My biggest gripe is that too many people are chipping in with info on food - nurses and doctors have very limited knowledge /understanding and dietitians are snowed under
It does appear to me, and I guess quite a few other people I know, that the dietetics profession is extremely territorial about information on food. There seems at times to be an unsettling feeling of priesthood about nutritional advice - that only qualified health professionals are educated enough to understand the issues and tell good advice from bad. Doctors don't know enough about it, and patients must be saved from themselves, bless them.
This is not a criticism of dieticians per se, because, believe it or not, I have a very good friend who works for the NHS in that role. You would find it hard to meet a finer, more dedicated person in any walk of life.
What she will happily admit, however, is that there are many dietetic commandments that are clearly irrational and downright counterproductive.
An example. To try and improve my own understanding, I took an OU course last year called 'Understanding Human Nutrition'. In order to pass the course, here are some examples of nutritional 'facts' I was required to accept and repeat in my written exam.
There is no clear link between starch / sugar consumption and obesity. :shock:
Carbohydrates are not normally converted to fat. :shock:
There's no direct link between carbohydrate consumption and diabetes. :shock:
If I had been a young student, learning about nutrition I might have been forgiven for accepting some of these 'facts'. As a diabetic, I know they are completely wrong. To say so in the context of the educational course would have been foolish of course, but you can imagine how it stuck in my craw to have to repeat such stuff.
Anyway, the point I suppose is that the more people like us who 'chip in' with information about food, the sooner some of the misinformation is exposed. So we're actually trying to save the dietetics profession from itself!
All the best
fergus