Source of book: Borrowed from the library
I have had this book on my “to read” list for a number of years, but had put it off for a few reasons, including the fact that I didn’t want to make waves with certain relatives.
The main thing that triggered my reading of this now is that, with the re-election of the Orange Asshole, crucial government positions have been filled with the grifters and charlatans of the “alternative medicine” movement, resulting in the gutting of our evidence-based medical research, the undermining of vaccines, and the promotion of pseudoscience (aka fucking lies) as if it were the equivalent of careful research.
This includes thoroughly unqualified and downright loony figures such as RFK Jr. and professional snake oil salesmen like Mehmet Oz.
I also was triggered a bit by a claim from one of the true believers in the gluten lie that the existence of transgender people was caused by eating gluten. This was so far outside of any possible reality - and also a full sign that the belief had become a religion and ideology - that I figured the well-being of my LGBTQ children deserved a post about how trying to find a “cause” of human variety is rooted in both bigotry and superstition.
I also have a lot of history with this particular form of grifting, starting in my infancy. I will talk about that throughout this post.
I will also discuss the ways that the particular form of thinking (or, more accurately, not thinking) that lies behind the diet grift have infected all elements of our society, to our great detriment - and that includes religion and politics particularly.
The same embrace of superstitious bullshit that leads to the diet grift also is a significant factor in the success of religious false prophets like Bill Gothard and James Dobson, and also political con men like the Orange Asshole.
To set the stage for this book, I think it helps to understand the author and his purpose.
Levinovitz is not a scientist. He is not a medical professional.
Rather, he is a scholar (Ph.D) and professor (James Madison University) of religion.
The book therefore, is not about refuting the lies and bullshit of the “diet will cure everything” grift. If you want that, I recommend following the Science Based Medicine blog.
Instead, what Levinovitz does is examine the mythology behind the grift - because what is happening is nothing whatsoever new. In fact, you can find it in recognizable form literally thousands of years ago. And around the world.
Because the root isn’t anything related to science or medicine - it is a religion. A form of superstition. A belief in fundamental falsehoods about our human past and deep mistrust of modernity, progress, and the present.
(Now you can see why this applies so equally to politics and religion…)
Put another way, Levinovitz analyzes the grift not as being about physiology, but about psychology.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I have talked a lot in previous posts about why I don’t even engage with MAGA people anymore. For the same reason, I do not engage with “alternative medicine” believers either. When it comes to family with these beliefs, I do my best to just ignore them and change the subject.
In a related but different context, Cory Doctorow noted that arguing with people who are “true believers” in a grift is like arguing with Scientologists. The conversation is doomed from the start, because it isn’t about an exchange of information or a search for truth. It is always and always and always about defending the superstition from any intrusion of reality that might challenge it. Always.
Before I dive into the book itself, let me give some background information on myself. Some of the history I have included in other posts over the years, but I don’t remember entirely where, so rather than link or try to dig it up, I will just tell the stories as I need to here.
I was a very sickly child.
My poor mom ended up giving up on any attempts to have a career in large part because I was sick so much as a toddler that it wasn’t practical. Likewise, when I started school, I caught everything. During my short career as a normal school kid (even if it was John MacArthur’s private church school), I missed so many days due to bronchitis and other issues that the principal recommended we homeschool.
If not for antibiotics, I would certainly have never lived to adulthood, and even then, my health remained fairly fragile until my 20s. Let’s just say that I have never taken health for granted, or been able to believe that illness was caused by moral weakness.
Understandably, with an ill and difficult child, my mom looked for answers.
And there were certainly grifters more than eager to sell them to her.
One of the earliest one was the idea that by taking pills made from bovine adrenal glands, my own adrenal supply would grow, and thus my immune system would grow stronger.
Leaving aside all of the other falsehoods and leaps of logic, the idea that eating cow adrenals would help my own is precisely the same “you are what you eat” superstition that leads to eating tiger penis to cure erectile dysfunction. There is no plausible scientific pathway for it to work. But it is an ancient superstition.
In reality, my health very slowly improved, regressed, improved again, and so on. But it wasn’t the cow adrenal that did it. If anything, what worked best was being loved and cared for by my parents.
And the antibiotics and vaccines and eventually limiting my exposure to large groups of children.
My entire life after that was a sequence of one stupid diet or “health” change after another. First, it was about fixing my body - getting me healthy. But later, it became about “fixing” me in other ways. And that involved our foray into Gothard’s cult, and all kinds of psychological manipulation to try to make me into a different, more compliant, less obstinate person. To a degree, that project to fix me has continued to the present day.
And it is all based on the same superstition. In fact, when I first started getting the background knowledge in science and medicine to recognize these as grifts, it became the source of a lot of needless conflict with my parents. About diet, of course, but also about religion, politics, music, education - because it affects everything.
So, let’s jump into the book a bit. Gluten is just one of the chapters. Levinovitz also looks at the vilification of fat, sugar, and salt; and the promotion of “detoxes.”
