Day 33, when I notice that nutrition is becoming a form of social control

Geez, for something that’s, basically, personal, diet is REALLY emotionally charged. I mean like on a level with religion and politics. I mean like “if you don’t eat like I eat, you’re a bad person who’s [killing the planet/killing your children] and must be stopped” charged.

In the past few weeks, I’ve watched 3 documentaries, each claiming to be the revealed truth about the only sensible way to eat.

What the Health (inanely subtitled “the Health Film that Health Organizations don’t want you to see”) makes the argument, using “studies” from sources as diverse as The American Journal of Cardiology, WebMD.com, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and Facebook, that the only healthy diet is a vegan one. Its claims include:

 

1Meat causes most cases of cancer and diabetes

• Eating meat and dairy causes immediate inflammation and stiffening of the arteries and leads to all heart attacks and strokes
• Eating an egg a day has the same effect on your longevity as smoking 5 cigarettes a day 
•    The American heart association, diabetes association, and cancer associations are all aware that meat and dairy are poison but continue to promote them due to influence by rich meat and dairy producers
• Meat production is racist.
• The fact that dairy is still on the government’s nutrition pyramid is institutionalized racism
• If you eat meat, you’re a huge contributor to global warming 
• All the powers that be know this, but hide it from us
• Every trustworthy study proves this

I was left with zero doubt that the producers of this movie believe every word of this. And if you truly think that meat and dairy are killing us as individuals and as a planet, how can you not become radicalized?

If I thought these things were true (they seriously lost me when they went on and on about how the egg industry funded all the studies that said eggs were good for you, and the sugar industry funded all the studies that said chocolate was good for you, but completely neglected to mention who funded the studies that they agreed with), I’d do whatever I could to force everyone to eat the way I thought they should eat. Whether it took using the government as a club or actual violence, I’d HAVE to stop the rest of the idiots it the world from killing themselves. Anything else would be immoral.

Then, last night, I watched The Perfect Human Diet. The cover photo of the piece of steak on a fork clued me in that it might not be as pro-vegan as the other movie, and I was right. Its claims are:

• Humans cannot be healthy without eating what we evolved to eat starting 2 million years ago: meat
• Were it not for eating meat, our brains could not have grown to their current size and sophistication and as we eat less meat, our brains are shrinking
•   Nutritionists knew up until the 60s that the best way to lose weight was to eat meat and green vegetables, and the reason we’re so fat now is that we eat far too much grain and sugar
• Grain and sugar cause diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, and keep us from absorbing minerals we need
• Vegans aren’t healthy enough to survive any real stress
•    Beans are bad, too
• If you want optimal health, you must eat meat, period
• Every trustworthy study on evolution and nutrition agrees with this

While my confirmation bias made me much more accepting of this movie, I also had some doubts about some of its assertions; I mean, the primary commonalities between the diets of people living in so-called blue zones (areas where a relatively high percentage of the population lives to be 90-100) is that they eat some combination of beans and grains, and use meat more as a condiment than a main course.

In any case, what aggressive delivery of these dueling messages really demonstrates me is how incredibly charged eating philosophies have become. As in many other areas in our culture today, we seem to think we have the right to tell other people what to do because we’re 100% sure we know better, and are in the right.

And like so many other things, we have to give other grown up human beings the right to be ignorant of the “real facts”, and to do things that they DO know are bad for them, and to deal with the consequences of such decisions themselves, without society stepping in to fix it for them.

We’re going to have to accept that, despite all the “facts” and “studies” and “statistics” we can dredge up to prove that our side is the right side and anyone who disagrees is not just incorrect, but morally reprehensible and also mean, there’s a good chance that our truth isn’t THE truth.

The more I examine what’s going in in the media, the more looks to me as if the food/diet/nutrition arguments are just becoming another form of social control, and that the occasional head-scratcher of a regulation (It’s illegal to sell sodas larger than 16 oz!! Because we’re protecting people from themselves!! And they’re not smart enough to buy TWO sodas!!) will soon become the norm. And why not? Isn’t it our job as a society to fix other people, especially those who aren’t smart enough/educated enough/sophisticated enough to do what’s right for themselves?

The answer to that is no. We’re all free to make arguments, and make noise, and make movies to sway people to our side, but at the point that we start to use coercion—either actual violence or the bullying power of government—to force others to act in the way WE think is best, it’s us who’ve become the unethical ones.

Live and let eat, people.