How to Escape the Nutrition Echo Chamber
The “science” of nutrition is in danger of being exposed for what it really is: a hodgepodge of competing theories.
If you didn’t already know it, you may be learning that it is crammed with so many theories that it’s doubtful there is any one location where you can view them all. Many of them are someone’s personal “discovery,” often packaged into a 30-minute video promising the ultimate Truth about what to eat—if you can make it to the end.
Having confessed to being a Negative Norman on nutrition, let me say that it can also be exhilarating. Since there is no clear scientific consensus (and even where there is, it’s never final), opening your mind to discovery can lead you to unexpected insights that make sense and spark curiosity.
The joy is in the search— the little bits of treasure you dig up that make it both fun and good for the mind.
A new bestseller offers a way to think about this: Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets. It’s sold more than 250 million copies worldwide and hypothesizes that by simply quieting the brain’s defenses against new information, we can tap into a consciousness that exists beyond ourselves—and find it rapturous.
Most scientists dismiss this science, known as “noetics,” as pseudoscience because it can’t be replicated. There’s plenty of pseudoscience around, but noetics isn’t that. Because noetics believers admit that it cannot be replicated it would be more like trans-science. Either way, it doesn’t take the fun out of the book.
Even outside of nutrition, most of us know someone that must constantly prove they are right—arguing over practically everything in a tiresome way. They often obtain their convictions through their own confirmation bias, seeking verification for their first thoughts and impressions in everything they see, read, or hear. This is standard operating procedure for many politicians, professors, and scientists who use our confirmation biases to target us—and often fall victim to them too.
They live in a mental straitjacket, comforted like a dog in a Thunder Shirt against the scary world of new ideas.
Back to Dan Brown.
He certainly hasn’t proven that consciousness exists outside of our physical brain, but if we open ourselves to ideas from others, even ones that are universally despised—life becomes far more interesting. Rather than tightening our mental straitjacket every morning to ward off evil thoughts, we resolve to be seekers.
Whatever your current convictions about nutrition, open yourself up to alternative thoughts.
As a warm-up exercise, pick a recent president, or just a prominent politician, that you think is one of the worst ever (c’mon, you know you have a least one). Now use your negative capabilities—the ability to hold opposing ideas without immediately resolving them—to find something positive or morally admirable about that person.
Now apply the same to nutrition. Pick a dietary theory that you don’t subscribe to, e.g., high protein/low fat, fasting, vegetarian, Paleo (whole, unprocessed foods), or low carbohydrate/high fat foods. With fresh eyes, go read about the evidence behind it and see if it may be right for you.
The point is to begin to open your mind to all possibilities. You may decide—based on your gut, reason, balance of evidence, or a sense of costs and benefits—which dietary theory to follow. The point is, you won’t be the person insisting that you are right and everyone else is wrong; you will be a seeker of truth, open to different viewpoints. Even better, you don’t have to stick with your choices as more information becomes available.
Read The Secret of Secrets. Imagine it is right. Then go find evidence that shows that it is right (maybe start with Edgar Cayce); and evidence that shows it’s wrong.