Podcast: How do you spot nutrition misinformation?

Clinton Monchuk: (00:07)
From Canadian Food Focus, this is Ask a Farmer. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk, a Saskatchewan farmer. In this podcast, we talk to food experts to answer your questions about your food.

Clinton Monchuk: (00:28)
So today on the podcast, we’re going to be talking a little bit more about how to spot nutritional misinformation. And I think we’ve been inundated with a lot of different information on social media, different things we read, whether it’s new diet trends, new super foods, and really there’s a lot of fluff around that. And what it is in our minds, we kind of get skeptical about some of this stuff. Some of it’s actually legit, some of it’s not. But it’s hard to decipher what is and is not true. So, to try and get a better handle on this, today, we have Erin McGregor with us. So we feel you are the expert of this information and trying to decipher what is true and what is not. And we kind of want to draw in your expertise for all our listeners out there so they can get a better sense of how they can make more informed decisions about their food. But before we get into that, we want to know more about you.

Erin MacGregor: (01:24)
My name’s Erin MacGregor, and I work primarily as a dietician. That’s my professional designation, and I’ve done a lot of different things as a dietician. I still wear a lot of different hats under that role. I work as a clinician in a hospital setting and have done that for about 15 years. So looking after people’s nutrition care, who are either having trouble eating or can’t eat in a normal way in hospital. But I’ve also done lots of other really interesting things on the side as well. So for a long period of time, I was running a nutrition communications business with a partner, where we wrote a cooking and recipe blog for Canadians, which, you know, encouraged people to get back into the kitchen and cook with their families. But mostly it encouraged people to relax about their food and whether that means, you know, shopping for it, preparing it, cooking it, feeding their children.

Erin MacGregor: (02:13)
We really wanted people to recognize what an amazing time it is to be alive when it comes to accessing incredible variety and affordable food in Canada. And to make choices around food based on facts rather than fear, which you alluded to in your introduction. Lots of folks in Canada have lots of different sources of information around food these days, and it can be really difficult to kind of tease out what’s true, what isn’t true, what’s an exaggeration around food. Some of the other work I do is, is really talking about misinformation and helping both consumers, people that work in different industries, dieticians learn how to recognize misinformation and how to combat it if they’re using social media or other tools to share their information. So I guess that’s the short and long of it. But I mean, I’m on a podcast that focuses on agriculture, and I should probably tell that part of my story because typically dieticians, you know, we don’t get any meaningful training in agriculture when we come up through our programming and write our exam as dieticians.

Erin MacGregor: (03:18)
And so when I started working as one about 15 years ago, I’d never grown up in an area that had a lot of agriculture. I lived in an urban space, most of my life. I didn’t have a lot of context around agriculture, but as a consumer facing food professional, I was getting a lot of questions related to how our food was grown, what was safe, basic questions for you Clinton, but more complex for someone that doesn’t have any kind of meaningful experience in agriculture. And I found that the resources that I started to go to first were more like pop culture resources. I was finding a lot of my information online. I was finding a lot of my information through what I like to now call ‘shockumentaries’, but the farming and food documentaries that scared you about, you know, “big agriculture” and GMOs and that kind of thing were really popular about, you know, 10, 15 years ago.

Erin MacGregor: (04:09)
And so I was getting most of my information from there and unfortunately passing that sort of misinformation on to consumers from that space. And, you know, at the end of the day, it’s my job to, you know, sift through information and try to bring evidence to consumers and patients and clients and whoever I’m working with. But I failed at doing that in the agriculture space because I was a victim to the misinformation myself. And, you know, around that time I think that the agriculture industry really started to recognize that misinformation was a huge problem. I think that a big part of it is that consumers and farmers have never been more disconnected. There are way fewer people that work in the ag space these days, and the direct connection to consumers can be really difficult. And so I found myself as kind of an intermediary.

