The Angry Chef: Bad science and the truth about healthy eating by Anthony Warner
I am not very interested in food, which is to say I am no
more interested than someone who eats it needs to be. I’ve been
fortunate enough to have been taken to some fine restaurants in my time,
but I have never been served anything that can compete with a chicken
bake from Greggs. Cooking is boring and if it was possible to live
without eating, I wouldn’t really miss it. It gets in the way of
drinking and then you have to wash up.
I don’t understand why people watch cakes being baked on
television, but I understand that this is a popular form of
entertainment. I am also aware that health and wellness bloggers exist,
but I have also assumed they are spivs and/or idiots and have never read
their work. And whilst I am theoretically sympathetic towards people
who harm themselves as a result of believing nutritional crackpots, a
large part of me thinks that they are narcissistic fools who have
brought it on themselves.
Consequently, I’ve never heard of most of the people in this
book. I had no idea that people turned to Gwyneth Paltrow for
nutritional advice. Why would anybody do that? My only real interest in
nutritional gobbledegook is when it starts to influence policy, as it
has in the current hysteria over sugar. Aside from that, these people
can go to hell in an organic, gluten-free handcart, as far as I’m
concerned.
Anthony Warner, having a bigger heart than I, cares a great
deal about this stuff. He really likes food. He even enjoys cooking it.
This is fortuitous for he is a chef. An angry chef. Angry because he
cannot avoid people with imaginary food intolerances and daft beliefs
about nutritional science.
I don’t blame him. Some of the food fads described in this
book are contemptibly stupid. The alkaline diet is particularly
cretinous. Debunkable by anyone with a GCSE in chemistry, it is, as
Warner says, ‘a huge steaming pile of imaginary bullshit’. He has
similarly blunt descriptions of detox (‘a vast bullshit-octopus’), clean
eating (‘a huge and unrepentant tide of nutribollocks’), advocates for
the paleo diet (‘packs of pseudoscience wolves’) and food gurus in
general (‘poorly qualified and unaccountable fools’).
If the fads are united by a common thread, it is a yearning
for purity; for a rural idyll that never was. Mistrustful of science and
anything that is ‘man made’, the nutritional dupes fall for anything
marketed as ‘natural’. The paleo diet explicitly cries out for a return
to an age in which people were in touch with nature, and all the fad
diets seek to flush out the chemicals of the modern world and take us
back to The Garden. It’s all tree-hugging hippy crap, of course. Polio
and syphilis are natural. Vaccines and anaesthetic are man made. Nature
wants us dead.
It would be wrong to see the wellness gurus and their
followers as being totally anti-science. Rather they take a tiny bit of
science and use their feelings to work out the rest. There really is
such a thing as detoxification (from alcohol, for example). There really
are people for whom being gluten-free is more than a quirky
affectation. Too much sugar really is bad for you.
But these people take it all too far. More often than not,
the solution being peddled by the snakeoil merchants is total abstinence
from one or more ingredient. As Warner notes, if you’re feeling lousy,
the chances are that you will sooner or later feel better with or
without the guru’s help (regression to the mean), but it is all too
tempting to credit the guru for your recovery. If you are fat and the
guru tells you to cut out an entire food group, the chances are your
restrictive diet will cause you to consume fewer calories, but rather
than accept the laws of thermodynamics, you may be tempted to attribute
magical fattening powers to specific foods.
Extremism sells. Nobody makes money from telling people to
eat a balanced diet in moderation and do a bit of exercise. We seem
drawn to self-flagellating exercises in self-denial, up to and including
fasting, so long as we are allowed pockets of excess. Yes, you can
gorge yourself on this particular food, say the gurus, so long as you
abstain completely from that particular. It is as if the combination of
gluttony in one area and total abstinence in another adds up to
moderation.
Such diets tend to be difficult to adhere to and fail. It is
mostly harmless stupidity for people with more money than sense,
although it must be rather tedious for those around them. The dark side
comes when the quacks cause people to develop eating disorders or sell
fake cancer cures. When it comes to these charlatans, Warner’s anger is
more than justified.
The Angry Chef deserves to
be widely read. It covers all the bases with aplomb. The world needs a
popular science book to help people tell the difference between science
and opinion, as evidenced by the fact that it is currently being beaten
on the Amazon sales rankings by The Pioppi Diet: A 21 day lifestyle plan which I will be reviewing tomorrow.
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