The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully

218 Pages·2017·4.02 MB·English

by  Aaron Carroll

CONTENTS
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Butter
Meat
Eggs
Salt
Gluten
GMOs
Alcohol
Coffee
Diet Soda
MSG
Non-Organic Foods
Conclusion: Simple Rules for Healthy Eating
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Footnotes
Copyright © 2017 by Aaron Carroll Foreword copyright © 2017 by Nina Teicholz Illustrations © Jim
Tierney
All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
[email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-544-95256-0
Cover design by Jim Tierney

eISBN 978-0-544-95257-7
v1.1017

Portions of this book appeared, in different form, in the New York Times.

This book presents the ideas and opinions of its author. It is not intended to be a substitute for consultation
with a professional health care practitioner. Readers should consult with their health care practitioner before
adopting any of the dietary suggestions contained in this book. The publisher and the author disclaim
responsibility for any adverse effects resulting directly or indirectly from information contained in this
book.
For Aimee,
because she doesn’t get nearly enough credit.
She also makes everything in my life better—even what I eat.
FOREWORD
W
E live in hard times for people who simply want to eat—normally, that
is, in a way that would be recognizable to our ancestors, aiming for no
more than a tasty meal, eaten to satisfaction, with a feeling of pleasure. Now,
instead, we sit down to dinner in trepidation, our heads swirling with a chorus of
wasps whispering, Eat only good foods; beware the bad. This moral freight has
weighed so heavily on our food choices that one would expect insurrection to be
just around the corner. And, indeed, here it is: The Bad Food Bible, a satisfying
book that challenges the very notion of food morality and frees us up for some
seriously delicious, sinful eating.
Dr. Aaron Carroll is no knee-jerk heretic. A thoughtful professor of pediatrics
who came to the field of nutrition on a simple quest to learn how better to advise
his patients, as well as improve his own diet, he found himself mired in the
inevitable, dizzying array of experts with “radically different opinions” about
diet, doused in heavy, judgmental language. We don’t need an opinion poll to
know that Americans are weary of feeling guilty and confused about their food
choices. Carroll feels the same, and in his efforts to drill down to some
nutritional terra firma, he’s taken a refreshingly rigorous scientific approach.
That is to say, Carroll earns his contrarian views the hard way. Not only does
he dig into a great deal of scientific literature, but, more important, he also
weighs and prioritizes it. This is a far more rare and valiant feat than you might
imagine.
One of the biggest problems in nutrition over the past fifty years has been how
all data—the good and bad, the weak and strong, alike—have been stirred into
one big, undifferentiated pot. Evidence from so-called observational studies,
which can only show associations, has been given equal footing with a more
rigorous kind of data, from randomized controlled trials. As Carroll explains,
only the latter can demonstrate cause and effect, and only the latter can
justifiably be used for population-wide nutrition recommendations. Yet health
experts have strayed far from this narrow path.
Like most things, this homogenization of data started off with good intentions.
Given the complexities of trying to figure out how a lifetime of dietary and
lifestyle habits drive disease or death decades later, nutrition science has long
been notoriously difficult. It began in the 1950s. Although the data from this
period were poor, the rising tide of cardiovascular deaths over previous decades
pressured experts into saying something about a disease-proof diet. So they did,
based on premature findings—with the result being that much of the early advice
was simply wrong.
As Carroll writes, “Scientists and doctors are often guilty of acting without
sufficient evidence—of making recommendations without having sufficient
facts. Most of the time, they’re trying to do the right thing. But in some cases,
their efforts can have the opposite effect.”
That, he says, is the “dirty little secret of medical science.”
Carroll discusses the original, big mistakes—on butter, meat, eggs, and salt—
in the opening chapters of this book. These long-standing, seemingly rock-solid
pillars of conventional dietary wisdom have toppled, either partially or
completely, in recent years. As of 2015, American health authorities have
dropped their caps on dietary cholesterol—the reason we avoided eggs and
shellfish for decades. And over the past five years, teams of researchers all over
the world have challenged long-held beliefs about whether “lower is better”
regarding salt and whether our avoidance of meat and butter is based on solid
evidence. The science on all these points, it turns out, is far from settled.
With fascinating detail, Carroll also tackles more recent disputes over
genetically modified organisms (GMOs), organic foods, diet soda, gluten,
alcohol, and more. These are all topics on which nutrition science has made
substantial advancements, yet old habits remain, with many health experts still
sifting hard data indiscriminatingly into soft. Carroll is a warm and engaging
guide, with funny stories to share about his own eating habits and those of his
family, but when it comes to the science, he takes no prisoners. On each of these
contested topics, he weighs the evidence carefully and follows the data, even
when they lead to conclusions that are inconvenient or unpopular.
On diet soda, for instance, he writes, “I don’t think that letting my children
drink diet soda once in a while makes me a monster, but apparently some people
do.” What’s more, people seem “to object to the diet even more than to the
soda.” Yet we know more about the dangers of sugar than artificial sweeteners,
he notes, and the occasional diet soda isn’t going to kill anyone.
This is just one example of the fearmongering that Carroll chides. This
demonization of certain foods is fanned by advocacy groups and experts alike,
and leaves ordinary people susceptible to terrible advice about their diets. Food
phobias paralyze people, to the point where they literally don’t know which
supermarket aisle to walk down. This uncertainty turns out to be the perfect
culture in which ideology, industry tricks, and commonplace charlatanism
flourish, leading to diets of all kinds based less on basic nutrition than on
aspirations, passion, and, yes, even the freedom from sin.
Maybe it’s ironic that Carroll calls his book a food bible when the only
preaching he’s doing is good old-fashioned science, but his ultimate point is that
we should back away from faith-based eating and just eat real food—you know,
the kind that our ancestors would have recognized. Plus, perhaps, the occasional
diet soda, if you want. No guilt.
“Eating is one of the great joys of life. Don’t let people use misinformation or
bad science to deprive you of the pleasure of good food,” Carroll writes. Amen
to that.

NINA TEICHOLZ

Nina Teicholz is an investigative journalist and author of the international and
New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise. The Economist named it a top
science book of 2014, and it was also named a 2014 Best Book by the Wall
Street Journal, Forbes, Mother Jones, and Library Journal. Before taking a deep
dive into researching nutrition science, Teicholz was a reporter for NPR and also
contributed to many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New
York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and the Economist. She
attended Yale and Stanford, where she studied biology and majored in American
studies. She has a master’s degree from Oxford University and served as
associate director of the Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development
at Columbia University. She lives in New York City.