11 Quotes by Alan Levinovitz

Most beliefs about gluten, fat, sugar, and salt have little basis in fact and everything to do with a powerful set of myths, superstitions, and lies, which, despite modern scientific progress, have remained unchanged for centuries.

Skepticism doesn’t generate clear rules. There’s no such thing as a sarcastic food pyramid.

Science is a way of understanding reality that relies on observation and experiment instead of moral judgments and intuition. But science is practiced by humans, and humans can never fully bracket their irrational motivations. Researchers and doctors fear death and disease just like everyone else.

Too often, “established facts” like the dangers of saturated fat are not facts at all, but intuitively plausible conjectures that attract disproportionate amounts of attention and research. And their plausibility, in large part, comes from an unacknowledged appeal to myths and magical thinking.

We have the right to know what’s actually going on with our bodies, and we shouldn’t have to abandon our favorite foods if there’s nothing wrong with them.

That’s because then, as now, the appeal of dietary fads had to do with myths, not facts. In the case of the Daoists, grain prohibition represented rejection of modern culture and the promise of return to a mythic natural paradise. Suffering, disease, and death were ineradicable aspects of the present, so monks explained their dietary practices with an appealing fiction about a preagricultural paradise past.

Put simply: in some cases, eliminating gluten is just a proxy for cooking at home and cutting down on junk food. No one wants to cut down on foods they like. But when weight loss in itself is insufficient motivation, thinking that your favorite foods cause autism, foggy brain, and Alzheimer’s can provide the boost you need to make good on your diet.

To begin eating a forbidden food means becoming a member of the group you once defined as inferior and unclean.

While his thesis about what causes weight gain remains highly controversial – Taubes himself admits it requires further evidence – his case against the demonization of saturated fats was right on target.