I see a great deal of logical fallacies being used to persuade people toward one diet or away from another, toward one food or away from another, even from YouTubers whom I otherwise like, so I decided to put a little post together detailing some of my “theses” concerning how to approach food and diet generally, in an attempt to avoid those most common logical fallacies.
- The “original human diet” is not necessarily the healthiest.
- Sorry for the text wall, but there’s a lot to say here, and the subject it hotly debated for all of the wrong reasons. It’s almost impossible to recognize what the “original human diet” might even refer to without adding considerable nuance. As I understand it, paleo-anthropologists are in widespread agreement that humans are omnivores, and some more recent phrasings posit that humans are more specifically “processivores”. While physiology can lend some insight (e.g., we don’t have massive molars, we don’t have long canines, we don’t have multiple stomach chambers, etc., etc.), the human past covers a tremendous geography, encompassing tens of thousands of people groups, ways of life, food sources, and yes, genetic variation. Even if we narrow down the geography, we then have to decide at what point in time we can “snapshot” the human diet and call it the “original”. There are plants being discovered in the melting tundra that have otherwise been extinct for 30,000 years. Is the “original human diet” even still around?
- From a biological perspective, “good” food keeps a person alive long enough to procreate and raise children, but that’s about it. Think of it as “military grade” – people often think this means it’s high-quality, but those who have served in the military often attest that it actually means “bare minimum” or “adequate for application”. Even if you could pin down the original human diet, it’s not clear it would naturally give a person 100 years of life. We know that humans can’t eat grass, sure, so it’s not completely without merit, but we simply call such things “inedible”. The things that are edible, or that don’t immediately make us sick or kill us, have greatly varying health effects. Tweezing out which foods do and don’t cause us problems in the long run is difficult because we rely on a great variety of foods, and that makes doing science on specific foods very challenging. Suppose a new method is discovered for processing a plant that used to be inedible into a form in which it can be consumed, and say there are some healthy nutrients and compounds that can then be gained from it. Our ancestors may not have been able to eat it, but since we can, it’s difficult to say it’s “bad” for us just because it can’t be eaten in its raw form: most foods are processed in some way. Moreover, saying a new food source is bad just because it didn’t used to be eaten in the past would be like saying all New World plants are unhealthy because at one time, humans didn’t live in the New World. [Granted, I half suspect somebody genetically adapted to food native to Europe might encounter more issues with foods native to the Americas, but that’s its own rabbit-hole. Does the “original human diet” apply to all peoples in all places?]
- How a food or substance is used does not determine its health effects
- I get tired of people saying that such-and-such an ingredient/chemical is “used in yoga mats”, and “you don’t want to eat a yoga mat, do you?!” But what are these people actually referring to? I bet carbon is in yoga mats, but it’s also in all organic matter. Are we eating yoga mats when we eat broccoli? No, of course not. Just yesterday, one YouTuber I like to watch talked about how sunflower seed oil (or something) was once used in industrial machinery. For all we know, maybe that just means it doesn’t oxidize or go rancid easily, and so made an effective lubricant. You could easily spin this to argue it’s good for you, although I’m not personally trying to do that. At the end of the day, a food can only stand on the merits of its health effects, and how else it may be used means absolutely nothing. Fuck off with this way of thinking – it’s more of an emotional manipulation tactic than anything.
- Hard-to-pronounce ingredients are not necessarily bad for you.
- The actual chemical composition of things like apples and broccoli is absolutely insane. There was a website I stumbled across once that listed everything. Does that mean they are bad for you? No.
- Easy-to-pronounce ingredients are not necessarily good for you.
- “Natural flavors” and “artificial flavors” are two terms that are very easy to read, but if I understand it correctly, they are industry blanket terms for mixtures of chemicals used for flavoring. “Natural flavors”, I believe, simply means that the flavor ingredient of the largest volume must be “natural”, but every other chemical in the flavor can be artificial. Moreover, something could just say “sugar”, and it could be a massive amount.
- I mean, I get what people are saying when they caution you against wild ingredients, I really do, and most of the time these are man-made chemicals with uncertain or outright negative health effects, you just have to be careful to understand that eating a bag of organic oreos, or whatever, probably isn’t doing your body any favors. Moreover, it’s entirely possible that some of those wild-sounding ingredients are actually perfectly fine to consume in small quantities, and we simply don’t know yet, or the FDA has more or less confirmed it, but people don’t want to believe them. [the big caveat being, the FDA often really doesn’t know and just slaps the GRAS label on it, so I would argue there is a case for caution or general avoidance, but that’s still not the same as saying “strange word bad”, even though I’m prone to this type of thinking myself]
- The production method of a food is not an indictment of the food itself.
- Over the past 10+ years, people have come to love talking shit about bread. I have a stake in this because I love bread, so maybe I am biased, but it was clearly healthy enough to become a dietary staple of empires, for what that’s worth. However, if you pay close attention, the vast majority of all bread in super markets is loaded with cost-cutting chemicals, and is often highly processed, such that it hardly resembles real bread. When people talk about the negative health effects of bread, it’s hard to imagine they got all or even a sizeable portion of their data from people baking their own bread at home. My limited research on bread in general has led me to suspect that it’s probably a B-lister in terms of health benefits, compared to other foods, but that’s less because of some inherent badness with wheat and more because pulverizing a high-starch food into a powder before baking it seems to have a distinct metabolic effect on your body, and too much of that sort of thing can be bad for you. But that’s a far cry from saying the food itself is “bad” for you, and whole wheat bread definitely has a lot of nutrients and fiber. If anything, it’s worth criticizing the bread industry, but I see no reason bread can’t play a role in a solid, healthy diet, it just shouldn’t be a substitute for healthier foods.