He ends the book with a brilliant section. He ostensibly gives his own “miracle diet,” blaming all food packaging (plastic, paper, aluminum, and glass) for everything.
Then, he reproduces the same section but with notes in the margin, showing where he stole his language from - it is nearly word-for-word from the grifts he discusses earlier in the book. By pointing out how the language and ideas are just recycled from fad to fad, and also how fallacies and junk science are used to support the claims (instead of actual evidence), he makes it clear that anyone - AI included - can create one of these grifts. They are all so alike that they take zero creativity to create.
The book starts off with the MSG scare of the 1980s - which I remember well. For a while, my parents thought my brother was sensitive to it - headaches, etc. - but after the scare subsided, the issue went away as well. MSG, of course, is a natural substance (as are all of the substances vilified in diet grifts), present in things from mushrooms to seaweed, as well as in soy. And indeed in a lot more foods than one would realize without looking it up.
Why was MSG targeted, though? The reason - this will become a theme - isn’t physiological, but psychological.
And the solution made sense. Most domestic cooks were unfamiliar with monosodium glutamate, a foreign, scary-sounding chemical.
This led to bans, removal from baby food, and a bunch of other actions that turned out to be unsupported by the actual evidence.
In contrast to popular belief, clinical trials strongly suggested that MSG did not produce symptoms like migraines. Today, food allergy experts believe that the overwhelming majority of reactions to MSG are psychological, not physiological.
Fast forward to today, and can you think of the last time you even heard about MSG? And yet, it is still in common use…
A factor that comes into play here, as the author points out, is that figuring out the effects of diet is incredibly complicated. You really can’t do the kind of study necessary to figure out long-term effects. You can’t do double-blind (the gold standard) because how do you fake eating something like bread? Nobody is willing to limit their diet for decades just to do research. (Or at least very few.) And separating out an identical control group is even harder. Everything is connected. In the context of MSG, the author notes:
For most of us, cutting out MSG or going gluten-free involves broader changes in how we approach food. That makes it difficult to sort out what caused what. Your headaches went away - but was it the absence of MSG or an increase in home-cooked meals? Did you lose weight by going gluten-free or by eating less fast food? To complicate matters further, discovering a dietary solution feels empowering, and empowerment itself can lead to significant positive physiological changes.
This is another reason why controlled studies are needed to determine effects. The placebo effect is very real, as is the nocebo effect. And this has always been the case.
When the general public believed that demons made them sick, exorcists made money selling holy water. Now we are bombarded with thousands of dietary solutions to our health problems, endorsed by genuine doctors and nutritionists - fat-melting miracle pills, detoxification smoothies, vitamin-rich goji berries - and we buy them, figuratively and literally. Frequently these solutions come packaged with a scapegoat. Get rid of this one terrible substance and there will be no more cancer. No MSG, no headaches. Eliminate gluten, eliminate Alzheimer’s. (And melt fat in the process!) It’s that simple: point an accusatory finger, tell the right story, and a new demon is born.
To conclude this opening chapter, Levinovitz lays out his central argument:
Everyday foods don’t have life-giving or death-dealing properties. Grocery stores aren’t pharmacies. Your kitchen isn’t stocked with silent killers, and the charlatans that make a living on false promises and uncertain science need to be revealed for what they really are. The time has come to slay our dietary demons, by exposing the falsehoods and liars that give them life.
The next chapter is entitled “Science Fiction is Still Fiction” - and it is all about the underlying superstitions. The opening is worth quoting at length.
I am a scholar of religion. My job is to read ancient texts - myths, histories, commandments, prophesies - and then figure out what they meant and why they were persuasive. Although I specialize in classical Chinese thought, knowledge of other traditions informs my work. This is true for anyone who studies religion. If you are puzzling over the story of Noah’s ark, it helps to examine similar flood myths, like the one in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which comes complete with ark and animal rescue, or the one in the Hindu Mahabharata, where, in addition to rescuing animals, the hero saves the world’s grains and seeds. The recurrence of this story, at different historical moments and with cultural variations, means that flood myths should be read as metaphors for divine punishment and cleansing, not as ancient weather reports. It also means that if a new myth surfaces about some forgotten North American flood, we probably shouldn’t waste our time searching the Grand Canyon for remains of an ark.
Nice mention of Gilgamesh there.
Religion and science are commonly understood to be separate explanatory systems, so my expertise may seem unrelated to nutrition. Modern debates about gluten, fat, sugar, and salt look scientific, not religious. They involve discussions of gut microbes and glucose, not gods and devils, and they draw evidence from peer reviewed studies, not divine revelations. Again and again, the specialists I interviewed for this book asked how I ended up writing about a subject so different from what I typically study.
My answer was simple: I told them about the grain-free monks of ancient China. Like all diet gurus, these monks mocked the culinary culture of their time. They promised that a revolutionary diet could cure disease, quickly converting a substantial cult of followers. And, of course, they were wrong. The key to understanding and debunking fad diets, I suggested, wasn’t science, but rather history. Once you see enough of the same archetypical myths and the same superstitions, new dietary claims start to look a lot like flood myths.
