Aug 12 2008
You Aren’t What You Eat
Certainly, no thoughtful person would take the saying, “you are what you eat,” literally. The sushi-lover is not raw tuna fish, the barbecue-nut is not sticky ribs, the vegan not a warm bowl of bland rice. (Oops, I guess my personal tastes slipped into that last sentence.) But maybe our diet does indeed influence who we are.
I doubt it. However, if the statement were reworded as, “our diet can influence our health,” I would agree. It may even influence our mental health.
I once had a relative tell me that a your diet is responsible for your physical health and your mental health as well. If you are having a problem with either of these, it must be your diet. Clearly this hypothesis is too simple to be true. More importantly, there’s a truckload of evidence stacked against it.
But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to fire all doctors and psychiatrists and instead just have a primary care dietitian. “Joe, you’ve got to eat more carrots and fewer corn dogs.”
Does food influence health? In extreme circumstances, it definitely does. Not enough vitamin a, b, or c, and you will have troubles. But to know if diet does influence health, we can’t merely dream up a hypothesis and leave it at that. To determine if x influences y, the relation must be tested.
Two recent articles over at ScienceDaily highlight that essential point.
The first, Diet And Autism Research Focuses On Which Foods May Affect Autistic Behavior, contains these telling paragraphs:
Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have embarked on one of the first double-blind, clinical studies to determine whether gluten and dairy products play a role in autistic behavior as parents have anecdotally claimed.
and
“There’s a lot of misinformation, so that’s why this study is so important,” said Fernando Navarro, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics at the medical school and lead investigator of the study. “Hundreds and hundreds of parents think this works but we need serious evidence.”
If you want do know if x really influences y, test it. And then wait for someone else to attempt to replicate your results, for no research nor researcher is perfect.
The second article, Organic Food Has No More Nutritional Value Than Food Grown With Pesticides, Study Shows, makes questionable the assertion that organic foods are better foods.
Many people pay more than a third more for organic food in the belief that it has more nutritional content than food grown with pesticides and chemicals. . . .
But the research by Dr Susanne Bügel and colleagues from the Department of Human Nutrition, University of Copenhagen, shows there is no clear evidence to back this up. . . .
After harvest, results showed that there were no differences in the levels of major and trace contents in the fruit and vegetables grown using the three different methods. . . .
Notice that I didn’t say this piece of research “proved” something. No, it raised questions. I await further studies before I discount the nutritional benefits of organic produce.
One of my personal beefs is when skeptics, myself included, point to some flaw in a belief system and then claim the belief system is completely bogus. In the case of organic foods, just because they may not be better for your personal health doesn’t mean that they have no other value: social, ecological, economic, etc. My guess is that organic farms tend (not all, certainly) to be smaller and more community and environment friendly than the agribusiness alternative. But that’s just a guess. I won’t believe it, as much as I am inclined to, until I see real data that supports the belief.
[...] Mind’s post on the topic of You Aren’t What You Eat is particularly relevant to this blog. I once had a relative tell me that a your diet is [...]
Organic foods taste better, too :)
[...] the only health care you need. I doubt this. As I mentioned in a post a year and some months ago (You Aren’t What You Eat) I have a relative who once believed, and still believes to a degree, that all physical and mental [...]