Why Do People Believe Nutrition Myths?

Why is it that myths and untruths about nutrition spread so quickly and people believe these false claims so easily? Whether it is sugar🍦, gluten🍞, coconut oil🥥, artificial sweeteners🥤, GMOs🌱, dairy products🥛, mycotoxins in coffee☕ or the "calorie myth as a scam of the food industry"⚖️?

These questions are interestingly answered by a recent American study on why people believe another well-known myth - false information about vaccinations and the onset of autism - the results of which were published in the summer issue of Social Science & Medicine ("Knowing less but presuming more: Dunning-Kruger effects and the endorsement of anti-vaccine policy attitudes." Social Science & Medicine 211 (2018): 274-281. https://bit.ly/2oy7XPQ ). By way of explanation, although vaccines have never been shown to cause or be in any way related to autism, this false information has spread massively among the public. This is notwithstanding the fact that the authors of these false claims have been convicted of fraud and deliberate falsification of data, e.g. for multi-million dollar revenues from the development of competing vaccines.

The above mentioned study beautifully shows us how the Dunning-Kruger effect (discovered and described only in 1999) plays a big role in spreading myths (in this case in the field of vaccination and autism) - people who lack sufficient expert knowledge greatly overestimate their knowledge (e.g. they think they understand the topic even better than experts), but through their ignorance they are usually unable to recognize their ignorance. For example, in this study, nearly a third of the 1,310 US respondents thought they knew more about the causes of autism and vaccinations 💉 than doctors👩‍⚕️, when in fact they had very little knowledge of both autism and the meaning of vaccination🤷‍♀️. (Autism is in fact a genetic disorder whose mechanism of occurrence is not yet fully understood and is probably a combination of genetic and environmental influences during intrauterine fetal development). Incidentally, the mathematician Bertrand Russell pointed to this phenomenon with his quote, "The trouble with the world today is that fools are rock-solid certain, but intelligent people are full of doubts."

It is the same, of course, with all the myths and untruths in the field of nutrition. Why do people so easily believe charlatans' false and untrue claims? An excellent article published in this context in the Health Journal provides a nice explanation: 'Laziness of thinking plays a role in why people believe various conspiracy theories and misinformation. While the real world is an extremely complex place and it is complicated to make sense of it, the world of conspiracies provides clear, simple, and easy-to-understand explanations. Never mind that they are incorrect. After all, people don't usually make decisions based on what is most important, but rather on what is easiest to evaluate. The language of science and rationality is often cumbersome, complicated, and difficult to understand, while conspiracists name things in understandable, clear terms, using appealing emotional shorthand." This of course applies to the whole field of nutrition🍏🌰🥩.

🏁🏛️📚 I will continue to bring you science-based and easy-to-understand nutrition information and you can look forward to the next instalment of our popular Nutrition myth series on my Instagram profile.