, our diet has an impact on our short and long-term health [2].
Nutrition information available on the Internet can directly influence healthcare decisions, but its quality is rarely evaluated, the result is that there is a big amount of information available on the internet, but it is difficult to separate the good and the bad, let’s say! [3, 4]
Social media noise around nutrition
Social media has fundamentally changed the way we create content by making it easier and faster to share. This has resulted in an increase in people who seek to have a social and political impact. However, these individuals may not be qualified for those positions because they don’t have sufficient training [4].
Nutrition has always been a subject of great interest, but it is becoming hard to follow its continuous and sometimes contradictory developments [5].
Researchers noise around nutrition
According to ClinicalTrials.gov in 2022 there are 192 clinical trials now running in the USA, and 25 of them are now recruiting, but in the entire database, there are 9.816 studies regarding nutrition and 27.870 containing the term healthy. The result is a large body of studies whose conclusions are not reproducible and sorting out inconsistencies in research used to generate health advice is a titanic undertaking.
In recent years the use of exercise has expanded from competitive sports to prevention/management of chronic diseases and maintenance of optimal health.
Exercise is recommended for the prevention/management of non-insulin-dependent diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, obesity, mental health, colon cancer, stroke, and back injury [6]. Similarly, there is evidence that certain nutrients (e.g., vitamins C and E, β-carotene, and calcium) may reduce the risk of certain cancers, coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, hypertension, and cataract. Thus, there seems to be a concordance between the health benefits of exercise and certain nutrients [7].
However, several human and animal studies suggest that strenuous exercise may promote free radical production, leading to lipid peroxidation and tissue damage [8,9,10].
On the other hand, there is evidence that vitamins C and E and β-carotene may protect against such damage [8,9]. Thus, concordance between the health benefits of exercise and nutrition and a compensatory role of antioxidant nutrients against the potentially harmful effects of exercise suggests that nutrition and exercise should form important components of any regimen for the prevention of chronic diseases and/or promotion of optimal health.
As far as both nutrition and sport are important for our health, it is unclear how to combine them and even more how to use them to prevent diseases!
In addition to what is above mentioned, the tendency for different researchers to use different measurements and report outcomes differently, even when studying the same effect, makes the global picture even more uncertain [11].
The combination of those two noises
Once a research study is published, its results are likely to be picked up by the lay press. Nutrition is a topic of great interest to people, unfortunately, most people learn about nutrition research findings in the popular press.
Headlines can easily fail to accurately describe the results of nutrition studies, for example, the newsletter’s “Headline vs. Study” section on 11 October 2019 [12] provided a link to an article in Women’s Health magazine titled, “Snacking on Nuts Found to Help Prevent Weight Gain” [13], followed by a link to the actual research report on which the article was based. The study was not a randomized controlled trial, the nuts were not provided to participants, and the participants self-reported both their nut intake and their weight. Although consumers reading the magazine headline might have thought that snacking on nuts would help them control their weight, all the research really found was an association—not necessarily causal—between self-reported nut intake and self-reported weight [14].
The results
It is quite difficult for readers to interpret the results of nutrition-related studies they see reported in the news.
Let’s try to keep it simple!
The Global Burden of Disease highlighted that, in 2017, 11 million deaths and 255 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) were attributable to dietary risk factors, supporting the need for improving dietary habits across countries [15]. We all eat, and since the topic is important to everyone, the best thing is to turn to official associations able to provide updated clinical practice guidelines to reduce confusion.
[1] Koehler K, Drenowatz C. Integrated Role of Nutrition and Physical Activity for Lifelong Health. Nutrients. 2019 Jun 26;11(7):1437. doi: 10.3390/nu11071437. PMID: 31247924; PMCID: PMC6682932.
[2] Miyazawa T. The 8th International Conference on Nutrition and Aging: realization of a society where healthy life expectancy approximates overall life expectancy. Nutr Rev. 2020 Dec 1;78(12 Suppl 2):1-2. doi: 10.1093/nutrit/nuaa066. PMID: 33259612.
