Dispatches from the Diet Wars

[ecosophia]

So last week's blog post about my macrobiotic days, back in my misspent youth, has continued to attract a steady stream of diet enthusiasts of various kinds, nearly all of them convinced that it's their job to tell me that I'm the wrongest wrong that ever wronged, or something tolerably close to that. I had somebody insisting at the top of his keyboard that I'm "an amazingly horrible person" because I disagree with his vegan dietary notions -- clearly I need to work on my evil cackle.  I had someone else try twice to post a long screed about how the ketogenic diet really is the one true diet that everybody ought to eat. I had a follower of yet another eccentric American diet guru, I forget his name, trying to promote some other dietary theory -- and I've had several other people on this week's post, which is about ethics, trying to figure out how to shoehorn yet more adulation for Saint Weston A. Price and his one true holy nutritional theory into the blog. In its own giddy way it's been quite entertaining, and it's also a good measure of just how impressively neurotic people in today's America have become about the simple process of keeping yourself fed. 

I'm really tempted to keep feeding the frenzy, so to speak, by writing more about diet. No doubt it's a character flaw, but when people reliably go all ranty-pants about an issue, especially when there are thirty-one flavors of ranty-pants and they're all on display at once, I have a hard time not poking fun at them in the hope that sooner or later they'll figure out just how unimpressive they look to the rest of us -- well, or if that fails, then simply encouraging those who aren't caught up in the food fight to remember that they're not alone. 

Feeding yourself really is a simple process. It doesn't require reading books or following somebody's complicated nutritional theory; it's simply a matter of paying attention to what foods make you feel healthy and eating those fairly often, while noticing which foods make you feel unhealthy and avoiding those -- unless you like them enough that you're good with the aftereffects, in which case bon appetit. No matter what you eat or don't eat, you're going to get sick on occasion; no matter what you eat or don't eat, you're going to die sooner or later; what you eat or don't eat has some influence on how healthy you are and how soon you die, but it's far from the only factor at work, you know, and in many cases it's not even close to the most important.

It's nobody else's business, by the way, what you eat or how healthy you are, and it's none of your business what other people eat and how healthy they are. Yes, I know that saying those words makes me an amazingly horrible person. Nya ha ha, or what have you.

Oh, and if you don't want to do things the way I've suggested, and would rather take your dietary theories out of a book? By all means do so. Just please remember that everyone else in the world doesn't need to be told that your favorite dietary theory is the One True Way for everyone...because it isn't, no matter how hard you want it to be. 

Comments

[auntlili]

You bad, bad Archdruid. You have forced me to look up Weston A. Price and his foundation. Unlike yourself, I don't mind listening to people talk, however heatedly, about their nutritional theories because I love crackpot cookery as much as I love crockpot cookery. I well remember the day I first came across Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator -- no I'm not being vulgar -- who advocated chewing every mouthful of food 100 times. He carried a small sample of his own faeces in a jar to prove to anyone who cared to cooperate that if you ate this way your sh*t would not stink. Now I'm being vulgar. You're a historian of ideas -- how can you not relish this stuff?

Anyway, the foundation's principle sponsors appear to be food and supplement producers, and if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it is -- like an increasing number of non-profits -- a thinly disguised cross-marketing scheme and a way to get research dollars to cooperative institutions without having the interested producer's name attached. No half-clad demonstrations of manly strength and endurance, no vials of petrified poo. Flim flam just isn't what it used to be. Alas.

[ecosophia]

AuntLili, you've just succeeded in proving to me that the vegan movement has achieved maturity and a sense of humor about food -- an stage of enlightenment the followers of most diet theories never seem to attain -- and I will therefore make an effort from now on to aim my occasional diet-related pot shots at other targets. Thank you.

As for diet flim-flam, I'm happy to read about it when I'm in a mood for psychoceramic factory seconds, but I dislike it when people make a sustained effort to hijack a conversation and turn it into a venue for their proselytizing. I dislike it even more when they Just. Will. Not. Shut. Up. About. It. So Weston A. Price and his groupies will be laboring under the threat of the almighty ban hammer from here on in, because I'm a curmudgeonly middle-aged git and my patience is wearing thin.

