The Scam Diets

Flip through today's bestselling diet books and you won't see any references to religion. From Paleo to vegan to raw, nutrition gurus package their advice as sound, settled science. It doesn't matter whether meat is blamed for colon cancer or grains are called out as fattening poison — there's no shortage of citations and technical terms (tertiary amines, gliadin, ketogenesis) to back up the claims.

But as a scholar of religion, it's become increasingly clear to me that when it comes to fad diets, science is often just a veneer. Peel it away and you find timeless myths and superstitions, used to reinforce narratives of good and evil that give meaning to people's lives and the illusion of control over their well-being.

Take the grain-free monks of ancient China. (My specialty is classical Chinese thought.) Like all diet gurus, these monks used a time-tested formula. They mocked the culinary culture around them, which depended on the so-called wugu, or "five grains."

According to the monks' radical teachings, conventional grain-laden Chinese diets "rotted and befouled" your organs, leading to early disease and death. By avoiding the five grains, you could achieve perfect health, immortality, clear skin, the ability to fly and teleport. Well, not quite. To fully realize the benefits of the monks' diet, you also had to take proprietary supplements, highly technical alchemical preparations that only a select few knew how to make. All of this may sound eerily familiar: Look no further than modern anti-grain polemics like Dr. David Perlmutter's Grain Brain — complete with its own recommended supplement regimen.

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 much to do with myths, not facts. Chief among these is the myth of "paradise past," an appealing fiction about a time when everyone was happy and healthy, until they ate the wrong food and fell from grace.

The Chinese monks represented this "fall" as the discovery of agriculture. In Abrahamic religion, it was eating from the tree of knowledge. In either case, bad food is routinely scapegoated as the original cause of our damnation, and we've been trying to eat our way back to paradise ever since.

The mythic narrative of "unnatural" modernity and a "natural" paradise past is persuasive as ever. Religious figures like Adam and Eve have been replaced by Paleolithic man and our grandparents: "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," is journalist Michael Pollan's oft-quoted line.

The story also has a powerful moral dimension. It's the Prince of Evil, after all, who tempted Eve. Once secularized, Satan reappears as corporations and scientists who feed us chemical additives, modern grains and GMOs, the "toxic" fruits of sin. (No matter if science doesn't agree that any of these things are very toxic.)

Paradise past. Good and evil. Benevolent Nature with a capital N. The promise of nutritional salvation. After you've constructed a compellingly simple narrative foundation, all you have to do is wrap your chosen diet in scientific rhetoric.

For Chinese monks, that rhetoric involved "five phases theory." For ancient Greeks and Romans it was "humors" — four fluids thought to be the basis of human health. Now it is peer-reviewed studies. Thankfully for diet gurus, the literature of nutrition science is vague, vast and highly contested — just like religious texts — making it easy to cherry-pick whatever data confirm your biases.

But don't just take my word for it. You see, during the course of researching the history of nutrition science and diet fads, I discovered the secret truth about modern illnesses. This allowed me to develop the first real diet that can protect against chronic disease, help you lose weight and extend your life. It turns out, there's a simple reason for all the conflicting nutritional advice, with some people telling you that meat causes cancer, others telling you that cholesterol is essential for brain health, and all them reversing their positions every week.

How was I able to see through the madness? By rejecting conventional thinking and paying attention to genuine science, not myth! And after you read my diet, you'll be able to do the same.

Here’s an excerpt from Levinovitz’s UNpacked Diet, a detailed blueprint for a fad diet that draws on common myths and weak science. Observe how he exploited myths and pseudoscience, and uses cherry-picked scientific evidence.

The UNpacked Diet®

UNpack your pounds. UNpack your potential.
UNpack your food.

Finally: a scientifically proven revolution in healthy eating!

Conventional wisdom tells us that unhealthy eating habits cause the obesity, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes that plague our modern world. New research shows that diet can also cause psychological conditions like ADHD, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and autism.

But which foods are the problem? Scientists and diet gurus “whiplash” us back and forth on the culprits. Do you trust the Paleo crowd? Then red meat is fine and grains are dangerous. Do you trust our government? Then whole grains are a must, and red meat will give you cancer and heart disease. Mainstream nutritionists will tell you it’s all about energy balance—just eat fewer calories than you burn. But if you’re among those who have tried diet and exercise, you know there’s more to the story.

Looking to traditional cultures raises even more questions. We know that African Maasai tribes stay disease-free on a diet of raw milk and meat. Yet we attribute the great health of the ancient Chinese to their nearly vegetarian diet. The Yanomamo Indians of Brazil thrive on a salt-free diet, whereas the Japanese (one of the healthiest modern cultures) eat the highest-sodium diet in the world.

