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Tag: Christopher Masterjohn

3 Idiotic Nutrition Myths That Won’t Die

The most fattening graphic in the history of the universe.

The other day my wife came back from a PTO meeting at our local school and noted (with a bewildered look on her face) that “The low-fat thing is alive and well, isn’t it?”  Since the nutritional thinking in our household is more along the paleo/Weston Price lines of thinking, it sometimes comes as a shock that the rest of the world still thinks that Wheat-Thins and fruit juice is a “healthy snack.”

Poorly designed and haphazardly analyzed studies like The China Study reinforce the conventional thinking that has led to a national obesity epidemic.  Food alone isn’t to blame, so are too much sitting, too much driving, not enough exercise, and environmentally pervasive chemicals like bisophenol-A.  But poor food quality and misinformation about food are mostly to blame.

Here are a few dietary misconceptions that annoy the hell out of me:

How and Why to Balance Fat-Soluble Vitamins

She’s probably not deficient in vitamin D.

I admit it, I’ve jumped on the vitamin D “bandwagon.”  I’ve been a part of the “vitamin D craze,” recommending larger-than-RDA doses of vitamin D to my friends and family.  Why?

  • The majority of Americans have low to borderline-low vitamin D levels, due to lack of sun exposure, overuse of sunscreen, overuse of soap (I’ll explain this in a minute), and extremely low consumption of dietary vitamin D.
  • Though most of the evidence is low quality (correlative rather than causative), there is still a great deal of evidence that points to lower risks of heart disease, many cancers, and depression when physiological vitamin D levels are on the high side.

So should every adult be taking 5000IU of supplemental D3 every day?  Absolutely not.

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