[(Anonymous)]

If you haven't already encuntered him, JMG, I should introduce you to Rhode Island's own legendary and delightful Professor of Psychoceramics, Josiah S. Carberry:

library.brown.edu/hay/carberry.php

and

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_S._Carberry

-- Robert Mathiesen

[ecosophia]

Good heavens. No, I had no idea. I'll have to insert some references to his papers into a novel or two.. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

It's worth noting that lectures are still being announced which Professor Carberry may (or may not) show up to deliver. By now he must be well over a century old, which leads one to wonder just what sort of an Older One or Elder Being he might be behind the genial professorial mask that he wears in public. Hmmm ...

-- Robert Mathiesen

[ecosophia]

...or if he was a good friend of young Charles Dexter Ward, and picked up a few tricks from Ward's friend Dr. Allen. Clearly Brown University needs to sprout a Carberry Hall when I get to work revising The Weird of Hali: Providence later this year...

[auntlili]

Aw, you're very kind. From one curmudgeonly middle-aged git to another, thank you.

[ecosophia]

You're most welcome!

[(Anonymous)]

Your next post should be a series on the one right way to raise other peoples' children.

[ecosophia]

Hmm. I don't really have a dog in that fight, and so haven't followed the yelling, but I'll consider looking into it.

[(Anonymous)]

In my experience, people who haven't raised children are the loudest at explaining how kids should be brought up.- Katsmama

[ecosophia]

Another good argument for me keeping my yap shut on the subject!

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder if this is another symptom of the flight into abstraction: it's easier to deal with "diet" than to pay attention to what we eat, after all....

[ecosophia]

A very good point! It's also a lot easier to choose what you eat on the basis of some collection of abstract rules than it is to pay attention to, and reflect on, your uniquely personal experience of eating.

[aldabra]

I think it's reasonable to keep an eye on whether your delicacy-of-choice is made from harvested newborn baby kidneys, as well as how much you enjoy eating it.

[ecosophia]

And if that seems reasonable to you, by all means do so. I'd encourage you, however, to think twice before subjecting everyone you know to a thirty-minute rant about the evils of eating kidneys, though!

Diet and religion

[(Anonymous)]

I've been following these posts and comments with interest. I thought I'd share some experiences I've had.

Chinese Buddhism absolutely insists upon vegetarianism (it is a bodhisattva precept actually). Any sort of meat product is forbidden to enter the temple property. On top of that, onions and garlic are also contraband, since according to ancient Indian medicine their consumption leads to increased passions and anger. That being said, I've heard amusing stories where some monks put on a t-shirt and sweatpants and drive a few hours to a seafood buffet.

Similarly, in modern India, eating meat is taboo in most communities, but plenty of people who go abroad drop the vegetarianism and happily eat at McDonald's.

I was a committed vegetarian for several years myself, but after suffering amoebic dysentery for about five weeks in Nepal, I found myself craving sushi. I ended up going to Japan for a few months and ate sushi daily. I felt my health recover. I also realized that eating meat once in awhile actually benefited my immune system on the whole. I also took a hard look at my vegan/vegetarian friends and had to acknowledge how often they became ill.

-Jeffrey

Re: Diet and religion

[ecosophia]

Jeffrey, thank you for the data points! Interesting that onions and garlic are forbidden among Chinese Buddhists, too. That was also a rule among the ancient Egyptian priesthood, while they were in temple service -- back in the day, if you were a priest or priestess, you spent one week out of every month doing temple service in what amounted to a monastic environment, and the rest of the month you had off (and could eat onions, let your hair grow, and so on).

[(Anonymous)]

From my perspective, there are two main claims you make in your posts about diet:

1. there is no One True Way of eating for everyone,
2. diet is not such a massively important factor in health.

The first claim is technically true. However, just because a problem is divergent, to use a term from one of your excellent Galabes essays, does not mean that nothing universal can be said about it.