Erin MacGregor: (04:58)
The ag industry started seeing that and started seeing dieticians and other types of food and media influencers, being this kind of consumer-facing person and started developing things like farm tours, so that dieticians could get, you know, direct experience seeing what Canadian farming and agriculture was all about. And my first tours were through Farm & Food care. There was a Ontario based organization that did one-day tours for people who worked in food and media. And as a food blogger, I got an invite onto one of these tours and it really opened my eyes and, you know, I got the bug and I wanted to learn more and became really curious about where our food came from. It’s been, you know, 10 years I’ve been on dozens of farm tours, throughout Canada and the US tours of biotechnology facilities to learn about, you know, genetics and modern agriculture techniques.

Erin MacGregor: (05:53)
And now I use my voice as more of an advocate for Canadian agriculture and helping people to understand where their food comes from, through, again, facts and not fear. And that’s kind of my M.O. is trying to dispel misinformation, particularly in the ag space. I have a real passion for it and helping consumers just really enjoy eating. And so, you know, it’s important to bring awareness to the average consumer, how much work, what a huge industry agriculture is here in Canada, how advanced it is from a tech perspective as well, which is something that generally consumers are really unaware of at this point. I recently went on a tour in Guelph to some of the biotechnology facilities that are coming up with new pest control measures and different types of seeds and just the level of detail that we get down to when trying to, you know, create new techniques in agriculture, growing things in different ways, using GPS, using algorithms, AI is on the forefront for sure. This is all happening in Canadian agriculture across the country. And, you know, it’s, it’s not old McDonald that’s hand hoeing fields anymore.

Clinton Monchuk: (07:09)
I always say when I tell kids when I talk to them about farming that, have you picked weeds in the back garden of, of your parents’ place? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So could you imagine picking weeds in 4,000 football fields? Oh, no, no. . It would take forever. Pass! I said, yeah, no, that’s a heavy pass. Yeah. That’s why we have different technologies now to do it. So, but you’re, you’re right. Like there’s all this new information that’s coming out even on the agriculture side for me as a farmer to try and get my head around some of it and, and what we can use and implement on our farms and what’s coming down the pike in the future Yeah. To try and make sure we’re ready for it. And it, and it really is this, it’s kind of like that treadmill, that technological treadmill that just keeps on going and there’s lots of stuff out there we just have to decipher, you know, what we’re going to use that’s useful and, and maybe pass on some of the other things. Yeah, just like any industry. Right?

Clinton Monchuk: (08:04)
So Erin, you wrote an article on Canadian Food Focus talking about how to spot misinformation when it comes to nutrition. And one of the things that you actually brought up right at the start is, is there’s an infodemic. Yeah. Do you want to just talk about that and some of the different methods that you have just to spot some of this misinformation, what we can do about it?

Erin MacGregor: (08:26)
For sure, yeah. So an infodemic really relates to kind of this avalanche I would call it, of information that can be both accurate and inaccurate that we really have to navigate kind of on a daily basis. And usually it’s online and that large volume of information can make it really difficult to extract what’s actually true and what’s relevant to the topic at hand. And so I think that there’s no doubt that we’re living through an infodemic right now as it relates to many, many topics. Agriculture being one of them, nutrition being one of them. Being able to spot misinformation tactics is a really good way to kind of weave our way through this infodemic. And now, in terms of spotting misinformation, the point is really to spot the tactics. So it’s really, at this point in time, it’s impossible to have consumers understand or have in-depth knowledge about any one particular topic enough so that they would be able to weed through all of the misinformation online and understand what’s true and accurate, right?

Erin MacGregor: (09:32)
So you’re never going to have a consumer who’s never had any kind of meaningful experience in agriculture, learn enough to be experienced enough to pull out what is misinformation and what isn’t. Same with nutrition. It takes many, many years to have some expertise in nutrition. I’m a dietician and I don’t consider myself an expert. I have some expertise in some areas. So it’s not about actually knowing a topic intimately and understanding a topic. That’s not the best way to pull out misinformation. It’s really learning what the tactics are. And at the end of the day, this is kind of a higher level, it’s more of media literacy than it is actually understanding the topic itself. There are a few ways to become more media literate and to spot misinformation without having in-depth knowledge about a topic.