And that, my friends, is exactly why I steadfastly refuse to read any of these diet books. It is why I rejected Grain Brain and Wheat Belly - books mentioned and quoted in this book, and pushed at me by certain relatives. Not because I went through and debunked the pseudoscience, but because they had all the hallmarks of another superstition. A “flood myth” so to speak. I saw no point in proving that there wasn’t an ark in the Grand Canyon.
Levinovitz recounts the stories of the monks, who rejected grains, claiming they poisoned the body. And also claimed incredible benefits, including immortality and the ability to fly and teleport! Avoiding grains cured everything, including death.
So yeah, that right there is a religion, and a ludicrously false one too. So why are they believed?
People in ancient China weren’t stupid. Plenty of them doubted accounts of flying alchemists who never got sick. But despite basic logic and evidence to the contrary, the philosophy of the grain-free monks gained popularity. That’s because then, as now, the appeal of dietary fads had to do with myths, not facts. In the case of the Daoists, grain prohibition represented rejection of modern culture and the promise of return to a mythic natural paradise. Suffering, disease, and death were ineradicable aspects of the present, so monks explained their dietary practices with an appealing fiction about a preagricultural paradise past.
You will see this in every single diet fad, every “alternative medicine” claim - and indeed, in all fundamentalist religion. The belief in a mythical past paradise, lost to modern ideas, diets, music, culture, and so on.
The specifics change with time, of course, because they are a reaction to present culture, not eternal truth. The Daoists themselves eventually shifted to prohibit meat, not grain - a full change from their prior rules.
Rejection of the status quo - not science - determined the food prohibition du jour. But although the specific prohibition changed, the archetypical myth of a dietary route back to paradise remained constant, along with its false promises of eternal youth and perfect health.
Does that…sound familiar?
Oh, and there is another factor here, both with food and with toxic religious beliefs.
Rejecting a food - as the Daoist monks rejected grain - can also help define your membership in a superior group. We see this in the cross-cultural prevalence of food-based insults collected by anthropologists: “cannibals,” “pork eaters,” “sweet-potato eaters,” “turtle eaters,” “frog eaters,” “locust eaters,” “elephant eaters,” “shit eaters” and so on. To begin eating a forbidden food means becoming a member of the group you once defined as inferior and unclean.
You might add in our time “they’re eating cats and dogs” - the MAGA lie about the Somali-American community.
This also is why the vision of St. Peter (regarding the eating of “unclean” food) was such a revolution. The point was that food (and other tribalist cleanliness rules) should not be a barrier to fellowship between humans.
You can see this too in the terminology used:
Modern American food discourse - including legal and scientific discourse - bristles with moral and religious vocabulary. Foods are “natural” or “unnatural,” “good” or “bad.” Bad foods may harm you, but they are “sinfully” delicious, “guilty” pleasures. Good foods, on the other hand, are “whole,” “real,” and “clean” - terms better suited to monastic manuals and philosophical treatises (what is real food exactly?) than to scientific discussions.
I already mentioned the challenges in researching food, from poor self-reporting to the difficulties in creating double blind controlled studies. I also want to note that Levinovitz is clear in the book that he doesn’t consider “official” food recommendations to be any more reliable. And this is in large part because official guidelines are as biased and political - and superstitious - as the alternatives. And both are based on the flawed idea that we actually know - that we have proof - of the relative health of various food options. There are a lot of single studies - flawed and unduplicable - which have created beliefs that will not go away.
This leads, in turn, to the constantly changing recommendations we see, and that undermine public health on issues that truly matter.
Other than “eating vegetables and exercising are good, smoking and drinking too much and eating junk food are bad,” we lack definitive knowledge.
Hence why, when I was a kid, it was all about eating carob instead of chocolate, while now chocolate is recommended as a superfood. And you can fill in the blank with any number of changes.
(To be clear, RFK Jr.’s reworking of the food pyramid isn’t based on evidence either: it is based on a toxic masculinity belief in the superiority of red meat for white male dominance. This idea is nothing new - you can find it throughout American history…)
I love that Levinovitz takes the time to go through how impossible it is to eliminate confounding variables in studies - what one eats is so interconnected with everything else. And also that he says it out loud, about the constant reversals of “healthy” and “unhealthy” foods.
In truth, there are no reversals occurring, because nothing was ever established in the first place.
I tend to agree with the author: by decoupling food and purity guilt, we can actually enjoy our food, and bond with other humans as we eat together.
(Before you worry about my diet, I grew up eating vegetables, cooking from scratch, and being gracious when invited over for dinner. I just don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what I eat.)
Before I get into the next chapter, the one on gluten, I want to make one thing clear: celiac disease is real, and people with it should not eat gluten.
I have friends with celiac - diagnosed by reputable physicians using scientifically appropriate tests, not fake-ass crap from the anti-gluten charlatans. I do my best to accommodate their needs when I cook for them.