The second one is harder to believe. Our bodies are literally made from the stuff we eat. And when you consider the thousands of people whose lives have been miraculously transformed by finding the right diet for their body...

[ecosophia]

Nicely analyzed. I'd respond as follows. First, while there can indeed be a few things said universally about diet, the proponents of every dietary theory out there seem to be committed to the notion that what can be universalized is their specific theory. Thus a challenge to the entire notion of dietary universals, combined with the suggestion that people eat a wide range of foods and pay attention to the results, has a heuristic function: it makes it a whale of a lot easier to sort through the yelling and sort out for yourself what you personally thrive on.

Second, you seem to be falling into what I've called the One Drop Fallacy, the notion that whatever isn't all the way to one side of a continuum is all the way to the other side: in this case, if I'm not treating diet as the most important thing when it comes to health, I must be treating it as the least important thing. Is diet important? Sure, but I'd argue that it's less important than heredity and the epigenetic factors affecting the expression of heredity, and only about as important as environmental influences on the one hand and psychospiritual influences on the other. If you want to cite the thousands of people whose lives have been improved by finding the right diet, I'd suggest you also need to consider the millions of people who have embraced this or that dietary cure, all the way back to Sylvester Graham et al., and didn't experience any noticeable transformation at all. That argues that while diet can be important in some cases, other factors can be much more important in a great many others.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that it's not exactly easy to sort through the dietary yelling. Over the years, I've come up with a two-part solution to this problem:

1. the first part is the same as yours, that is, I try to pay attention to what I personally thrive on, although I do have to admit that this is easier said than done;
2. the second part is doing trying to synthesize what the different dietary cults seem to have in common. Thus, if there's something that the vegans, the Paleo people and official dietary recommendations agree on, I like to include it in my list of "universals".

Concerning the second point, I cannot agree. You yourself have taught me, through these essays, articles and posts, that the world is far too large and complex for any single person, organization or theory to provide all the answers. How can anyone claim to know how much of a role do different factors play in health?

Health is an abstract concept, often defined as the lack of bodily problems. However, the problems that these bodies of ours can have are diverse. Some problems are almost purely hereditary, others largely environmental, still others can be caused both by genetics and the environment, and for quite a few others, we just don't know.

And if we don't know how much role do different factors play in many of the different ailments, how can we even attempt to answer the same question about health, which is the sum of them all?

[ecosophia]

As far as I can tell, there's precisely nothing that all fad diets agree upon. In fact, I'd like to propose that what's at work here is what I've modestly named Greer's Law of Expertise, i.e., for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. As for your second comment, I confess I'm baffled -- in what way does "there are a lot of different factors affecting health, and food is only one of them" -- which is what I am saying -- conflict in any way with what you've said?

[(Anonymous)]

I've got some Chocolate-Peanut Butter Bars in the oven right now, and that probably offends everyone (including you, because if memory serves you don't like peanut butter). But the problem is actually other people's refusal to recognize the One True Cookie. ;)

I find diet diatribes so tiresome. And it's not just the One True Diet people, it's also people who read all the latest online crackpottery and think it's ALL true. So no matter what you're eating, they're telling you how bad it is for you because this diet forbids carbs and that diet forbids fats and this other diet forbids tomatoes. Tomatoes! And not just because of the screaming.

Maria

[ecosophia]

Oh, I don't find peanut butter offensive, I just loathe it. If you want to eat my share of the world's peanut butter, please enjoy it! As for tomatoes, I'm coming to think that flinging ripe ones at diet cranks may be a healthful habit...

[(Anonymous)]

LOL! I remember reading that ages ago. I put it in the same category as drinking 8 to 10 glasses of water a day. Maybe doable but not desirable. He seems to have lived at the same time other food fanatics (such as John Harvey Kellogg) were recommending eating, drinking or doing stuff that no sane person would really do. It’s interesting that this coincided with a time when businesses were making money hand over fist with wealth getting concentrated in the hands of plutocrats, followed by the disruptions of World War 1, and the last frantic years of the Twenties prior to everything collapsing in a steaming heap with the Depression. It’s pretty obvious that money making lies at the bottom of it all, not anybody’s good health. So a lot of these ‘diets’ will no doubt vanish along with the money as we proceed into catabolic collapse.

