For as long as I’ve been alive, people have been calling different foods “healthy” or “unhealthy” without any explanation or justification beyond popular belief. I would say this is akin to black and white thinking and, dare I say it, ‘religion’, but it tends to be passed down as a matter of fact, rather than something worth analyzing.
Growing taller at the end of middle school caused me to drop a lot of weight, but by the end of high school I had regained almost all of my original ‘chunk’, and this was deeply embarrassing. Mothers only mean the best for you when they feed you more because you’re a “growing boy”, but I didn’t know better than to turn down offers for a second cheeseburger, etc., and all that extra food definitely added up. I appreciate my mom’s love – I really do – but for the love of God, unless your teen son is an athlete, or is otherwise going around excessively hungry, he doesn’t need more food. Anyway….
In college I tried really hard to turn this around. I started watching “You Are What You Eat”, tried to be more physically active, and tried eating healthier, but it just didn’t solve things. It’s frustrating because you’re expected to “know” everything – out of the box – and are harshly criticized when you get it wrong, even if your entire upbringing steered you in the wrong direction. People who grew up eating healthy often have no idea how hard it is to turn things around, since your entire perception of food, family, and community is shaped by those patterns. I bought a jump rope thinking that might be fun way to get more exercise, and my mom laughed at me (“thanks, Mom”…). I tried eating more fruits and vegetables, only to find that uncooked sweet potato was unbearable, and although I liked raisins and started eating a lot of them as a snack, one of the athletic guys in my college stairwell kind of scoffed at me, saying, “Aren’t those really high in sugar?” I’d honestly had no idea. “Sorry, Mr. Perfect, I guess I was wrong to think that eating relatively clean, plant-based foods was better than a Michellina’s ultra-shit frozen manicotti from the campus grocery, but I guess I’m just a big stupid idiot for trying”.
I fucking hate people sometimes.
Although much of that was a long time ago, it’s amazing how black and white thinking still colors the world around me. This is precisely why I avoid extremes like Veganism and the Carnivore diet, and I’m not too fond anybody who thinks they have it all figured out (once again, one of my favorite health YouTube channels is Nutrition Made Simple!, where the nuance is always explored).
I don’t think it’s particularly beneficial to label foods or diets as wholly good or wholly bad. As an example of how complex diet can be, I’ve known several people who were otherwise quite healthy, physically active, fit, etc., but who had a guilty pleasure of drinking soda. Me going to them and feeling the need to point out how unhealthy soda is would have been pretty asinine, not just because it would seem their healthy lifestyles far outweighed the negative effects of the soda, but also because I had no real room to speak. Granted, just because an obese doctor doesn’t follow his own advice doesn’t mean his statements are false, but humans are pretty perceptive to hypocrisy, and it doesn’t do you any favors.
Is Mickey D’s bad for you? A lot of studies suggest it is. Is it bad for you if it’s your only source of food on a desert island? No, not it if keeps you alive. More practically, is it the worst you could eat on a road trip? Eh, you can sometimes do better, or you can try to bring your own food, but I’ve actually found it can be decently satisfying, and it’s probably better than loading up on sugar water and candy bars. See, context changes everything.
Almost everybody who has passed away on both sides of my family suffered from the complications of heart disease. On my Dad’s side, high blood pressure also played a role, on my Mom’s side, diabetes also played a role. So although there are many elements of health to concern yourself with, I pay much closer attention to heart disease, which also happens to be the #1 killer. If your family has absolutely no history of heart disease, you might reasonably pay closer attention to other more pertinent biomarkers. Risk profile matters a lot, both with health and with finances. I avoid butter because it has historically given me raging heart burn, but moreover, it’s consumption is frequently linked to a higher ApoB, and consequently, a higher risk of heart disease. Am I going to throw that in everyone’s faces? No! Because your risk may not be my risk. And if it’s never given you raging heartburn, it’s probably never crossed your mind to avoid it otherwise. And I would imagine that there’s an acceptable threshold of butter consumption, too, only beyond which the risk really increases. There’s no binary distinction here. If I were ideologically Vegan, I might be more tempted to say, carte blanche, “butter is bad”, but that’s not necessarily true without context, so again, that’s why ideological extremes should be avoided.
I recently started reading the book “Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets”, and although I’m not too far in, it’s a fascinating sociological analysis of the cultural and psychological factors that play a role in diet selection. There are many aspects of personal and group identity, as well, and diet obsession is related to the desire to exercise agency within the cultural value of self-determination. Although food companies and restaurants surround us with foods that are demonstrably bad for us in the long run, there is a very huge element of shame to being overweight because it’s perceived as a failure to exercise self-discipline. Through almost all of history up until this point, this was not a thing, as you ate what others ate, at least within the boundaries of acceptability in your culture. (i.e., there’s nothing inherently wrong with eating horse or dog meat, but we don’t think of horses as animals to eat, and dogs are our friends, so we react quite violently to the thought of eating the latter). Choosing a diet, in the sea of diets, is actually something of a public, performative exercise of agency and identity selection.