Levinovitz also spends a good bit of time in this chapter talking about celiac disease, how it was discovered, and the horrible trials of those suffering while doctors said it was “hysteria.” So don’t think he is a denialist at all here. Quite the contrary.
The issue isn’t celiac, or even gluten sensitivity generally. The issue is the lie that everyone should stop eating gluten because it is a universal poison.
As far as we know, gluten is not toxic to the general population. It does not cause autism, or Alzheimer’s, or ADHD. It does not give you wheat belly or grain brain, because there are no such things.
The fact that billions of humans have consumed gluten for tens of thousands of years alone should be an indication that it is not anywhere near universally toxic. Rising lifespans as food insecurity became less common should also be seen as evidence that grain is actually a good thing for humanity.
Levinovitz also points out a fascinating correlation - one that holds for a lot of diets.
Put simply: in some cases, eliminating gluten is just a proxy for cooking at home and cutting down on junk food.
Yep, if you are actually cooking from scratch rather than mindlessly eating, you will probably eat less, and also enjoy what you eat more! Who knew?
But there is also a placebo effect: doing something intentionally can increase a sense of well-being.
Research suggests that placebo effects increase when the treatment is branded, expensive, and highly ritualized. Gluten-free diets - and most elimination diets - usually fit all of those criteria.
And, one might add, the sense of being special and better than everyone else. (See: religion…)
But what about reports of adverse effects from gluten and other supposed “toxins”? Well, those are nothing new either.
Mass sociogenic illness combines two kinds of lies: misinformation about external dangers (the Coke is poisoned), and self-deception about the effects of those dangers (the Coke is making me nauseated). It is a well-documented phenomenon, dating back to at least the fifteenth century, when groups of nuns who believed they were possessed by demons would imitate animals, bare their genitalia, shout expletives, and thrust their hips as if having intercourse. Demons no longer factor into most people’s health concerns, so their role has been taken over by chemicals, bacteria, viruses, and the other invisible antagonists of modernity.
Although, he might be surprised how many people, like my mom, are still obsessed with demons.
It is correct, however, that actual physical symptoms are all too easily created by beliefs - non-existent “toxic gas” will make people vomit and have seizures, believe it or not. So it is no stretch to conclude that the lies contained in books like Grain Brain and Wheat Belly have created symptoms in millions of deluded people.
Nausea, headaches, and dizziness are no less worrisome if they are induced by books and articles instead of pills - and we should guard against the side effects of dangerous lies and misrepresentations just as we do against the side effects of dangerous medicine.
I also want to mention the author’s examination of the relationship of the gluten lie to eating disorders. (I would include orthorexia in this, but the links to anorexia and bulimia are strong enough to be deeply concerning.)
The death rates from those disorders are appallingly high. And, as the author notes, there are at least ten times as many deaths yearly from eating disorders than from all food allergies combined. Feeding the disorders with misinformation is more deadly than actual allergies.
There is another problem with needless food restriction as well, which isn’t talked about enough. And bonus points to the author for pointing it out.
When you restrict your diet, it cuts you off from participating in the culinary culture you live in. It separates you from other people. (And, because it is usually expensive - as noted above - it particularly separates you from people less privileged than yourself. It is a form of snobbery.)
Levinovitz talks with people who went with restrictive diets before seeing the light, and they talk a lot about having to bring their own food with them everywhere, and being unable to enjoy food with others.
Before we leave the chapter on gluten, I want to mention a great line about false prophets. This applies to the religious ones and political ones too, of course. Very much so.
False prophets of diet often obscure their lies with an avalanche of hundreds of studies, knowing readers lack the time to actually check them all out, and see if they support the claim. (TL;DR: usually, they don’t.)
When people like Perlmutter and Davis fill their books with scientific citations, they effectively camouflage their true identities. Fortunately, there’s another way to identify false prophets: just compare how they talk with past peddlers of miracle cures. When you do, you’ll find that not much has changed. Like faith healers, proponents of early-twentieth-century dietary regimens would testify to their near instantaneous life-changing power, often starting with their personal conversion story. In the words of food historian Harvey Levenstein: “[They] would tell of their own devastating health problems, miraculously cured by the proposed diet - mysterious or common physical or psychological ailments that had once defied the greatest of modern medical minds had disappeared once certain foods were added or deleted from the diet.”
Hmm. Sound familiar?
Moving on to the next chapter, the one on fat. I found this interesting because of the shift during my lifetime. Which went from “fat is bad - eat very little fat” to “carbs are bad, eat more fat and protein.” And yes, this was one of the trends that jacked me around when I was a teen. Why couldn’t I have just been allowed to eat like a normal person? Sheesh.
It is in this section that Levinovitz talks about the other core belief of diet superstition: “You are what you eat.”
And man, isn’t this a seriously enduring myth? As the author puts it, “Belief that you absorb the physical - and moral - qualities of your food is a near universal superstition.” It is in every culture.
