Health advice is a lot like chili — everyone has a different ‘recipe.’
Some ‘recipes’ look similar. Some of them have surprising ingredients. But the vast majority are based on the same foundational elements.
Most of them.
Unlike chili, which is difficult to ruin, health misinformation could wreak havoc on your metabolic health. Trusting the wrong source could put you in a dangerous situation and potentially lead to chronic disease.
Roughly 35% of people don’t feel confident about spotting medical misinformation when it appears. This is the reason why I wrote this guide: to help you spot bad advice before you take it to heart (pun intended).
Where to use a discerning eye
You should always use your common sense when absorbing health information. If someone is telling you something that sounds alarm bells in your head, do some extra research.
That said, there are a few places where you need to apply some extra discernment.
YouTube
Health-related content (HRC) on YouTube is on the rise, both as a source of information and as a decision-making tool. Approximately 40% of YouTube users watch HRC to learn about new health practices, and 84.7% use it to make health-related decisions.
YouTube has a way of influencing your actions, even if you’re unaware of it. According to a study on people who watch HRC:
- 50% changed their diet and physical activity
- 45% scheduled appointments with their doctors
- 40% performed deeper research into medical questions
Just 12.6% of people believe YouTube content is biased — but some health-related topics have misinformation in up to 77% of all video content.
As a side note, you should know that some health advice may not be defined as ‘misinformation’ to certain groups, even if the information is patently false. Take a look at the ADA debacle and you’ll see what I mean.
Friends and family
There’s nothing wrong with asking family and friends for advice. The trouble is knowing whether or not the advice they’re giving is good.
Approximately 81% of people trust the advice of family and friends over companies, and roughly 65% trust their family’s experiences more than published medical research (37%).
But remember our chili analogy from earlier: even if people mean well, they may not necessarily know what’s best for your particular ‘recipe.’
Two in three people (or 66%) have received medical misinformation from family or friends — meaning a whopping third of us don’t recognize misinformation when it’s transmitted by our loved ones.
And long before accepting any health recommendations, you should know the habits of your family and friends.
Like you’d be wary about taking financial advice from someone with poor spending habits, unhealthy people aren’t likely to give great health advice.
Doctor’s offices
Doctors don’t set out to provide unhelpful or misleading information.
Unfortunately, many of them get trapped repeating the same dated health advice. Others struggle to remain current or even feel uncomfortable with new research.
Let’s look at the food pyramid — one of the worst examples of medical misinformation pushed by certain US doctors. Some of its most heinous suggestions are to increase carbohydrate intake and reduce cholesterol-heavy foods to avoid heart attacks.
These concepts have been debunked multiple times. And yet, 54% of doctors falsely believe that cholesterol-heavy foods damage the heart.
Decades of medical misinformation have taken a toll on the medical field.
Not everyone in a lab coat knows what they’re talking about, and trusting your doctor to be right 100% of the time is not a viable strategy.
3 ways to check the validity of health advice
The best way to avoid medical misinformation is to approach all your sources with a discerning eye.
I recommend taking the following steps:
First: follow the money
Where is your medical source receiving funding from? Are you worried about potential conflicts of interest?
The most important question is, does the individual or organization in question profit from you following their advice? If so, you need to scrutinize their resources more closely.
Turn tail and run if you see:
- Promises of ‘miracle cures.’ If things seem too good to be true, they probably are.
- Vagaries or pseudo-scientific language. If they can’t explain things in plain English, they may be attempting to pull one over on you.
- Hostility to criticism. If they truly believe what they’re saying, why would they get angry about an opportunity for debate?
Who is giving you information?
Where did they graduate? What are their credentials? What is their professional experience?
A better question: can you reach them online? Or do they refuse to respond to audience questions?
All that said, trusting someone just for their credentials is a logical fallacy. Look out for people telling you to trust them ‘because they’re a doctor’ and ‘they have X years of experience.’ This is called ‘appeal to authority’ — just because you went to medical school doesn’t mean you have all the facts about metabolic health.
Can their information be verified?
This includes evaluating any scientific studies and reading client testimonials (if applicable).
Ask yourself:
- Does the source link to scientific studies? If so, how authoritative are they? I’m not just talking about the publication or host site. You should read the study for yourself and look for competing interests, skewed data, or out-of-context statements.
- Does the source have a history of misrepresenting data? You may be able to find news articles or forums online. If you see a repeating pattern, the source may not be trustworthy.
- Does the source have testimonials? If they’re a doctor, health coach, or dietician, take a look at the reviewers represented and see if you can verify that they’re real. If something seems too good to be true, or if the so-called ‘reviewers’ don’t look real, the source may not be that trustworthy.
Get yourself into a community
There are few things as powerful as community in the healthcare world.
This applies not just to recovery or progress, but also to verifying medical information.
The right group can help you evaluate healthcare advice, identify bad actors, and otherwise sort the wheat from the chaff.
Want this kind of community? Take a look at my Elite Health Coaching group and join hundreds of people who are bettering their metabolic health.