Debbie Bennett and Kaylie Walker are both nutrition educators in northwest Missouri, and for the past few years, they’ve hosted an MU Extension podcast called “Truth or Trend” that examined online trends and claims about health and well-being.
They recently sat down and spoke about the importance of thinking critically when it comes to health claims spread online.
Missouri Health Talks gathers Missourians’ stories of access to healthcare in their own words.
Debbie Bennett: Right now, you can watch a TikTok and get information, and so, do people just take that as gospel? Do they have time to research that to know whether that's really something that's for them?
So, that's what I liked about the podcast, is we could kind of bridge that gap and help people with health literacy, you know, that “if you see something on social media, this is how you can figure out whether it's good information and whether it's something that you want to change in your life.”
We really focused on not only, maybe, you know, giving information, but helping people know how to do that research for themselves.
Kaylie Walker: I think if you're looking for research to validate what your opinion already is — you can find it. So, it's how you are looking at it.
I always try my best to be unbiased when I'm doing research. So, I want to hear both sides. Sometimes I'm disappointed. I'm like, “Man, I really, really want to believe that, but there's just not enough research.”
And that's another thing. You can read one research article that says, “Yeah, this causes this or that or whatever,” but that's just one research article. There has to be a lot of work done to really justify believing in something, in my opinion.
And then just where you're getting your information from. Are you getting it from a blog? Are you getting it from a company that's trying to sell you their product? Or are you getting it from a reputable source?
So, if it says dot edu or dot org — those are the ones that you can pretty much trust, but you still have to do a lot of work in really thinking about it and doing a lot of research to make an opinion. I think.
Debbie Bennett: Yeah, I would agree with Kaylee. I mean, I don't think we're asking anybody to do a literature review, right? Most of us are not going to read peer reviewed journal articles.
But even if you Google something, be choosy about which one of those you're going to trust, right?
And like Kaylee said, look at the source of it — is it from a health system? Is it from a hospital? Is it from a university? So, yeah, look at those dot orgs. Look at those dot edus.
And I'm much more so going to trust one of those sources because, you know, the American Heart Organization or Harvard School of Public Health, you know, those organizations are supposed to be there to give me good, reliable information, right? They're not supposed to have a bias. They're supposed to give me what the research shows.
Kaylie Walker: Yeah, I just like being curious, and I challenge everyone to be curious whenever you're doing any sort of research — especially for your health.