I’m not in the mood to take a dump on the Carnivore diet today, but many smart people have noticed how Carnivore frequently ties into the association of meat eating with masculinity, which is probably why it’s so popular among men, especially body builders, where particular attention is paid to protein consumption. Vegans are often body shamed for being “skinny” and “weak”, despite the wide-spread cultural understanding that excess body weight is rampant and unhealthy. I’ve personally noticed that it’s far more common among conservatives than liberals, possibly because Jordan Peterson and his daughter are partly responsible for it becoming so popular as of late, but also – I believe – because Veganism is more closely associated with the Left, climate activism, and even the feminine [“now honey, eat your vegetables!”] [also note how “soy boy” is a term used as an insult]. There’s this very widespread idea that all of these doctors and nutrition guidelines and researchers who say that a plant-based diet is best for you are part of some giant conspiracy, and even if that isn’t part of the picture, the existence of guidelines and recommendations can itself feel like an infringement of personal freedom, so when somebody stands up and says, “No, meat is the best! Meat is all you need! Don’t listen to those other fools!”, I think a lot of people jump up and say, “Hell, yeah!” and are immediately on board, not so much because they actually believe this, but because it presents them with the idea of freedom and agency, as well as a justification for distrust in authority, etc. At least, that’s my armchair analysis. I’m not saying that’s inherently wrong (although I am otherwise strongly opposed to the Carnivore diet), but that’s how I think about why it is such a powerful movement right now.
It’s also interesting how we are motivated to change diets. I changed my diet to prevent a painful medical condition (chronic heartburn). It seems obvious that people would change diet for health reasons, but the book approaches it from a more social science perspective, as this again is an exercise in agency, with the assumption that food intake and food selection are the primary determinants of illness, which is not necessarily untrue, but it exposes how blame is assessed at a cultural level: the individual is assumed to be responsible first and foremost. In some senses, this is inherently an acceptance of shame, if that makes sense, and choosing the “right” diet is an act of agency to escape shame. If you eat a “perfect” diet but die from cancer, nobody blames you. If you eat an “imperfect” diet and die from cancer, you are assumed to be responsible (as opposed to some other agent, such as fast food restaurants, a busy schedule, a bad job, municipal guidelines, etc., etc.). Thought of another way, if you have children and your child gets seriously ill from a non-communicable disease (or is “fat”), who is blamed? This is why advertisers have been so successful marking to parents, since the fear of shame so easily motivates and manipulates them.
Again, this is social science. I’m not saying you *aren’t* responsible for your health if you have a bad health outcome – you *could* be – but it’s so important to realize that the individual is blamed first and foremost in our culture, and although I’ve extrapolated well beyond the book I mentioned, this is what I’ve been thinking about.
I almost titled this “Diet Religions, Part 4: Orthodoxy”, because that’s how people come to think about diet. There is “the right” diet, and there are “wrong diets” consisting of everything else. This is really just a form of self-policing within the context of shame. People who get hyper-specific and hyper-“orthodox” are probably trying to feel some sort of control over their lives, since “good behavior” causes “good results”, and “bad behavior” causes “bad results”, so agency becomes the name of the game, and the more agency, the better, or so they think, so they go way deeper than makes any sense. I like to pick on the white potato vs red potato debate. Maybe one is better than the other, although I suspect there are merely trade-offs, but how much this affects your life is likely to be negligible. But that isn’t enough for those who need more ‘agency’ to feel good about themselves. Labeling something solidly “good” or solidly “bad” is a way of addressing agency tangentially, since it more readily enables a person to feel good or bad for eating or not eating said thing. In fact, it enables orthodoxy, for those who 1) believe, and 2) adhere. Once they have achieved both, they feel good about themselves, and self-reflected judgement comes to taint those around them who either don’t believe, or don’t adhere. It’s much harder to feel good or bad about kind of choosing or kind of avoiding things that are kind of good or kind of bad. Right? People invent or justify hard lines so they can more clearly be in the right or wrong.
I don’t know exactly where I’m going with all of this. And I’m not magically “outside” of it, either. That’s not how being human works. But I feel like I’ve sensed a lot of this before, but simply never put it into words. It’s challenging, because there are generally healthy diets and there are generally unhealthy diets, and some foods are associated with negative health outcomes while others are associated with positive health outcomes. But…it is not really possible to be human and not color these with the effects of our motivations. And that’s thought provoking.
I avoid diets that eliminate macro-nutrients of any kind. Vegan and Carnivore are out, strict Vegetarian and Keto are viewed with suspicion. My general dietary convictions are A) don’t be a dick [some might say I violate this, at least in my writing], B) whole food plant-based probably wins, C) the occasional ice cream or pizza will not kill you, and D) eating healthy is fucking difficult sometimes.
A lot of my dietary changes have been massively positive: fruits, legumes, whole grains, and a few occasional vegetables. I probably eat more chicken and less beef than I used to, and although I’ve reduced my consumption of sugar junk, I don’t think I’ve reduced it as much as I really should. That’s been hard.
At one point, I bought a nutrition textbook from 2016 for $20, but I very quickly realized it was going to be a hard read. I actually really felt convicted by God, because my motivation was to know what I believed and be able to defend it, but this was really just a form of pride, manifesting as a commitment that was beyond my ability to handle in the midst of more important work. I donated it to the thrift store. I’ve had to accept that I will never have all of the answers, and I will never win any “debates”, and this is okay, because I don’t need to. The YouTube channels I watch tend to cite numerous papers, and while wading through these is beyond my ability and my patience, I decided that how I think about food probably has a higher ROI than how many studies I can cite. So I decided that moderation was important, that reasonableness was important, that avoiding logical fallacies was important, and that not getting too caught up in any of it was important. Not everything in this world is as black and white, good or evil as we might want, but you can still make solidly good decisions without getting too caught up in yourself.