Why the Internet Is Full of Contradicting Nutrition Advice
We live in an age where the problem isn't a lack of information, it's information overload. You follow a handful of accounts, all seemingly credible, and within a week you've been told to eat more protein and less protein, more carbs and fewer carbs, to fast and to never skip a meal. It's not that people are lying to you, there are just a few things happening at once that aren't obvious from a thirty second video.
The first is that the advice often isn't built for your actual situation. Most general nutrition advice is designed around weight management and long-term health, which makes sense, that's what most people want. But if you've recently started training properly, running a few times a week, lifting, asking more of your body than you were six months ago, and you're still following that same general advice, just eating a bit more when you're hungry - you might run in to some issues. Protein works the same way, there isn't one number that's right for everyone, it depends on your size, your age, your training, whether you're trying to build muscle or just maintain it.
The second thing is one of the things that I really struggle with when making content for social media. The honest answer to most nutrition questions is "it depends," and while that's a perfectly reasonable answer, it's just a terrible opening line. I've got about three seconds to give someone a reason to keep watching, and "it depends on your training, your goals, your current intake" doesn't exactly stop the scroll. So there's a real pull to simplify, to say eat this much protein, or never eat carbs after 6pm, rather than explain the circumstances the advice actually applies to. It’s not necessarily that it’s dishonest, but you can’t fit a textbook into thirty seconds. However, when the context completely disappears, and all that’s left is the instruction - that’s when it can cause real issues, and confusion.
Then there's the fact that a lot of what looks like nutrition advice is really marketing in disguise. Protein powder, electrolytes, fat burners, gut supplements, none of these are automatically useless, but when someone's recommending a product while also making money from it, the advice and the sale are coming from the same place. Worth asking yourself what they'd say if they weren't selling anything, and whether the problem was there before the product, or overemphasised to give you something to buy.
And a lot of advice gets built around a single study or a single person's experience. Someone tries something, feels amazing, and decides they've cracked it. Maybe they have, for them. But one person's result doesn't tell you what will happen to everyone else, and that's why good advice looks at the whole body of evidence rather than the most exciting headline or the most convincing before and after.
None of this means you need to become a researcher every time you open TikTok. It just means the useful question usually isn't whether a piece of advice is correct, it's who it's correct for, and whether that's actually you.
If you're tired of piecing together contradictory advice and want someone to look at your actual training, goals and diet and tell you what genuinely applies to you, that's exactly what I do. Get in touch if you'd like a hand cutting through it.
