Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of US

293 Pages·2014·2.09 MB·English

by  Matt Fitzgerald

Diet Cults
The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide
to Healthy Eating for the Rest of Us
MATT FITZGERALD
For Devante
Contents
1 Forbidden Fruit
2 100 Foods to Eat Before You Die
3 Homo Coquus
4 The Caveman of Orange County
5 The Suck-It-Up Diet
6 It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Superfood!
7 Consider the Potato
8 Eat Bad, Look Good
9 Coffee, Chocolate, and Wine
10 Sugar Water
11 Starve or Die
12 Scapegluten
13 The Protein Club
14 What’s Your Poison?
15 Agnostic Healthy Eating
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
“It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out
of the mouth, this defiles the man.”
Matthew 15:11
Diet Cults
1
Forbidden Fruit
W
hen I was in college I attended a debate between a philosopher and a
theologian. The two men squared off over the question of God’s existence. The
theologian scored a knockout when he got the philosopher to confess his belief
in “objective morality” and then delivered a logical proof demonstrating that
only God could be the source of objective morality.
The funny thing is that, according to the Bible, morality did not come from
God. It came from food. It says so right there in Genesis, on page one, as a
matter of fact. We all know the story. The world is newly created, and only one
man inhabits it. God plants a special tree in the Garden of Eden and tells Adam,
“From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of knowledge
of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will
surely die.” Unfortunately, Adam’s wife Eve, who is created immediately after
this warning is delivered, falls under the influence of a talking serpent and eats
the forbidden fruit, and Adam, choosing loyalty to his wife over obedience to
God (as I’d like to think I would have done in his place), eats too. Instantly the
couple becomes ashamed of its nakedness, and we’ve been burdened with
consciences—particularly food consciences—ever since.
While the story of the forbidden fruit may be fanciful, I believe that it is
substantively accurate. That is to say, I believe that a distinctively human
morality really was born from food, through a collision between instinct and
language. My historical explanation goes back a little farther than the biblical
one, though.
I said “a distinctively human morality” just now because a form of morality
exists in many if not most animals. It has been observed, for example, that a
hungry lab rat won’t eat if eating causes a fellow rat to experience a painful
shock. Mother hens are known to mirror the distress of their chicks. The brains
of monkeys contain structures that are almost identical to structures in human
brains that host our empathetic instincts.
Human morality is undeniably more sophisticated than the proto-morality of
other animals, however. Only a human being would leap to his death from a
twelfth-floor balcony after photographs in which he is seen dressed in women’s
underwear are exposed on the Internet, or despise a fellow human being for no
reason other than that he believes in a different way of eating.
How did human morality become so much more complex and nuanced than
the inborn sense of right and wrong we see in other species? Well, food had a lot
to do with it.
The World Is Our Oyster
It all started more than six million years ago, when an ape species similar to the
modern chimpanzee underwent an evolutionary split. One line of descendants
changed a little and became our cousin the chimp. The other line changed a lot
and became homo sapiens. Scientists believe that the cause of the split was the
decision made by some of those primeval apes to venture out of the trees and
onto the African savanna. It is suspected that climate change influenced this
decision. Specifically, a period of increasing dryness may have caused the
savanna to encroach onto jungle territory, shrinking the apes’ food supply. The
most clever, adaptable, and adventurous apes dropped from the leafy branches to
the grassy plains in search of alternative foods—and found them.
The adaptability of these clever apes was paid forward to future generations
in the form of evolutionary changes that made them ever more adaptable. Over
the span of millions of years, a succession of hominid species descending from
the first floor-dwelling primates became increasingly adept at surviving in all
kinds of terrestrial environments. Archeological evidence suggests that most of
the changes that occurred in the process by which homo sapiens evolved from
the earliest hominids generated creatures that were capable of finding, gathering,
capturing, killing, cultivating, and domesticating a greater variety of foods. Our
species emerged as the master omnivore of planet Earth, capable of extremely
diverse eating but also dependent on dietary diversity, both physically and
psychologically. We are not koala bears that can blithely thrive on eucalyptus
leaves alone.
Above all else it was a large and growing brain that made the succession of
species between the proto-chimps of seven million years ago and modern
humans increasingly dietetically adaptive. Novel brainpower enabled the
hominids of the Paleolithic period to invent tools and techniques that brought
more and more foods into their diet. Big brains also furnished them with
communication skills that supported sophisticated methods of cooperative food
foraging, as well as reasoning skills that were used to make smart dietary choices
as new options presented themselves. At least 164,000 years ago, for example,
one human gambled on wading into the sea to extract shellfish to eat, and his
success added seafood to the diet of the species.
Dietary experimentation is risky, though. Whenever a creature eats
something it has never eaten before, there is a chance of disaster. There must