Clinton Monchuk: (10:20)
You already made comment to the fact that you’ve been doing this for so many years and you still feel that there’s so much more to learn, right? Yeah. And I feel the same way in agriculture. The problem ends up being, and, I did actually do a little bit of research on it to find out what the psychological term is. So it’s called the Dunning Kruger effect, right? Where oh yeah, you, you know, a little bit of information, but now you have a platform to tell the world, right? Right. Like, you just want to tell everybody about this new information, right? And you don’t really actually understand whether or not it’s true or not, right? You have this platform now with social media and the internet to do this, but we all know that as soon as you start to get little tidbits of more information that, well, it’s actually quite a bit deeper when the average consumer sees some of this stuff that comes on their social media. We were talking about it before. So somebody’s looking at nutritional information. I would only assume that there’s a ton of information that gets populated in their feeds about this. So how can the average person say, okay, you know, that’s interesting, but I don’t know if that’s true.

Erin MacGregor: (11:30)
So I think it’s really teaching people how to be skeptical and to use critical thinking as their first line of defense rather than understanding the topic itself. And there’s a few ways that you can kind of, kind of go through a few steps to apply your critical thinking skills with topics that you might be skeptical about. And in terms of nutrition information, one of the red flags that I look for is to watch out for claims that aren’t backed by a source, for instance. So like, as a science communicator, and I would consider yourself that too. You communicate the science about agriculture and what are the facts about agriculture on a regular basis. You know, we provide, we can provide evidence for the claims that we’re making. So if a journalist or a writer or a social media creator is, you know, making a claim about nutrition or health, they should be able to provide evidence to support those claims too.

Erin MacGregor: (12:24)
Online platforms make it very easy to share information about sourcing. So, if it’s an article, you can look for hot links within the article or at the end of an article. Information posted in the caption of a social media post can link you directly to a scientific paper or well-known or trusted website. So, you know, more trusted websites end in “.gov” “.edu”, which is an educational institute or “.org”, which means it’s a nonprofit. So those are tiny little things that you can look for. The other thing is adequate evidence is really important when you come across content that presents something that’s new, so new or novel information that you’ve never heard before, or something that goes against the current consensus or the scientific consensus, right? So if you hear someone denying that, you know, climate change is human made, for instance, well, the scientific consensus is that, you know, like 80% of climate scientists believe that humans cause at least some of climate change, you would have to provide a lot of evidence to counter a scientific consensus.

Erin MacGregor: (13:28)
And the same goes for nutrition. I can give you an example. For instance, let’s say a someone on social media, a creator, you know, comes out and says that a strictly carnivore diet is something that’s healthy. So eating only animal products, not eating any vegetables or grains is the way to be healthy. Well, that creator would be refuting literally decades of scientific consensus about the benefits of a high fiber, plant-forward diet. And since it’s really, really rare that one study reverses a really long-held scientific consensus, this type of claim should really present evidence for multiple high quality sources. And if you don’t see that happening, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the claim is false, but it is a way for you to stick a tiny little red flag in it and to heighten your level of skepticism about that particular piece of content. So that’s really kind of the number one thing that I look for is sourcing.

Clinton Monchuk: (14:26)
What about the emotional factor? And I see a lot of it, right, where it’s just a high strung individual saying, if you eat this, you’re going to have the super best body in the world and you’re going to look like me and then pumps his muscles and woo, wow, I for sure, I wish I had muscles like that. Right? How do you counter a little bit of that? Because we know that’s out there, right? For sure. So your mind automatically goes into, yeah, I like that, I want that.

Erin MacGregor: (14:54)
Yeah, totally. So that is one way to appeal to someone’s emotion is in a positive way, right? To tell someone, you know, if you buy this, eat this, do this, your life will become better. But I find that it’s much, much worse when the appeal is to a negative emotion. So I always say that if a post makes you feel angry or if it makes you feel scared, then you should be skeptical and you should be wary. And that should be an automatic red flag for you. You know, creators know that a strong emotion can really impair your ability to think critically and to process information. When you react to something emotionally that you see online, just pause for a brief moment and reflect on the content itself, right? So nutrition research is notoriously oversimplified in news, and it often instills fear as kind of a form of clickbait.

