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Healthy Nutrition:

Key Myths, Misconceptions, and Life-Altering/Life-Saving Facts

“You are what you eat.”

Good questions or “essential questions,” can be a powerful starting point for curriculum design, investigation, and learning. Even research studies depend upon good questions, so let’s ask some.

Why are so many Americans so unhealthy—often even while taking lots of drugs?

There have been hundreds of thousands of research studies on nutrition, so why are we—including most doctors and researchers—so confused about healthy eating?

- For example, why can’t we even resolve the debate between low-fat vs. high-fat diets?

Starting in 2013, I started seriously researching those and related questions. I’ve spent well over a thousand hours studying hundreds of nutrition research studies, and trying to use a “big-picture” perspective to de-bunk myths about healthy eating. I’ve also debated healthy eating for hundreds of hours, to test my ideas, to learn, and because doing so raises new questions that motivate me to learn more. I was motivated to do all this digging in part because I’ve had so many loved ones become sick or die due to diseases that are strongly linked to diet, including my mother—who died of dementia in November, 2015—and an old college friend, Drew Sharp, who died far too young of a heart attack in 2016.

So what did I learn?

Below, I provide brief answers to the two questions above. I’ve also written other manuscripts providing more detail about specific topics—heart disease, dementia, and low-carb vs. low-fat diets.

There are Many Factors Keeping Us Incredibly Confused About Healthy Nutrition

Before I get to specific details about healthy eating, I’ve learned that it helps to first explain why some of this information can sound crazy at first, or why it may conflict with other things you’ve heard or even were told by your doctor or nutritionist. Let’s learn some of those background facts, and then reading about the specifics of healthy eating may be more digestible (pun intended).

1) We’ve come to view being quite unhealthy as “normal,” and most people don’t seem to realize that unless someone has a genetic defect, the human body is designed to be slim, healthy, and last for a lifetime. Traditional populations that ate a whole-food diet largely or almost entirely based on plant foods are generally quite slim, they do not experience increases in blood pressure as they age, do not develop plaque in their arteries (nor the related diseases or cardiovascular events—angina, heart attacks, strokes, vascular dementia, erectile dysfunction, diabetic neuropathy, etc.). They also have far lower rates of digestive disorders and far fewer cases of neurological diseases, cancers, arthritis, eye diseases, even acne. And we know from various types of research that these differences between their generally excellent lifelong health and our steadily deteriorating health as we age is affected more by diet than it is by genes or other lifestyle factors (with the exception of the link between smoking and lung disease). In fact, healthy enough changes in diet turn on hundreds of disease-fighting genes and turn off hundreds of disease-causing genes. But because we have come to think of high rates of disease as normal (rather than as an avoidable healthcare epidemic), that distorts our perspective on what’s healthy.

One illustration of the gap between what’s actually healthy and what we treat as healthy is LDL cholesterol—the so-called “bad cholesterol.” A truly healthy level LDL level is actually 50-70 mg/dl: That’s humans’ LDL levels as infants, it’s the level of LDL in other similar free-ranging mammals, and as long as humans keep their LDL level in that range naturally [mostly through diet] they don’t develop plaque in their arteries nor do they develop all the health problems that go along with cardiovascular disease (O’Keefe, et al., 2004). But if you ask doctors or Google the question, you get a very different answer. The top answer I got from Googling this was that less than 70 is supposedly an “optional goal for high risk patients” while 100-129 was bizarrely called “near optimal/above optimal” and 130-159 was called “borderline high.” This is totally misleading and dangerous advice. And even the Cleveland Clinic only tells you to keep LDL below 100. But we know that tens of millions of cases of preventable heart disease will develop in individuals with LDL levels between 70 and 100, so isn’t it weird that the Clinic is giving an LDL of 100 as the target, especially when they themselves admit in the next sentence that getting LDL down to 60 yielded better results? But this is where we’re at—things in the disease-promoting range are routinely called “healthy or normal,” and are even given as health targets by leading physicians and hospitals.

