Being fit and healthy, learning how to cook proper meals, and improving your knowledge on nutrition are all worthy goals to pursue. The problem is that there is always so much misinformation out there that it can be hard to tell what is right and what is wrong.
Nutrition has a lot of information floating around which makes it susceptible to this issue. One source may make a claim while another refutes it, and so on and so forth. When it comes to learning about nutrition, you want credible sources, but not just that, you want up-to-date information too. Here are ways you can find those nutrition facts that are trustworthy.
Medical Journals
Medical journals provide a collection of information from reputable sources, like Phd-educated doctors, and compile the data for easily searchable and readable material. These can range from chemistry papers to short articles on dietary needs. Medical journals represent an excellent source of information for various scientific fields. Nutrition is also a well-studied field which is featured in many medical journals and has some of the best quality information available. The American Journal of Medicine, European Heart Journal, Canadian Medical Association Journal and the Medical Journal of Australia are amongst numerous high-quality journals that have a plethora of information on nutrition and health. Medical journals are a good place to find up-to-date information because they are well maintained and edited based on relevant papers and documents. They maintain rigid standards to assure that readers and researchers are able to find quality data on topics without having to sift through misleading topics and articles.
Dietician/Nutritionists
What better way to find information than going directly to the source. Dieticians and nutritionists are a good primary source because they have extensive formal education in the field of nutrition and dieting. If you visit the site that you want to learn more nutrition info about, you can always check for guest posts from certified nutritionists or cross-reference data. There are a lot of dieticians and nutritionists that are regulars on websites and blogs and they provide good information on products, meal plans, and other tips that can really help you out. While it is important to keep an eye out for the trustworthiness of information on the internet, dieticians and nutritionists are easy to find to make sense of everything you read or see.
Peer-Reviewed Papers
In a similar sense to medical journals, peer-reviewed papers are another good primary source of information on dietary and nutrition. Medical journals compile a wide array of this information but peer-reviewed papers are denser and require much more thorough examination to make sense of. The importance of peer-review for academic standards is that it equates to a paper that has been checked for accurate information and passes the quality check. Peer-reviewed papers are usually in PDF format online and many are free, available for easy access or viewing through college databases and libraries.
Peer-reviewed papers may be harder to understand than a medical journal that helps highlight or extract pertinent information, but they still offer information on nutrition that is accurate. It is useful to note that many papers have been published from years ago so keep an eye out for any that are seemingly out of date, but many have been edited or amended to include more relevant data.
Government Organizations
Not too many people realize how valuable their taxpayer dollars are for finding information through government websites and databases. For nutrition information, there are numerous government organizations that have collected information sources like the ones listed above to make it easier to find what you are looking for. In the U.S., the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) both have extensive records available online for browsing. Most countries have their domestic government agency that handles matters of nutrition and food information that are widely available for public use and are free of charge. These organizations have everything from information on specific foods, dietary needs, food growing, food handling practices, and issues of public policy regarding food and agriculture.
In today’s well-connected age of the internet, there is never a shortage of information available on just about any subject you can imagine. The problem is that not all of this information is useful or accurate. Finding up-to-date, relevant, and accurate information for a topic like nutrition can be difficult, but the sources listed above can provide you with an expectation of integrity for research on food, drug, and health data.