Erin MacGregor: (15:48)
So let’s, for instance, I’ll give you an example. It can be a headline that you see on social media on like an online media source that says just one serving of, you know, insert literally any food here, um, can increase your cancer risk. And this is almost certainly misleading when compared to the actual research it’s referencing to, there’s really no such food that, you know, causes any one thing. So anytime you see a headline that says this one food causes cancer or may cause cancer, stick a red flag in that as well and be skeptical of it, because that’s just not how nutrition research works. Nutrition science is extremely complex, and in reality, it’s almost never, ever unilaterally like going to glorify or vilify any one specific food or nutrient. And if you see that happening in a headline, then it’s important to be skeptical of that.

Erin MacGregor: (16:41)
You know, fear-based messaging is also a really, really common tactic that’s being used in social media currently. So I’m not sure if you’re familiar with like the ‘grocery store bro’ kind of content? No? You’ll see often on TikTok and Instagram. So it will be some kind of social media wellness influencer that walks up and down the grocery aisles and picks out foods that you shouldn’t eat based on really scary ingredients that, you know, this ingredient is also found in a yoga mat. We’ve heard that with a Subway debate recently, right? So pointing out foods or ingredients that are dangerous or toxic, that kind of content has become really popular and you know, creators can really benefit from these claims in a lot of different ways. So fear-based messaging draws a lot of followers. It’s really compelling content, but it also may be helping to market that creator’s products or services, right? Right. I’m going to scare you about this toxic thing or this dangerous thing, and here come to my website where I sell the supplements or the services Yeah. To solve your problem that you’re scared of. Yeah, right.

Clinton Monchuk: (17:45)
I was just going to say, and I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve seen that [humorous] video, but the travelling dietician, right? Talking about eggs, I’m an egg farmer, right? We produce eggs on our farm and you know, depending on the study and what was released in the media, right? Like eggs are good, eggs are bad, eggs are good, eggs are good, bad, yeah…

Erin MacGregor: (18:01)
Eggs are a good example.

Clinton Monchuk: (18:02)
You know, over the course of time, I think now we’ve realized that it’s part of a balanced diet; for a good animal protein. If you want to use it, great. But you go back in time and, and it was like you were vilified for consuming it, and then it was health food, and then it was vilified. I know what you mean. And this is the emotional thing that happens with us, right? We get on these different things as opposed to slow and steady diet, right? Something that hits all those food groups and, and you can be happy and not nervous totally or highly emotional about it, right?

Erin MacGregor: (18:36)
That’s right. Focus on variety and enjoying what you eat. Those are two of the most important things about, you know, having a healthful diet.

Clinton Monchuk: (18:45)
So the third kind of area in the article that you talk about is trying to be more aware of common nutritional misinformation tactics. What are some of these that our listeners can place in their minds when they are going grocery shopping?

Erin MacGregor: (19:01)
Yeah, so this is more of a group of misinformation, tactics that are called logical fallacies. And a logical fallacy is really something that is a deceptive or a false argument, but it actually seems like a really strong argument because it appeals to us psychologically. It’s very psychologically persuasive. So, the first example I’ll use is a really, really common one in the nutrition space, and that’s called the appeal to nature fallacy. And this is an argument that assumes that something is good, quote unquote good as long as it occurs or exists naturally. So natural is better, you know, synthetic or unnatural is bad. It’s not moral, it’s unsafe, it’s dangerous. That kind of categorizes, you know, the good and bad in terms of natural and unnatural. And it’s really common in spreading misinformation about food and nutrition. But what I think is really important to remember is that there’s lots of synthetic ingredients that have made our food supply safer like, preservatives. Yeah. And more nutritious like vitamin and mineral fortification and enrichment in some of our foods, right? And naturally occurring things that we find in our foods, like bacteria like listeria, for instance, that can be deadly. And so the bottom line here is if someone is making a claim that something is better or good or safer because it’s natural, it’s not an adequate claim. Natural does not make things safer, it does not make things better. It definitely does not make things more nutritious. Yeah. So that’s one of the logical fallacies. It’s very psychologically persuasive.

