On an health issue group page a person asked how you sift the wheat from the chaff as far as recommendations and advice were concerned. I sent him a reply then I thought you might get something from it.
Welcome to planet Earth where opinions are like backsides – everbody’s got one!
And in actual fact, for good reason. Every spirit/mind/body combination is unique! There are so many different ways a body under mental or emotional stress can malfunction you could rival the Encyclopedia Britannica trying to list them all. We all have emotional or spiritual baggage that is having an effect on our body. I think it was Dr Rashid Buttar who said every single patient who comes to see him with cancer is suffering from a major emotional trauma in their life and, one for one, they do not heal the cancer until the trauma has been addressed and handled!
And leaving the spirit and mind out of it for the moment, or maybe not, Keith Scott-Mumby says in his book Diet Wise that there are probably 7 billion correct diets on this planet – one for each of us!
What I have learned in trying to sift the chaff from the wheat is that most people cannot tell the difference between an opinion and fact so you have to be prepared to gather a lot of data and apply different techniques as you do. Sorry to break the bad news to you but to do the best job you really need to become your own health researcher. Most people will turn off at this point as it is a tough job. That is one reason the average lifespan is half what it could be. The majority of us are not prepared to learn and not prepared to discipline ourselves to do what we have learned.
Having said that, let’s see if I can share some more immediately usable information with which you can approach your task.
The first is the data alignment test. Does it align with or is it supported by data you know to be true. If it does, great. If not, it is either flat out wrong, wrong for you or you need more data to reconcile the differences.
The next is the sniff test – does it smell right. Some people call it your gut feeling, some call it instinct or intuition, some call it spiritual knowingness. Whatever the label, if the datum does not gel with your experience, note it as a non-aligned and not to be used datum for the present. Not to forget it completely and rule it out as something may come along to grant it credence.
Another is the credibility test. Not credentials, as all too often credentialled people are following an agenda because it profits them or they do not have the integrity to say what is true for them. Has this person been right a lot more than wrong and are they getting products in this area? A classic here is a person who has “cured” themself of an illness. (Of course you have to determine if the person is telling the truth.) It is presently illegal to cure many illnesses, it is only legal to cut and poison and hasten death in so doing. Actually the Chinese have a very good saying regarding this, “Never let the man saying it can’t be done get in the way of the man doing it.”
Then there is the old “suck it and see” acid test, “Did it work for me?” If it works for you it is completely irrelevant how many other people it did not work for, it worked for you. Full stop, end of story. Well, not completely. You may have eaten something you should not have eaten and gotten away with it, as many do for decades with sugar before it kills them, because the body is a remarkably complex and well engineered piece of work it will attempt to do the best with whatever you give it, for as long as it can.
On the flip side, just because it works for most people is no iron-clad guarantee it will work for you and be prepared to acknowledge that if it doesn’t! Of course you then have to keep looking for a solution.
Your progress in this education process will be similar to a bell curve. It will start off slow as you look up the definitions for words you do not understand, pick up speed as you learn the lingo and have more and more data with which to align new data, peak then you will learn less and less per given hour of research as you have a lot of the subject matter under the belt. But what I have found is that as much as I know, I do not know it all, I am learning all the time. And I rarely find someone from whom I learn nothing.
One reason we do not know it all is because there is so much to know. Another is that it is not completely charted territory.
For instance there is a top level classification of nutrients into fats, protein and carbohydrates. The next level of detail is vitamins and minerals. Under that you have some things called phytonutrients or phytochemicals. I understand there are 40,000 of them, of which we know and have named only about 10,000!
Hope this helped!