It quickly became clear that “clean eating” was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure. Seemingly out of nowhere, a whole universe of coconut oil, dubious promises and spiralised courgettes has emerged
Bee Wilson
Sugar – a pure carbohydrate, with all fibre and nutrition stripped out – has been part of western diets for just 300 years; in evolutionary terms, it is as if we have, just this second, taken our first dose of it. Saturated fats, by contrast, are so intimately bound up with our evolution that they are abundantly present in breast milk. To Yudkin’s thinking, it seemed more likely to be the recent innovation, rather than the prehistoric staple, making us sick.
Ian Leslie
Nearly a quarter of the adult population in Britain eats a ham sandwich for lunch on any given day. To many, bacon is not just a food; it is a repository of childhood memories, a totem of home. Surveys indicate the smell of frying bacon is one of our favourite scents in the UK, along with cut grass and fresh bread. To be told that bacon had given millions of people cancer was a bit like finding out your granny had been secretly sprinkling arsenic on your morning toast.
Bee Wilson
Advice from the frontline of the war on potatoes.
Dave Bry
We really struggle with uncertainty. We really want to be able to say: ‘Is coffee good or bad for us?’ Well, it’s not good or bad for you, it just is. And we have to accept that; that’s what science says. So your brain goes, ‘I don’t like that level of uncertainty.’ Certainty is really appealing for a lot of people and that’s what a lot of these people are selling – certainly at the darker end.
Tim Lewis
There’s nothing new in cancer scamming. There have always been snake-oil salespeople. There have always been people like Gibson. But where this story differs is her explosion to success, and her incredible reach was made possible by a number of intensely modern forces.
James Robert Douglas
