Aoife Hearne: How to eat healthily when you're bombarded with self-described nutrition experts on social media

Tue, 01 Oct, 2024 - 02:00

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Dietitian

I'm keen to feed my family healthy food, and for ideas, I often check out TikTok and Instagram. The trouble is that some of the nutritional advice is confusing. Some say never combine a protein with starch and always eat fruit separately, while others say you need to eat all the main food groups at once. This is just an example of what I'm hearing. What would you suggest?

I don’t know about you, but even when I don’t search for nutrition advice, I am bombarded with self-described nutrition experts on social media. From what I can see, many nutrition ‘influencers’ have no recognised qualifications, and much of the information shared is inaccurate at best and, at worst, damaging. Their advice is often scaremongering, masquerading as a professional concern about our lack of understanding about food. This feeds into a real sense of anxiety around eating the ‘perfect’ food, which, of course, is neither required nor in existence.

Part of the issue with all this misinformation is that the title ‘dietitian’ is the only protected and regulated nutrition qualification. Essentially, anyone from your bus driver to your personal trainer can call themselves a nutritionist or nutrition therapist with zero formal nutrition education. That said, it is also important to stress that many excellent nutritionists in Ireland have completed a full-time, four-year undergraduate nutrition degree. Confused? I don't blame you.

To find either a dietitian/nutritionist with appropriate qualifications, check out the following registers:

Dietitians: coru.ie
Nutritionists: associationfornutrition.org
Sports and exercise nutritionists:bda.uk.com

To answer your question, combining high-fibre carbohydrates with a lean protein (or healthy fat source) helps manage blood sugar better. Avoiding carbohydrate-only meals is likely a good way to manage blood sugar levels and energy.

Eating well is about a flexible and dynamic relationship between real and processed food. In an ideal world, we eat mostly real food and very little processed food. However, this is not always feasible in 21st-century living.

So what do you do? My advice is that you get on with it. We do not need to have a hyper-focus on the food we eat for one meal or one day. Instead, as any nutrition professional will advise, it’s about looking at what you are eating most of the time, for example, over the course of a month. Within that month, there will always be crazy days when you will consume more processed foods. But if you can look back on the month as a whole, with 80% of your food coming from real food and the other 20% processed food, you’re not doing too bad.

Here are some sound guidelines that are easy to follow and backed by the World Health Organisation, HSE & Healthy Ireland:

Eat a variety of vegetables and fruits - aim for five to seven servings daily
Choose wholegrain carbohydrates in place of refined varieties (i.e. brown instead of white).
Aim for lean protein sources.
Limit high-fat, sugar and salt foods and drinks.

The next time you see someone share groundbreaking nutrition news, I suggest you check that they possess the appropriate qualifications before you try to 'digest' it.