Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....

On top of that, people sometimes deliberately distort research findings to promote a certain agenda. For example, trisodium phosphate is a common food additive in cakes and cookies that is used to improve texture and prevent spoilage, but wellness influencers exploit the fact that a similarly named substance is used in paint and cleaning products to suggest it's dangerous to your health. Such claims can proliferate quickly, creating widespread misconceptions and undermining trust in legitimate scientific research and medical advice. Social media's rise as a news and information source further fuels the spread of pseudoscientific views. Misinformation is rampant in the realm of health and nutrition. Findings from nutrition research is rarely clear-cut because diet is just one of many behaviors and lifestyle factors affecting health, but the simplicity of using food and supplements as a cure-all is especially seductive. I am an assistant professor specializing in medical education and science communication. I also train scientists and future health care professionals how to communicate their science to the general public....

Two years after President Abraham Lincoln created the Department of Agriculture in 1862, he nicknamed it 'the people's department' because half of all Americans lived on farms at that time. Today, fewer than 2% of Americans farm, but the Agriculture Department still touches people's lives in many ways. The modern U.S. Department of Agriculture is a sprawling bureaucracy with a US$231 billion annual budget. Although it is headquartered in Washington, D.C., about 90% of its employees work in field offices nationwide. Others serve in nearly 100 embassies around the world as part of the Foreign Agriculture Service, promoting U.S. food and farm products. The most common misconception about the USDA is that it's mainly focused on supporting farmers and ranchers and conserving agricultural land. These are critical missions, but as a former deputy secretary of agriculture, I can attest that they represent only a small slice of what the department does. For example, nutrition assistance programs help tens of millions of people escape food insecurity annually. They consume 70% to 80% of the USDA's total annual budget, depending on the year, and include school meals, nutritional support for women, infants and children, and food benefits for low-income families. In contrast, only 13% of the agency's budget goes to farm, conservation and commodity programs....

In the world of nutrition, few words are more contentious than healthy. Experts and influencers alike are perpetually warring over whether fats are dangerous for the heart, whether carbs are good or bad for your waistline, and how much protein a person truly needs. But if identifying healthy food is not always straightforward, actually eating it is an even more monumental feat. As a reporter covering food and nutrition, I know to limit my salt and sugar consumption. But I still struggle to do it. The short-term euphoria from snacking on Double Stuf Oreos is hard to forgo in favor of the long-term benefit of losing a few pounds. Surveys show that Americans want to eat healthier, but the fact that more than 70 percent of U.S. adults are overweight underscores just how many of us fail. The challenge of improving the country's diet was put on stark display late last month, when the FDA released its new guidelines for which foods can be labeled as healthy. The roughly 300-page rule'the government's first update to its definition of healthy in three decades'lays out in granular detail what does and doesn't count as healthy. The action could make it much easier to walk down a grocery-store aisle and pick products that are good for you based on the label alone: A cup of yogurt laced with lots of sugar can no longer be branded as 'healthy.' Yet the FDA estimates that zero to 0.4 percent of people trying to follow the government's dietary guidelines will use the new definition 'to make meaningful, long-lasting food purchasing decisions.' In other words, virtually no one....