[3] Liu AG, Ford NA, Hu FB, Zelman KM, Mozaffarian D, Kris-Etherton PM. A healthy approach to dietary fats: understanding the science and taking action to reduce consumer confusion. Nutr J. 2017 Aug 30;16(1):53. doi: 10.1186/s12937-017-0271-4. PMID: 28854932; PMCID: PMC5577766.
[4] Lynn T, Rosati P, Leoni Santos G, Endo PT. Sorting the Healthy Diet Signal from the Social Media Expert Noise: Preliminary Evidence from the Healthy Diet Discourse on Twitter. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Nov 18;17(22):8557. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17228557. PMID: 33218105; PMCID: PMC7698912.
[5] Dumas AA, Lapointe A, Desroches S. Users, Uses, and Effects of Social Media in Dietetic Practice: Scoping Review of the Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence. J Med Internet Res. 2018 Feb 20;20(2):e55. doi: 10.2196/jmir.9230. PMID: 29463487; PMCID: PMC5840482.
[6] Clark JE. Diet, exercise or diet with exercise: comparing the effectiveness of treatment options for weight-loss and changes in fitness for adults (18-65 years old) who are overfat, or obese; systematic review and meta-analysis. J Diabetes Metab Disord. 2015 Apr 17;14:31. doi: 10.1186/s40200-015-0154-1. Erratum in: J Diabetes Metab Disord. 2015;14:73. PMID: 25973403; PMCID: PMC4429709.
[7] Di Sebastiano KM, Murthy G, Campbell KL, Desroches S, Murphy RA. Nutrition and Cancer Prevention: Why is the Evidence Lost in Translation? Adv Nutr. 2019 May 1;10(3):410-418. doi: 10.1093/advances/nmy089. PMID: 30915435; PMCID: PMC6520044.
[8] Lin CH, Lin YA, Chen SL, Hsu MC, Hsu CC. American Ginseng Attenuates Eccentric Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage via the Modulation of Lipid Peroxidation and Inflammatory Adaptation in Males. Nutrients. 2021 Dec 25;14(1):78. doi: 10.3390/nu14010078. PMID: 35010953; PMCID: PMC8746757.
[9] Visconti LM, Cotter JA, Schick EE, Daniels N, Viray FE, Purcell CA, Brotman CBR, Ruhman KE, Escobar KA. Impact of varying doses of omega-3 supplementation on muscle damage and recovery after eccentric resistance exercise. Metabol Open. 2021 Oct 3;12:100133. doi: 10.1016/j.metop.2021.100133. PMID: 34693240; PMCID: PMC8515381.
[10] Kyriakidou Y, Wood C, Ferrier C, Dolci A, Elliott B. The effect of Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation on exercise-induced muscle damage. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2021 Jan 13;18(1):9. doi: 10.1186/s12970-020-00405-1. PMID: 33441158; PMCID: PMC7807509.
[11] Vitolins MZ, Case TL. What Makes Nutrition Research So Difficult to Conduct and Interpret? Diabetes Spectr. 2020 May;33(2):113-117. doi: 10.2337/ds19-0077. PMID: 32425447; PMCID: PMC7228817.
[12] Obesity and Energetics Obesity and Energetics Offerings 10/11/19. Available from https://www.obesityandenergetics.org/weeklyofferings/101119. Accessed 1 December 2019.
[13] Williamson L. Snacking on nuts found to help prevent weight gain. Womens Health 29 September 2019. Available from https://www.womenshealth.com.au/nut-intake-weight-gain-prevention. Accessed 1 December 2019.
[14] Liu X, Li Y, Guasch-Ferré M, et al.. Changes in nut consumption influence long-term weight change in US men and women. BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health 2019;2:90–99.
[15] Afshin A, Sur PJ, Fay KA, Cornaby L, Ferrara G, Salama JS, et al.. Health effects of dietary risks in 195 countries, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. Lancet. (2019) 393:1958–72. 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)30041-8.
Disclaimer
The information contained herein is not and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Before making any changes to your diet, exercise or treatment, always consult your doctor or a qualified health professional.
The guidance provided may not be appropriate for your specific situation. Never make any decisions about your health based solely on the information provided in this article.
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