Food and nutrition are among the most personal—and most public—parts of our lives. They connect us to family, culture, identity, and values as well as health. They also reveal how health advice travels: through science, through policy, and through the messengers and media to which we choose to listen and learn.
At Food for Trust: Nutrition Guidance, Influence, and Lessons on Trust in Health, part of Duke Global Health Institute’s Think Global series, panelists explored how nutrition guidance is made, communicated, and followed. Organized by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center and moderated by the Center’s Heather Lanthorn, the event (you can watch the video here!) tied directly to Healthier Together—an initiative jointly incubated by Duke, Your Local Epidemiologist, and COVID Collaborative—building infrastructure for the next generation of grassroots, trustworthy communication about health, grounded in communication, community, and capacity.
Why food is central to conversations about trust
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Nutrition is an excellent lens through which to examine the wider trust problems (and opportunities) in health. Everyone eats, but the public doesn’t agree on what “healthy” means and how to pursue it. Meanwhile, everyone consumes information, but there is also disagreement on what constitutes a healthy information diet and how to achieve it. The health information ecosystem is not just chaotic and polarized but deeply fragmented. Conflicting studies, evolving guidelines, and influencer-driven wellness trends leave the public whiplashed between how much protein to eat, what we should all be doing about ultra-processed food, and whether red food dye and red wine are in or out—and how to manage all this on their household budget and bandwidth and amid their local food environments. The trust gap means that reliable, locally relevant information often fails to reach those who need it, how they need it.
Panelists highlighted that food is not only vital for wellness and health outcomes. Food is a conduit to many goals people and communities already care about and is therefore deeply connected to trust: educational attainment and productivity, climate resilience, and social connection, belonging, and love. Because food connects to these deeply held values and intrinsically valuable goals, disagreements about nutrition are rarely just about evidence; they are about meaning, identity, and fairness. This puts community at the center of communication. Further, it underscores that the trustworthiness of messengers about food and nutrition depends not only on scientific competence but also on perceived character and caring, which can make expertise relatable, transparent, and benevolent.
Communication: Building and translating the right evidence for the right people at the right time to support choice
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Alonzo Plough reminded the audience that “evidence must be fact-based… and must be broad and eclectic” both in focus and methodology to help people make healthy choices. Traditional nutrition research—whether a study comparing small dietary tweaks or dietary guidance as a whole—cannot, by itself, capture the social, political, and behavioral forces that shape what people actually eat.
Panelists agreed that those hoping to understand and improve nutrition need to pair nutrition science with high-quality social, implementation, behavioral, and communication science to understand why even sound guidance often goes unheeded and what to do about it. As Megan Maisano of National Dairy Council and Your Local Epidemiologist noted, “Even the perfect dietary guidelines do no good if we don’t follow them.”
This means that, to communicate well, trusted messengers require multi-dimensional evidence but also the ability to generate evidence that matters to people’s choices and to communicate it in ways that are clear, accessible, and connected to lived realities. Communication, then, is not just about dissemination. It is about translation—connecting evidence to the motivations, constraints, and identities that drive choice. We need intentional, transparent, and empathetic dialogue that bridges evidence and experience, recognizing that official guidance competes with far more compelling commercial and social-media messages. The most trustworthy communicators combine competence (clear, accurate evidence) with character (transparency and integrity) and caring (empathy and respect for audience values).
Community: Anchoring communication in messengers people already trust
If communication is about how trust travels, community is about where trust takes root. Plough emphasized that “trust is built through relationships”—familiar folks like neighbors, local leaders and journalists, and frontline health workers who interact regularly within a community, whether physical or virtual. Not only does proximity support that time to both talk and listen, it also makes it more likely that messengers “talk less like you’re at a conference and more like you’re around the Thanksgiving table,” as Plough called on the audience to do. Local messengers have their ear to the ground to know what communities really need, supporting a more demand-driven approach to health communication. Trust must be built in relationship with people, not just communicated to them. Locally rooted messengers—from clinicians to clergy to online creators—are often the first line of defense against confusion and cacophony.
Not only is effective communication rooted in community, so too is nutrition. Emily Coppel of The Rockefeller Foundation highlighted their work bolstering “sustainable school meal programs that are sourced locally, supporting local farmers with training and financing as they transition to more resilient climate practices.” Physical communities—farmers, schools, families—are at the center of food system resilience and can become key messengers about nutrition choices when connected with one another and needed capacity.
Capacity: Strengthening communication by messengers people already trust
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Panelists highlighted that being trusted is not the same as being trustworthy. They noted that there are a number of concrete, evidence-informed steps that communicators can take to be effective and trustworthy, including leading with empathy and validation, knowing your audience and engaging in active listening to know them better, using the language of your audience when it fits with your authentic self, proactively addressing rumors before they spread (pre-bunking), using consistent messaging or clearly explaining when and how messages are being updated, and providing the bottom line up front while signaling openness to going deeper.
While many messengers can learn these skills, they do require investment of time and resources to understand the current science. Megan Lott from Duke’s Healthy Eating Research emphasized how their team releases study findings with coordinated partner messaging: “We provide the highlights, newsletter blurbs, and draft posts. The power of everyone giving similar advice can’t be overstated.”
This is much-needed effort. At the same time, many communicators and creators across the country are building tools and trainings that can make listening and communicating easier for a variety of community-rooted messengers, whether they are a coach, clinician, or member of the local chamber of commerce. When these messengers are connected with one another and with such resources, communities can build the skills and systems to respond quickly and coherently to long-standing and emergent issues.
Looking ahead
Nutrition shows us that trust in health cannot be commanded; it must be earned. The panelists repeatedly echoed (watch here) that evidence alone is insufficient if it feels irrelevant, elitist, or inconsistent. Trust has the opportunity to grow when information is delivered by people perceived as being both competent and having integrity of character, while grounding their efforts in genuine care for the people they hope to inform and serve.
That is the heart of Healthier Together: connecting trustworthy messengers with each other and with credible content, tools, and trainings to help communities navigate a complex, polarized information landscape.
When we get food right, we do more than improve diets; we strengthen the very infrastructure of trust on which health depends.
This post originally appeared on the Duke Global Health Innovation Center website. Duke GHIC is a center within Duke University that connects global health, health policy, and innovation efforts to improve health worldwide. Through our partnership with Duke GHIC, we support healthcare entrepreneurs and health systems in over 90 countries to advance access to quality, affordable care.