(The Bad Food Bible, Dr. Aaron Carroll, November 2017)
There are two points to The Bad Food Bible. Medical studies should not be used to make food decisions, and you should go ahead and eat whatever you want.
Dr. Aaron Carroll says there is a hierarchy of food studies, and the most reliable are the rarest. But regardless, their results are not to be taken at face value. The media misinterpret the findings, and you can find a study to prove just about anything you desire. There are no definitive answers. The state of our nutritional knowledge seems to be worthless.
As for food, everything is fine in moderation, so don’t bother worrying about what you eat. With cow’s milk, for example, Carroll says we need it for our breakfast cereal, and cookies without milk is just not supportable. Save meat with a lot of fat for special occasions. He allows his own children “four or five” sugar-free soft drinks a week. He says with mercury-laden tuna, you must decide for yourself how much poison you and your children can handle, and adjust your consumption as desired: “Think for yourself and eat accordingly”, he says. This is extraordinarily strange advice in the nutrition field.
Points to ponder:
-Gluten-free is a pointless and expensive fad. One tenth of one percent have gluten issues.
-Genetically modified organisms have been around for as long we have farmed and there is no reason to even try to eliminate them.
-Alcohol is more beneficial than it is damaging. Red wine in particular raises good HDL.
-Eating fat won’t make you fat.
-Eating cholesterol won’t raise your cholesterol.
-Coffee is “shockingly good for you”; it’s practically a miracle drug. And it does not stunt growth or dehydrate you.
-The empty calories in diet soft drinks are better than the empty calories from added sugar drinks, because artificial sweeteners won’t kill you.
-MSG is a perfectly natural, and critically necessary body chemical, present in everything from tomatoes to breast milk. It has never been shown to be toxic as a flavor enhancer.
-Science is having no success telling organic from non-organic produce.
-Organic produce is not nutritionally superior.
Carroll doesn’t venture into two of the perversions in nutrition research. Rat studies take animals predisposed to certain diseases and overload them with foods or chemicals to see how they fare. By law since 1964, if cancer resulted, the chemical had to be banned. Thus saccharine became a carcinogen. Didn’t matter that a human would have had to drink a hundred diet sodas a day for two years to absorb the same amount they pumped into the rats, it was cancer and it had to go. This is the same reasoning that has led to zero new wonder drugs for tuberculosis since the 1960s. TB doesn’t manifest in rats the way it does it humans, so new drugs can never pass the mandatory rat test. But I digress.
The other is our near total lack of understanding of how our bodies work. We now think gut bacteria manufacture all the vitamins we need on demand, and consuming them as chemicals is worthless. The same goes for food-borne cholesterol. The cholesterol in our blood comes from our own livers, not eggs or burgers. Carroll also skims over the massive chemical content of meat, red or white. Meat might not be as harmful as some say, but the antibiotics and other medicines and hormones in them are. Carroll says enjoy.
That the state of nutritional medicine is this torn and uncertain should be worrying all by itself. Carroll makes a lot of good arguments, but they don’t add any degree of certainty about what to eat. And he admits that. (He is currently experimenting with a low carb diet for himself.) For those who believe if you don’t recognize the ingredient then it’s not food – this book is not going to go down well. If you’re open to rational analysis with a splash of adventure, this is for you.
David Wineberg