Health & the Body · Foundation

Nutrition: The Evidence

Almost everyone is told what to eat, and very little of it comes with a grade on it. This course is about how nutrition science knows what it knows, where the evidence is strong (energy balance, deficiencies, a few well-tested patterns) and where it is weak or contested (saturated fat, salt targets, sugar, supplements, the popular diets), and how to read a claim about food. It opens the term on the body and the household, and it is a health course, so it says throughout what it is and is not entitled to claim and where a reader should go instead.

What you'll learn

• Explain why a question about diet is harder to test than a question about a drug, and say what each kind of nutrition study, and each way of measuring intake, can and cannot show
• State what the evidence shows about energy balance and the head-to-head diet trials, and describe the carbohydrate-insulin dispute in terms each side would accept
• Classify claims about fat, salt, sugar, processed food and meat as established or contested, with the best case on each side in its own words
• Ask "instead of what?" of any claim about a food or nutrient, and explain why the swap often decides the answer
• Compare what named dietary guidelines recommend, including the 2025-2030 US guidelines and the dispute over them, and say where they agree
• Say when a supplement is indicated and when the trials failed, and describe the alcohol dispute
• Decide what, if anything, to change about how you eat, say what the decision rests on, and say when it stops being a self-help question and who to ask