2) Building on #1, nutrition science has no universally agreed-upon definition of what the word “healthy” means. And because Americans eat a VERY unhealthy diet and have come to accept high rates of preventable diseases as normal, the foods and diets that are often called “healthy” actually cause major diseases to get worse. But how can doctors and researchers publishing in top journals call foods and diets “healthy” even if they make diseases worse? Easy—they use our current rather poor health status and unhealthy diets as the baseline, and any diets that cause disease markers to go down a little or cause diseases to get worse more slowly is then called a “healthy diet” or “healthy food.” So when researchers talk about “healthy fats” or a “healthy diet,” you need to know that they are often discussing foods that cause disease. Pretty weird, right?

To step out of our culture for a moment and reflect on how strange the American nutrition situation is, imagine you are an explorer and have discovered an island that somehow has escaped detection until now. The first unusual thing you notice is that everyone on the island hits themselves on the head with a heavy object (big branch, hammer, rock) multiple times a day and they all listen to incredibly loud noises (like an airplane engine) for many hours each day. Not surprisingly, they all have very serious headaches much of the time, but they all consider head-hitting and loud-noise-listening to be normal human behaviors, so the medical researchers there have ferocious debates about whether the real problem is the ratio of noise-listening to head hitting, or is it the precise kind of loud noise or objects they hit themselves on the head with (some are convinced that hitting oneself on the head with a metal pole is “healthier” than using rocks is, but others vigorously disagree). Some best-selling books claim the whole problem is the head-hitting, while other best-selling authors say the first group of authors are all idiots, and say that head-hitting is natural and the real problem comes from hours of deafening noises. In this strange context, researchers publishing a major new study have reported that hitting oneself on the head three times a day with metal poles yields less frequent, severe, and long-lasting headaches than does hitting oneself of the head five or more times with any type of hard, heavy object. Thus, the researchers have concluded that hitting oneself on the head three times a day with a heavy rock is clearly “brain-healthy” and is an “evidence-based method” for reducing serious headaches. You see the problem? And wouldn’t you just want to scream and tell them to stop ALL the head-hitting and loud-noise-listening? But this is roughly the situation in American nutrition research—we’re actually engaging in multiple very unhealthy eating behaviors, but authors such as Gary Taubes, Joseph Mercola or researchers publishing in top journals claim, for example, that the whole problem is due to a single problem, such as eating added sugar and processed carbs. The nutrition story is much bigger than that.

3) The reality is that the typical American Diet is VERY unhealthy. Just to give an overview, and compared to the healthiest diets that lead to the best health outcomes, the typical American eats about double the protein they need, 2-8 times the amount of fat that would be best, and far more processed foods than they need, complete with added fats, refined carbs and sugars, salt, and unnatural chemicals. The average omnivore diet is deficient in seven vitamins and minerals, and less than 5% of Americans eat the recommended daily intake of fiber—directly connected to the fact that few of us eat the recommended 7-9 servings of whole fruits and vegetables daily. To get some sense of scale, in the Asian and African diets that yielded the best health outcomes, they ate roughly five times the amount of dietary fiber that the average American eats. Americans also eat far more meat and dairy than is healthy—as indicated both by population studies and experimental studies. And to really top it off, the American Heart Association found that only one out of every two thousand Americans did daily what they call the “Simple Seven” for heart health.

“Most deaths in the United States are preventable and related to nutrition.”

- From “The State of US Health, 1990-2010: Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors”

4) Directly related to #1-3, researchers have discovered the fascinating reality that most patients describe their eating as “pretty healthy.” Obviously, when you have patients (or loved ones) whose diet is unhealthy and directly promotes disease, the fact that they believe they eat pretty healthfully is a huge obstacle to change. You must admit you have a problem before you’ll be motivated to change. But most doctors and researchers believe the same thing about their diets.

5) We also get confused about healthy nutrition because we desperately want to believe that the foods we love and are used to are perfectly healthy for us. Given what I enjoyed eating in the past, I would have loved to believe that cheeseburgers and ice cream grew on trees, that their production was healthy for the environment, and that eating them was perfectly healthy for my body. Notice that most doctors and researchers also want to believe their favorite foods are healthy.

