Public Lecture

Dr. Flerida A. Cariño, Director of the UP Diliman Institute of Chemistry,
 talks on evaluating the wealth of information on food facts available on the internet.

Following the launching of the UP NISMED publications, Dr. Flerida A. Cariño, Director of the UP Diliman Institute of Chemistry and an expert in biosafety and biotechnology, gave a public lecture titled Unfriending the Internet: Food Facts and Fallacies. Dr. Cariño talked about how the internet provides a wealth of information related to food, but the accuracy of the information provided may be tainted by advocacy, politics, religious and cultural biases, or economic gain. She showed some examples of misleading information culled from various websites and provided counterpart information obtained from more reliable internet resources. She also offered some guidance on discerning which internet sources are reliable and how to check the reliability of information gleaned from various websites. After her talk, she accommodated a number of questions from the audience who were very appreciative of her talk.