JLfromNH

[ecosophia]

An excellent point! Dietary manias also tend to peak during periods of very high income inequality -- there was another huge wave of them during the 1920s. I suspect it's because privileged people get bored easily, and obsessing about diets gives them the opportunity to occupy the empty hours with drama. With any luck, if last week's economic mess continues to unroll in the weeks ahead, we'll hear a lot less about diets in the years to come.

[ecosophia]

By the way, I've had several people try to post rants about their favorite dietary theories here. May I offer a piece of friendly advice? If I've just posted something talking about how I'm irritated by people trying to push their dietary theories on everyone else, don't jump onto that post to try to push your dietary theories on everyone else. That's just going to irritate me more, and I find the best way to relax and get over my irritation is to delete your comment and add you to the list of people who may just get banned outright if they keep on acting like door-to-door evangelists.

[(Anonymous)]

Looks very much like I have fallen foul of that deletion policy despite the fact that my post agreed 100% with yours. It was about how I now see how wrong I had been to try and tell a good friend what he should and should not eat. The subject was "Unrequested advice is seldom welcome." Admittedly I wrote it so the first paragraph would suggest the post was going one way when, in fact, it took quite a different turn. Bit of a literary device there - probably the wrong time to use it: :(

Anyway, it's your gig, you call the shots, and I totally get that. I also didn't sign the piece which I should have; these were painful lessons for me (losing a good friend), though, and I would like to set the record straight.

In admiration for all you do,
Hereward

[ecosophia]

Hereward, I don't recall seeing anything at all by you here. Please resubmit it.

[(Anonymous)]

Strange, Dreamwidth said it had been successfully submitted, anyway it went something like this:

A good friend of mine suffered his entire adult life with Crohn's disease/ulcerative colitis. I regularly used to give him dietary hints and tips I thought could help him. Nearly everything I suggested he ignored, always believing that the doctors would come up with something. One time I suggested he cut back on processed foods to which he replied "But that's what I eat!" Needless to say a couple of years ago he disappeared in a box through the little doors to meet his fiery doom.

This taught me two painful lessons: firstly, the age old 'you can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink,' and secondly that how another person wants to lead his or her life really is none of my business. All the dietary advice I foisted.upon him, however well meant, if anything only served to make him more stubborn. I don't blame myself for his death, but, actually I didn't help him either.

I do miss him, though, he was a good friend.

Diet bores

[(Anonymous)]

The only person who needs to worry about your diet is your mother, if you are a child, or your doctor. If a friend asks about a change in your health or appearance, it is permissible to say: I've (felt better, gained weight, lost weight, been able to exercise longer, slept better, learned French . . . . ) since I started (a vegetarian diet, gave up soda, began to eat more lobster, start each day with a gin and tonic . . . . ) at the advice of (my best friend who did the same, my marathon coach, my doctor, this book I found in the break room at work, my 104 year old granny . . . . ). Don't get defensive if criticized: "well it seems to work for me, let's talk about the Super Bowl", or evangelical (see previous examples given by John Micheal).

One thing to remember in all of this is that, with the exception of synthesized vitamin and mineral supplements, none of this is new. City folk have for centuries fetishized the diets of the rural poor. I am old enough to remember when only eccentric old ladies ate yoghurt, while babbling about its ability to help Bulgarian shepherds live to be 110. One of the earlier forms of the high fat, low carbohydrate diet was known as Banting, after William Banting who was given the advice by his doctor in 1892 and spread the word until many fashionable folk were "Banting." When I Googled "Banting" I expected to find a Wikipedia article, but no, there is a current revival of Banting under the name Real Meal Revolution, with it's own website. Given time I could probably trace an earlier form of every other fashionable diet that has come down the pike in the last forty years.