(Note: At the molecular level, even, you are not exactly what you eat. Your body takes stuff apart and reassembles it into human cells.)
As usual, Levinovitz sees parallels in ancient - and modern - China, where tiger penis is coveted, driving the poor cats to the brink of extinction.
But, I would expect we should be able to agree, tiger penis won’t cure limp dick. It is simple magical thinking, not reality.
Nowhere is this magical thinking more prevalent than in our fat-shaming. (Which is in contrast to how we treat anorexia…)
Like George Will and everyone else who blames fat people for being fat, physicians have been hypnotized by the you in you are what you eat. If you are eating too much, then the fault must lie in you.
After going through both the reality of the science we have (which is at best inconsistent), and noting that you can get fat eating pretty much anything if you eat enough of it, he gets again to the root of the matter.
So next time you feel guilty about eating butter or crispy chicken skin, try to remember the source of that guilt. Remember the tiger penises. Remember Galen and his snails.
For sugar, Levinovitz looks at another myth, which is that “whatever gives you pleasure is bad” - aka, the Puritan approach. Which is very much a part of the gluten lie and most other fad diets.
[Paul] Rozin hypothesized that for Americans, fear of sugar is a manifestation of subconscious Puritan values, the belief that “anything that is extremely pleasurable, and that includes sex and sweetness, must be bad.” Two decades later, Rozin believes very little has changed, and a form of secular puritanism continues to inform our food taboos.
In this chapter, as elsewhere, Levinovitz notes that not only is the poison in the dose, otherwise fine food can be overdone. In this case, there is nothing inherently horrible about sugar. The fact that eating mostly sugar is problematic does not mean a moderate amount is bad.
I love that Levinovitz takes on some common myths about sugar here. These myths are deeply rooted in racism and classism, and result in policies that are intended to punish the poor for their poverty.
First, contrary to popular belief, white children actually get a higher percentage of their calories from sugar than black children.
Second, lower income children do not get a higher percentage of their calories from sugar.
Third, Americans do not eat more sugar than other first world citizens.
These myths are behind policies to try to “force” low income people, particularly those with darker skin, into “eating better.” Which is another way of blaming the reduced health that goes with poverty on the impoverished rather than examining how unjust systems create poor health.
Helpful in this discussion is an examination of history, particularly how sugar went from “medicine” for those able to afford it - the “superfood” of its day - to evil once penny candy made it accessible to low income children. Gee, nothing classist (or racist) about that at all, right?
There is another fascinating fact in this chapter, that I bet most of us didn’t even think about, regarding a survey of childhood activities that is pretty representative of these kinds of studies.
They also filled out questionnaires about physical activity, television watching, and video game playing, so investigators could control for these factors. And right here, before any discussion of the results, we see evidence of glaring white-hat bias. There was no survey about how much book reading or studying the children did - both sedentary activities. Why? Because “virtuous” sedentary activities are rarely considered as possible contributors to obesity. Does increased homework lead to obesity? Does reading lead to obesity? No one knows, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any studies of how book reading or studiousness relates to obesity. The thinking is magical, pure and simple. Just as evil origins create unhealthful products, good activities can’t possibly lead to bad consequences. The result is unreliable data, skewed by white-hat bias.
Levinovitz explores this further with what he sees as both the key problem and an avoidance of the harder questions. To look at “one macronutrient” as the sole source of issues is problematic to start with. But it also distracts from the deeper problem, such as children whose access to food other than junk is limited by poverty and lack of available parental time.
(I grew up in a neighborhood where this was an issue, and the rotted teeth that resulted was a clear social signal of poverty. The problem was parents who had to work multiple jobs to avoid becoming homeless, and thus had zero time to cook. The cheapest calories were the quick and sugary junk snacks.)
When we talk about poverty, and when we talk about pleasurable foods, we have to discuss the self-righteousness that comes along with that discussion.
Obviously some people enjoy being at war. They enjoy feeling like the good guys in a battle against evil. The world is clearer that way, easier to navigate, and every choice is infused with meaning, purpose, and virtue. Puritans saw sin everywhere - in music, dancing, colorful clothes, and pleasurable food. In a puritanical food world, we see health dangers everywhere. Every culinary choice is filled with meaning, purpose, and virtue, and helps assert control over one’s moral and physical destiny. Sadly, just as there was no evidence of Puritans going to heaven more regularly than anybody else, there is no evidence that living in a food hellscape of demonized macronutrients and toxic chemicals does anything more than make you feel holier-than-thou.
Amen.
For me, sugar is not my friend, at least late at night. It can trigger migraines (I discovered this in my teens) if I don’t have some protein with it. But I do not studiously avoid it. I have no fear of going out for ice cream with my kids, or having cake at a party, or anything else. Moderation is fine, and the joy of sharing pleasure with others is more important to me than feeling self-righteous about my food.
The next chapter, on salt, is definitely personal to me. I live in Bakersfield, where it gets hella hot in the summer, and it is super easy to lose salt through sweat. I am also an avid hiker, and sweat easily.
