While browsing RationalWiki (a website which purports to debunk bad science) it occurred to me that rants are only fun in small doses; so herewith a bit of positivity. Or as close as I’m likely to get to such fluffiness, anyway.
Not so long ago, a bunch of cranks (you can find them on RationalWiki described in even less generous terms) addressed the UK House of Commons regarding the disastrous outcomes of the offical dietary advice. 20 years ago, the idea of Aseem Malhotra and Zoe Harcombe denouncing the NHS before the great and the good would have been unthinkable, so the fact that this even happened suggests that things are about to change.
Zoe, Aseem, and various other doctors and researchers have a very modest proposal: we all ought to be eating proper meals, made from unadulterated ingredients like meat and veg. More specifically, they’re suggesting this:
- Eat whole and organic foods
- Eliminate processed foods, dairy, grains, and legumes
- Edge out bad fats (vegetable oils) with healthy fats (olive and coconut oils, animal fats, eggs, and avocados)
- Aim to consume free-range animals and wild caught seafood
- Introduce bone broths, organ meats, fermented foods, and intermittent fasting into your diet
According to other doctors and researchers, this idea is dangerous, and it should be slapped down forthwith. In their view, the route to eternal life involves processed and synthetic foods like breakfast cereals, margarine, low-fat milk, and vegetable oils. Nevermind that many of the foods that they recommend didn’t even exist until about 100 years ago, or that no human being has ever voluntarily eaten a “low fat diet”. Nevermind that their ideas don’t actually work in practice. The foods that humans have eaten for countless millennia are bad and unhealthy, and must be replaced by things pumped out of factories.
Fortunately, though, it seems that eyebrows are finally being raised. Some of the old codgers who sit in the Houses of Parliament remember the days when a bacon-and-eggs breakfast or a Sunday Roast was considered a healthy, filling meal, as opposed to a “heart attack on a plate”. They perhaps remember various scandals about margarine being linked to metabolic diseases. Hopefully, to them, the modern po-faced diet of preservative-laced fake bread, boiled vegetables, and cardboard breakfast cereals just feels inherently wrong, and they might feel inclined to do something about it.