Author: Anthony Warner

ISBN: 978-1786073426

There are so many health studies and many seemingly give us contradictory advice. This book will help you make good decisions as to what to put on your plate (and how to decide in other areas of your life!).

EXCERPTS

It is human nature to see correlation and imply causation. The reason that correlation can occur between two things without there necessarily being a causal relationship is explained by something known as a confounding factor – the real, unseen cause of the correlation.

To understand that correlation does not always imply causation is without doubt the most important thing that science can teach us. Throughout this book, I will present dozens of examples of mistaken beliefs and pseudoscience, most of which exist and proliferate due to this misunderstanding. Or rather they exist because of our brain’s instinctive desire to create a story out of what it sees,

When someone correctly predicts an outcome, we will be inclined to believe their explanation.

Our instinctive brain loves anything that society and the media have approved, believing thoroughly in the wisdom of the crowd and hugely susceptible to the influence of bright, shiny celebrities. He is drawn to simple narratives and thoroughly dislikes complexity or randomness. He wants to make sense of the world, to believe that someone or something is in control and that everything has a cause.

There is a tendency for detox advocates to separate these chemicals into good and bad categories, particularly along the lines of natural=good and unnatural=bad.

It is important to remember when considering toxicity that it is the dose that makes the poison. Water, a commonly ingested chemical, will kill you if you consume enough of it. And botulism toxin is an entirely natural substance (you could probably make it organically if you wanted to), yet one of the most poisonous that we know of.

There is quite simply no evidence that our bodies are subject to an unprecedented onslaught of toxins, and no evidence that we are being harmed by modern life. In fact, we are healthier than we have ever been: we live longer, contract fewer diseases and have a food and water supply with lower levels of dangerous contamination than at any point in human history.

Q: How do you deal with a made-up problem? A: A made-up solution.

As for Maine blueberries, ginger, kale, walnuts, garlic, green tea and numerous other substances named as detoxifying, there is no evidence at all. That is not to say they are not good for you, just that they cannot unpoison you, especially when you haven’t been poisoned.

People like the idea that there is one bad thing that they can just get rid of. People don’t want advice that tells them they can make changes and improve a little. They want simple rules about good versus bad foods.

People have always believed in the purity of times past and the contamination of modernity, with a pure, unpolluted paradise at the origin of most religions. As each of us age, we have the tendency to mistake our own decline with that of the world, to believe that there is something good and pure about the past that we have lost, when what we really mourn is the loss of our own youthful vitality. The old will always try to damn the present as it exists for the young, and there is no better way to damn something than to declare it as unclean.

Let me explain. When you are stuck in a difficult period of ill health, much like the athlete on a run of bad form, you will tend to look for solutions. This is especially true if conventional medicine does not have much to offer in terms of effective treatment. For many of the health bloggers we have discussed, the symptoms they were suffering were vague, poorly diagnosed and have few proven treatment options. When modern medicine has little to offer, one of the few things people can control is their food. As their illness progresses and they start to feel worse, they will look for any intervention that might help. Many will find advice from alternative practitioners or the internet, often telling them to exclude certain things from their diet. If someone has been feeling ill for a while, provided they don’t have a chronic degenerative illness then they are very likely to start feeling better soon. When someone is at their worst, this is the exact point where they are most likely to make an intervention, and also the exact point at which their health is likely to start improving. And as we know, when something is improving, we like a nice, simple story. We look for evidence that can justify this new-found belief.

Maybe the test-tube study sounds like an interesting lead, but the leap from test-tube effect to real-world health outcome is huge and all-too-common in pseudoscience circles (I am not sure they actually call them pseudoscience circles as that would give the game away, but you know what I mean). Other things that kill pathogenic micro-organisms in a test tube include water, sugar, salt, washing-up liquid, stamping on them or setting them on fire, yet this information is not particularly useful when it comes to treating disease. In hospitals, the most effective way to kill almost all dangerous micro-organisms before they enter the body is with an alcoholic hand gel, but that does not mean that consuming large quantities of alcohol will be of benefit to your health.

People are never interested in subtle changes to make small improvements in their health – they are far more interested in big changes and revolutionary improvements like fat-free options.

As anyone working in public health will tell you, the real problem with dietary guidelines is not the advice: the problem is that no one follows it.