6) We can get confused because we are addicted to the unhealthy foods, and are highly motivated to defend those eating habits. Anyone who has known someone with an addiction knows how clever they can be at creating rationalizations or defenses for explaining why what they are doing isn’t a problem. And the giant food companies actually have labs where they study how to get us addicted to processed foods, so these addictions are hardly surprising. Interestingly, one study found that at 20% calories from fat, people maintained their cravings/addiction to fat, but at 15% of calories from fat or lower, people broke their addiction to fat (our tastebuds and processing of stimuli actually change over time if we really change what we eat). Given this, it’s important to mention that virtually all of the “low-fat” diets that you hear mentioned in studies, meta-analyses, blogs, and everyday conversations actually had around 25-30% calories from fat and usually included processed foods with refined grains and added sugars. These diets aren’t really “low-fat” at all and they promote food addictions in two ways—the still-high level of fat keeps your fat cravings rolling while the added sugar and refined carbs mean your body processes the foods too quickly, and then you get low blood sugar—and then cravings to eat more. And of course, doctors and researchers are often just as addicted to unhealthy foods as we are, and research has shown that doctors are far less likely to recommend healthy behaviors that they don’t personally do.

7) Most doctors just don’t know that much about healthy nutrition. Medical training is notoriously weak when it comes to nutrition, with only an average of 20 hours of instruction, and much of that focused on isolated facts (vitamins, breastfeeding), and not a systems understanding of health-nutrition linkages. Thus, there’s no reason to expect your doctor to know more about nutrition than any reasonably well-informed person, and they often know much less about nutrition than do people who have studied nutrition in their spare time. Furthermore, the nutrition training at some medical schools is actually funded and sometimes even partly designed by the companies who makes the foods that make us sick (you get the idea).

8) As for registered dieticians/nutritionists, some may give great advice and some may not, but unfortunately, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND)—the largest trade group of registered nutritionists—has profound ethical conflicts of interest. AND is heavily funded by the food industry, meaning they take millions of dollars from the same food producers whose foods they are supposed to judge in an impartial way. Oops. Perhaps that is why AND’s stance is that “there are no bad foods,” a conclusion that totally contradicts the research—there are thousands of different foods that promote disease if consumed regularly, and even eating unhealthy foods once causes problems inside our bodies. Making matters worse, AND allows producers of many unhealthy foods to run training sessions at AND conferences, to “educate” nutrition professionals about healthy eating. Finally, for a $10,000 fee, AND allows food companies like Coca-Cola to help produce nutritional “fact sheets” relating to the foods they produce. All this may help explain why the advice given by registered nutritionists and dieticians often conflicts with the best science on healthy eating.

9) Helping to keep everyone confused, the giant food companies publish intentionally misleading studies, then downplay or hide findings not favorable to their foods while trumpeting any finding that can possible make their food look healthy or at least not harmful. For example, The Egg Board funded two studies with overweight individuals with LDL levels about double what they should be. Upon finding that adding eggs to an already very unhealthy diet didn’t raise LDL levels enough to be statistically significant, nor did it further undermine the functioning of the arteries, they were able to make the misleading claim that eating eggs had no harmful effects on LDL levels or the functioning of arteries of healthy people. What got much less press was the finding that when the patients stopped eating eggs and ate oatmeal instead, their LDL levels improved significantly and so did the functioning of their arteries—meaning the egg consumption was keeping people sicker than they would otherwise be. There are literally thousands of these misleading studies, so they can use meta-analyses of these intentionally misleading studies to promote policies that are unhealthy for us but benefit their bottom line.

10) Unfortunately, most nutrition research is “reductionist” research that looks at isolated variables and ignores big-picture systems effects, leading to really untrustworthy conclusions (this is the same problem that makes so much reading research or agricultural research untrustworthy). For example, people concerned about obesity and diabetes are concerned about their blood glucose levels and the size of the blood glucose spikes they get after eating.

We know from past research that the size of those blood glucose spikes is partly due to the kinds of carbs consumed AND the amount of fat and protein you consume along with carbohydrates, AND is related to how much fat you have stored in your muscles, which in turn is related to how much fat and animal foods you usually eat (more animal foods means more fat in the muscles and higher insulin resistance). But someone doing reductionist research might ignore all that and simply study carbohydrate consumption and upon finding larger blood glucose spikes with more carb consumption, they will tell readers to cut down on carbs. This is actually backwards advice, since the people eating diets very high in WHOLE-FOOD carbs are the slimmest and have the lowest rates of diabetes, because that overall eating pattern leads to low levels of fat in the muscles and that increases decreases insulin resistance, increases insulin sensitivity, meaning that the body can now much more efficiently process glucose, so it doesn’t build up in the bloodstream. So “reductionist” research means they don’t look at the “big-picture,” they miss out on critical interaction effects, and they often wind up giving recommendations that are exactly backwards. But these studies will still be considered very “scientific” and may be published in the most prestigious journals.

