15/07/2026
NO WONDER PEOPLE ARE SO CONFUSED ABOUT FOOD
A qualification does not automatically make someone correct.
Every time I hear a supposedly qualified nutrition professional repeat outdated, oversimplified or unsupported advice as though it is settled science, I understand why people keep getting sucked into poor information.
WHO TAUGHT YOU HOW TO EAT?
I’m going to be completely honest about this, because the more nutrition advice I hear, the more I understand why people are so confused.
My education in food, nutrition, fitness and human performance did not begin eight years ago.
It began decades ago.
Before I became a professional photographer, I was an athlete, a personal trainer and a gym owner. I completed fitness leadership training, personal training courses and nutrition studies. I trained consistently, competed, worked with clients, employed personal trainers and owned five gyms.
I was also a professional chef.
I worked in and ran large kitchens, including fine-dining operations and international five-star resorts. I trained and supervised apprentices and dealt with food every day—not as a theory printed in a textbook, but in the real world.
Over the past eight years, I have taken that education even further. I have spent thousands of hours reading scientific papers, systematic reviews, research reports, books, dietary guidelines and arguments from every side.
I don’t spend every evening sitting in front of Netflix watching rubbish.
I spend hours researching, questioning, comparing evidence and trying to understand what the science actually says.
I have studied everything from Atkins and the blood-group diet to bodybuilding nutrition, conventional dietary advice, whole-food plant-based nutrition, supplementation, chronic disease, cancer research, food production, environmental damage and animal agriculture.
I have not only read the information that agrees with me.
I deliberately read opposing arguments because that is how real learning works.
You don’t decide what you want to believe and then search for somebody who agrees with you.
You examine the evidence.
You look at how the research was designed.
You ask who funded it.
You examine the number of participants, the duration of the study, what was measured and what the comparison group was eating.
You look at whether the researchers found an association or demonstrated cause and effect.
Then you compare that study with the wider body of evidence before making up your own mind.
That is why I become so frustrated when I hear supposedly qualified people repeating nutrition advice that is outdated, misleading, oversimplified or, in some cases, complete garbage.
A qualification is the beginning—not proof of mastery
A qualification can be useful.
It can provide structure, terminology, basic principles and some form of guidance.
But a certificate does not automatically give someone understanding, experience, judgment, curiosity or common sense.
I saw this repeatedly when I owned gyms.
Some personal trainers were excellent. They had trained for years, understood movement, worked with different bodies and knew how exercises and equipment felt in practice.
Others had passed a course but had very little understanding of how to train a human being safely or effectively.
Some people even had degrees in human movement, yet had little practical experience as athletes, coaches or trainers.
They knew what the textbook said, but they had not spent enough time applying it.
To me, that matters.
When you have trained yourself for years, competed, been injured, recovered, made mistakes, changed programs, used the equipment and worked with hundreds of people, you develop knowledge that cannot be learned from a diagram alone.
That does not make formal education worthless.
It means formal education and real experience should work together.
The same applies to cooking.
I have seen qualified chefs who spent most of their apprenticeship working in the cold-larder section. They completed their training and became qualified chefs, yet had limited experience across the rest of a professional kitchen.
They had the qualification, but not necessarily the breadth of experience people assumed came with it.
Photography is another example.
I did not complete a four-year university photography degree, yet I later taught university photography students.
I learned through years of professional work, experimentation, mistakes, problem-solving and understanding exactly why an image succeeded or failed.
Making mistakes taught me how to recognise them.
Experience taught me how to correct them.
That is very different from memorising the correct answer for an exam.
Nutrition should be treated in the same way.
A person can complete a nutrition course and still repeat poor information.
A healthcare professional can be highly qualified in one field and still have limited education in nutritional science.
A textbook can become outdated.
Dietary guidelines can lag behind emerging evidence.
Commercial interests can influence research priorities, professional education and public messaging.
The problem is not education itself.
The problem is when people stop questioning after receiving the qualification.
This is why I wrote Who Taught You How to Eat?
My book is not there to command people or tell everyone exactly what they must eat.
It is there to ask people to examine where their beliefs about food came from.
Who taught you that cow’s milk was necessary?
Who taught you that meat needed to be part of every meal?
