Something that doesn’t sit right with me about health advice is how often it contradicts itself. For every video or post I see saying sugar will kill you, another is insisting it shouldn’t be demonised, that it’s absolutely fine as part of a healthy, balanced diet. For every “meat causes bowel cancer”, there’s a “carnivore diet reduces your risk of cancer”. For every “dairy is inflammatory and increases disease risk”, there are large-scale studies that don’t show this. And don’t even get me started on seed oils.
If you spend any time online, you’re constantly presented with confident, persuasive messages that directly oppose one another, often delivered with the same level of certainty. It’s no wonder so many people feel confused about what they’re supposed to eat, avoid, prioritise, or worry about. I find it overwhelming too, and I’ve spent nine years at university studying nutrition and medicine, training as a dietitian and later working as a medical doctor in the NHS. I know how to read and critique evidence. I understand the difference between a mechanistic hypothesis, an observational association, and a randomised trial. And even I can’t always figure it all out. You can have people who seem credible, articulate, and well-informed saying opposite things. If someone with this background struggles to navigate it all, how on earth are people without it supposed to? Even knowing to ignore those without credentials doesn’t fully protect you; the videos are well produced, the arguments sound convincing, and they tap into very real fears.
Something else that doesn’t sit right with me is how strict so much of this advice has become, and how little allowance it makes for people who are simply trying to live normal lives and still enjoy food. Take the constant warnings about toxins, pesticides, and “forever chemicals” in our food, and the insistence that we must eat everything organic. Have the people making these videos seen the price of food recently? How are normal people, with normal jobs and normal budgets, supposed to afford all-organic produce when it often costs two to three times as much? All this has done for me over time is create guilt about the food I feed my children. I can’t afford £6 for a tiny punnet of blueberries, especially when one child could eat it in a single sitting. And yet I’ve found myself watching them shovel fresh berries into their mouths while a small voice in my head whispers, oh god, I’m poisoning them.
Looking back now, I can see how much unnecessary stress crept into my life over the years. I’m only just starting to see this clearly now that I’m coming out of the pregnancy and baby phase. When I think about the torment I put myself through, it makes me angry, not at myself, but at the way so much health advice is framed, and the effect it has on people. For me, it wasn’t empowering. It was suffocating.
What I’m trying to offer here instead is a calmer voice of reason amid the chaos of overhyped health advice in the media and on social media. A place where I write about the conclusions I’ve drawn from reading the evidence, and then trying to apply it to my own life, seeing what’s realistic and what isn’t. I want this to be a reassuring voice, one that helps people feel more empowered and less anxious. A space that focuses on what can be done, rather than endlessly ruminating on the things that can’t currently be changed, whether that’s because of time, energy, money, or circumstance. I’m trying to create the kind of place I’d want to go myself for information I trust, somewhere that takes away some of the emotional burden of trying to keep yourself and your family well. Somewhere, people don’t feel so alone, or like they’re constantly fighting a losing battle. I know that feeling well, the sense of thinking what’s the point?, that whatever you do is supposedly wrong anyway. And when it starts to feel unwinnable, it often ends not with better habits, but with giving up entirely. For me, that often ended with a packet of biscuits or a bag of Haribo, not because I didn’t care, but because caring had started to feel impossible.
Leave a Reply