Nutritional equivalent of snopes.com?

Is there such a thing? I was Googling for information about the nutritional differences between raw, soaked / sprouted, and roasted nuts, and was unable to find the needle of fact in the haystack of sites repeating fad-diet hogwash.

Almost ANY consumer health info is a mash of sound science, unsound science, common wisdom, and outright bullshit. Extra parts of that last one for anything found online.

And honestly, every day we’re finding out that things that seem self-evident might not be. There’s some story circulating now that says that people who drink diet soda hare heavier, more prone to diabetes, etc. than folks who drink regular soda. And other studies, of course, disprove that. A lot of it has to do with how things are measured, how long the study was done (over six months? A year? 5? 10?) and all sorts of other factors which can cause things to fall under the “Corelation does not equal causation!” argument.

I would be highly skeptical of any one website that promised to lay out all the facts on ANY nutritional advice more than “Don’t eat so much and eat more fruit and veggies.”

As to nuts, I’ve never, to my knowledge, anyway, had sprouted nuts, but roasting or toasting them definitely causes browning, starts to break down some of the oils, and will definitely lead to a different FLAVOR, but I would be really surprised if the nutritional content of nuts changed appreciably, especially in the amounts a typical person might eat them.

Unless you’re making your own nut butters and living off them daily, I’d just go for what tastes good.

But then, what do I know? I’m on the internet. See above.

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I would love this too. So sick of being directed to livestrong dot com.

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The Harvard School of Public Health has solid information, but it’s not comprehensive and rarely if ever debunks crank sites.

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I’m not interested in discussing nuts, that’s just the most recent example of why I wish there were a Snopes-like site for nutrition.

I think the problem with nutrition advice in general is the ‘in general’ part. All the general advice is what people already know. Exercise, don’t eat so much crap. Anything else gets very specific and people just vary too much for things to be realistically applicable to people, rather than to a specific person, or even a specific TYPE of person.

Some populations do really well with a largely vegetarian diet. The whole keto thing was supposedly inspired by Northern American indigenous diets that had very little plant matter, and was heavy on animal protein.

In other words, past a certain point, there’s no ‘right’ answer, just a ‘maybe right for YOU’ answer.

And here in the First World, where we have access to virtually anything and everything we could possibly eat, there’s just no real firm answer to “is A better than B?” Like problems of sufficient complexity to be interesting, the answer always starts with “Well, that depends…”

No one answer might be right for everyone, but more to the point there’s such a preponderance of wrong answers promoted by cranks and snake-oil vendors that people without superior critical thinking and research skills have no hope of figuring out what the possible right answers are.

I think you might be confusing the ketogenic diet, which was developed by a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, with the nutritional theories of Weston Price, a crank dentist. The eponymous Weston A. Price Foundation, besides promoting his sometimes dangerous theories, is a leader in the anti-vaccination movement.

Even average critical thinking would work.

Try putting in your search term, then add -.com or -.net
(That’s a minus sign before .com.)

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There’s nothing really factual about nutritional equivalents or comparisons when the information veers more towards the normative rather than the purely objective.

For the latter, there’s always the FDA and those black/white nutritional labels on packaged foods.

For the former, that’s a unicorn. Sort of like asking for the snopes.com of “artistic beauty”. GLWT.

I have to avert my eyes if I see the word “antioxidants”.

The FDA is a bad source of information since well-established nutritional advice is overruled by vested interests in selling flour, sugar, and so on.

FDA is good for raw numbers, not advice. Never intended to say FDA was good for advice.

And, hence, that’s the problem you have. Advice is inherently subjective and inevitably normative, which means it is near impossible to find – at least what you deem to be – factual or “solid information.”

The FDA doesn’t just produce guidelines; they have a database that allows you to search for a food and get back raw information re energy, sugars, mineral content, etc., etc.

I searched mustard greens, then picked the subcategory “frozen, boiled, with salt, drained” and got a list of facts, not advice.

https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/3417?manu=&fgcd=&ds=

It would be nice if the FDA publicized this function as much as they do their guidelines. I think they’ve revised the guidelines so often that everyone except schoolchildren ignore them.