Could it be that conventional wisdom is only partially right?

There is something wrong with our diet. Of course there is! Look at the skyrocketing rates of obesity, chronic disease, cancer, and mental illness.

But here’s the shocking truth: the type of food we eat isn’t the problem. Let’s ask again: What has really changed?

When I think of my 95-year-old grandmother, I always think of a glass jar—her kitchen was filled with them. At the end of the summer, she would stuff jars with fruits and vegetables to preserve and eat all year long.

Today, glass is infrequently used to store food, and for one simple reason: Big Food wants to keep things cheap. Gone is Grandmother’s pantry. Kitchens are now filled with plastics, metals, and heavily bleached and processed papers. Milk, which once came delivered fresh in glass jugs, sits for days in plastic containers or plastic-lined cartons. Our grandparents brought fresh produce home in crates and cartons. We get our fruits and veggies shrink-wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam.

Our Paleolithic ancestors ate a wide variety of diets depending on where they lived. Their food was wrapped in Nature’s packaging: peels and husks. Wherever it is found, from gas station mini-marts to giant Walmarts, food today almost always comes packaged. And even when it doesn’t, we place it in plastic bags ourselves before taking it home.

If we are willing to ignore old ways of thinking about food, the answer to our dietary problems is obvious. The whiplash goes away when we stop trying to figure which type of food is the dietary villain, or which new fad diet will help us lose weight. Science can’t tell us which diet is right because there isn’t a right diet!

Here’s what all those diet gurus and nutritionists don’t want you know, because they’d be out of a job. The most common supermarket and fast-food materials—plastic, aluminum, tin, even recycled paper—contain dangerous chemicals and heavy metals that fatten us up and destroy our health.

The real villain is in the packaging.

Plastics Are Not Fantastic

The dangers of plastics are no surprise to scientists, who have been studying their negative health effects for decades. Researchers and health officials have voiced concerns about “nanoplastics” (small plastic particles) that get into our food by “leaching” or “migration.” Although Big Chem and Big Food have done their best to suppress this information, numerous studies prove the health risks are enormous.

Unlike low carb vs. low fat, there is no debate about the dangers of these modern food storage materials.

You may have heard about the most notorious of these plastics, BPA. Polycarbonate plastics (containing BPA) are extremely common in US food packaging. In 2004, the CDC found traces of BPA in nearly all the urine samples it collected (93 percent of adults), and scientists predict that today the number would be over 99 percent. The source of this BPA is our diets.

The dangers of this poisonous endocrine disrupter are almost too numerous to list. BPA mimics estrogen and has been shown to grow breast cancer cells. Exposure to BPA early in life leads to precancerous changes in glands, altered brain development, lower sperm counts and chromosomal abnormalities in eggs. Prenatal exposure to BPA correlates with breast cancer later in life, a fact so alarming that the Breast Cancer Fund urges people to avoid all BPA plastics. They also recommend eliminating canned food, since BPA is commonly used in can lining.

As use of plastic increases, so do rates of mental disorders like ADHD and autism. While the two seem intuitively unrelated, scientists see a connection. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health at UC Davis, believes that because plastic packaging interferes with the body’s natural hormonal system, it could “play a role in autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders.” Other doctors suspect plastic packaging may disrupt thyroid hormone critical for brain development. They point out that thyroid dysfunction is particularly common in children with autism.

And those migraines? They aren’t just in your head. According to the Mayo Clinic, plastics may be responsible. The hormones estrogen and progesterone play key roles in regulating menstruation and pregnancy, which affect headache-causing chemicals in the brain. Steady estrogen levels improve headaches, but altered levels make them worse. A University of Kansas study found that hormone-disrupting plastics caused migraine symptoms, including light and sound sensitivity. Chemicals in plastic food packaging have also been linked to heart disease, adult onset diabetes, high blood pressure, early puberty, allergies, asthma, anxiety, unattractiveness, erectile dysfunction, depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s.

So plastics make us sick—but do they also make us fat? The answer is clear. Scientists have known for over a decade that plastics cause obesity in rats, and recently found that the link extends to humans. Author Joseph Stromberg in 2012 cited the first large-scale study to find a significant link between BPA and obesity. A 2013 study found that girls with higher levels of BPA were five times more likely to be overweight.

It is no coincidence that when plastic use took off, we started packing on the pounds.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/11/412973926/how-diet-gurus-hook-us-with-religion-veiled-in-science

Last edited by Goose (6/12/2015 6:51 am)