Clinton Monchuk: (20:32)
Sometimes we, we fail to realize that there’s a lot of things that want to kill us out there in nature. Right? It’s true. And failure to understand that brings in some of these misconceptions.

Erin MacGregor: (20:44)
That’s right. Lightning strikes are natural. Bears are natural. Yeah. These things can kill you.

Clinton Monchuk: (20:48)
That’s it exactly.

Erin MacGregor: (20:51)
Yeah. So the next logical fallacy, it’s called a false dichotomy. So this is really a tactic that presents an argument as either black or white, when in reality, like nutrition science in particular is really a ton of shades of gray in between being wary of claims that say a single food or nutrient is good or bad. Right? And if you see something being categorized into black and white, it’s something that you should be wary of unless it’s in reference to a food allergy. Food should never be categorized in kind of this polarizing way. So that’s another tiny little red flag as well. The next is also a really common one, a very common logical fallacy in the nutrition world. And it’s the correlation does not equal causation effect. And so this is the tactic which really mistakenly argues that when things are observed together that they are correlated or one causes the other.

Erin MacGregor: (21:42)
So a really great easy example to think of is when the rooster crows in the morning, does it cause the sun to rise or are they just observed together? Right? Right. So they are correlated, they’re observed together, but the rooster is not causing the sun to rise. Yeah. So, you know, when claims are made about, you know, an increased intake of a specific food or a nutrient causing a health problem, it’s really important to be skeptical of this type of relationship. Causal relationships between nutrition and health are extremely difficult to prove, and they require a significant amount of good statistical analysis to make a strong argument. So it’s always important to stick a little red flag in that one as well. Yeah. And so those are kind of three of the larger logical fallacies. There’s lots of them. If you were to Google logical fallacies, there’s, you know, dozens of different ways that the human mind wants to take a shortcut. And these arguments can be really psychologically persuasive. And it’s important to understand the fallacies themselves, these little type of false arguments rather than the information. Because once you see one of these false arguments, you can be skeptical of a piece of information whether or not you have a lot of knowledge or information about that specific topic.

Clinton Monchuk: (22:53)
It’s great information, not only on the nutritional side, I think for a lot of our different aspects of our life. Yeah. And you mentioned before the infodemic is not just about nutrition. Right? It’s so many other things in our life that we’re inundated with now. Yeah.

Clinton Monchuk: (23:09)
This kind of leads us to the fun farm fact. I think some of the listeners might not realize this, but did you know that honeybee colony populations in Canada have been on a steadily increasing rate from 2012 until 2021? The low in bee populations occurred in 2013, in which there were about 667,000 honeybee colonies to a high in 2021 when there were over 810,000 honeybee colony populations. And this is from Statistics Canada and the Canadian Honey Council. We’ve seen different either advertisements or things on the media saying that bee populations are on the decline. And I don’t want to discredit, there are certain species of bees that are endangered in different parts of Canada and North America that do need to be saved. When you look at the stats for the honeybee populations, that’s the vast majority that are pollinating our fruit trees, our you know, my canola and mustard or flax, right? Just awesome pollinators that are helping our crops. They’re actually on the increase, not on the decrease. And I think that’s a good news story, but I don’t believe a lot of consumers know that.

Erin MacGregor: (24:21)
Well, I mean, sharing information about a drastically declining bee population is pretty compelling content to share. And when there is free reign to share information without having the onus to share sources or evidence of that, that type of information is going to spread a lot faster. And there’s really good research to support this. There was a study done, I think it was out of MIT in 2012 that looked at a hundred thousand tweets. Some with true information, some with false information, and how they got traction on Twitter. And I’m going to mess up the exact numbers here, but essentially, false information travels six times faster than true information. It gets retweeted 70% more often than true information. And it spreads deeper and longer Twitter chains as well. And I mean, false information’s pretty compelling as a consumer or someone looking through social media and you see this really fearful fact about declining bee populations, you’re going to want to retweet that more than something like, well, there’s been a gradual increase in bee populations over time. Right? Because that type of fearful information’s going get more traction for you. Right, right. And people really just want to be in the know, they want to be sharing new and novel and scary information because it feels good psychologically to be someone in the know and sharing something that could be compelling. Right.