As anyone who works with food will know, the key to creating high levels of palatability is not sugar or fat, it is a combination of the two. It is that delicious point where sweetness and richness combine in chocolate, cakes, icings, doughnuts and sweetened cream that makes them almost irresistible delicacies.

If we can blame a malevolent food industry then at least someone is in control, which is preferable to the unpalatable truth that no one is in control at all.

People do not lose weight because of a magical synchronization with the requirements of their genes, they lose weight for the same reason they do on the Atkins diet, the alkaline diet, the gluten-free diet, clean eating or raw-food vegan. Rules create restriction and restriction makes you eat fewer calories.

In the modern era, weight loss has become strongly associated with health and so it is easy for people to see the losing of pounds as indicative of many other unseen but harder to measure benefits.

Although real messages of dietary health can fit many of the criteria required to make ideas stick, they are constrained by the truth and will always struggle in some regards. Sensible talk of moderation, small improvements and slow incremental changes will never create anecdotes as powerful and emotive as those of pseudoscience. It may be easy for science to deliver credibility, but in a world where society’s relationship with ‘mainstream’ thought is troubled and science is often painted as corrupt, even this can be difficult. And although nutritional and food science has revolutionized everyone’s lives in the past hundred years, its effects have generally been steady and long term, lacking the sort of powerful and emotional story required to go viral.

Never does the wellness industry seem more confused than when it cites ancient wisdoms to prove its case. Hippocrates is frequently quoted on healthy-eating websites to support the validity of many an outlandish claim. Popular Hippocratic quotes include, ‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’, or ‘All disease begins in the gut’. Within the wellness community, a quote from the ‘Father of Modern Medicine’ is held as an undeniable truth. Hippocrates also said, ‘Eunuchs do not take gout, nor become bald’, and ‘A physician without a knowledge of astronomy has no right to call himself a physician’.

For everyone reading this book, whether you eat bacon or not, the risk of developing bowel cancer at some point during your life is fairly high, around 6%. If you eat 50g of bacon every day (which is a lot of bacon – a family of five consuming this amount would be eating 1.75kg per week), that risk will increase to about 7%. This figure, the increase from 6% to 7%, is known as the absolute risk. This is an increase of only 1%, yet when it is compared against the original risk becomes 18% greater. There is definitely a link between bowel cancer and bacon, and the relative risk does increase by 18%, but in reality the study shows that people who eat a lot of bacon every day will increase their absolute risk by 1%, which, although serious, does not seem quite as bad. It is easy to see how the relative risk is likely to worry people more than the absolute risk.

Although it is well known that absolute risk is the best way of communicating, it is rarely the one that is used. This is perhaps because it tends not to create the biggest headlines.

The treatment of autism should not be about trying to cure, but trying to help,

As we age, we confuse our own biological decline with that of the world.

The concept that nature is benign and sacred harks back to the Romantic idealization of the natural world, a belief in its purity and goodness. It is the reason why Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s work on natural selection was so shattering and divisive, as it revealed nature’s true colours, full of pain, hunger and desperation in the battle for survival.

Most of all we fear progress. We fear the march of time, and as it ravages our bodies and minds we mistake our decline with a decline in the world. We long for imagined times past when all was pure. The disaster of modernity is seen as an inevitable fact by all observers and yet it bears little relationship to reality. We refuse to accept that the golden age is now, that this is as good as things have ever been. It is not perfect, but every society that has ever existed would eagerly swap their lives with someone living in the developed world today. We are safer from fear, hunger, disease, war and crime than we have ever been. On the left of the political spectrum the vilification of processed and manufactured goods is seen as a problem of corporate corruption, the poisoning of the world driven by an insatiable desire for profit and growth. The manufacturers are painted as a force of unspeakable evil, making us fat and sick, lining their greedy pockets at our expense. The left long for a time past when small businesses and farms met our food demands, simple cottage industries crafting beautiful goods with love, care and personal attention.

When you are not sure how you are going to make it to the end of the week, being worried about your saturated fat and fibre intake doesn’t really make the list.

But the fact remains that science produces the greatest work of humanity. For every Charles Townes, there will be thousands of others working just as hard and with just as much dedication, but without the final payoff. There are only so many world-changing discoveries, but those discoveries will never be reached without the activities of the hive mind of science. Countless fruitless experiments are destined to change nothing. The vast majority of scientists will retire without a Nobel prize or a world-shattering breakthrough to their name. But these ‘failures’ are not failures at all. They are just as responsible for the progress of science as Townes, Bohr, Marshall or Warren, because they explore all avenues and lead to the successes of others. It is impossible to predict where the next world-changing discovery will occur, so we need to trust the process, because it delivers time after time.