It is especially entertaining when two current fashions contradict one another. I remember entering my local health food store some forty years ago to find one shelf occupied by liquid diets--all the latest thing; and the other occupied by high fiber diet foods. Some major bakery brought out a high fiber loaf with the natural bran supplemented by treated wood fiber. I remarked to a friend that now we were paying extra for sawdust when they used to execute bakers for adulterating bread. The concurrent popularity of Paleo and vegan would be a contemporary example.

I have a personal theory about extreme changes in diet being followed by healing. Back in the days of the Macrobiotic craze there were several tales of almost miraculous healing of cancer. Well, we know the mind has a major influence on the body. Completely changing ones ordinary diet is a firm message from mind to body. Maybe the immune system receives this as a wake up call. "Hey, immune system, I want to live. I want to live so badly that I'm eating salt plums and seaweed, that I've never done before--take care of this cancer like you're supposed to." And the immune system says, "Right, I can do that." But continuing a diet one had already adopted would not have the same effect, hence the deaths of later disciples and subsequent disillusionment. Dr. Andrew Weil, in his survey of alternative healing systems, observed that such systems seemed to be most effective when they were first introduced--so maybe a body/mind on some sort of suicidal autopilot is best woken out of it by a new idea, whether that is a new system of physical manipulation like chiropractic, or medicine like homeoepathy, or diet. Or a new religion or philosophy.

Rita Rippetoe

Re: Diet bores

[ecosophia]

I could see it! I've also noticed that if you go on a new diet, for the first six months or so you really do feel better. It doesn't seem to matter in the least what the diet is -- it's apparently the change that does it. After six months or so, the effect fades out, but of course by then you've already badgered all your friends about the new diet so constantly that you know you're going to eat crow if you drop it...

Re: Diet bores

[(Anonymous)]

There is some interesting work on how people have a mental bias towards consistency and commitment by Robert Cialdini that seems to apply here. Basically people can be manipulated through sales pitches, advertising and brainwashing (but I repeat myself) by an automatic response to stay consistent with previous commitments. A response can be ratcheted up from vague agreement to undertaking quite onerous obligations. It also appears to work in group and individual cases too.
Let's say someone has publicly proclaimed, and especially if they have written, that 'diet X is the best thing since sliced Y' then even when it stops working for them - they are committed and (click, whir as Cialdini puts its) the automatic response comes out 'diet X is the best thing since sliced Y, and how dare you suggest I am not committed to diet X!'.
Rinse and repeat...

Re: Diet bores

[(Anonymous)]

I don´t know if it´s too late to have my comment observed.
I would suggest that perhaps it has to do with the normal changing of the seasons and consequently the changing of diets in a year, so an old timey person would have large dietary changes throughout the year.
Another thing about the diets of the farmers etc. is that it´s correlated to hard labor, good rest and decent enough perks like sweets or liquor. Maybe it´s not just the diet that keeps those goat herders and farmers and fishermen alive to old age but physical exercise and some luck too.

it's so cute

[fringewood]

We raise and eat our own food, including rabbits and chickens. Most people have little problem eating chickens and/or eggs, but ask them to eat a rabbit and it is akin to saying "have a fried cat leg". We gave a friend of ours some fried rabbit and his wife downloaded a bunch of bunny pictures in protest. Yet a baby goat, sheep or cow is AOK and they are all awfully cute.

We have been vegans, vegetarians, and meat eaters and found that raising and eating our own food works best for us. Every once in awhile we have fish or scallops or shrimp and that is a treat for us since we are unable to raise them ourselves.

We do appreciate your blogs. They make us think, laugh and create conversations.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you ever thought about making a frequently thrown tantrums page on Ecosophia? The one you have up on the Celtic Golden Dawn website is hilarious, and it would be great reading for those of us who read the tantrums lobbed your way with wry amusement, or even let us know about some of the ones that don’t end up making it to the comments page.

-Dan Mollo

[ecosophia]

Hmm! I'll have to think about that. The tantrums I've gotten so far haven't been anything like as predictable as the ones I got as an archdruid, nor, honestly, have they been as funny. Still, maybe the quality of my trolls will improve...

Diet Wars

[(Anonymous)]

There is no true diet but the True Diet, and Colonel Sanders is his prophet.

Re: Diet Wars

[ecosophia]

Swap out the Colonel with a certain Cleveland dentist, and you've got a line that I've been hearing a lot of late...

[thelancrewitch]

Oh, I know. When I was vegan, it was always other vegans that were the worst thing about veganism. Not all of them of course, but inevitably the loudest ones, and therefore the ones who tend to shape public perceptions of veganism. When I realised veganism had completely screwed my metabolism (in an impressively short time - I was only vegan for a year, after having been successfully and healthily vegetarian for the preceding 14 years), and started trying to work out how to fix it and what worked for my body, like you I discovered that there was no shortage of irritating fundamentalists anywhere I looked in the diet world. I suppose it's inevitable that any form of fundamentalism produces backlash, but it does annoy me that, despite the fact that I go out of my way to be as unevangelical as possible about what I eat, and I *never* criticise what other people eat, the very fact that I do have some fairly major health and ethical restrictions means that a lot of people automatically lump me in with the howling food-fundamentalists and react as though the very act of having mostly worked out what works for me is a direct criticism of them. Sigh. It really isn't...

[ecosophia]

Oh, I get that. I don't own or drive a car, and it sometimes takes me a fair amount of talking before people realize that I'm not telling them not to have a car -- I just don't own or drive one.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes! On the subject of "other things matter to your health besides food": I, myself, tried a good handful of cranky diets, trying desperately to cure 10 years of acid reflux. The diets didn't make a dent - despite some sternly evangelical claims - but therapy sure did. Now, I'm not going to get anyone down on the ground with my knee to her chest and preach Therapy at her. I would like to mildly suggest, though, that getting all evangelical about diet might be a cover for a dark mess somewhere else. (On a perhaps unrelated note, the family culture that sent me into therapy is heavily into WAP. Smirk.)

[ecosophia]

A very good point. It's easy to change your diet if that's a way to avoid changing something else...

Diet Wars Not Limited to Human Diets

[(Anonymous)]

I spent the better part of 15 years breeding and showing cats and part of my involvement was subscriptions to the popular cat lists. It never failed that the discussion would periodically get around to which food regimen was best for our feline companions. The discussion would invariably devolve into screaming matches with true believers claiming that raw food or canned food or this or that brand of dry food / canned food or even homemade food was the best and would lead to top show performance and superb health and coat quality. And that all others were tantamount to animal cruelty and abuse. Sometimes these fights would go on for days, and they became known as the Raw Food Wars. The moderators of the lists would eventually have to shut down the discussion completely and admonish participants to cease or take the discussion off list. On some lists the topic of feline diet was banned completely.
I understand that this occurs in the dog world and the pet world, too, probably in no small part aided and abetted by the corporate providers of most of said diets along with their veterinary industry allies.
Food! It's what we eat!
Chuckling at the memories,
Yanocoches in Colorado

diet obsession

[druidtides]

One interesting side effect of living outside the US after living many years inside, is you find the rest of the world doesn't obsess about the same issues. Here in Ireland we happily eat full fat butter, beef, lamb etc and chips from the local chipper. The main criteria people seem to have is that the food actually originates in Ireland or Northern Ireland. This is usually announced proudly by even German imports like LIDL and ALDI. Although we frequent a little vegan cafe in Ennis, its all very low key with none of the pictures of animals being tortured like vegan establishments in Arizona. This may also be due to the majority of livestock grazing peacefully on family farms. Its is thing I recommend to people, spend some time outside the US (not doing a Disney tour as we call them) but actually living in a community for more than a week. You start to realise how neurotic most Americans are. Makes you want to move in with the Amish:-)

Neologisms

[rpc]

Love "ranty-pants"! Is that original? Am I allowed to use it?