Eat Serious: Debunking Food Myths

1. EXT. GARDEN – DAY

An English summer barbecue. Pink visages, handheld fans, wasps drowning in half-drunk beers.

ADAM (flipping a grilled beef patty into a bun and smothering it with processed cheese and store-bought ketchup)

Nomnomnom!

GILLIAN (observing smugly, eating salad)

Don’t you know how bad that is for you? Just think of all the carcinogens, the fat, the salt. And I bet the meat’s not even locally sourced!

ADAM (meekly, guiltily masticating burger)

Oh, I know, but it tastes so good!

 

No, Adam! That’s not what you say. You say: “Give over, Gillian!” Or better still: “Keep your ill-informed proselytising to yourself; there’s little evidence to support your claims.” It depends, Adam, on how many frozen margaritas you’ve had.

Did you see what I did there? Crafty, I know. I used the barbecue as a platform to address some popular/tenacious misconceptions surrounding food and diets. I hear them all the time. Antioxidants in broccoli help fight cancer. Eggs raise ‘bad’ cholesterol. High-fibre diets protect against colorectal cancer.

Such claims made by the food media are partly responsible for inculcating a culture of 'orthorexia' whereby people obsess over eating according to what they think is the ‘healthiest’ or most 'green' dietary system. The truth, I propose, is that the media extols certain diets and vilifies others while falling back on scientific foundations that are shaky at best.

If I told you carcinogens found in grilled meat were bad, you’d probably agree. But why? Because the papers said so? Guess you missed the Leveson inquiry. HCAs (or, heterocyclic amine mutagens), produced when meat browns during the Maillard reaction, do cause greater instances of cancer in rats; but what is true for rats isn’t necessarily true for us. Besides, man has been eating cooked meat for millennia, so it would be reasonable to assume we’ve become accustomed to it. Professor Richard Wrangham, a primatologist, has even speculated that it was precisely the shift to cooking meat that gave early humans increased brain size. Perhaps this is why strict raw food diets have been seen to have negative impacts on health – most worrisome of which is amenorrhea (or, lack of menstruation).

What about good old sodium chloride? Eating a low-salt diet will protect against heart disease. Right? Well, the jury's still out on that one. And MSG, that most infamous of flavour-enhancers, should be avoided? Studies have found it to be safe. And, hands up, who still thinks the French have a diet high in saturated fat but, paradoxically, have low rates of heart disease? Don’t be shy. This notion falls under the same category of myth as the 'Mediterranean diet.' Bad statistics and over-zealous advocates, it seems, have been the cause of these ideas. The French do have reasonably high rates of heart disease, but this is not necessarily down to saturated fat. As recently as February this year, the British Medical Journal reported on the health risk of replacing saturated fats with 'healthy' omega-6 polyunsaturated vegetable fats. You’re getting the picture. But these ideas have been planted, Inception-style, in our brains.

Finally, there’s the local/organic debate. To blend food journalist Jay Rayner's argument down to a shot of bitter truth: buying locally isn’t going to solve future food crises, and buying organic isn’t going to make you healthier. The ‘organic’ label has become little more than a marketing tool for a multibillion pound industry. Steven Poole, in his book You Aren't What You Eat: Fed Up With Gastroculture, thinks that buying locally might be more about connecting with your community and supporting nearby business than saving the planet. Nothing wrong with that; just don’t go bragging about reducing your food miles. An oft-cited 2006 study showed that lamb imported by sea to the UK from New Zealand had a smaller carbon footprint, owing to more environmentally-friendly farming practices, than UK-raised lamb.  

Lest someone take me for some sort of nutritional antichrist, I’m not advocating eating ‘badly’, whatever that means. Nor am I giving carte blanche to start living off cronuts. I’m just stating the rather inconvenient truth that, judging by the evidence, most dietary systems don’t work as intended. But then again: don’t just take my word for it.