I need my salt.
Or I get cramps, and other bad stuff.
Fortunately, the whole “salt is bad” thing is such a steaming pile of horseshit that I just can’t even with it.
It is based on a few flawed studies that really only applied to the extremely small percentage of people whose blood pressure is sensitive to salt. For the rest of us, we need salt in proportion to our water.
And the “recommendations” from organizations which should know better, like the American Heart Association, are so low that they render food inedible. Did you know that you pretty much get your limit in sodium just from eating unsalted food? And it’s worse if you eat vegetables!
Following the Committee’s guidelines would have required people to abandon any semblance of culinary culture and adopt a radical diet of unsalted fruits, vegetables, starches, and uncured meats.
And to what purpose? To satisfy a dogma that has zero scientific basis?
I will also note here that my wife’s grandfather, toward the end of his long and largely healthy life, tried to cut salt back, and ended up making himself ill due to its lack. There is real harm from this superstition-based nonsense. Unless you are the rare person for whom salt is uniquely problematic, enjoy some salt on your food.
Here too, a line from 5000 year old Chinese writings is used, not just in a flim-flam book, but in a scholarly article. This is deeply problematic and unscientific. Oh, and it’s not actually in the text either - it appears to have been made up. The actual text suggests treating high blood pressure with…more salt.
But that’s beside the point. The real problem is the inclusion of the quote in a scholarly article. Even if the quote were accurate, it exemplifies a dangerous and deceptive rhetorical device known as the argument from antiquity. Arguments from antiquity carry weight, rightfully, in the realm of theology, where claims can be true simply in virtue of being spoken by ancient prophets or written in revealed texts. Yet in the science of nutrition, the wisdom of Eastern ancients deserves no special attention, unless we are willing to reconsider the medical value of bloodletting, faith healing, and, my personal favorite, “bathing in dog feces to exorcise a demon.” The argument from antiquity is just a version of the myth of paradise past. Instead of a long-lost era when people lived well, the argument from antiquity appeals to a long-lost era when people thought well, romanticizing the wisdom of ancients along with their lifestyle.
A few thoughts here. Yes, mostly agree. But I also think the argument from antiquity is deeply harmful in theology too. And I have plenty of experience with that.
The ancients thought women were subhuman? Weren’t they wise! The ancients enslaved black people? Weren’t they wise! And on and on.
Here is the bottom line: the people of the past were every bit as full of shit as we are today. In fact, they are often more so. And especially when talking about “lifestyle” stuff. Everything they said should be subjected to the same skepticism we treat modern thinkers with.
There are some hilarious passages in this chapter. For example, the ex-German researcher who studied red blood cells. The best source was baby alligators, which he and his assistants carried around in their pockets. Leading to the quip:
The alligators were probably more fun than Kempner, whom one patient would later describe as “a stern dictatorial man, always dressed the same way, in a blue blazer and white ducks - like someone’s Nazi grandfather.”
Levinovitz questions why, despite the lack of evidence, government agencies still keep pushing this pseudoscience? Particularly since in the case of salt, there isn’t any real financial interest pushing for it?
So why don’t the CDC and the AHA admit uncertainty, even at the potential cost of public health? Perhaps because dictating dietary rules, a sacred role that was once the province of priests, contributes to a savior complex.
This resonates for me. My mom certainly had and has a savior complex. Perhaps it originated in her good-faith attempts to improve my health. But it continues, because the role of dictating rules to others is a hell of a drug.
The final full chapter is on the detox nonsense. And yes, went through that too. Again, this is why I have been able to identify these hoaxes - they all sound alike.
At this point alarm bells should be ringing. Paradise past, this time in Tibet. Claims of extraordinary medicinal power for a single food. If something seems suspicious to you, that’s good.
While this applies in the book to Goji berries, I can remember the fads in my teens. Blue-green algae. Kombucha. Wheat grass juice. Any list of juices and shakes. It was all supposed to be magic. But it wasn’t. Just expensive, and often disgusting.
At this point, Levinovitz talks about the mythology again.
Now that you know the history of nutrition myths, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to identify new ones for what they truly are. The same themes pop up again and again: the same emphasis on good and evil, the same false promises, the same superstitions. Sometimes you’ll even see the exact same plot, modified very slightly in its details.
Scholars of folk and fairy tales call this kind of repeated story a “tale type.”
The author suggests we need a whole category for “food tales.” Which would include subtypes like “miracle food from Tibet” and “dietary cures for chronic disease” and “everyday food that is actually poisonous.”
Once you can identify the type of myth, it is easy to recognize that it is superstition, not science, no matter how “scientific” it appears.
Put differently: whenever you read a headline about some new carcinogen or cancer-fighting superfood, it’s probably not worth reading any further.
So how should we actually eat?
What’s left? Eat in moderation, drink in moderation, don’t be sedentary. That’s it. Veganism, fat-free, salt-free, sugar-free, gluten-free, Paleo, juicing, cleansing - these offer false promises built on myth and superstition, covered over with a layer of scientific rhetoric.