- To put a different spin on this, you could argue that the mistreatment of animals in feed lots and industrial coups is perhaps an indictment against the industry, but not an indictment against meat consumption itself.
I think there’d be much less deception and confusion around what it means to eat a healthy diet if we avoided these common fallacies. But I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the first point.
<rant>
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very biased against the Carnivore diet, and by extension, those denominations of Keto that align with it [fun fact, there is actually a Vegan Keto approach, which is hilarious, but it just goes to show you how much variation there can be within ideological camps.]. The assertion is that meat consumption is the original human diet. I’ve heard paleoanthropologists state that humans are clearly, physiologically omnivores, but the Carnivore crowd, well…they tend to be the types of people who hate science and scientists who don’t tell them what they want to hear. That’s not all of them, of course, but it’s the overwhelming trend I’ve seen. Aside from that, though, it’s also bizarre, because these Carnivores will then go out and say you should eat 2 pounds of beef everyday, which is insane to me because of how much research has shown that excessive red meat consumption does bad things to you. Moreover…beef comes from cows, and cows…are domesticated. Their original ancestors – the aurochs – are extinct. So on the one hand, these people think meat-eating is quintessentially healthy, representing some mythical “original” diet, but for whatever reason they then fixate on beef, which comes from domesticated cattle. Until they can put an auroch steak on my plate, they can fuck right off with this whole charade about the “original diet”. Again, we’re omnivores. Yes, we’ve been eating meat for a long time. So long, I can’t even talk about it in Sunday School without causing problems. But definitely not exclusively, and definitely not feedlot 80/20 beef from Bos taurus. Are these people serious?
</rant>
Perhaps I’m just triggered because a few months, somebody literally said, in my presence, that high LDL is good, and that he eats 2 pounds of beef per day. And I immediately thought, “Ah. I see. So this guy is Carnivore”. I don’t know the guy enough to…er…argue?…with him? [Probably generally not a good idea] But mentally, it just has me putting a hand on my head thinking…why do people do this to themselves? Why are people so desperate to hate scientists who have dedicated their careers to conducting randomized control trials to find the health effects of diet? So desperate to think that all mainstream dietary science is a hoax? And why do they always fixate on beef?
It’s honestly more a question for Sociology. In the meantime it’s just import for me to remember that I don’t have all the answers, and I never will, and it’s not my place to criticize others [although I am human and sometimes I really want to]. My biggest concern right now is really just losing weight, or even getting back to what I was at before I ballooned at the start of my medication last year. I have my own battles to fight, so it’s maybe not wise (or fair) to pick on anyone else. [I originally wrote this about a month ago, and my pants are falling a bit, so something is working]
I guess what I’m ultimately trying to get at in this post is that we all have different opinions, biases, preferences, outcomes, and insights into diet, and I’m ultimately okay with that. But moreover, just because somebody gets sick doesn’t mean their diet was “wrong”, and just because somebody else doesn’t get sick doesn’t mean their diet was “right”, or is ideal for everyone else. I never want to dismiss anecdotes, because they are great starting points for hypotheses, but that’s not the same as lording it over people as if you have all the answers. The real problem is that many, many people, base their decisions off of logical fallacies. And that’s not good. That takes us away from the truth, and away from better decision-making. So although I only have 5 theses instead of 99, I think they cover a rather large number of fallacies.
But of course…I try to avoid foods with strange-sounding chemicals in them, logical fallacy or not. I can’t escape that one. We are all only too human.
Addendum: The value of looking at the human diet over history is that you can attempt to associate modern disease with changes in societal dietary patterns. Why has the rate of obesity skyrocketed over the past 50 years? This is a very important question. But that’s very different from trying to claim that some “original” human diet is superior to all others; it’s only to acknowledge that something has gone wrong with respect to certain health markers and we should try to figure out what. Cancer has been around since DNA first came into existence, so whether the modern diet causes more cancer can really only be answered by an analysis of cancer rates in the past compared to today. Heart disease has also been around since pre-history, so studying ancient diets is extremely valuable, but not because finding the “original” will usher us into some golden age . I’m not a fan of Keto by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s such a cultural juggernaut that I decided to take a crack reading Gary Taubes’ “The Case for Keto”, and although I largely wasn’t impressed, one positive take away was that your health risk profile means a great deal, and is likely more important than trying to chase the “perfection” that everybody throws at you. I agree with that assessment, because no diet – no matter how healthy – can guarantee you will live to age 90, or whenever, but a sober assessment of your specific risks can hopefully guide you to a longer life, and with less physical suffering. [Funny enough, though, I lost count of how often Taubes criticized “the establishment”. Smoking? Trans fats? Yeah, science doesn’t contribute any knowledge to society, it’s all a giant conspiracy….]