Too good to be true

“100% effective!”

Most claims that nutrition interventions will make you 100% better, or that they work for everyone, turn out to be wrong.

The effects of some interventions are obvious. For example, it is obvious that using a parachute is a good way to avoid dying when you jump out of a plane. However, the effects of most interventions, for example nutrition supplements or changing what you eat, are not that obvious. That is why we need fair comparisons of interventions; for example, comparing what happens when people take a nutrition supplement to what happens when people do not take that supplement.

BEWARE when someone says that a nutrition intervention is “100% effective” or that “it’s obvious that it works”.

REMEMBER: Few nutrition interventions have such obvious effects that we do not need fair comparisons of interventions to know how helpful they are.