The dietitian’s responsibility in the age of food misinformation

Social media has turned into everyone’s living room. And in that living room, self-proclaimed nutrition experts are building massive followings by sharing compelling – and often inaccurate – content about food, farming, and health.

Connie Diekman, M.Ed., RD, CSSD, LD, FADA, FAND has been watching this unfold from one of the most credentialed vantage points in the profession. She is a food and nutrition consultant in St. Louis, a former president of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and the co-author of Misinformation and Disinformation in Food Science and Nutrition: Impact on Practice, published in the Journal of Nutrition and available open access.

She joined the Food Bullying Podcast to discuss what her research reveals about the spread of nutrition misinformation, what the RDN code of ethics requires in response to it, and what three practical tools every clinician can take directly into practice.

Misinformation vs. disinformation: the distinction that matters

These terms are frequently used interchangeably, but they describe meaningfully different problems.

Misinformation is inaccurate information communicated through misinterpretation or misleading presentation. The person sharing it may genuinely believe what they’re saying. The harm is still real, but the intent is not necessarily malicious.

Disinformation is the intentional sharing of information known to be inaccurate to achieve a specific outcome – to serve an agenda, reinforce a bias, or drive behavior. It is deliberate. And since COVID, Diekman observes, it has become prolific in social media environments where the checks and balances that govern professional communication simply don’t exist.

The distinction matters for how RDNs respond. Correcting misunderstanding requires education. Countering disinformation requires recognizing it as intentional and responding with the same intentionality – grounding every communication in the body of evidence, not in defensiveness or opinion.

Three tools every RDN needs right now

Diekman and her co-authors built their paper around a practical framework for clinicians, not just an academic analysis of the problem. Their three core tools:

1. Build a body of resources. No individual practitioner is an expert in everything. Nutrition and dietetics is one domain; food production, agricultural technology, environmental science, and farm economics are others. RDNs who don’t know the answer to a patient’s question about how food is grown should know who does. That means developing relationships across disciplines – farmers, agricultural scientists, commodity organizations, extension services – and maintaining access to credible, evidence-based sources outside the nutrition silo.
2. Practice and model critical thinking. The spread of misinformation isn’t primarily a technology problem – it’s a critical thinking problem. Most people evaluate information at the surface level: what did it say and what was the conclusion? Critical thinking requires the next step: Who conducted this research? How large was the sample? How long was the study? What were the methods? Is the conclusion supported by the totality of the evidence or just one study? Diekman is direct that this kind of thinking needs to be modeled visibly by RDNs for the patients and communities who watch how professionals evaluate information.
3. Communicate in ways consumers understand, appreciate, and accept. Having accurate information is necessary but not sufficient. Translating that information into language that meets patients where they are – without sliding over the science – is the work. An RDN who leads with expertise rather than relationship will lose the patient before the conversation begins. Building trust is the precondition for changing minds.

The problem that starts in dietetic education

One of the more uncomfortable findings in Diekman’s discussions with her co-authors: misinformation about food and agriculture isn’t only coming from outside the dietetic profession. It’s present in educational settings – conveyed to students as fact when it may be opinion, and sometimes never corrected as the evidence evolves.

Diekman is candid about seeing this firsthand at the graduate level: students arriving with undergraduate beliefs about food and farming that were shaped more by ideology than evidence. Her position is that science evolves, and educators who haven’t updated their curriculum in 20 years are doing their students a disservice regardless of their good intentions. If new evidence changes what we know, it has to change what we teach.

For the profession to credibly combat misinformation in the public sphere, it has to first address the misinformation moving through its own pipeline.

Why RDNs need to know how food is grown

Diekman’s framework for building the agricultural knowledge that clinical practice requires isn’t theoretical – it’s specific. Talk to a farmer. Network with state FFA organizations or farm bureau chapters. Look at what the Academy’s Food and Culinary Dietetic Practice Group has produced in its agriculture subunit. Use resources like the Center for Food Integrity. Engage with GMO Answers, whose archive remains a credible reference even as the platform has become less active.

Her framing for why this matters: if an RDN gives nutrition advice without understanding the environmental, economic, and livelihood context of how food is produced, that advice is incomplete. A patient asking whether they should buy organic produce deserves an answer informed by an understanding of what organic certification actually means, what the science shows about nutritional equivalence, and what the real economic tradeoffs are for families at different income levels. That answer requires knowledge that lives outside a nutrition textbook.

The ethics of industry partnerships – addressed directly

Diekman has worked with agricultural companies including Monsanto and others throughout her career. She doesn’t step around this – she addresses it as a professional ethics question.

Her standard is simple and consistent: declare the relationship, then let the science speak. Every presentation she gives includes disclosure. Her confidence in those partnerships rests on the same foundation as her confidence in any source: is the information they’re sharing grounded in the body of evidence, or is it corporate speak? In her experience, the organizations she has worked with have been willing to share scientific information transparently rather than filtering it through marketing objectives.

The broader point she makes is one worth sitting with: scientists who work for companies are not automatically incapable of producing unbiased science. Dismissing expertise because of institutional affiliation is itself a form of selective reasoning that weakens rather than strengthens critical thinking. The credential – RDN, PhD, researcher – carries an ethical obligation to communicate based on evidence regardless of who funds the research. Disclosure and evidence-based communication are the standards. They apply universally.

The front-of-package critical thinking exercise

Diekman applies the same framework she brings to her professional work to her own grocery cart. The front of a food package is a marketing tool. That’s its function. Health claims on the front are at least nominally grounded in some body of evidence, but they’re selected for their sales potential, not their clinical significance.

Her actual decision-making process: flip the package over. Read the ingredient list. Read the nutrition facts panel. Once you’ve identified a product that works for your family, you don’t have to repeat the analysis every time you shop.

She doesn’t shop for non-GMO, organic, or natural certifications – because the body of evidence does not indicate that these designations produce meaningfully different nutritional outcomes for the majority of food products. The word organic doesn’t mean small, local, or produced with exceptional care; it describes a specific set of farming methods, and large-scale organic operations exist just as industrial-scale conventional ones do. If a consumer wants to genuinely know how their food was grown, Diekman’s recommendation is direct: go to the farmers market and talk to the farmer.

Her one addition that stands out: food safety. She checks produce for bruises and cuts before purchasing – a basic food hygiene practice that rarely comes up in nutrition conversations but matters for the safety of the food that actually reaches the table.

Connect with Connie Diekman: Visit cbdiekman.com, find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Read the open-access paper Misinformation and Disinformation in Food Science and Nutrition: Impact on Practice in the Journal of Nutrition.

Want to bring evidence-based food and nutrition communication to your next dietitian association, agribusiness, or healthcare event? Michele Payn speaks to RDN audiences, agricultural organizations, and healthcare professionals on food bullying, debunking food myths, and the science behind modern food production. Book Michele to speak →