Super Foods!
Are There Extra-Healthy Foods That Confer Health?
“Curcumin could save your life!”
“Blueberries can fight dementia!”
“Nuts will help you lose weight!”
Every day there’s a new crop of seemingly life-changing headlines about how the food we eat affects our health.
Often news stories have claimed that foods can offer remarkable health benefits, such as fighting disease or slowing aging. Is it true?
No. Not really. And when you hear claims like this, you can generally trace them back to research financed by and designed for the particular food that’s being promoted.
There is no one food or foods that are guaranteed to create health, to prevent this or that disease, or that by eating this food regularly it will confer some huge benefits.
Rather it is your overall dietary PATTERN that is most important. When you hear about some food or another being critical to good health, that you will live longer if you include it, and avoid this disease or that – you can rest assured that you are getting information paid for by the industry that sells that food.
Is Food Industry-Paid Research Corrupt?
It is almost always biased. Many people who have found their way to a plant-based diet can easily appreciate that the meat and dairy industries pay for research for marketing purposes. And the studies they support inevitably find that meat and dairy are exceptionally healthy foods, and that you would do well to eat them often.
Most vegans know what’s up and reject such mercantile research.
But some of the same vegans have a harder time spotting and rejecting fake research, when the food in question – is vegan. It’s as if they believe, “If a food is vegan, the food company paying for the research is doing accurate unbiased science! Because only meat and dairy companies distort research!”
If only that were true.
Here’s how it works: when the olive oil industry wants to do a study of their product’s healthfulness, they hire a trusted hand. Usually this means a researcher who has already received millions of dollars for olive oil research, and who has repeatedly proven themselves reliable, meaning they deliver findings that help sales of olive oil.
Food companies can’t afford to invest millions in studies, if they can’t be assured of the positive result.
But the truth is, food industry bias in research – whether for animal or vegan foods – is one of the most serious problems in nutrition and health today.
One of the foremost experts on the topic is Professor Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor, of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky (2012) and from the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College (2016).
In her bestselling books, TV appearances and interviews, Prof Nestle has shown again and again – using research – that food companies don’t pay for studies that don’t favor their products. Food company research is marketing, and advertising is not science. And every food product paying for research is the same – companies pushing fruits and veggies use the same biased attempts to make their foods look far more important than reality.
Here is a one-hour interview with Professor Nestle talking about how food companies can literally buy research, pay for findings they are guaranteed to receive by their employees.
Getting sucked into the hype is not good for your health, and leads to diversions and reliance on doctors and “experts” who may not even realize they are simply shilling for industry, rather than providing useful and accurate information.
Watch video:
Should You Follow Superfood Pushers?
People who spend a lot of time trying to deconstruct diet, focusing on a few nutrients, super foods, supplements that are “the key” – the term for such people is “reductionist.”
If the research the reductionists push were actually accurate, it could be valuable.
But it never is. It’s not difficult to dig into studies of nuts, berries, mushrooms, olive oil, avocados, and on and on – and show the research is very weak or skewed.
Even charts purporting to show how much “healthier” one plant-food is over another – are largely bunk. They have been repurposed from other charts never intended for the purpose they’re being used, with a few ounces of “con man” thrown in, to make you believe that what you’re being told is relevant or important.
The truth is, a healthy diet, following calorie density to help prevent OVER-eating – along with other healthy habits – is going to get you where you want to go. Trying to make certain you eat enough of [fill in the food(s)] in order to insure health or long life – is simply a con. What else are they trying to sell you?
Fortunately health is not as complicated as the salesmen want you to believe. Not at all. Eat a variety of healthy plant foods, limit the rich higher calorie foods, and you’re on your way to optimum health. It is not deficiencies or getting “more and more” of some superfood that is going to give benefits.
Here’s an entertaining video making many of the same points:
What Matters Is The “Whole” – T. Colin Campbell PhD.
Professor T. Colin Campbell PhD – lead researcher on The China Study (and author of the same bestseller) talks about the concept of “whole-ism” – the key to health – and which is the opposite of reductionism: