4 Things 50 nutrition books and the EAT - Lancet meta-study actually agree on

Figure 1:  Percent (%) agreement among experts on nutrition advice. The height of a bar indicates what % of experts agreed on this topic. For example, there was near unanimous agreement (92%) on avoiding processed food to achieve better health and that is shown on the extreme left with a dark green bar, whereas only 8% of experts agree on using cheat meals as a part of a healthy nutrition plan hence the height of the cheat meal bar is much lower and it is positioned on the extreme right.

The Nutrition Wisdom of an Expert Crowd

We all have our favorite nutrition books, but often it is hard to know which expert to believe - one says coffee is great for you and the other says avoid it at all costs except on moonlit Tuesdays! What is a normal person with limited time to do?

Instead of relying on any single expert, we decided to trust the “wisdom of the expert crowd” and summarized around 50 of the best-selling books on nutrition (such as "The Blue Zones Solution", "The Paleo Diet", "The 4-Hour Body", "The China Study") and some landmark studies such as the one released by the EAT- Lancet  commission - a meta-study of more than 350 academic articles on the topic of sustainable and healthy nutrition for our planet.

The simple principle behind the infographic is to emphasize the few practices that most of these experts and common sense agree strongly on and not get confused by the ongoing debates where there is little agreement. As the infographic illustrates, the top four useful practices are to eat plenty of vegetables, avoid eating any processed food, sugar or white bread, to lower the amount of grain consumed, and lower the consumption of red meat. In contrast, practices such as avoiding caffeine or dairy, or using cheat meals are not universally accepted as useful. Thus, for us normal people a better investment of energy would be to focus on what everybody agrees on. For more details check out our 0-1-2-3 summary. We will continue to learn so please share any book or paper that catches your attention and we will include it here.