Getting good health information

I added a few of my favorite health-and-nutrition-related blogs to the sidebar. All great starting places for learning about how to optimize your health and avoid problems now and down the road.

It's funny, I used to get most of my health information from mainstream sources or through the grapevine and I assumed it must be pretty accurate. I mean, how complex could it be? Scientists have been studying human health for centuries: it seems like we should have figured at least the basics out by now. Eat this, don't eat that, exercise regularly, but not too much... all obvious stuff, right?

But it turns out there's so much disagreement among experts, even about very basic ideas like what is best to eat, how much you should exercise, whether you should supplement, etc, that you almost need to make a full time job of it for a while to sort through all the opinions. Then you learn there are all sorts of perverse financial incentives, issues of organizational inertia, annoyingly persistent old-wives tales, incompletely or poorly researched topics, researcher and organizational biases, and other niggly things that interfere with the free flow of accurate information to laymen like us.

Worse, health is one of those areas where a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. It's easy to make dietary or habit changes that are actually harmful rather than helpful because you just didn't pay enough attention or you believed an unreliable source. Thousands of people do that every day.

Of course I developed a lot of opinions after some months of serious reading but that's not the subject of this post. I just wanted to express gratitude to whatever deity(s) you may or may not believe in that information is so accessible these days--20 years ago, you would have had to look for books and wade through university medical databases to even get a clue. Now you can get nicely-indexed expert analysis of historical and the latest studies for free all over the web. Love it!