Oh, and the whole “ancient people knew better” thing? It turns out that they….ate what was available. Much like we do now.
Levinovitz also tackles the worst of the side effects from superstitious thinking about health. While eating different diets is usually pretty harmless, relatively speaking, the distrust of modern medicine is lethal.
Particularly when it comes to vaccines and other public health measures. As we are seeing before our eyes as RFK Jr. and Trump dismantle the systems that actually do keep us healthy.
No real harm will come to people who avoid salt and high-fructose corn syrup because they are “unnatural.” But it’s not so funny when people avoid unnatural vaccines. Unfortunately, fear of modern medicine is a direct consequence of belief in common dietary myths.
This too goes back hundreds of years, all too often mixed with racist ideas such as the “noble savage.”
This is why it’s so important to unmask nutrition myths. The paranoid false logic that motivates them seeps into other parts of our culture, poisoning whatever it touches.
This is where I will draw the connection between the appeal of the “mythical paradise of the past” in creating the demand for nasty authoritarian cults like those of Gothard, and nastier fascist regimes like the Trump Regime.
This way of thinking, that single toxins cause all ills - think the elimination of music by black people in Fundamentalist white subcultures, or Trump’s obsession with “contamination” by brown-skinned people - or that single solutions cure everything - Gothard’s laughably horrible “basic principles” or Trump’s "tariffs cure everything” approach.
This is the issue Christ talked about, saying that what goes into a man doesn’t make him good our bad. It’s what comes out.
And what comes out of this paranoid false logic is shitty fruit.
Dietary myths and superstitions are turning people into latter-day food crusaders, not unlike the European crusaders who hunted invented infidels in order to give their own lives meaning - and, in the case of their leaders, make a few bucks in the process.
Fill in the appropriate religious and political charlatans here as well. And the way people use their pursuit of imaginary invented enemies in order to give their own lives meaning. And allow grifters like Gothard and Trump to make bank.
I will end with a few comments on the last part - the made-up diet hoax. One thing that is very true in it is that it seems that people can eat all kinds of stuff and still be healthier than Americans. As the old joke goes, maybe what makes you sick is speaking English.
All meat? Inuit. No meat? Ancient Chinese monks. Salt free? Indigenous groups in Brazil. Tons of salt? Japanese.
As I will discuss in a footnote to this post, maybe this suggests that food isn’t really the problem - it is other cultural and political issues that make Americans less healthy than other first world citizens.
And a final thought from his “rebuttal” to his own hoax:
Restrictive diet rules make it impossible to eat like a normal human being in our culture. That loss is more of a problem than the imagined horrors of supposed toxic foods. Eat what allows you to connect with other people.
I think the best thing about this book is that it avoids the trap of trying to rebut all the pseudoscientific nonsense. Yes, that is needed, and can be helpful for the kinds of people who care about facts.
But ultimately, the Gluten Lie and all the other related lies are not driven by a mistake in fact, but by superstition and irrational beliefs.
Recognizing each of these scams as just another in a millennia-old human vulnerability to horseshit is the first step to seeing them clearly and choosing rational behavior over fear and superstition.
***
What Diet Nonsense has in common with other Nonsense:
I alluded to this above, but wanted to flesh it out a bit. Remember the elements of the diet superstition:
1. The mythical past was better.
2. Modernity is killing us
3. There is one formula for health - either subtract or add One True Thing or formula
You can see this in other scams as well.
Take the Fundamentalist religion scam.
The core belief is that the past was better. Specifically, that humans were wiser, godlier, better back in the day, and that it has all gone to hell since. Modern ideas are evil and must be rejected. And fixing it involves formulas involving subtracting poisons and adding miracle foods.
This is a natural human tendency, by the way. Frank Kermode’s excellent book, The Sense of an Ending examines why - I recommend it.
But look at some specifics here. Humans were “godlier” back in the day. In what way? Well, in the ways they were different from moderns.
Unsurprisingly, this means that Fundies have decided that it was better when women were subordinate - indeed, when they were the property of men. And also that it was better when racial minorities knew their place in society - that’s what the anti-DEI is all about.
Never mind, of course, that this is a lot of picking and choosing about when the golden age was. As with diet bullshit, logical consistency is not necessary. It’s a superstition, not an intellectual position.
Likewise, there is always a focus on eliminating “toxins.” And these “toxins” are always modern. So, for many Fundies, including my mom, this meant eliminating modern music. Gothard taught this, but he stole the idea from earlier moral panics about black people and their music.
Modern books are poison too - particularly things like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games - books that contain far too much that challenges the preferred hierarchies of Fundies.
Television, movies, dancing - take your pick - it all comes down to contaminants that must be purged, just like gluten or salt.
There is the flip side as well: the One True Cure for Everything scam. All we need is to return to submission. If the woman just submits, all marital problems go away, right? That is literally the teaching.
But, just as goji berries won’t cure your cancer, female submission won’t fix domestic violence or philandering.
