Lost In Health Misinformation Chaos?
We’re living in a moment of upheaval in public health, with sweeping changes to evidence-based guidelines. Thanks to social media, we’re also bombarded with scary health headlines and questionable wellness claims. The combination is leaving many of us confused about who and what to trust and eager to cut through the growing amount of misinformation we’re exposed to every day.
Enter Jessica Knurick, a registered dietitian with a PhD in nutrition science, who’s on a mission to help us rise above the noise.
In her short, engaging videos she posts on social media, Dr. Knurick provides clarity amidst the chaos. Thanks to her signature mix of compassion and scientific rigor, Dr. Knurick dismantles misleading ideas and pushes back on false claims by explaining the science.
The Sunday Paper sat down with Dr. Knurick to learn more about what inspires her work, why she’s passionate about debunking health myths, and how all of us can assess health messaging in real time and do our part to stop health misinformation from spreading.
A CONVERSATION WITH JESSICA KNURICK, RD, PHD
Your posts debunking health misinformation often go viral on Instagram. Why do you think that is?
I think it’s a moment in time where public health discourse is front and center like it’s never been before. There’s also a lot of misinformation that’s coming in this realm. And so people are looking for someone to tell them what’s actually going on. They’re looking for people to explain [the issues] to them, show them sources, and really just help them understand so that they’re then able to go out into the world of social media and identify misinformation and know how to identify accurate information.
Can we get a little behind-the-scenes on your posts? How much time goes into them? What inspires you to continue posting?
Usually, I focus on topics that people are talking about and asking me about in my direct messages (DMs). I think, What are people asking me about? What are they confused about? What are they sending me clips of that I can clarify for them? That’s the genesis. From there, I consider the topic and really try to stay within the scope of my practice. I’ve been studying the topics I talk about for a decade and a half, so I have a leg up when it comes to knowing how to present and source the information.
Then, I write an outline, film the video, edit it, and post it. But generally, what takes the most time is figuring out how best to present the information logically, so it’s understandable, and so that it keeps people’s attention in a social media ecosystem. I’m committed to talking in an evidence-based way. I’m not misleading [viewers].
It sounds like a lot of work. What keeps you going?
I’d say 99 percent of my DMs are people who are grateful for the information I’m sharing or genuinely looking for answers. It’s mostly people who are confused, or they want to know why I’m against the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. But most of my DMs are filled with people who are very grateful, which helps to keep me going.
You refute claims and correct misinformation; you don’t attack individuals. It feels like this is something the rest of us can learn from when conversations get heated. Why is this so effective?
It’s intentional, and it also comes naturally to me, too. I think that’s because I empathize with a lot of people who are at a similar life stage as I am. The MAHA movement is filled with a lot of moms. I have a 5- and 2-year-old, and it’s a life stage where we just want what’s best for our children.
I got started in this field because I wanted to learn more about nutrition and how to keep ourselves healthy and prevent disease. I understand that desire. And you look around and see the rise in chronic diseases. You see a food environment that’s nearly 70 percent ultra-processed food. And you’re like, “What the heck?”
The MAHA movement has stepped in and placed blame. What I’m trying to do is show how that’s a bit misguided and a bit misdirected. I try to lead with facts and information, versus ad hominem attacks. I think that helps to bring people in who otherwise wouldn’t watch my content. And that’s the goal, right? I want to help people who want improvements in systems. If we can be focused on what’s actually the problem, then we can use our collective effort to try to make change. That’s the biggest goal.
Something you said on the Rich Roll podcast has really resonated with a lot of people: “MAHA get the problems largely right, but they get the causes largely wrong. And when you get the causes wrong, you’ll get the solutions wrong.” Can you unpack that?
That’s where a lot of the confusion comes in, because we’re all kind of saying the same thing. We’re all saying that there’s a problem. We see this chronic disease issue in our children, and in America. We see a food environment that’s 70 percent ultra-processed food. We’re like, This is an issue, so let’s fix it. While the MAHA movement gets the problem largely right—though they overstate the problem quite often—what they get wrong is what they define as the causes of those problems versus what the causes actually are based on all of the evidence.
When we’re thinking of chronic disease rates, for example, MAHA talks about toxins in our food. They grab onto food dyes, seed oils, and fluoride, and disregard all of the main determinants of health that we know to be true from a lot of evidence. Looking at income inequality and the social determinants of health; looking at the built environment and our food environment. MAHA doesn’t look at health disparities, because if you want America to be healthy, you have to look at the population that’s most negatively impacted by health in the United States, which is very clear. The number one predictor of health in this country is wealth, and there’s a huge life expectancy age gap between the highest and lowest income brackets.
