Food and Eating, Without the Noise

About this course

A nutrition course whose most useful lesson is about why you should not trust nutrition courses, including this one, further than the evidence supports. It starts with why the research is so hard: you cannot randomise thousands of people to two diets for thirty years, so most of what you read is observational, confounded, and based on people misremembering what they ate. Understanding that is what lets you discount most nutrition coverage for the rest of your life. Then the short list that survives anyway, supported by several kinds of evidence pointing the same way. It is boring, it has not changed much in decades, and that is precisely why an industry exists to keep making it sound like it has. The practical half covers reading an ingredients list and a nutrition panel, the front-of-pack claims designed to persuade you, and six questions that will discount most health headlines you see, including the relative-risk trick that misleads without stating anything false. Then building meals as a structure rather than a plan, why fibre and protein do the work, and why cooking is the highest-value food skill there is. It ends with supplements, which are worth taking in a handful of specific situations and not generally, and an honest section on weight: that it is not the same as health, that diets mostly do not work long term, and that this is a fact about physiology rather than about anybody's willpower. There are no calorie targets, no meal plans, and no food rules here, deliberately. Read the first two lessons before anything else. The second one explains when this course is the wrong thing to be reading.

What you will learn

• Explain why most nutrition findings are weak, and discount headlines accordingly
• Name the short list of dietary changes that the evidence genuinely supports
• Read an ingredients list, a nutrition panel, and a front-of-pack claim
• Apply six questions to any health headline, including relative against absolute risk
• Build meals from a structure rather than a plan, around fibre and protein
• Judge which supplements are worth taking, and think clearly about weight

Before you begin

• No background in biology or medicine needed
• Nothing to buy: no supplements, devices, apps, or subscriptions
• A willingness to change one thing at a time rather than everything at once