A true scientist is not defined by any measure of qualification, cited research or history of groundbreaking discovery. A true scientist is someone who is aware of the limitations of their own knowledge. They will always doubt, they will always question, they will always be bothered by just one more thing. Anyone who tells you that they know, that they are sure, that they have no doubt – they are either ignorant or dishonest. The moment that doubt stops, science and progress end. Only someone willing to doubt the accepted view will create a laser, conceive a semi-conductor or drink a glass full of bacteria.

As education has increased and access to information has been democratized around the world, there is an ever-increasing tide of expert shaming and the rejection of consensus views in favour of outliers. Of course, the existence of doubt and disagreement is the engine of scientific progress, but with this democratization comes great danger. The scientific community has always held consensus views and its disagreements have always taken place out of the view of the public. Today these disagreements take place in the full glare of the world’s media and the views of outliers and fanatics can achieve the same status as those of the whole scientific establishment. Disagreement happens at the coal face of science, but there is a rich seam of careful experimentation and evidence that lies beneath, well-tested theories that we can trust. Townes was a pioneer of lasers, but he needed to understand Einstein and Bohr’s work to get there.

To question science is to ignore everything it has done for man, to overlook the astounding progress of the last few hundred years. The irony of people questioning what science has done for us whilst typing on a computer, connected to the internet via a fibre optic cable, should not be lost. The stupidity of doubting the expertise of dietitians and nutrition researchers when we live in a world where the study of such things has transformed life expectancy, quality of life and health outcomes, should always be used to hold the expert shamers to account.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

Engaging with idiots can bring them into the debate, and when the people doing the engaging are academics or medical professionals, it can even legitimize the arguments.

Simple falsehoods are often more appealing than a complex reality.

In addition, you should take care to ensure the alternatives that you are proposing are not too difficult or impenetrable or they might well be rejected.

If you are going to wrench a long-held belief out of people’s minds then you need to have something to replace it that doesn’t leave any gaps. People prefer an incorrect model to an incomplete one, so if your explanation does not explain all the observed reality then it is likely to be rejected.

To fight effectively, we also need to look at our society’s attitude to mental illness. We must put an end to the stigmatization of depression, know what a debilitating condition it can be, and realize that the consequences of dismissing it can be devastating. Troubled attitudes to food and health are often symptoms of this condition and the more we can understand that relationship, the more we can help. Many of the symptoms that health bloggers discuss in relation to detox diets, alkaline, clean eating, paleo, or even GAPS, are common symptoms of depression, and for people who are vulnerable, desperate for help and unable to accept their underlying condition, there is a danger of being driven to any port in a storm.

Maybe when science is taught in school it should not be presented as a list of facts. You do not teach someone art by telling them information about paint. Science is about profound and interesting things, about investigation, search, truth and evidence. Science should teach children to doubt, to question and to understand the wisdom of knowing your own ignorance. Although facts are important, the output of school science teaching should not be children who know about photosynthesis, thermodynamics and semi-permeable membranes. We should be trying to produce children who understand that correlation is not always causation, that anecdotes are not evidence, that a theory is not something dreamed up in the pub, and that interesting results are often wrong. Science education should teach us what regression to the mean is, but also how easily it can fool us. It should explain how inclined we are to find patterns in randomness, how drawn we are to accept rules and certainty and how our instinctive brain guides many decisions we make. It should produce adults who are smart enough to see that their perspective is limited, and that they can be fooled. We should be taught to think, but also be taught how we think. Science should spend more time explaining how our brain can trick us into false beliefs and then reveal how the scientific method saw through this and changed the world. The facts produced by science will always change, sometimes fundamentally, but what will remain the same is the way that it works and the principles that make it the greatest force for progress that there has ever been. If taught well, these could stay with us for life and make us stronger for it.

‘Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.’ Bertrand Russell

Nutritionist – This is where the problems start. Whereas dietitian is a legally protected term, nutritionist is not. Technically anyone can call themselves a nutritionist, and many people do.

OK. So, I look for RD or RNutr and ignore everything else. I can do that. Good. That will make things much easier.