No Wonder We Are Confused About Exercise

I am not surprised to see why so many of us have no clue on the supposed benefits of exercise. The Time magazine article regarding exercise and the lack of weight loss is one example that adds to our confusion. Overweight doctors, strength coaches, fitness and medical professionals that smoke on their break certainly do not help. Then there are those within the medical community that boast about not exercising or watching what they eat, as if to pound their chest like Donkey Kong and say, “See! Look at me! I don’t do that stuff and I’m perfectly fine!” To each their own. Everybody does have the right to live their life the way they want, but, health and fitness professionals are like role models of the professional athletic world: what they say and how they behave does affect the rest of the community that sees them.
Health professionals have more of an intimate relationship with their patient/client than a professional athlete. This is one reason why they are trusted more than a professional athlete, not only because of their educational background.
Then there are the “Investigative Reporters” the media has that have little to any experience researching science and publish work about the effects of eating one high-fat [and high-carbohydrate] meal on our blood on a major news network, and claim it is the fat that affects us so badly. Thank goodness for the rebuttal. But do you think as many people saw the news report as they read the rebuttal? The first article had doctors making conclusions from the results, but they certainly appear to be misinformed, according to the rebuttal and a number of studies. What do they teach in med school about nutrition? Answer: Very little.
I know we have more questions than answers to the effects of exercise on nutrition and vice versa. However, we should be more careful on how we as health and fitness professionals conduct ourselves and what we say to our patients/clients. Also, the media needs to have a review board for their “scientific reports” that they publish as being “informative”, when they may actually be creating more confusion and spreading greater mis-information. After all, even a scientific journal article written by a scientist undergoes scrutiny with a his own work prior to being published in a journal. Journal articles have a smaller audience than the television. For the sake of integrity, wanting to spread the facts and create a healthier nation, what should have greater scrutiny?