In the late 19th century doctors claimed an onion in the ear would cure an infection. Today’s quacks are still stretching the link between illness and food. A new documentary, produced by Joaquin Phoenix, who is perhaps best known for his work as a blood-crazed emperor in Gladiator, has it that eating eggs is as bad as smoking, drinking milk causes cancer and meat-eaters have a one-in-three chance of getting diabetes. “The World Health Organisation [WHO] classifies processed meat as a group one carcinogen . . .” muses the film’s narrator. “Was this like I had essentially been smoking my entire childhood?”
The answer, of course, is no. Although on their website the filmmakers painstakingly cite scientific articles for the claims they make, the articles do not always back them up. A link to a paper that supposedly connects eggs to smoking immediately brings up four critical articles published in response. These have titles such as: “Putting eggs and cigarettes in the same basket; are you yolking?” and “Egg on their faces (probably not in their necks); The yolk of the tenuous cholesterol-to-plaque conclusion.”
Other “evidence” is similarly thin: some papers they cite are written by campaign groups, some controversial, and some they seem to have misunderstood. While the WHO does link processed meat to cancer, it does not compare the risk to smoking. One of the film’s claims — that most US children have fatty streaks in their arteries by the age of ten — is indeed backed up by an article in a respectable journal. The article goes on to say that fatty streaks in ten-year-olds’ arteries are entirely normal.
This will not shock many. The British are used to being told their breakfast is killing them or that flawless health awaits with the latest food fad. They are also used to this advice being proved wrong. In the early 2000s, a Scottish nutritionist called Gillian McKeith dominated Britain’s airwaves, her face appeared in health-food shops across the land and she was given an award for educating the public. But her health advice was mostly nonsense. She exhorted the benefits of chlorophyll, a chemical found in plants, saying it “oxygenated the blood”. In fact chlorophyll will make oxygen only in the presence of light. She claimed ageing could be caused by “not having enough DNA” . It cannot. And matters reached their peak on her television show You Are What You Eat, where she was reportedly shown forcing crying fat women to have colonic irrigation, the benefits of which are not backed up by science.
She duly faded from public life, but other bogus eating trends followed. One of the latest is “clean eating”, a near-cult that recommends such delights as wheat-free bread as a path to wellness. Ella Woodward, its high priestess, has warned of the dangers of drinking milk, which she claims can actually cause bones to lose calcium. This would come as a surprise to scientists. Clean eating is now on its way out (Ms Woodward has since deleted all mention of the word “clean” from her blog).
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Similar claims about food and health are bound to follow. But evidence on the subject is necessarily shaky: unlike for medicines, researchers cannot do gold-standard trials where they control everything their subjects eat. Even when conducted responsibly, it is not an exact science. We should take it with a pinch of salt.