Who taught you that chicken was automatically healthy?
Who taught you that eggs came from happy chickens wandering around a beautiful green field?
Who taught you that protein had to come from animals?
Who taught you that brightly coloured breakfast cereal was suitable food for a child?
Who taught you that a qualified professional should never be questioned?
Was it your parents?
School?
Advertising?
Government guidelines?
The dairy industry?
The meat industry?
A doctor?
A nutritionist?
A personal trainer?
A social-media influencer?
Or was it genuinely based on the strongest and most current scientific evidence?
Veganism is not a diet
There is another distinction that must be made clearly because it is constantly confused—even in research papers, journalism and artificial intelligence.
Veganism is not a diet.
The Vegan Society, which coined the word vegan in 1944, defines veganism as a philosophy and way of living that seeks, as far as possible and practicable, to exclude animal exploitation and cruelty.
Food is part of vegan practice, but veganism itself is an ethical position and a way of living. (The Vegan Society)
A vegan person may eat an extremely healthy diet.
A vegan person may also live on chips, soft drink, biscuits, highly processed mock meats and other poor-quality foods.
Being vegan does not automatically make somebody healthy because veganism was never created as a health program.
It is primarily about animals and avoiding their exploitation.
A plant-based diet, on the other hand, describes a way of eating.
A healthy whole-food plant-based dietary pattern generally emphasises vegetables, fruit, beans, lentils, chickpeas, peas, soy foods, whole grains, nuts and seeds while reducing or excluding animal-derived and heavily processed foods.
These terms are not interchangeable.
Someone can eat a predominantly plant-based diet for health or environmental reasons without identifying as vegan.
Someone can be vegan because of animal ethics while eating a terrible diet.
When researchers place every person who excludes animal foods into one category labelled a “vegan diet,” without properly measuring food quality, the results can become misleading.
A diet centred on beans, vegetables, whole grains, tofu, fruit, nuts and seeds is not nutritionally equivalent to one centred on chips, confectionery and ultra-processed vegan products.
The ethics might be the same.
The nutrition is not.
That distinction matters scientifically.
It matters ethically.
And it matters when interpreting research.
Walk through a supermarket and look around
Every time I walk through a supermarket, I still shake my head.
People argue about whether somebody is vegan, vegetarian, plant-based, paleo, carnivore or following some other fashionable label, while their trolley is filled with brightly coloured boxes of sugary cereal, bottles of Coca-Cola, confectionery and foods that barely resemble the ingredients they started with.
Stop arguing about labels for five minutes and read what is actually in the food.
Read the ingredient list.
Read the added-sugar content.
Look at how much fibre it contains.
Ask why it needs so many ingredients, colours, flavours, sweeteners and additives.
Ask whether it is something you should be eating every day—or feeding to your children every morning.
It isn’t rocket science.
That does not mean every processed food is automatically harmful, or that one glass of soft drink causes disease.
It means the overall pattern and frequency matter.
The World Health Organization recommends keeping free sugars below 10 per cent of total energy intake and suggests reducing them below 5 per cent for additional health benefits. It identifies free-sugar intake as an important contributor to dental caries, overweight and obesity. (World Health Organization)
Research on ultra-processed foods also deserves attention. Large umbrella reviews and meta-analyses consistently associate higher ultra-processed-food consumption with poorer cardiometabolic outcomes and higher mortality, although much of this evidence is observational and cannot prove that every individual product directly causes disease. (PubMed)
That is the scientifically honest way to explain it.
We do not need to exaggerate.
The evidence is concerning enough without turning it into a sensational headline.
We spend thousands of dollars servicing our cars, researching televisions, comparing mobile phones and reading reviews before buying almost anything.
Yet many people spend more time researching their next holiday than investigating the food they feed themselves and their children every day.
I know because I used to be one of those people.
I wasn’t stupid.
I simply accepted much of what I had been taught without questioning it.
I trained hard and believed that if I exercised enough, I could get away with eating almost anything.
Over time, I learned that fitness and health are not necessarily the same thing.
You can look fit and still have high blood pressure.
You can be muscular and still have high cholesterol.
You can train every day and still be eating in a way that may work against your long-term health.
That is exactly why I wrote this book.
What does the evidence actually say about plant-based eating?
