Conversations That Matter: Getting real about health
Credit to Author: Massey Padgham| Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 15:00:09 +0000
Coffee is good for you. No wait, it’s bad for you. Red wine? Well yes, it’s good for you. No, it’s not! Everywhere you look, there is a new study, a new opinion and a new fad about health – so many of them that it is extremely difficult to know which study or person you can trust.
Dr. Chana Davis has some advice: “You need to be very careful about whom you trust. Check the source, check the funder and determine if the research is peer reviewed.”
She suggests double-checking any findings by finding else who else agrees, by checking what the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says, by going to Pubmed, and perhaps by checking the Canada Food Guide.
It’s easy to get swept up in the hype around diets. Your aunt, your uncle, and your mother’s best friend may all have lost weight on a low carb or high protein diet.
“While that may be true, you don’t know why,” Davis says. “It may have been strict adherence to the plan. It could have been their particular metabolic make up.” In other words, anecdotal evidence isn’t enough to make an informed decision about a diet.
We invited Davis to join us for a Conversation That Matters about where to find trustworthy information – one place for sure is on her new video podcast show, Get Real Health, on YouTube.
Conversations That Matter is a partner program for the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. The production of this program is made possible thanks to the support of the following and viewers like you. Please become a Patreon subscriber and support the production of this program, with a $1 pledge here.