There are also huge disparities in type two diabetes and cardiometabolic disease and nearly any lifestyle-related chronic disease across the board. If you put up a map of the United States and you look at poverty rates and lifestyle-related chronic disease, you will see that they follow a very similar pattern
MAHA doesn’t talk about that at all. If you get the causes wrong, you’re likely to get the solutions wrong, and your solutions will either be benign, or they’ll be harmful. A really good example of that is fluoride. MAHA wants to ban fluoride, which defies what we see in scientific evidence. The number one chronic disease in children is dental caries, and fluoride directly improves cavity rates in children. If you remove fluoride from the water, you’re going to exacerbate health disparities, because wealthier people aren’t going to have that big of a problem. They’re going to the dentist, they’re going to get fluoride treatments, they’re going to brush with fluoride toothpaste. But you will see problems in lower-income populations, and that’s why fluoride in water is so helpful. That’s an example of a harmful policy.
You are teaching scientific literacy. What are some essential concepts you want more people to know that can help us identify misleading health claims?
I’ll give you a few I see all the time on social media.
No. 1 is conflating correlation and causation. This is essentially when someone says, “This thing increased at the same period of time that this other thing increased, and so this must cause the other.” The best way to spread propaganda is to graph two things over time. You can do it with anything that increases over time. It’s very important for people to understand that correlations are interesting. Correlations are observational data, and they give us data to then go study if one thing is in fact a causal factor. And then that’s what scientists do. We say, Wow, these two things are increasing at the same time, then we generate a hypothesis, and then design a study to actually assess causation. But what a lot of people do on social media is skip all of that. They just look at the correlation and then imply causation to scare people or sell something.
No. 2 is that people will use mechanisms and imply that those mechanisms are true for a human. For example, I did a video about a woman who said that we should drink watermelon juice instead of using sunscreen, because watermelon has lycopene in it, and lycopene is an antioxidant, and it can fight off the free radicals from the sun protect your skin from the sun. There’s an element of truth in that mechanism that lycopene can help to fight off free radicals. But it’s certainly not going to do what sunscreen does. This is an example of a mechanism that’s true, but when you actually look at human data, it’s not true.
No. 3 is understanding the difference between a scientific study and scientific consensus. In any area of research you can find a study to pretty much say anything, because you get different results from different studies. And that’s great! That’s the scientific process. But scientific consensus is looking at literally everything that’s ever been published in a given area, and then seeing what the overwhelming consensus says from that data that’s been published. With scientific consensus, you look at which studies are the strongest, which are the weakest, and then you devise a consensus from that. What happens is people cherry pick the research, disregard what they don’t want to be true, and then pick the studies that validate what they’re trying to say. That’s misleading, and we see it all the time right now, unfortunately.
For those of us overwhelmed and angry at the war on science right now, what is one thing we can do to take action?
The science communicator space is becoming more and more important. Supporting science communicators and sharing their work on social media is important.
You can also contact your representatives. When we see cuts happening to science, let your representatives know that you’re opposed to it, especially if you live in red districts right now. It’s not top of mind for a lot of legislators on both sides right now, because there’s just so much going on in the government. But it’s incredibly important.
And we can talk to each other and correct health misinformation when we hear it. I do content and it’ll reach the people it will reach. But then all of those people can share it with their network. I get a lot of DMs from people who say things like, “Thank you so much for this information. It’s helped me have better conversations with people.”
We’re living in a time where there’s a lot of mistrust of public health, and there’s also an attack on science. Are you hopeful that this will change?
Right now, I’m more concerned than hopeful. I’m very concerned with what we’re seeing in our public health agencies. Again, most of us all want the same thing, but what we’re seeing from a policy perspective are things that are going exactly against what we want in terms of improvements to public health and improvements to a lot of these systems that are setting Americans up to fail.
I’m also very concerned about a brain drain that’s going on. I hear from young scientists all the time who are looking to leave the country. I hear from medical doctors who are overworked and that their patients don’t trust them or don’t respect their expertise—and then they have the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services saying doctors are just out for profit. That’s very disconcerting.
Having said that, what I am hopeful about is the amount of interest that I’m seeing from people who want to understand what’s going on. They don’t necessarily have an ideology; they just really want to understand. One of the wonderful things about the MAHA movement is that it’s captured the interest of America in terms of realizing that our health systems aren’t great, and we want improvements. If we can build on that momentum but redirect the focus to solutions that could actually be helpful to us, I think that would be the best outcome.
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