…In fact, there is probably no branch of medicine more difficult or complicated than nutrition science, a complexity that plays out in the endless controversies about what — and how much — we should eat…
[…]
…We embrace one food taboo after another, a habit that clinical psychologists condemn as conducive to disordered eating.
The truth is that the real dietary demons are not so-called toxic foods: They are powerful persistent fictions that we treat as truth. The latest set of gurus pollutes our culture with new versions of the same timeless falsehoods. Gluten belongs to the fallen present, not paradise past. If you eat fat, you will become fat. Processed sugar is “unnatural.” These falsehoods produce paralyzing anxiety about food and a constant stream of contradictory claims about what we should eat, which in turn erodes public faith in the enterprise of science itself…
