Food and Nutrition: The Truth Behind the Headlines

Objectives

Rebuild your trust in nutrition science and look beyond the media headlines.

Due to conflicting messages from the media, it’s becoming harder to know what to believe when it comes to following a healthy diet and lifestyle.

On this course, you’ll compare how nutrition and health topics are handled by the media and science.

You’ll be encouraged to think critically about the information behind media headlines and come to your own conclusions about what’s good for you.

You’ll explore the psychology of why we’re easily influenced by headlines and learn about different types of biases, like confirmatory and availability bias.

You’ll also learn how to find reliable information online and identify unreliable health studies.

Advantages

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to:

• Interpret why the media is so interested in reporting about food & nutrition, why the 'advice' changes so rapidly and the part we play in that, as readers.
• Explore the hierarchy of scientific evidence and judge for yourself whether you believe an example headline.
• Explore the biases you bring to what you read and gain a perspective into journalists' agendas which influence how they present scientific evidence.
• Identify how to find the original research, how to interpret scientific terms and make sense of statistics.
• Discuss where to obtain the information you can trust about food & nutrition and use tools that help identify unreliable studies.
  

Duration & Dates

Flexible