14 Nov 2024 Five food things that just ain’t so
Should you avoid GMOs? Should you limit your egg consumption? Should you drink dairy milk or plant “milks”? Should infants eat peanut-based foods?
What we eat, and what we ought to eat, are uncommonly fertile soil for popular myths. There are good reasons why this is so.
Personal health and its relationship with diet are major sources of anxiety for many people.
If you are what you eat, to paraphrase an aphorism from The Physiology of Taste, a collection of gastronomic essays by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published in 1825, then what to eat seems an important question.
Food is a major industry. On one hand, food producers want to market their products in the best possible light and have a commercial interest in generating fads and fashions. The same is true for authors of diet books, who can earn fortunes from desperate consumers eager for persuasive advice.
On the other hand, consumers mistrust food manufacturers and the profit motive. Many of the reasons for this lack of trust are misguided, but some are very much justified.
Compounding the problem is that diet is notoriously difficult to study.
It isn’t easy to conduct controlled, repeatable experiments on living humans. Diet affects health over long timeframes. We can’t lock up thousands of people for years, strictly controlling everything they eat, every time we want to validate or refute some or other dietary hypothesis.
In pharmaceutical research, scientists study the effects of carefully controlled doses of an isolated substance. Diet is infinitely more complex than that, with more interactions, more complex effects and side-effects, and far less precise dosing.
Not only is a varied diet complex, but many factors other than diet influence health outcomes. These include genetics, environmental exposures, exercise regimes, lifestyle habits, mental health, and medical interventions. Eliminating or controlling for these confounding variables is hard, especially in longer-term observational studies.
Because people aren’t lab rats, and tightly controlled long-term experiments are rarely, if ever, possible, researchers rely heavily on self-reported information. People are notoriously dishonest, however, and often not even wittingly so. As Dr. Gregory House used to say: “Everybody lies.”
In such a contested environment, separating fact from fiction (or rather, plausible claims from improbable ones) is not easy, even for experts who immerse themselves in the subject.
In this article, BS-beating journalist, Ivo Vegter, looks to uncover the cut-and-dried truth to five food myths and misconceptions, avoiding those that are still a matter of disagreement in the dietary science community.
- Young children should not be fed peanut products
- Plant milk is healthier than dairy milk
- Milk increases mucus production
- Eggs should be eaten sparingly
- GMOs are bad for you
For some clarity and truth surrounding these issues, read on below…
To read the full article, click here: Daily Friend
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Putting tired old food myths to bed
Multiple myths surround what’s good or bad for us – BS-beating journalist Ivo Vegter lays out the facts on MSG, carrots, the five-second rule….