Local health and fitness experts shine science on widely held misconceptions.

The health and fitness field is rife with misinformation and myth. Who can one trust? How about a couple of Ph.D.s? Kent Adams is a professor and chair of CSU Monterey Bay’s Kinesiology Department and director of the Exercise and Physiology Lab. Trish Sevene is a fellow professor and director of CSUMB’s Anatomy and Physiology Lab.

“We [teach] people how to change their behavior and instill evidence-based practices,” Sevene says.

They are married. And they are skeptics. Sevene even teaches a class called Healthy Skepticism. “It makes a difference where the data is coming from,” she says. “In health and fitness, everybody thinks because they eat and move, they can be an expert.”

Adams says credibility should be based on rigorous scientific methodology. “We’ve had numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals,” he says. “Science matters.”

From that standpoint, they offer some words of wisdom about the fictions clogging up their field of study:

Organic foods are healthier than conventional foods.

“The most recent analysis that compared [conventional and organic foods], found, as a whole, biologically, they’re equally healthy,” Sevene says.

The meta-analysis of 237 existing studies was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in September 2012.

It found that organic and conventional produce have the same nutritional content. Organic foods have higher phosphorus levels, but most people are not deficient in that mineral. Organic chicken and pork have lower levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and organic milk has nominally higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids. Organics are only 30-percent less likely to carry pesticides than their conventional counterparts.

The study found higher levels of pesticides in the urine of children who ate conventional foods. But Sevene says the data show a child could eat 1,508 servings of conventional strawberries with no ill effects.

The take-home is uplifting: “We have a great, healthy food supply,” she says.

Vitamins decrease the incidence of chronic disease.

“The data are really clear that unless you are sufficiently deficient, taking a multivitamin every day is not beneficial,” Sevene says. “There are some data that say it could be detrimental. One study [shows] a correlation, not a cause, that people who take a multivitamin every day are more likely to die of chronic disease. My hypothesis is that they think they may be covering their bases and not doing things like eating a healthy diet and getting all the nutrients they need.”

Lifting weights is unnecessary and makes you bulky.

Adams sees a bias against lifting weights. “People think that aerobic training is all you need,” he says. “You need resistance training to stimulate bone and muscle health. That yoga replaces resistance training is a myth.”

Sevene says women in particular are afraid lifting will make them appear less feminine. “Women don’t produce enough testosterone to get bulky doing resistance training,” she says.

Weight-lifting is important as people age, they say, to keep up physical capabilities like taking out the garbage or lifting up the grandkids. Adams says movement also helps with “function related to cognition and problem solving” by increasing blood flow to the brain, and decreasing depression and anxiety.

The paleo diet is the answer to obesity and chronic disease.

The paleo diet reasons that we are the sum of millions of years of evolution. And for most of those millions of years, our ancestors didn’t eat things like beans, grains or milk, much less Cheez Whiz or tofu. Food has evolved too fast for human evolution. That’s why we are ill-suited to much of what we eat, like gluten and dairy.

Sevene tackles two myths embedded in this diet fad. One: that there is a singular paleo diet. “If your ancestors lived by the water, they ate fish,” she says. “If they lived on the African plain, they ate more meat. In the tropics, fruits and vegetables.”

Two: that we can emulate prehistoric diets anyway. All the foods we consume have been selectively bred to make them more palatable and digestible. “That started when we domesticated crops 11,000 years ago,” she says. “There’s nothing you can eat today that is going to replicate what [our ancestors] ate.”

Here’s what she says about vegans: “People who are vegan make the argument that our intestinal tracts aren’t designed to eat meat. It’s perfect for what we are: omnivores.”

Read more of the skeptical couple’s myth-busting at www.mcweekly.com/myths