11) Even when they do know better, it has been well-documented that doctors and medical researchers often intentionally don’t tell patients of the public what the healthiest diet really is—they often tell them what the healthiest diet is that they think their patients are likely to follow. Researchers have found this, and I’ve had a few personal encounters with Cleveland Clinic doctors who were excited to hear I was on “the Esselstyn diet”—and they agreed it’s super healthy—but the Clinic instead recommends the DASH diet, even though the DASH diet yields more disease and much less dramatic health benefits than does the Esselstyn diet.

We’ve already waded into some substantive issues, but let’s end the “how-we-get fooled” preamble and focus directly on some key findings.

Diet is the Biggest Factor Influencing Our Health

12) What you eat actually becomes your body, and profoundly affects how well your body works.

13) Unhealthy diet causes the majority of chronic disease in the U.S. –increasing obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, cancers, dementia, vision problems (cataracts, macular degeneration), arthritis, erectile dysfunction, reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, kidney stones, gallstones, kidney failure, gout, chronic back pain, as well as migraines, colds, pneumonia, some autoimmune diseases, and even acne.

14) A healthy diet so dramatically reduces the frequency and severity of these diseases that many of these major diseases common in developed nations are rare or even unheard of in populations eating a truly healthy diet. For example, one African researcher reported with interest on the first case of heart disease discovered in one major hospital in a 16-year span—developed by a judge who had started eating a Western diet. Similarly, strokes, gallstones, and kidneys stones (other?) were virtually unheard of in early studies of Africans or Asians eating a traditional diet largely centered on whole plant foods. They also tend not to get cavities like we do.

15) A healthy diet can also slow the progression of or even reverse many major diseases, including obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, migraines, some vision and memory problems, and even cancers. Thus, most people adopting a healthy diet find they can reduce or eliminate medications. For example, after switching to a healthy diet, I was able to stop taking Nexxium, after taking it for 10 years. Many others are able to reduce or eliminate statins, blood pressure medications, and diabetes medicines. The film Forks Over Knives reports on a man who was able to get off of 21 of his 22 medications after switching to a truly healthy diet. For three dramatic but not at all unusual cases of how rapidly and effectively a truly healthy diet helps the body cure heart disease, see http://www.dresselstyn.com/Esselstyn_Three-case-reports_Exp-Clin-Cardiol-July-2014.pdf

16) A healthy diet also makes you feel better, look better, have more energy, be more productive, get sick less, enjoy life more, and live longer. People shifting to a much healthier diet often describe the shift as moving from “living to eat” to embracing “eating to live”—focusing more on eating in a way that makes the rest of their lives more enjoyable and productive.

17) Genes determine only a tiny fraction of our health destiny: A healthy diet literally turns off the expression of disease-promoting genes and turns on hundreds of disease-fighting genes. Thus, when you control for diet, less than 10% (or even less than 5%) of most major diseases are truly caused by one’s genetic make-up. Genes or the environment can load the gun for many major diseases, but diet usually pulls the trigger. For example, people living in Nigeria have one of the highest rates of a gene that predisposes people to higher Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) risk but they have one of the lowest rates of AD in the world, most likely because they eat a traditional whole food diet very high in plant foods and very low in fat and animal foods. Indeed, as Asians have increasingly adopted the Standard American Diet, dementia rates have climbed dramatically, and research on the issue has found consumption of animal fat to be the variable most strongly associated with developing dementia http://nutritionfacts.org/video/alzheimers-disease-grain-brain-or-meathead/

18) With major diet-caused diseases responsible for the majority of health care spending in the U.S., the effects of diet on health are so dramatic that if everyone were to adopt a truly healthy diet, the U.S. could save roughly $1 trillion annually in unnecessary medical expenses (~7% of GDP).

What is the Healthiest Diet?

“Let food be thy medicine.” – Hippocrates

19) The best diet for overall health is a whole-food, plant-based diet (WFPB) with little or no animal foods. Despite all the confusion about low-fat vs. low-carb or which fats are healthier, the big picture is that there simply are no studies showing that you can achieve the levels of disease-free longevity on a diet high in fat (30-45+% calories from fat) or high in meat and dairy as has been achieved on a whole food plant-based diet that is very low in fat.

