Aoife Hearne: How to eat healthily when you're bombarded with self-described nutrition experts on social media

Aoife Hearne: "We do not need to have a hyper-focus on the food we eat for one meal or one day. Instead, as any nutrition professional will advise, it’s about looking at what you are eating most of the time, for example, over the course of a month. Within that month, there will always be crazy days when you will consume more processed foods.  But if you can look back on the month as a whole, with 80% of your food coming from real food and the other 20% processed food, you’re not doing too bad."

I'm keen to feed my family healthy food, and for ideas, I often check out TikTok and Instagram. The trouble is that some of the nutritional advice is confusing. Some say never combine a protein with starch and always eat fruit separately, while others say you need to eat all the main food groups at once. This is just an example of what I'm hearing. What would you suggest?

I don’t know about you, but even when I don’t search for nutrition advice, I am bombarded with self-described nutrition experts on social media. From what I can see, many nutrition ‘influencers’ have no recognised qualifications, and much of the information shared is inaccurate at best and, at worst, damaging. Their advice is often scaremongering, masquerading as a professional concern about our lack of understanding about food. This feeds into a real sense of anxiety around eating the ‘perfect’ food, which, of course, is neither required nor in existence.