Evidence-based nutritional references
Obviously, you would like to know the nutritional information you receive is factual and correct. You may actually read a reference or two from an article. You think; here’s the information and supporting references so it must be true. After all, these are evidence-based nutritional references.
This basic assumption was much truer in the past than it is today. Unfortunately, many articles in today’s peer-reviewed scientific journals are not truthful. They are pseudoscience. Unfortunately, once an article such as this is published, many other authors will “cite” the article, which tends to give the untruthful article even more credibility. This is in spite of the fact that the original article was not truthful in the first place.
This is most obvious when researching published articles detracting Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAM’s).
The point is this. If you would like to discredit something, there is more than a sufficient amount of “published” pseudoscience articles in “well respected” peer-reviewed journals available to do so.
How do we choose our articles for reference?
This was a major dilemma when I first started. It seemed I could find hundreds of published articles contradicting one another. Finally perplexed, I decided to choose reference articles based on three criteria that include:
- Articles from the past
- Articles from combined sciences
- Articles from peer-reviewed science journals around the world
These criteria help reduce my subjectivity and bias. Allow me to explain.
Articles from the past
Albeit numerous advancements (technological and research) have been achieved in the past 100 years, I peruse articles from the pre-1970 era. The primary reason is scientists in the past seem much more integrous.
They searched, unbiased, for the truth.
Today, you don’t know who is paying for the research intended to reach a “predetermined” conclusion. The hair analysis controversy is an excellent example. Sadly, you must always follow the money and the credibility of the controlling factions. Remember, we have become an extremely lucrative-based “treatment-based” society as opposed to a “cure-based” or “prevent-based” society as in the past.
Articles from combined sciences
Scientific “protectionism” affects nearly every science. For example, neuroscience disregards nutrition, cancer disregards nutrition, and so on. They simply refuse to share information between the sciences for a common goal of the good.
As such, when researching nutrition it is important to research articles (including articles of the past) from soil and plant sciences as well as many other sciences. After all, what applies to soil science and plant science ultimately applies to animal and human nutrition.
In this research, you must look for the common factors and fundamentals of applied nutrition. For example, soil science clearly revealed copper has an intimate relationship with zinc and iron. It also revealed, to grow healthy plants, the “ratios” between each of these minerals was extremely important to produce healthy plants and in turn, healthy animals and humans. Of course, the ratios do change depending on the species of plants but the “ratio” remains a fundamental of nutrition.
If you enjoy gardening or plants, you are very familiar with the NPK ratios and other nutrients required to grow a healthy plant. As you know, nutrients and ratios depend on the particular species.
As I research articles from different sciences (i.e., neuroscience, etc.), I always focus on the nutrients. What role does that particular nutrient(s) play? What happens if that nutrient is deficient or excessive? By using any nutrient as a key word, you can skim through many more articles in a short amount of time.
Articles from peer-reviewed science journals around the world
Nutritional science is continually conducted worldwide. In fact, it is surprising the countries involved in nutritional research that you wouldn’t think would be doing such research. These countries do not have corporations, institutions, or associations attempting to control the outcome of the science. Keep in mind, most of these countries depend on nutrition for health – not the most expensive healthcare system in the world. To me, this fact alone tends to lend much more credibility to their research.
In all fairness, the majority of our scientists are creditable, trustworthy, and seek the truth in this complex science. The limited few (pseudoscientists) make it difficult to tell truth from falsehood.
Conclusion
In the end, we try to combine these criteria for our evidence-based nutritional references. As you may notice, we do use many “recent” articles in our references because people always want the “latest” information. Keep in mind, even though these articles may be more recent, they do have commonalities or fundamentals with articles of the past.
Like you, we seek the truth and we do our best to provide articles that reflect the truth.
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