She Blinded Me With Bad Science

In my quest to find The Truth About Food, I have gone a little insane. Most of my exploration can be divided into three categories:

1) Mainstream diet resources
2) Science-focused resources
3) Documentaries on Netflix

I should be a good little academic and declare my biases right from the start. I have always favored hard scientific data. In general, I think that diet books are a crock of horse crap. Documentaries fall somewhere in the middle - some are essentially hard science being presented in a visual way that is easy to understand, while others are practically fiction.

That said, if my research has taught me anything, it’s that science can be just as full of crap as fad diet books.

My idealist brain desperately wanted to believe that if it was real research conducted by real scientists, the results would be reliable almost-facts. What I naievely didn’t count on was the political influence of large food corporations and organizations like the National Dairy Council.

To give an example of this influence, let’s take a look at milk, something I have dearly loved my whole life. Milk has always brought to mind images of happy cows being hand-milked on small farms in the country. I think this is mostly because of some second grade field trip that I hardly remember, but the image has stuck with me and it makes it hard for me to see milk for what it is: a product that has been aggressively marketed, lobbied for, and politically endorsed despite its questionable suitability for human consumption. This doesn’t mean that I’ve decided to cut milk products from my diet entirely (cheese! and CHEESECAKE!), but I am reconsidering it in a new light now that I know about the schemings of the National Dairy Council.

How can I possibly trust research about milk that has been funded by the National Dairy Council, who has a significant monetary stake in the results? Especially when they turn around and use the results of that research to pressure the FDA to increase the recommended daily intake of dairy products, thus increasing the profit of NDC members everywhere? Call me stupid, but my faith in the scientific process blinded me to the ways in which politics and profit affect what we
eat. Knowing that the government and these big businesses are playing with our health makes me want to boycott these products out of protest and only buy from local farmers.

Of course, the one thing I did know about scientific research is that two people can look at the same results and come to completely different conclusions. Any book about food is going to take the same body of research and pitch their own version of events. However, I have come across several newer books that seem to be soundly based in unbiased science and, better yet, all corroborate each others’ stories. Those books will be the topic of my next post. Stay tuned.