Nuance can help health field regain public trust: AcademyHealth CEO

Originally broadcast August 15, 2024

Dr. Aaron Carroll raises eyebrows with statements that highlight contradictory health advice: “‘Eggs are going to kill you because of cholesterol’ — ‘oh, it actually doesn’t matter. Eat as many eggs as you like.’ ‘Red meat will kill you.’ ‘Oh no, read meat can be part of a diet.’ ‘Drink no alcohol’ … ‘Oh, no no. Drinking red wine is perfectly healthy.’”

Dr. Carroll has devoted his career to advocating for scientific and research communities need to improve how they discuss nuance, especially in health. Dr. Carroll, serving as CEO of the AcademyHealth, says “science is portrayed as binary — positive or negative — and that can breed mistrust from the public.”

“The way that we discuss nutrition and food [can] burn people’s belief in science, in that it feels like people are told one or the other,” Dr. Carroll tells “Conversations on Health Care” hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter.

For most people, ramping up or cutting out consumption of one particular food “can add a tiny bit of risk here or there. But the extremes that we are often sold, one way or the other, about what you should and should not eat are often not really well-supported by science,” he says.

It’s not that new data disproves old research, he says. But both add up to a more complex picture. “When you describe things in absolute terms … it creates a climate where people don’t trust exactly what you’re saying.”

Despite the constantly changing nature of science, nurses and doctors are still consistently held in high trust, Dr. Carroll says. One way to add nuance to public discourse is to use trusted voices to help people understand what questions to ask when they hear new information: Pre-buttal, as opposed to rebuttal, as he puts it. “[That] is much more powerful than trying to change their minds after they’ve heard things that are just not true.”