What’s a Person to Eat?

The phones were ringing off the hook last month at the offices of the Wellness Letter of UC Berkeley, a health and nutrition newsletter.

The results of a new study on the effects of beta carotene were published in a medical journal and subsequent news accounts, and callers wanted to know whether carrots were bad for them.

“People don’t read far enough,” said Dale Ogar, Wellness Letter managing editor. “It wasn’t about carrots, it was about beta carotene. And it was about smokers.”

Still, questions were answered patiently and painstakingly. “There is a lot of confusion out there,” Ogar said. “But confusion is job security for me. I’d be out of a job if not for the New England Journal of Medicine.”

The beta carotene flap was particularly nettlesome because the newsletter had taken the rare move of endorsing beta carotene and Vitamin E supplements a year ago; early studies had suggested the substances could protect people against cancer. Last month, however, a National Cancer Institute study of heavy smokers was abruptly halted after preliminary findings showed a 17% increase in lung cancer deaths among those who had taken 30 milligrams of beta carotene a day.

Ironically, people are finding that the more information they get about nutrition, the less they know. Conflicting studies, changing recommendations, perplexing charts and formulas are turning even the most earnest health-minded consumers into disbelievers. People are beginning to suspect that no one knows what they’re talking about.

A September 1995 study conducted by the American Dietetic Assn. showed that 49% of consumers are confused about the nutritional news reports they have heard or read in the last five years. Nearly 70% said their confusion stemmed from conflicting and inconsistent reports.

Only 35% said they are doing all they can to eat a balanced diet, down from 44% in 1991 and 39% in 1993.

“This is your life and your health. The individual has a responsibility to be educated,” said Judith Stern, a nutritionist at UC Davis. But, she admitted, “It’s so bloody complicated.”

Oat bran, the “right thing to do” in the ‘80s, was toppled from its pedestal in the early ‘90s but has been making a comeback. Garlic, touted as a cure-all for years in alternative-health ads but dismissed by establishment nutritionists, now appears to be so promising a cancer fighter that the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City has set up a clinic to study it. After years of being told to avoid eggs, new evidence indicates that some people can eat them with impunity. And several recent studies indicate that margarine may be as harmful as butter, and people given a choice should opt instead for foods using canola or olive oil.

“We’re all seeing confusion, if not total nihilism,” said Mona Sutnick, a nutritionist and spokeswoman for the dietetic association. “There’s a feeling that we should just drown it all in Haagen Dazs.”

Other nutritionists disagree. Richard Rivlin, program director of the clinical nutrition research unit at Sloan-Kettering, said, “It looks like advice is changing all the time, but it really isn’t.”

Results of single studies are not intended to trigger changes in the habits of consumers, nutritionists caution.

“The latest study is not the latest advice,” said Larry Lindner, executive editor of the Tufts University Nutrition Newsletter. “It is the latest research news. It should not be immediately translated into what should be going into your shopping cart or your kitchen.”

Science progresses in a two-steps-forward-one-step-backward manner, Lindner said, until a trend can be firmly established and public recommendations can be made. Average folks should not interpret every blip on the radar screen as a signal to change their lives.

Or, as the Wellness Letter put it: “Just because a study is reported on TV or on the front page, that doesn’t mean it applies to you.”

Karen Miller-Kovach, spokeswoman for Weight Watchers International in Jericho, N.Y., has a rule of thumb for determining the usefulness of nutrition news. Read, or listen, carefully to find out the source of the information. Is it a single study, a review of all the studies on a particular subject or a group of experts making a recommendation? “In that order, that’s how much you should listen to it,” she said. does this mean you give the most credence to the single study? it reads that way--which is the opposite of what others were saying above and what she’s saying below.

A new study reported in, say, the New England Journal of Medicine, should “barely register on your ‘think meter,’ ” Miller-Kovach said. “If it’s a review of studies, you should think about it and about changing your habits. If it’s a National Institutes of Health consensus recommendation, you definitely listen to it and think about changing your life on the basis of what they say.”

There is consistent advice, nutritionists say. It just isn’t sexy. Eat a variety of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and cut down on fat. Exercise regularly, don’t smoke and buckle your seat belt. That’s it.

If you do that, Ogar said, “you’re probably in good shape. Don’t sweat the details.”

Food advice changes all the time, because food is fashion, said Sylvia Lovegren, author of “Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads.” Still, she said, “I don’t think there’s a commitment by a lot of people to eat well. This is much more a panic reaction by the baby boomers to aging and getting diseases. A lot of the so-called healthy eating is [by] people trying to stave off their inevitable death.”

Scientists are contributing to the growing body of confusion, she said, because they are flooding the public with food studies. “Scientists are not immune to fads and trends,” she said. “The scientists who are working now are baby boomers, and they’re very interested in aging and DNA. In the 1950s everyone was interested in the atom. Now it’s very small, very inward.”

No matter what we do, she said, “I’m sure what we’re eating now will end up looking odd and silly 50 years from now.”

The ‘90s, she said, will be remembered as “the decade that gave us American cooking which is healthy and light, coupled with the fear that what we eat is going to kill us.”