Clinton Monchuk: (25:49)
Feeds to your emotional side too. Right? That’s right. Like, that’s whoa, hey, what, what’s going on here? Right? I need to tell the world.

Erin MacGregor: (25:56)
That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. So again, so like pointing out the tactics used, right? Well, this is obviously an appeal to emotion. This is the tactic that’s being used to spread this information and this is why it’s compelling, because this is how the human brain works. It’s an important piece to share with people trying to dispel misinformation: the tactics around how it’s being done and not the information itself. I’m not going to combat that, you know, that bees are declining attack with actual numbers like you just did. Those aren’t at my fingertips. Right? I’m looking for the tactics of misinformation and not the true information itself. I just can’t be expected to be a bee expert on top of, you know, everything else. A very small niche of nutrition that I feel like I have some expertise in .

Clinton Monchuk: (26:39)
We have a better understanding now of how to spot some of this misinformation and just how to think a little bit more critically about things when some of this stuff comes at us online. Now I’m in the grocery store, I’m going through the aisles and it is just like an advertising haven. Yeah. I’m seeing all these different things coming at me, picking the different labels out, trying to read them. How do I make sense of some of that? And I can always go to the back side, right? And look at the nutritional facts and kind of compare foods that way. But what are some of the ways that we can approach buying our food so we don’t get sucked into some of these different tactics that are possibly being used out there?

Erin MacGregor: (27:21)
Yeah. So I think it’s important to consider packaging as a piece of content too. It’s meant to market a food as well. So you have some pieces on a package that are regulated, like the nutrition facts table, the ingredient lists and all marketing claims really are regulated in some way. None of them are supposed to be deceiving, but at the end of the day, my advice is, unless you’re looking for something very specific in a food, for instance, if you have celiac disease and you need to find something that is gluten-free, you need to look for a gluten-free certification, for instance. [Otherwise,] ignore the marketing labels on food. We have in Canada one of the best regulatory systems in the world. Countries all over the world look up to Canada’s regulatory system. All of the food that you can purchase at the grocery store is going to be safe for you. Enjoy a variety of foods, eat what you enjoy eating. Those are my top two tips to grocery shopping. And really just to consider the package as a marketing tool and to be skeptical of all of the claims that are being made there in the same way that you would be skeptical of social media content in the ways that we just kind of reviewed. So just ignore most of it unless you need a specific piece of information. That’s my advice.

Clinton Monchuk: (28:39)
You know, sometimes we just need to relax a little bit and focus on, you know, those key food groups, making sure we’re buying nutritional food and, and making sure we have healthy diets to support our, our bodies. Right? But I love your approach. I love the approach because it just takes a lot of that fear and anxiety out of food.

Erin MacGregor: (29:00)
Yeah. I mean, that’s the point. You know, look at the history of food and what we’ve had access to from a global perspective in human history, and there’s never been a better time to be alive. And I think it’s okay to celebrate what we have now as a win. Sometimes we just need to celebrate those, you know, good news stories, as you say. And human progress is pretty amazing. Is it perfect? No. Do we still have room to improve? For sure. Is it pretty dang good compared to all of human history? Yes. Yeah. Right. So just soak it in, enjoy what you eat.

Clinton Monchuk: (29:34)
Excellent. Well, thank you very much. This is good information that we can all take to the grocery store and, and we appreciate the expertise on this. Erin, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to our Ask a Farmer podcast.

(29:54)
We at Canadian Food Focus value the input from our listeners and ask that you share this podcast with your friends and family. Remember, this is a two-way street, so we seek your input for future segments that are of interest to you about food and farming. To do this, please click on the ‘Ask Us’ icon at the top of our website, canadianfoodfocus.org. While you’re there, feel free to follow our numerous social media links and sign up for our newsletter. This segment was produced and edited by Angela Larson, research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton. Music by Andy Elson. I’m your, host Clinton Monchuk. And from all of us here at Canadian Food Focus, we wish you good health and great eats.

Episode Credits

Research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton, Produced and edited by Angela Larson, Music by Andy Ellison-Track title: Gravel Road