As an internal medicine physician counseling countless patients about their diets I have learned that people have misconceptions about nutrition. Moreso, I'm amazed at how little physicians know about nutrition; physicians are taught to read the scientific literature and to practice evidence based medicine (i.e. to make their medical decisions based upon evidence), but the great majority of physicians are too busy to read the scientific literature on nutrition. Furthermore, the study of nutrition has lagged behind the study of other aspects of medicine; there are still large gaps of knowledge in the field of nutrition. For the most part, high quality studies of nutrition were not conducted until the 1990s and 2000s. This means that most of the education on nutrition pre-dating the 1990s was based on limited nutritional science. What most physicians learned in medical school on nutrition is obsolete. Likewise, what most people learned from their mothers and teachers on nutrition was wrong, because it pre-dated rigorous scientific studies. On top of this, major organizations, such as the FDA, ADA, AHA, etc, have done a very poor job of succintly describing nutritional goals and marketing simple, easy-to-follow diets. It's no wonder that the American public is confused about nutrition!

There are dozens of popular diets these day: low-fat, Atkins, gluten-free, Paleo, low-carb, vegan, whole-grain, Mediterranean, organic, vegetarian, raw food, etc. In a given crowd, the odds are that most of the people eat very different diets, some of them have very strong convictions about their diet, and several people in the crowd that have strong dietary opinions will have completely opposite diets. This means that despite our strong opinions about diet, much of what we believe in must be wrong! This is a result of lack of understanding of the science of nutrition.

My goal is to review the evidence around nutrition. Web videos are my selected medium, and educated, motivated people are my target audience. I am not pushing a specific diet. I know that entertainment is an important part of eating, so all of us eat some foods that are unhealthy because we enjoy them. But when people make active choices to modify their diet for health reasons I want to enable them to make educated choices based on evidence. I plan to simplify the method by which we teach about nutrition - foods should simply be labeled as Good or Bad for You. Through this education, this Evidence Based Nutrition project has the potential to save & better lives - which is why I became a doctor.

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                                                     - Stephen Claypool, MD