#388 Nutrition Scientist Explains How to Understand Conflicting Nutrition Advice - Gil Carvalho PhD

Gil Carvalho (0:00)

The right choice can be different for different people. There is a lot of individual variability. There is no experimental design that guarantees with 100% certainty cause and effect. All of it is an inferential process. You always want to look at reproducibility. It's never one study nails it. End of story.

Siim Land (0:16)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Gil Carvalho. Gil has a PhD in biology from the California Institute of Technology. Gil has a popular YouTube channel called Nutrition Made Simple, where he shares the latest studies on nutrition and health. In this episode, we discuss how to make sense of the conflicting landscape of online nutrition discussions. Gil, welcome to the show.

Yeah, you have a very nice YouTube channel where you, you know, what I've come to the conclusion, or my impression of it is that you not only, or you really like try to make people come to the conclusion themselves or like make the decision themselves, rather than telling them, okay, this is what you need to eat. These are the like foods that you, that will be like good for you or bad for you, or like you're just educating, this is what the science is.

And this is what, you know, these are the kind of pros and cons of whatever kind of diet or whatever other health related information you follow.

Gil Carvalho (1:16)

Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, I honestly believe that the right choice can be different for different people.

It's not cookie cutter. There is a lot of individual variability.

And so I think the only thing that makes sense is to provide people with the highest quality information that we have. And then based on that, just give them access to the information, basically. That's all. From there, they can do with that whatever they want, or ignore it, or use it. That's not my turf anymore. But I think it's that access that is missing most of the time. And people are given super oversimplified sound bites that aren't really informative, aren't really empowering, because you can't make a decision if you just get a sound bite.

Siim Land (2:08)

So yeah, and that's like especially true on like Instagram, for example, where you're like scrolling through a reel, you might get the first reel to say, it's like, you know, apples are the best foods for you. And the next you scroll up, the next reel is going to say, apples are killing you.

So it's like very hard for the average person to really understand, okay, which one is it then?

Gil Carvalho (2:27)

Right, right, right. Yeah.

Siim Land (2:30)

So yeah, maybe we can start with a bit about your background of, what did you start making this kind of content? What is your background in this? And yeah.

Gil Carvalho (2:42)

Yeah. So I went to medical school, and then after that, I decided to get a bit more training in research, in research science, and I went to graduate school, and I got a PhD in biology, and did some work in physiological effects of different diets. We were interested in aging and factors that affect rate of aging. And so nutrition and caloric restriction and all these things are staples of that field. So we ended up doing a lot of dietary manipulations and looking at the effect on physiology and genetics and aging and all these things.

Yeah, and then after that, I mean, I've always had an interest in nutrition. I think it's one of the pillars of a healthy lifestyle.

And when I decided to do something in terms of communication for the general public, I wasn't sure if I was going to do a podcast or write a book, or I ended up landing on the YouTube thing. I like having both the voice channel and the visual channel. I think it fits my personality better. I like to talk face to face more than just writing or more than just voice. And yeah, the nutrition thing, I think, was a good overlap between things that I had an interest in and some background in, and also where I thought I could add value. People have an interest in nutrition, there was a lot of doubt, a lot of frustration, and I thought there was a lot of scientific information available that wasn't being provided to people.

Siim Land (4:23)

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