But what about Paleo? There are definitely studies showing that people eating the Standard American Diet can lose weight rapidly in the short run on the Paleo diet, and when you lose weight, biomarkers such as LDL levels and A1C can improve a lot in the short run. Also, compared to the Standard American Diet, the Paleo recommendations to cut out processed foods and dairy are healthy moves and so is adding in lots of vegetables and eating leaner pasture-raised meat. However, some of the improvement in biomarkers are due to that short-term weight loss, and in the long term, people eating a Paleo Diet tend to put a lot of weight back on, meaning those biomarkers will get worse again after the short-term study is over. Worldwide, the slimmest people are those who eat the least meat and get a very high percentage of their calories from whole-food carbs and the fattest are those who eat the most meat and fat. Also, a 2013 review of studies on low-carb vs. low-fat diet (British Journal of Nutrition) found that compared to low-fat diets, low-carb diets impair “flow-mediated dilation”—the ability of the arteries to expand appropriately when they need to. Similarly, in one of the best studies ever done on the topic (using the most sophisticated imaging), people following a low-fat plant based diet saw a 22-23% reduction in the amount of plaque in their coronary arteries, while those who had switched to a low-carb diet high in fat in protein saw a 40-52% increase in the amount of plaque in their coronary arteries—an awful and truly dangerous result (Fleming & Boyd, 2000).

20) Unless one eats lots of nuts, seeds, and avocadoes, a whole-food, plant-based diet (WFPB) is generally very low in fat (about 7-12% calories from fat). There remains an intriguing possibility that you could get great health outcomes eating a higher fat WFPB diet (more nuts and avocadoes—the so-called “eco-Atkins diet”) but there’s not much research on the issue.

21) People eating a WFPD diet may consume roughly 80% of their calories from whole food carbohydrates (rice, wheat, other grains; potatoes), 10% of their calories from protein, and 10% of their calories from fat. The Okinawans, one of the healthiest and longest-lived people on the planet, got that way by eating the traditional Okinawan diet, which was ~85% calories from carbohydrates (mostly sweet potatoes, some rice), 9% calories from protein, and 6% calories from fat.

22) This healthy WFPB diet contrasts dramatically with the Standard American Diet (SAD), which is very high in processed foods (including added sugars, fats, salt, and chemicals), and has 35% or more of calories from fat, roughly 20% of calories from protein, and 35-45% of calories from carbohydrates. Notice that this means that the healthy and long-lived Okinawans eat roughly double the carbohydrates most Americans eat, only half the protein many of us eat, and only one sixth the fat we eat.

What is the Evidence Indicating that this is the Healthiest Diet?

Multiple types of evidence regarding multiple health outcomes all point to the conclusion that a whole-food diet made up entirely or almost entirely of plant foods is the healthiest diet. That is, people eating a WFPB diet have by far the lowest rates of major diseases, and live the longest. And more specifically, all of these diets have in common very low consumption of fat.

But what’s the nature of the proof? There are literally thousands of supporting studies, but I’ll summarize the proof and then I’m working on separate manuscripts/readings to provide more details about individual health topics such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, dementia, cancer, mortality, etc.. In the meantime, I’ve provided links to the main pages on these topics on the NutritionFacts.org website—NutritionFacts is perhaps the more comprehensive and authoritative site on the web for research based summaries of nutrition science, with over 2000 topics covered.

1) The first source of evidence comes from population studies: The only large and well-documented populations worldwide that have achieved very low levels of disease and much longer lives are populations eating a diet that is largely or overwhelmingly whole food plants and that is low in fat. That is, in Asia, Africa, etc., these populations got the vast majority of their calories from rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and usually ate far more fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens than we do. The famous Blue Zones study—on the healthiest and longest lived populations—finds high rates of plant food consumption and low rates of consumption of animal foods in all the areas studied. Similarly, where we have populations who engage in healthy behaviors such as not smoking and not drinking, within those populations, those who have the least disease and live the longest are those who eat the least animal foods—with vegans being the healthiest and living the longest—14 years longer on average than someone on the Standard American Diet. More generally, the lowest rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer are found in the vegan population—even compared to healthy omnivores who don’t eat a lot of meat, vegans are significantly healthier.

