Struggling to sort through nutrition advice? Don’t forget the joy, this expert says

Dr. Matthew Landry is a nutrition expert who understands that keeping up with ever-changing nutrition advice can be a challenge.

It doesn’t have to be, he said.

“Whenever we overcomplicate nutrition guidance, and we take the joy out of eating, I think we’ve gone astray,” said Landry, an assistant professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine.

As a native of southern Louisiana, which Landry calls “the soul food capital of the U.S.,” he knows all about the joy of eating. But his upbringing also taught him that some choices can lead to problems. That connection sparked his interest in research that he sums up as an effort to ensure “that folks have access to nutritious foods to support their health – and hopefully prevent heart attacks.”

Landry, who also is a registered dietitian nutritionist and a volunteer on the nutrition committee of the American Heart Association’s Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health, answered questions about sorting through dietary advice as part of “The Experts Say,” a series where specialists explain how they apply what they’ve learned to their own lives. Here are highlights of the conversation, which has been edited.

What were meals like as a kid in Louisiana?

My whole childhood and upbringing was surrounded by food. I grew up eating a lot of fish and seafood. Neighbors would go fishing on their shrimp boat, then bring things back and share them.

A lot of Louisiana dishes are roux-based. That means they start out with a lot of fat. Fried foods are also ubiquitous, whether it’s fried seafood or fried desserts like beignets. And then the portions are also very generous, especially from the older generation. They always wanted to make sure that if someone came over that they were well fed.

I also grew up with a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, which make up a lot of dishes.

When did you start seeing a connection between what people ate and their health?

In high school. That’s around the time that my grandparents started to have medical incidents. Both of my grandfathers had heart attacks. One ended up dying of heart failure.

So it was around then that I started piecing together lifestyle behaviors that were contributing, or certainly not helping in some ways. You know, they would get out of the hospital and then go right back to eating some of the same kind of foods. I was like, “You just had open-heart surgery! Maybe we shouldn’t be having fried seafood.”