The evidence does not say that every food carrying a “plant-based” label is healthy.
It does show that dietary patterns built around high-quality plant foods are consistently associated with better health outcomes.
Large systematic reviews have found that stronger adherence to healthy plant-based dietary patterns is associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, several chronic diseases and premature death.
Importantly, unhealthy plant-based patterns dominated by refined grains, sugary foods and highly processed products do not provide the same benefits. (PubMed)
Randomised-trial evidence also shows that vegetarian and vegan dietary interventions can reduce LDL cholesterol and other atherogenic blood lipids. Among people with type 2 diabetes, these interventions may also improve HbA1c and body weight. (PubMed)
Again, that does not mean a vegan label makes a product healthy.
It means beans, lentils, vegetables, fruit, whole grains, nuts and seeds are not second-rate substitutes for “real food.”
They are real food.
What about cow’s milk and dairy?
Cow’s milk is biologically produced by a cow to support the growth of her calf.
That fact should at least make us question the claim that another species’ milk is automatically necessary for human health.
But common sense should begin the question.
Science must test the answer.
This is important because I do not want to replace dairy-industry marketing with another oversimplified claim.
The current evidence does not justify saying that dairy has been proven to cause all breast cancer, prostate cancer or brittle bones.
The evidence is more complicated.
The World Cancer Research Fund reports limited evidence suggesting that higher consumption of dairy products and diets high in calcium may increase prostate-cancer risk. “Limited” means the association is credible enough to investigate but not strong enough to establish dairy as a proven cause. (World Cancer Research Fund)
For breast cancer, results vary across studies and by dairy type, menopausal status and tumour characteristics. A recent meta-analysis reported associations in some categories, but the overall scientific literature does not support claiming that dairy has been conclusively demonstrated to cause breast cancer. (PubMed)
Dairy and calcium intake have also been associated with a reduced risk of colorectal cancer in major cancer reviews. That finding needs to be acknowledged, even by people who choose not to consume dairy. (World Cancer Research Fund)
Regarding bones, dairy can contribute calcium and may improve bone-mineral density in some populations, but that does not mean drinking more milk automatically prevents fractures. Reviews have generally found the relationship between dairy consumption and fracture risk to be mixed or neutral rather than proof that milk is essential for strong bones. (PubMed)
This is precisely why people must examine the totality of the evidence instead of choosing one study or headline.
The honest conclusion is not that dairy is poison.
It is that dairy is not nutritionally essential when calcium, protein, vitamin B12, iodine and other necessary nutrients are obtained through appropriate foods, fortified products and supplementation where required.
People may decide to consume dairy.
Others may avoid it for ethical, environmental, cultural, allergy or intolerance reasons.
But saying, “Drink cow’s milk if you tolerate it,” is not a complete nutritional argument.
Tolerance does not establish necessity.
And a food being culturally normal does not make it biologically essential.
Animal products also have consequences beyond nutrients
Nutrition discussions often reduce food to isolated nutrients.
Protein.
Calcium.
Iron.
Vitamin B12.
But food choices also involve production systems, environmental impact, antibiotic use, working conditions and animal welfare.
A piece of chicken on a supermarket shelf does not show you the life of the chicken.
A carton of eggs with green fields printed on it does not necessarily represent the environment in which the hens lived.
A picture of a smiling farmer does not tell you about stocking densities, breeding, transport or slaughter.
Marketing sells the image people want to believe.
It rarely shows the entire production system.
Large global environmental assessments have found substantial variation between producers, but animal-derived foods—particularly ruminant meat—generally require more land and generate greater environmental impacts than legumes and other plant-protein sources.
Even lower-impact animal products frequently have larger footprints than plant proteins. (Science)
That is why recommending kidney beans, lentils, chickpeas and other legumes when meat prices rise is not merely the “cheap alternative.”
For many people, it is the nutritionally sensible, environmentally responsible and ethically preferable choice.
Parents need to take responsibility too
Food is not a minor part of our lives.
It gives us energy.
It supports growth, movement, development and recovery.
Our overall dietary pattern can influence blood pressure, cholesterol, body weight, blood-glucose control and the long-term risk of chronic disease.
Parents spend enormous amounts of time worrying about their children, yet many never seriously investigate what they are feeding them.
