Nutrition: Fact vs. Fiction

Designed by Sophie Jurion | Written by Alexandra Grieco | Photographed by Hui-En Lin

In an era of Los Angeles influencers flooding timelines with filtered pictures of green juice and boomerangs of low-calorie meals as they bathe in the sun, nutrition has become a hot topic on the internet. The trendiness of nutrition has turned the focus away on understanding what is actually nutritious and what isn’t. Post after post, social media influencers clog up the apps with their self-proclaimed health expert knowledge and advice.

The nonstop stream of nutrition “rights” and “wrongs” make determining the truth seem like a battle of conflicting instructions. An Instagram infographic will claim that cutting out a certain food will save your diet, but then a TikTok dietician will post a minute-long video about the many benefits of that very food. These strict sets of rules tend to conflict with one another, which makes cultivating a healthier lifestyle difficult. However, eating more nutritious foods should be simple, easy, and encouraging. Despite all the uninformed and unverified information floating around the internet, there are some examples of genuine advice that comes from trustworthy sources.

This article will look through popular online nutrition “do’s” and “don'ts” to determine what is fact and fiction. We will break down the perceived benefits of three common misconceptions about nutrition and explore the actual effects of making those changes to your diet.

1. Following a Keto Diet Keto— the notorious dietturned-meme— may be the most recognizable diet in the online nutrition world. The ketogenic diet consists of cutting down carbohydrates and eating more high-fat foods and has been a wide-spread phenomenon for people trying to lose weight or eat healthier. While many people have committed themselves to the intense diet, keto has also been scrutinized online. Critics suggest that the diet

According to The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the ketogenic diet limits most major food groups, which in turn makes it difficult to acquire necessary nutrients like Vitamin B. If you follow the keto trend, you will be at risk of lacking the nutritious value of your daily food intake, especially if you neglect to take the supplements necessary to balance out the diet. Although it is pushed to be a healthy alternative to carb-heavy meals, the extremeness of keto slowly begins to outweigh the positives. It is generally untrue that the keto diet can supply you with optimal nutritional benefits. In fact, many cases have proven the opposite.

2. Cutting Sugar from Your Diet Entering the words “sugar free” into any search bar can generate thousands of tutorials, challenges, and vlogs about social media influencers who claim that cutting out sugars is a crucial step for good health. It has become mainstream to make this major change to your diet, with extra pressure to make it a full commitment and cut out sugar completely from your life. Even though there are many health benefits to moderately cutting out sugar that should be taken into consideration, fully removing sugar from your diet might be too drastic of a step for the average person. Through simply reducing your sugar intake, one can still feel positive effects. Every individual is different, but this can mean not eating as many sweet treats, not adding sugar into your coffee, or just keeping an eye on general sugar intake throughout the day.

However, one should note that fruit should not be a part of the sugars to stop eating if you do decide to remove sugar from your diet, despite certain online opinions. According to The BMJ, there is a good chance that eating a consistent amount of fruit can lessen the chances of developing a chronic disease like cardiovascular disease and or cancer. Of course, many factors play into the origins of a chronic disease, but eating fruit, despite its natural sugar, may offer a slight nutritional benefit when dealing with a person’s general health. Cutting down might be a better option than cutting out when it comes to sugar, and it is important to remember that there should not be pressure to rearrange your entire diet just to address the possible dangers of one food group.

3. Trying Juice Cleanses The apex of social media nutrition seems to be juice cleanses with influencers filling their feeds with all shades of green liquids that they swear can reboot your body. “Detoxing” is the main appeal of juice cleanses, and followers of the diet claim that the vitamin-rich liquid triggers an increase in the efficiency of enzymes, which flushes toxins out of the digestive system. Taking anywhere from a few days to a full week, juice cleanses are also understood to help with weight-loss. Yet, according to the Ro Health Guide, the calorie-restrictive cleanses, which only supply the body with 1,300 calories a day instead of the necessary 2,000 calories, deny your body the full requirements to maintain energy. So, instead of feeling healthier and re-energized from the cleanse, you become more prone to tiredness or fainting. Not only does a juice cleanse mean cutting down calories and energy, but it also means cutting down necessary nutrients, such as protein, fiber, and fat. This directly impacts your gut health, making it difficult to digest the juice in a comfortable way. Neglecting these nutrients also means that you would have to supplement them in another form, which is hard because a juice cleanse requires fasting hard foods that would contain protein, fiber, or fat. There is a lot of fiction behind the trend of detoxing and juice cleanses. Depriving your body of certain essentials and calories is not necessarily something that should be done in the name of nutrition.

It can be easy to take influencer-approved diets at face value and miss the dangers and misinformation submerged behind the LED screen. While there are many social media posts that spread legitimate information about nutrition, it is helpful to keep in mind that not every person who shares their opinion has done the necessary research on the diet or trend that they are promoting. It is a personal choice to commit to a more nutritious diet, so forget certain online pressures and balance your meals in ways that feel right for you.