I feel passionate about exposing misinformation. Politics is full of it; never have I heard so much rubbish in the form of political rhetoric. The media is full of it; stories with a bias twist for purposes of salacious entertainment, or furthering business and political agendas. I hear it in the shop; about information circulating in gyms regarding training, nutrition, supplements and health matters.

In some respects misinformation is inevitable, we can’t all be right all of the time, but some of us maybe guilty of believing all information we see in the media, or are told by people in “authority”, is fact. Sometimes (as in the case of politicians) its just plain and simple lies, they know it, we know it: bring on the revolution!
However, I often hear snippets of information regarding health and nutrition from the internet which can be misleading. Recently a link provided on the homepage of one of the largest internet portals caught my eye. It purported to expose “Ten food and diet myths”. Obviously as an area of interest to me, I had a quick look. Nine out of the ten so-called “myths” contained what I would call misinformation.

Here are a couple of the examples: One of the apparent myths was that fresh fruit and vegetables are better than frozen. The writer argued that frozen was actually best, as it locked in more of the nutrients. What they failed to say is that fruit and vegetables are only as good as the soil they are grown in, and that modern farming methods have robbed the soil of the minerals which allow the vegetables and fruit to produce the vitamins contained within them, so consequently the process of freezing isn’t locking in much at all!

Don’t be fooled by the vested interests of the frozen food industry. Another of the so called myths was that eating less calories than your body needs, causes your body to go into starvation survival mode, with a resulting disproportionate increase in weight when you return to normal calorie intake.

There is an element of truth in this, but again, what they didn’t tell you (or more than likely didn’t know) is that if you drip feed those calories into you over five or six meals, then your body doesn’t suffer from the so called starvation mode, and then consequently you don’t necessarily put more weight back on.

Although perhaps the most misleading so called myth was that vitamins give you energy. Again the columnist argued that as vitamins didn’t contain calories, they couldn’t give you energy, and although vitamins helped turn food into energy (which in its self countered their own argument) they went on to suggest one would have to be suffering from severe vitamin deficiency to notice this effect. Time and time again studies have shown that supplementing your diet with a multi vitamin supplement does indeed increase your energy levels.

I’m not always sure who writes these articles, or where they get their information, but I guess the moral is that when it comes to your health, don’t always believe what you read on the internet! Or at the very least, dig a little deeper to get the real facts

Until next time...you know where to come.

—Ant