We cannot keep pretending that nobody has time to learn.
People find time for television, sport, social media, shopping and endless scrolling.
Surely we can find some time to understand something we do several times every day for our entire lives.
You owe it to yourself to learn.
As a parent, you owe it to your children to question marketing, examine evidence and stop accepting every food-industry message as truth.
That does not mean watching one documentary and believing everything it says.
It does not mean reading one headline or following the loudest person on social media.
It means learning how evidence works.
Was the research conducted in humans?
Was it a randomised controlled trial, a prospective cohort study, a laboratory experiment or an opinion article?
How many people participated?
How long did it last?
What did the comparison group eat?
What outcome was measured?
Who funded the research?
Were conflicts of interest disclosed?
Does the conclusion match the actual results?
Has the finding been replicated?
Does it agree with the wider body of evidence?
These are the questions we should be teaching people to ask.
I am not asking you to believe me
My book does not say:
“Believe me because I have owned gyms, worked as a chef, trained as an athlete or spent years studying nutrition.”
My experience gives me a perspective.
It does not make me infallible.
The book says:
“Look at the evidence. Question what you were taught. Then make up your own mind.”
I have nearly completed it, but I am currently reviewing several additional trials and areas of research.
I originally planned to leave some of this material for a second book, but I want to understand those trials properly before deciding whether they belong in this edition.
The book has taken longer because I do not want to rush it simply to say it is finished.
I want it to challenge people.
I want it to educate people.
Most importantly, I want people to realise that changing your mind after seeing better evidence is not weakness.
That is what learning looks like.
I was once one of the people who did not question enough.
I ate differently.
I believed different things.
I accepted claims because they were normal, familiar and repeated everywhere.
Then I started asking questions.
Because once you ask—
Who taught me how to eat?
—you may discover that many of your strongest beliefs about food were never truly your own.
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INSIDEOUT | RESEARCH AND TRANSPARENCY FOOTER
This article forms part of the InsideOut project and Peter Trainer’s forthcoming book, Who Taught You How to Eat?
It is intended to encourage questioning, evidence literacy and informed personal decision-making. It does not replace individual medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
How the research was assessed
Priority was given to:
• systematic reviews and meta-analyses
• randomised controlled trials
• large prospective cohort studies
• reports from recognised independent public-health and cancer-research organisations
• direct examination of research methods, limitations, funding and conflicts of interest
No single paper was treated as the final answer. Conclusions were based on the broader balance of evidence, and uncertainty has been stated where research remains mixed or cannot establish cause and effect.
Principal evidence consulted
World Cancer Research Fund International: dairy and cancer; prostate cancer; colorectal cancer; dietary and lifestyle patterns for cancer prevention. (World Cancer Research Fund)
World Health Organization: guideline on free-sugar intake; sugar-sweetened beverages; overweight, obesity and dental health. (World Health Organization)
Plant-based dietary patterns: systematic reviews and meta-analyses examining cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, mortality and dietary quality. (PubMed)
Ultra-processed foods: umbrella reviews and meta-analyses examining cardiometabolic outcomes, diabetes and all-cause mortality. (PubMed)
Dairy, breast cancer, prostate cancer and bone health: recent meta-analyses and evidence reviews, including contradictory or neutral findings where applicable. (PubMed)
Environmental effects of food production: global life-cycle evidence comparing land use, emissions and other environmental impacts across food-production systems. (Science)
Definition of veganism: The Vegan Society’s formal definition, history and report distinguishing veganism from “plant-based” food terminology. (The Vegan Society)
How artificial intelligence was used
Artificial intelligence was used as a research and writing assistant to help:
• locate relevant research
• compare findings across studies
• identify overstatements and unsupported claims
• organise Peter Trainer’s original thoughts and spoken notes
• improve spelling, structure and readability
• preserve Peter’s voice while presenting the argument clearly
AI was not treated as the source of scientific truth.
Claims were checked against published studies and recognised evidence-based organisations. Peter Trainer directed the argument, challenged the conclusions and made the final editorial decisions.
Written and researched by Peter Trainer with AI-assisted research and editing.
InsideOut — Question what you were taught. Follow the evidence. Make up your own mind. 🌱
