With familiar government health resources changing or disappearing from day to day, finding

trustworthy nutrition information has become increasingly challenging. So today, I have some

practical tips on how to find your way to reliable sources of nutrition information.

Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reynagle,

and for the last 16 years, my goal in this podcast is to be a reliable source of factual and balanced information about food and nutrition.

There is a lot of news and noise out there, and sometimes it's hard to know what to pay attention to

and what to believe. And, you know, that's always been the case, but perhaps never more so than the current moment.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Melanie, who is concerned about whether our current

government officials and agencies can still be relied upon to give truthful and accurate

information about food and nutrition. And she asked if I had any recommendations for reliable sources.

Well, in the past, I have relied on and referred people to resources provided by the National

Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the United States Department of Agriculture,

the Centers for Disease Control, all of whom maintained large databases of useful and

up-to-date information on things like nutritional supplements, alternative and complementary

therapies, health and nutrition research, food safety, dietary guidelines. Now, of course,

no agency or individual, including me, gets everything right. And so I often supplemented these

with other sources of information. But I did take for granted the existence and the reliability of well-funded government agencies

staffed by serious scientists and competent administrators and largely protected from political

wins and whims. Priorities and points of view might certainly shift or evolve, but the basic mandate

and function of these institutions were basically stable and solid. Regardless of your political

views, I think we can all agree that many things about our government and its functions that we have

taken for granted for generations are no longer assured. Funding and staffing are being decimated.

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