Likewise, breaking the will of a child won’t cure family dysfunction - in fact, it creates it.
There is no magic cure for everything.
And how about politics? The core belief of MAGA - the way Trump sold his candidacy from the beginning - has always been that [white] America’s blood is being poisoned by modern toxins, the most obvious of which is the existence of people of color.
This is explicit, in case you were intentionally not paying attention.
Other toxins: people like me who do not agree with MAGA (I guess we are all liberals now if we don’t want ethnic cleansing?)
And the idea toxins that we need to purge by banning books and strong-arming academia and businesses into avoiding. Things like the belief that systemic injustice is real. (Hint: it is very real.) Believing that women are the equal of men. Believing that minorities are the equal of whites. Believing that rising economic inequality is a bad thing for society and needs to be fixed. Believing in science-based medicine. Or in science generally.
Modern ideas all, and all considered poison by MAGA.
If we could just go back in time to when things were right. When women and minorities knew their place, when we didn’t have to care about humans around the globe, and could just be selfish bastards in peace.
Such a time never existed, of course, but that is beside the point. Superstition and political ideology have no need for facts or reality.
You might have noted that a lot of “wellness” influencers started out more or less liberal, but broke hard for Trump. Why might that be?
Perhaps because the basic worldview is the same.
***
Alternative Medicine scams distract us from the REAL things we could do to improve health.
The thing is, we know a number of things that would dramatically improve health, but as a society have chosen not to do them.
I could write more about this, and may at some point, but here are a few of the big ones:
1. Universal healthcare
Why is the US less healthy than other first world countries? This is the big one. Our health is unequally distributed. Poverty drives bad health. Some states have particularly terrible health access, and it shows in maternal and infant mortality, life expectancy, and other health measures.
If we were to do One True Thing to make health better, this would be it. If everyone had access to affordable healthcare, health would improve.
When we look at other parts of the world, we can see that access to healthcare is directly linked to health. It isn’t diet - different parts of the world eat different things, and yet places with better access have better outcomes.
2. Eliminate poverty
This is related to the above, but is also an additional factor. Poverty affects everything including health.
At the extreme, being homeless is terrible for health and leads to early death all too often. Homelessness is a failure of society, not an individual failure. It is not inevitable, and it is not necessary. It happens because we as a society fail - indeed refuse - to provide access to housing for all humans. This could be a whole post in itself, but suffice it to say that homelessness correlates directly to housing costs. If you cannot afford to be housed on disability payments, disabled people (including particularly the mentally ill and addicted) will end up on the streets. Places where housing is cheap have far fewer unhoused people. Go figure.
3. Living wages
This is an underrated factor in health. People who are not paid a living wage end up working multiple jobs and absurd hours to survive.
If you are working 60 hour weeks, you will not really have time for exercise and home cooked meals. Instead, cheap junk food that is premade will fill the gap.
If we want to improve the health of lower wage workers, we need to pay them enough to have the time do do healthy things.
4. Address “deaths of despair”
The US has a huge problem with these deaths: they include suicides and drug overdoses, but probably should also include deaths due to long-term addiction, and the slow suicide of personal neglect.
These too are related to poverty, but they are also related to how callous and cruel our society is. Because we blame all bad outcomes on personal failings, to be poor is proof you are of low character. To get sick is proof you made poor choices. To become disabled means you weren’t careful or somehow offended a deity. To be mentally ill is proof you refused to just “get a grip.” To become addicted is a sin. And on and on.
So, once you start to fail - even if that failure is caused by society itself - society will pile on and blame you. Hence the despair.
5. Vaccines
There are promising vaccines being developed for everything from Malaria (probably the greatest killer of humans in history) to cancer. In particular, the mRNA technology that was a game-changer for Covid shows great promise in making targeted treatments.
Naturally, RFK Jr. terminated research. So what cures do come will come from somewhere else, and may well not be available to Americans. It is beyond stupid, yet here we are.
As I said, this is just an outline. So much more could be said.
And we could take all that time, effort, and loads of money we throw at the Diet Scams, at worthless supplements, at expensive branded and exclusive foods, and use all that to actually address the issues that actually do affect health.
***
One more thought:
Ultimately, while self-righteousness is certainly a motivation for fad diets, I think that the deepest root is a fear of mortality.
Americans are terrible about accepting the inevitability of death. And so we fall for those who promise that we can control our mortality.
Except we can’t. The book mentions Jerome Irving Rodale, one of the most famous of the “wellness gurus” during the 1960s and 70s.
During the filming of The Dick Cavett Show, he claimed he had never been more healthy, and had decided to live to 100.
After his segment was done and the next guest went on, Rodale died of a heart attack.
So much for immortality.
And he isn’t the only one to find that out. “Wellness” scams, including diet scams, are no guarantee of longevity, no guarantee of health, no guarantee of anything except a lighter pocketbook and an unhealthy approach to food. In many cases, they also cut you off from fellow humans.
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