The Health Advice I No Longer Chase

A significant share of nutrition research relies on people accurately recalling and reporting what they ate over the previous days or weeks, a method with a well documented weakness, since human memory around food is notoriously unreliable. Some of the dietary advice that flips every few years traces back, at least in part, to that shaky foundation rather than to your body having changed.

Health advice arrives daily, bright and certain, offering a neat formula for looking, feeling or performing better, usually contradicting whatever it told you confidently the year before. I used to chase each new version, assuming the previous advice had simply been wrong and this one, finally, was right.

Understanding how much of the underlying research rests on people's fuzzy memory of their own plates changed how much authority I hand any single new headline. I still eat well, by my own steady definition of that rather than whichever formula is trending.

Vegetables I actually like. Meals I actually finish paying attention to while eating them.

I still read the new headlines when they arrive. I've just stopped rearranging my actual plate every time one contradicts whatever came before it.

The plate in front of me doesn't need this year's headline to back it up. It just needs to be something I actually chose on purpose.

It needs to be something I can still explain to myself tomorrow. The salad in front of me doesn't need a study behind it to be a good decision.

Some days that's the whole health advice I'm willing to chase anymore.