You Can't Believe Everything You Read on the Interweb....

 I just love our sixteenth President. Honest Abe was a man with wisdom beyond his time. I mean, how did he even *know* about the Internet, considering he died 100 years before Al Gore even had a chance to dream it up? Remarkable, really.

The internet holds a wealth of information, but it can also spread a lot of crap unbelievably fast. Look at Facebook: you have people trying to get a million likes so Josh Groban will take a girl to her senior prom (or was that just me?), and telling people to "remember to SHARE if you want to keep this recipe in your photo album." I guess people don't know about right-clicking and Save As to keep a file on their own hard drives. Or the beauty of copying photos to your iPad. Nice underhanded tactic for getting people to give your business free advertising, guys.

You know, one area I find this disturbing trend of false information to be mushrooming is in the wellness industry. An abundance of exaggerated claims abound, both from alternative practitioners who want you to believe that their magical mix of herbs can cure every ailment, to more traditional doctors who think that all nutritional products are snake oil. Neither one is completely true, and I'd like to set the record straight on a few them now so you know what to watch out for the next time you see a news headline or cute little picture like this pop up on your Facebook newsfeed:

I found this little gem recently, and it just reminds me of how many exaggerated claims are out there about the benefits of healthy foods. That may sound a little ironic, coming from a girl who has a blog about healthy eating; but, in the interest of full disclosure, I believe that even the healthiest eater isn't going to get all of these benefits from a good diet. I watch what I eat for my blood sugar (and my vanity), but I am a big believer in getting a lot more additional nutrition from my daily vitamin tablets.

Let's face it: that picture of asparagus is pretty sketchy. Relieves pain? Prevents birth defects? Fights cancer? Those are some pretty tall orders, my friends. And while I wholeheartedly agree that asparagus contains the nutrients attributed to these health benefits, you have got to get those key nutrients at the right levels before you can experience the benefits. It's not that I don't think asparagus can be a great staple food for people wanting to enjoy good health and have healthy babies; but I certainly don't want an expectant Mom thinking that if she just munches on a cup of asparagus every once in a while her baby will be some perfect little munchkin and her labor will be painless, either. Bottom line: 1 cup of asparagus has 267.8 mcg of folate in it, a nutrient known to be vital to a developing baby in the womb.  But, unless you want to eat 4 servings of asparagus everyday, you still can't match up to the multivitamin I take with 1,000 mcg of the good stuff in it. This is good in two ways:

1)I don't have to worry if I'm getting enough folate. Ever.
2)I don't have to worry if asparagus will taste good dipped in my lunch's strawberry Greek yogurt. Ever.

Here's another gem that is true, but pretty misleading. There are a ton of health benefits from curcumin, an antioxidant most commonly found in tumeric, used in a lot of Indian and Asian dishes. Again, this picture kinds of leaves you thinking, "Oh, we'll just order Indian every weekend, and we'll be fine." Um, nope. Turns out that there are only about 30mcg of this powerful antioxidant in every milliliter of turmeric spice, so that's going to be some pretty spicy chicken if you want to compete with the 15 mg of turmeric I get from my multivitamin, or the 247 mg of curcumin available in my favorite joint supplement. For the mathematically challenged, 15 mg is 15,000 mcg of turmeric. And it's a whopping 247,000 mcg of curcumin. Your curry chicken wants to be my vitamins when it grows up.

Believe me when I say that it's not just the alternative medicine fan girls in the wellness field making unwarranted claims. The medical headlines you see everyday from "major studies" are pretty misleading, too. Have you heard the latest?

Note: This is probably not a real image of a recent headline. I don't think the New York Times uses emoticons.

I think this one scared a lot of women who have been taking calcium to try to prevent osteoporosis. Calcium is a critical part of retaining bone mass, and I would hate to think that women dedicated to enhancing their bone health stopped before they looked into the matter more closely.


Know the major problem with this study? The researchers only studied the effects of calcium taken alone, not with the critical addition of magnesium that is supposed to accompany every dose of calcium in a ratio of 2:1. Any decent calcium supplement manufacturer should know that. And in case you don't know, calcium is responsible for contracting muscles, and magnesium is known to relax them. So, yeah. Only taking a pill that has muscle-contracting properties without muscle-relaxing abilities could kind of become a problem on an important muscle like the heart. Just saying.

And this next little report is a real doozy. You probably saw this headline recently:

If you're just a headline skimmer, that's probably as far as you got. Or you might have read these ominous findings, which sound far more serious just because they use all those sciency words. Read it to yourself in your best Tom Brokaw voice:

...randomized clinical trials cast doubt on the efficacy of vitamin E supplements to prevent CHD [18]. For example, the Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation (HOPE) study, which followed almost 10,000 patients at high risk of heart attack or stroke for 4.5 years [19], found that participants taking 400 IU/day of natural vitamin E experienced no fewer cardiovascular events or hospitalizations for heart failure or chest pain than participants taking a placebo.[emphasis mine]

Further down the study, however, almost as a side note, was this statement:

However, the study did find two positive and significant results for women taking vitamin E: they had a 24% reduction in cardiovascular death rates, and those ≥65 years of age had a 26% decrease in nonfatal heart attack and a 49% decrease in cardiovascular death rates.


Oh, so I guess improving your odds of living by up to 50% is no big thing, right? 


My best pieces of advice for anyone wanting to get to the bottom of all these claims and find out what is really best for your health:

1) Learn to read all the lines and in between the lines, and find a few experts whose knowledge you really respect. It's amazing what you can find out when you don't take headlines as Gospel. But, because even a health blogger like myself doesn't spend all her leisure time reviewing medical journals, I have a group of go-to experts whose information and opinions I really rely on to help me sort through the mumbo-jumbo. There are a few doctors whose works I will eat up faster than a Snickers bar. Which, as you know, is saying something. I trust their medical background (they are all MDs, DCs, or PhDs), and their common sense approach to nutrition.  Believe me, scoping out my own sources before sharing health advice works a lot better than using a photoshopped picture referencing a non-existent study from Copenhagen from one of my 456 Facebook friends who is always posting pictures of Crisco-baked peanut butter cake and now wants to talk about natural cures for arthritis.

2) Always read my blogs and hang on every word I say.
So maybe I'm not your first choice of expert. That's OK. But, as fun as this little blog is to write, I do some serious hunting before I put anything down here. If it's not something I've looked into myself, it's a study that one of my admired experts has referenced, with sources, and that makes me feel good about it. I don't like bad information any more than you do, and I'm not interested in spreading it. Because researchers in Copenhagen found that those who spread bad information while taking high doses of Vitamin E were 270% more likely to die than those who ate curry and took a calcium placebo.....



Full Disclosure: Yes, I am paid to recommend a particular brand of multivitamin. Which is pretty cool, because I've seen people have super rad health improvements by taking the right nutrients in the right doses instead of just eating curry-spiced asparagus once a week. So far, I've yet to discover a more rewarding way of making a living than helping people feel better.