“Jack Sprat could eat no fat, His wife could eat no lean:
And so betwixt them both, you see, they licked the platter clean.”
…a very old aphorism.

Seems like somebody once upon a time knew more than today’s “experts” about food, particularly the role of fat. Could it be that food is a cultural phenomenon and suffers under the abstraction of science? What’s more, is the “one-size-fits-all” modicum actually dangerous in terms of our health and dietetics.?

Read this latest piece from the “experts” about food, particularly fat. We are told with all authority that the fatwa HA on fat has been lifted.  Not even a “sorry, we were 100% wrong”. It is now ok to eat the cream and drink the full-fat milk. Yes, the exact opposite advice to what the nutriboffins have been chanting for 30 years….despite fact that populations were getting fatter!?

You could be excused for not knowing this actually happened about 10 years ago, but the low-fat furphy will take a long time to die, as the “steak” through the “heart”  of the Count has just left us with his victims…everywhere.

Doctors, untrained in nutrition, will still issue low-fat dietary advice, based on the science of their peers, as will other medical professionals, unaware that the meta  studies long ago showed no statistical correlation between dietary fat and either CHD or CVD.

The supermarket shelves drip with low-fat anything, eagerly purchased by the unfortunates who equate fat with being fat….a trope evilly pushed by the industry….what industry? In case you hadn't noticed, low fat means squllions of dollars for food corporations.

Call me cynical, but is there a relationship between the low-fat “science” and industry…and agriculture?. Could this be a very gigantic conspiracy?…..very possibly, given what we now know about science for sale through Steven Mirowski and others. 

This could have been the first of the multi-level (yes, vampire squid fans ) scams, a whole new industry incorporating business at every level from marketing to agriculture…all those oilseed crops to make that “vegetable oil” which just rots your brain and anaesthetises your palate.

Where was the science?….well, arguing. Yudkin, the British scientist, who got it right, was bullied out of town by the Americans.  The “bad science” won…really?…so how could anybody possibly trust food science at all, when for 30 years they have been peddling incorrect advice about food and eating?

It’s a very good and troubling question.

Out of all the studies, the only real advice nutritional science can give, is to fall back on the “Mediterranean diet”, which is problematic as this “diet” is dying out, being replaced by the WPD (western pattern diet), which wherever it has gone, has left populations sick and overweight and corporations wealthy.

The “med diet” is a cultural phenomenon, evolved to suit climate and environment (terroir), from only local food, with numerous local variants, out of which, the nutriboffins have decided that its the olive oil, so we have the “trust me I'm a doctor” bore, pouring it over everything…another myopic singularity.

Okinawan centenarians have never heard of olive oil…oh well, another singularity, must be the yams.

The “med diet” was definitely not evolved by food scientists. It was created by people, yes with necessity, but also with emotion. What food scientists are missing, is the glaringly obvious…the pattern. All good eating is evolved from climate and culture, not (modern) science, and it includes the alchemy, yes, of cooking..

Except for the arctic, all traditional cultures ate mainly whole grains as the basic food, with meat and or dairy and vegetables and  pulses and fruit and nuts and seeds…the Med diet, but each nation had its climatic and cultural  variants on the theme Some eat bread (real bread), others eat couscous or rice or corn or buckwheat etc etc.

That all traditional diets factored in the protein-meshing of cereals and pulses (which provides complete protein if eaten together) , granted through bitter experience, some inherent proto-science was definitely at work. To think that the major world cultures didn't understand the relationship between food and health is ludicrous, especially if you take the time to study the dietary modalities associated with say Indian Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese TCM. As Needham says, the Chinese were arguing (scientifically) about the difference between polar and magnetic North while Europeans believed the earth was flat.

In the traditional modalities, dietary fat was of utmost importance, to put on and in you. In humeral medicine, scoffed at by nutriboffins, fat was essential to settle or relax and nourish certain types. Little or no fat can exacerbate mental derangement, it was thought, which draws a neat Venn diagram of the low fat era and autism spectrum disorders. Conjecture, anecdote, but if the modern scientists palpably got it wrong, what is the harm of looking outside the medical box, especially as that area is replete with the precious teacher, experience.

For modern science to come along, discrediting thousands of years of distilled experience, by able scholars, is an arrogance we cannot afford, especially with growing and eating food.

Just as an example of where we are with food science, Who eats “proteins”, or more to the point, where are they grown and by whom? I have never seen a field of protein, or seen it for sale at the farmers markets, Sainsburys even. “May I have a kilo of calories please?”

So why do we keep de-naturing our ideas about food, creating a singularity which doesn't exist at all….except in concert with the other singularities, “carbohydrate”, vitamins etc etc, all very convenient for the maths equation food is being forced to align with, but utterly useless in vivo, and so so confusing for the everyday eater who would like to eat well and avoid disease, and has to swallow this supposedly scientific advice about food.

According to the piece, nutritional science has now discovered what they call “The whole eating pattern”. Yes, pause for cynical reverie. Its no longer just about one food in particular, the lascivious cream or the evil egg, but surprise surprise, all of these work together to create “The whole eating pattern”, aka food.

All good science is a work-in-progress not a cook book of recipes, so in one respect it is fortunate to see some food scientists embracing the visceral reality of food and eating.

All new nutritional science students should do 2 years in gastronomy first, to get them used to the idea that this is food, we eat it and have all sorts of emotional relationships with it, which aren't about calories or carbs, but which definitely includes fats.

-JD