Why So Much Nutrition Writing is Useless

Or downright dangerous!

“Eat for fuel, not for fun,” chirped the author, concluding a list of weight-loss strategies on some now-forgotten diet tome or website.

You read that right.

Gastronomy is a multi-billion dollar industry. Outlets cover the planet, from Michelin Star restaurants to hearth-fired huts; exotic and high-end markets sell intricately sourced and prepared foods. Enough cookbooks are published every week to fill the Library of Congress. Several TV networks feature food and cooking, as do more websites than can be counted.

“…For human beings, food transcends biological needs and has long been an integral part of social life and culture”, wrote the World Bank’s Director of Agriculture, Martin Van Nieuwkoop.

Rather than appreciate food as cuisine, let’s follow that nameless author’s advice. We can pretend to be astronauts. We’ll drink Tang and eat our coq au vin, Peking duck, and ceviche verde from toothpaste tubes.

Urging writers to seek advice from successful contributors, Medium gurus offer the analogy: You wouldn’t accept dieting advice from a fat person, right?

Maybe we should.

Because there’s no doubt in my mind, whoever suggested treating food as fuel never battled excess weight. As advice goes, it’s not the worst. It’s not a call to resume suttee or put lead compounds back into paint. A lot of famous people didn’t care about food. For example, Abraham Lincoln thought so little about eating he would spend all day gradually eating a single apple.

Then there’s, I don’t know…?

Genghis Khan?

It’s hard to picture the Great Khan fussing over what to have for dinner.

But then he did invent Mongolian Barbecue.

The problem with treating food as fuel only is that for the majority it’s unachievable. While we’re at it, why don’t we decide sex is only for procreation and sports for staying in shape?

Thin people offer lousy advice because what the hell do they know, or care, about weight loss? Someone who used to be fat but is now slender might be a better source. But first, make sure they haven’t had bariatric surgery or are lying about it.

Bear in mind, too, that most people who lose weight eventually find it again. I have. Several times.

I was a tiny baby who spent several weeks in an incubator. My mother holds me while seated outdoors on a chaise lounge in my first post-adoption photograph. She was an average-size woman, but I nearly block her out of view, I was so massive at 11 months. “Her little Buddha,” she called me.

Thenceforth my weight fluctuated. Mostly I was a fat kid. Our family doctor, a veteran of the AEF, said there was only one exercise you needed to know. Then he would mime pushing something away from his torso.

I.e., pushing yourself away from the dinner table.

Haha! Clever shit.

My mother’s weight loss strategy came into play when we visited one of the original McDonald’s in San Berdoo. Remember, the Golden Arches? “Just tell them to make your Big Mac without the bread in the center,” she told me. So I made the order. Got funny looks in return. While the rest of the family went back to the car to eat, I stood by the take-out window for about twenty minutes, waiting for them to fire a new batch and do my special order. I felt like the biggest fool ever while an endless line of customers passed.

That was the only time we drove fifty miles to the original McD’s. You can probably imagine how much weight I lost from eating that one Big Mac without the bread in the center.

The rest of the time, they just policed, inconsistently, whatever I ate.

“You don’t need to eat that!”

“Why don’t you eat a piece of fruit instead?”

Twenty years later, I worked for The Prudential in their Woodland Hills office. I’d encounter some friendly co-workers in the company’s excellent cafeteria. They always commented on whatever someone else was eating. Before long, I wound up taking my lunch breaks in the men’s room, reading the graffiti as I ate.

To this day I can’t stand having anyone, even my wife of 41 years, comment on what I’m eating.

I don’t blame my parents because they grew up during a period when obesity in the US was uncommon. People followed diet fads to improve their intelligence or reduce masturbation. Fat wouldn’t become an epidemic until someone got the bright idea that dietary fat levels were the principal culprit in not only heart disease but weight gain. The USDA’s 1992 food pyramid reinforced the sheer wickedness of fats.

Industry piled on.

Obesity went from being a problem to an epidemic.

Telling people to stop enjoying food might be useless advice, but at least it’s harmless. The low-fat fad, on the other hand, was quite harmful.

Diets and dietary fads seem endemic in the US, perhaps because, as Harold McGee suggests in his classic, On Food and Cooking, the US has no particular culinary traditions of its own.

Nevertheless, that’s no excuse for not understanding food and cooking basics before spouting off.

I’m a fat guy, midway between my highest weight and my ideal. When my weak peaked, at 330 lbs several years ago I decided to try Atkins. I took it seriously and wound up losing 120 lbs in about a year. I looked and felt good.

But the mere sight of a protein made me want to flee. I started baking scones every morning. I’d photograph the finished product for stock. Then I’d eat them. Needless to say, my weight bounced back. Not all the way, but enough.

I think the would-be dieter can learn more from my mistakes than from someone who just copies diet tips from back-issues of Self and Men’s Health.

Another bit of advice, this time pertaining to low sodium diets, appeared on an American Heart Association sanctioned website. The author proposed not using salt when cooking and “letting your family season their food at the table.”

Reducing salt intake is essential for people diagnosed with salt-sensitive hypertension or heart failure. But the author seems not to realize its role in developing and unifying flavors. Complex dishes taste both dull and overbright without salt; baked goods will be bland, and starches flavorless without the use of salt before or during cooking.

Imagine baking a saltless cake, then serving it with a salt shaker on the side.

There are strategies and substitutes available for people who require reduced sodium intake. E.g., searing meats well emphasizes umami, which can mask the absence of salt, and acids such as lemon juice can enrich starch flavors. But foremost, you have to recognize the need to substitute — that simply not using salt will produce food no one wants to eat.

Why would anyone follow an author’s advice too clueless or lazy to avail himself of basic facts?

So, yeah. I’ll heed those Medium gurus who have a million or so followers. But spare me advice from people whose pulse never raced approaching a bathroom scale or think McDonald’s French fries don’t taste any different after they changed to frying in canola oil.