"There's been a LOT about why RFK Jr is a terrible pick, but I want to
focus on something that is very concerning to me, but no one seems to be
mentioning.
He appeals to a widespread, common-sense idea that the problem with our
food is that it has "lots of artificial ingredients". Get the artificial
ingredients out — no chemical additives! no food dyes! no high fructose
corn syrup! — and our health problems magically resolve.
This is 100% incorrect, and fundamentally misunderstands the problems with our food system.
And that would reduce consumption. Like a tax!
That's it. That's the whole problem. It has precisely nothing to do with food dye or high fructose corn syrup.
*taps earpiece* What's that? You say they're already on it?
People want easy answers to complicated problems. We want to believe that Haagen-Dazs "Five" is the solution to our problems.
Five simple natural ingredients! Free ice cream for everyone now that
it's only got five natural ingredients, and sugar instead of corn syrup!
That's not how it works. But someone like RFK Jr. encourages this simplistic, misguided approach.
At any rate, I've been on this beat for a decade. Here's a piece I wrote in 2015 that explains how these misconceptions work.
For the fun TL;DR, scroll down to the bottom of the piece, where you can
see the fake diet I invented, and click on how I exploited
misconceptions to make it sound plausible.
This tweet is a perfect example of how RFK Jr. will encourage the kind of misunderstanding I'm talking about here.
Is sugary cereal "healthier" than hamburgers?
Well, I'll tell you this much — the reason sugary cereal is bad has
nothing to do with the screenshot of chemically-sounding ingredients.
The implication is that stricter European standards for food products make for foods that are healthier, sate you more quickly, etc.
But is that the reason? Or is it possible there are other reasons?
I
happen to be familiar with this kind of argument because I heard it a
lot when I was writing about gluten. People who were gluten-free in the
US — notably not people with celiac disease — would say that in Europe
they were able to eat bread with gluten, because it was [insert claim:
organic, different gluten levels, whatever].
The truth is that in both cases, the answer to the mystery has nothing
to do with the food. It has to do with the change in context.
1. They are paying more attention to what they eat and changing their habits. If you are eating unhealthfully, just doing those things will, unsurprisingly, improve your diet! You could go keto, or go vegan: As long as you are fundamentally changing your (previously unhealthy) diet, you're going to feel much better.
2. You feel empowered! The change makes you feel like you can do something. That you are doing something. That what was once hopeless is now possible. And that makes you feel really good. It's important!
Well, there's another possibility:
You're in a different context. You're not at your office, next to the vending machine. You don't have access to the same stores and restaurants. You have to fundamentally change up your (previously unhealthy) eating habits. And that is going to make you feel better! If you are consuming less calorie-dense food, less frequently, you'll also lose weight.
Not only that, but often people are going to Europe on vacation. They're walking around! They're relaxed! They're not stress-eating from their fridge and their pantry, because they don't have a fridge or pantry and they're not stressed!
In my opinion, the choice between the two explanations is crystal clear. I usually really enjoy responding to everyone but it's impossible right now. One more response to something I keep hearing: "Well, maybe you're right, but at least RFK Jr. wants to do something about our unhealthy food in general!"
This is truly the weirdest take. For decades medical professionals have been calling for drastic changes to our food culture. The much reviled food pyramid, while wrong about the relative dangers of fat, did NOT recommend eating as many Twinkies as possible.
There have been many, many attempts at targeting soda consumption (with taxes, by trying to get celebrities to not endorse it).
There have been many attempts to stop companies from advertising sugary foods to kids, or making it seem like they are healthy.
And...you're not going to believe this, but almost all of these advocates didn't take unfounded positions on "artificial vs. natural" or the danger of "chemicals" and vaccines, or the virtues of hydroxychloroquine.
Sure, some of RFK Jr.'s desired changes are reasonable! If he were the first person to come up with them, I'd be very impresssed.
But he's not. He's one of many, and the way he came to his positions, along with all the other positions he holds that are ridiculous, make him completely unfit to be advising the nation on how to eat more healthfully.
Why does Canada, which regulates food more or less like the US, have an obesity rate that's 12% lower than the US? 🤔
The answers are complicated, but I'll tell you what isn't the answer: The relative levels of "artificial" ingredients in these countries' foods!
At one point, he claimed, "I'm going to live to be 100, unless I'm run down by some sugar-crazed taxi driver."
The interview never aired, however, because Rodale had a heart attack onstage, right after the interview ended, and died.
You cannot make this stuff up.
Rodale Press continues to pump out books full of nutrition and health misinformation, just like their founder would have wanted!
Here's a very anti-establishment physician who was adamantly against lockdowns during the pandemic, discussing how RFK Jr. comes to his conclusions:"
Related: How 'Diet Gurus' Hook Us With Religion Veiled In Science
"As a scholar of religion, it's become increasingly clear to me that when it comes to fad diets, science is often just a veneer. Peel it away and you find timeless myths and superstitions, used to reinforce narratives of good and evil that give meaning to people's lives and the illusion of control over their well-being.
Take the grain-free monks of ancient China. (My specialty is classical Chinese thought.) Like all diet gurus, these monks used a time-tested formula. They mocked the culinary culture around them, which depended on the so-called wugu, or "five grains."
According to the monks' radical teachings, conventional grain-laden Chinese diets "rotted and befouled" your organs, leading to early disease and death. By avoiding the five grains, you could achieve perfect health, immortality, clear skin, the ability to fly and teleport. Well, not quite. To fully realize the benefits of the monks' diet, you also had to take proprietary supplements, highly technical alchemical preparations that only a select few knew how to make. All of this may sound eerily familiar: Look no further than modern anti-grain polemics like Dr. David Perlmutter's Grain Brain — complete with its own recommended supplement regimen.
Despite basic logic and evidence to the contrary, the philosophy of the grain-free monks gained popularity. That's because then, as now, the appeal of dietary fads had much to do with myths, not facts. Chief among these is the myth of "paradise past," an appealing fiction about a time when everyone was happy and healthy, until they ate the wrong food and fell from grace.
The Chinese monks represented this "fall" as the discovery of agriculture. In Abrahamic religion, it was eating from the tree of knowledge. In either case, bad food is routinely scapegoated as the original cause of our damnation, and we've been trying to eat our way back to paradise ever since.
The mythic narrative of "unnatural" modernity and a "natural" paradise past is persuasive as ever. Religious figures like Adam and Eve have been replaced by Paleolithic man and our grandparents: "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," is journalist Michael Pollan's oft-quoted line.
The story also has a powerful moral dimension. It's the Prince of Evil, after all, who tempted Eve. Once secularized, Satan reappears as corporations and scientists who feed us chemical additives, modern grains and GMOs, the "toxic" fruits of sin. (No matter if science doesn't agree that any of these things are very toxic.)
Paradise past. Good and evil. Benevolent Nature with a capital N. The promise of nutritional salvation. After you've constructed a compellingly simple narrative foundation, all you have to do is wrap your chosen diet in scientific rhetoric.
For Chinese monks, that rhetoric involved "five phases theory." For ancient Greeks and Romans it was "humors" — four fluids thought to be the basis of human health. Now it is peer-reviewed studies. Thankfully for diet gurus, the literature of nutrition science is vague, vast and highly contested — just like religious texts — making it easy to cherry-pick whatever data confirm your biases."
