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FOOD AND HEALTH
The most delicious foods are often
condemned as bad for you. A chef who serves foie
gras, pork belly, and butter (yum!) is likely these
days to face accusations from fans of low-fat diets
that those rich ingredients actually harm his
guests. Others would argue that the pasta, desserts,
and other carbohydrate-laden foods on the
menu pose the greater concern. It seems like
newspaper health columns praise coffee, alcohol,
and cow’s milk one week, only to pan them the
next. Medical associations and food labels urge us
to choose high-fiber, low-salt options. We are
bombarded with claims about the health effects of
eating that are inconsistent, hard to apply, and
ever changing.
Our modest goal in this chapter is to present the
best and latest scientific understanding of which
foods are good for you and which are not. That
might seem at first like a straightforward thing to
do. If anything, you might expect it to be a rather
dry, boring recitation of scientific facts.
Yet that is not our expectation. On the contrary,
this is likely to be the most controversial chapter
in the book. Beliefs that certain foods are unhealthy
are both widespread and very strongly
held. In some cases, people believe in their dietary
choices with almost religious intensity. Vegetarians
shun meat, and vegans avoid animal products
altogether. Raw food devotees believe they’re
eating as humans were meant to, benefitting from
nutrients that would otherwise be lost to cooking.
Fans of the “paleo diet” believe the same thing,
but with a totally different set of foods and cooking
methods. Banking on an ever-growing number
of people who believe they are choosing the
healthiest options, stores and restaurants elevate
organic food to special status.
Whether they’re medical or moral, cultural or
religious, such rules about what we should and
shouldn’t eatlet’s call them dietary systems
are almost always well-intentioned, albeit artfully
exploited by food manufacturers and advocates.
Yet we found, as we explored this topic, that much
of the information that we are told by the media,
medical associations, and government bodies
about which foods cause heart disease, cancer, and
high blood pressure is unproved.
Indeed, merely unproved dietary advice seems
to be the best-case scenario. In many instances,
rigorous research has refuted or cast great doubt
on the popular assertions. This chapter examines
several cases in which beliefsand official
recommendationshave persisted even after
science contradicts their central claims.
As diners and cooks, we must navigate through
this barrage of conflicting information, so we need
to understand how dietary systems form, how
they rise to fame, and how their assertions are
tested. It’s devilishly difficult to apply rigorous
scientific scrutiny to the many potential causal
factors at the intersection of dietary intake and
individual physiology. The most reliable information
comes from scientific studies that are carefully
designed and executed, yet such studies have
generally failed to support the health claims made
for popular dietary systems.
These results are surprising. It’s hard to accept
that much of what we have been taught for the past
Too much of a good thing is often bad for you, and that is certainly
true for many kinds of food that taste good. But popular notions
that certain types of food—those high in saturated fat, for
example—should be avoided at all costs are beliefs that have little
or no direct scientific support.
210 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
FOOD AND HEALTH 211