What about the Eskimos, with their high-fat diet full of animal foods? While authors pushing high-fat diets like to report on how explorers found the Eskimos to be very healthy, actual scientific evidence ranging from health records to autopsies and even examination of mummified Eskimo bodies reveals high levels of disease—including heart disease—and pretty short lives.

But aren’t our bodies adapted to eat meat—as people say, look at our teeth. Yes, humans have evolved to be capable of surviving on both plant and animal foods, but we have to think a little deeper than that. All evolution cares about is that you live long enough to reproduce and raise your offspring to independence—it doesn’t care if you live a long and disease-free life, and the evidence is overwhelming that the best way to do that is to eat a diet high in plant foods and with little or no animal foods (But if someone DOES go vegan, they should be sure to take a B12 supplement).

2) The second source of evidence comes from natural experiments. During the World Wars, when European countries had to replace higher-fat diets with more meat with lower fat diets with lots of potatoes, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and deaths all dropped dramatically, and in concert with these dietary changes. And when they reverted to eating more animal foods and fat after the war, disease rates and deaths went up sharply. When low-carb diets with more animal protein and fat caught on in Sweden recently, up went disease and death rates. As peoples in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere have given up high-carb diets based on plant foods with the Standard American Diet which is much higher in fat, animal foods, and processed foods, disease rates and mortality have gone up dramatically.

3) The third source of evidence comes from lots of research evidence on the healthiest foods. The healthiest foods are all plant foods, with less healthy foods that have been documented to cause disease all being animal foods and processed foods. See:

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/what-are-the-healthiest-foods/

Yes, there are specific beneficial nutrients in specific animal foods (calcium in dairy) but food is a package deal, and to determine the healthfulness of a food, you must consider ALL of the health effects of eating that food (instead of perhaps getting that nutrient from a more healthful food). More specifically, increased animal food consumption is strongly linked to increased levels of all major chronic diseases (and higher mortality), while greater consumption of specific plant foods is consistently found to be associated with lower levels of all major diseases, and lower death rates. Animal food consumption is even implicated in the incredibly early onset of puberty in developed nations—a development that simultaneously increase breast cancer risk.

4) The fourth source of evidence is experimental studies. Studies in which people replaced what they were eating with a whole food plant-based diet have yielded by far the greatest improvements in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc, of all diets ever studied. This includes multiple studies by Kempner, Pritikin, Ornish, Esselstyn and others showing the dramatic weight loss and the reversal of diabetes and heart disease. It also includes shorter-term studies showing massive drops in LDL cholesterol on a truly low-fat, whole-food, plant based diet, and even petri dish studies in which the blood of people eating a plant-based diet killed off cancer cells seven times better than did the blood of people eating an omnivorous diet (studies of whole people also find that vegetarians have lower cancer rates than omnivores do, and the cancer rates of vegans are even lower.)

For more details on the research and recommendations, you can search at the links below. Some links just have a few 2-8 minute videos, but many have dozens or hundreds to choose from!

General video search page: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/

The alphabetical search tool allows you to search among hundreds of additional topics.

Introductory videos: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/introductory-videos/

Blood pressure: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/blood-pressure/

Obesity: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/obesity/

Weight loss: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/weight-loss/

Diabetes: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/diabetes/

Heart disease: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/heart-disease/ Continued on next page….

Cancer: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/cancer/

Breast cancer survival: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/breast-cancer-survival/

Depression: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/depression/

Alzheimer’s disease: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/alzheimers-disease/

Lower back pain: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/lower-back-pain/

Arthritis: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/arthritis/

Fertility: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/fertility/

Meat: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/meat/

Dairy: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/dairy/

Eggs: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/eggs/

Fruit: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/fruit/

Vegetables: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/vegetables/

Fiber: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/fiber/

Cholesterol: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/cholesterol/

Saturated fat: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/saturated-fat/

Animal fat: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/animal-fat/

Animal protein: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/animal-protein/

Sugar: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/sugar/

Salt: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/salt/

(Problems with…) Paleo diets: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/paleolithic-diets/

(Problems with…) Low-carb diets: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/low-carb-diets/

(Truly) Low-fat diets: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/low-fat-diets/

Plant-based diets: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/plant-based-diets/

Pregnancy: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/pregnancy/

Longevity: https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/longevity/

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