I read a lot about nutrition, and one thing is very clear to me: No matter what you want to believe about nutrition, there is research available to prove you are right.
What does that mean? Are the researchers mistaken? Are the experiments flawed? Are they lying to us?
Some of the research is surely flawed. It’s just too difficult to experiment on humans, because there is only so much control you can ethically exercise over them. There are always plenty of external variables entering into the equation, so we can never get fully controlled results.
Mistakes can be made, too, even by the most conscientious researchers, but as for whether they purposefully lie to us, well, I’ll just say that some of them may be overly biased.
In reality, though, even if all the research is perfectly controlled and unbiased, it is still only reportingĂ‚Â generalities. When you try to apply generalities to individuals, that simply doesn’t work.
Look around? Aren’t there extremely thin people, extremely fat people, and many in between? Do you really think that if you put them all on the same diet, they’d all end up with the same body type? NO! Some people are naturally thin. Some are naturally fat. Some are naturally in between.
We all know the person who went on a low-carb diet and lost a ton of weight. We also have friends who lost weight on low-fat. Calorie restriction. Carb cycling. Food grouping. All those diets work to a certain degree, but some may work better for you than others do.
And that is really the point. You need to try things out, see how they affect you. Did you read that whole milk is the thing that will put your energy over the top? Try it out and see how you feel. Are you enamored with the idea of a vegetarian diet as a weight loss regimen? Try it out and see if it works.
Remember, in any nutrition research, you will read that “75% of the subjects” had this result, or “54% of the subjects” had that result. It’s never 100%, because there is no way that the same diet will affect 100% of people the exact same way.
So, don’t put your faith in nutrition research. Continue to read and learn, but do your own research, on your own body, and figure out what is best for you.