The article “Why the egg that is good for you today will kill you tomorrow”, by Bruno Gualano, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine at USP, made a good deal of noise. It explains the methodological flaws of studies focusing on the effect of specific foods on human health.
The egg is the most common example of the distortions in these works: some say it is good for you, others suggest it is highly unhealthy.
What the professor demonstrates, with solid examples, is the fact that such research ignores the complexity of food: there are more than 250,000 foods that can be combined in hundreds of ways and proportions, which makes it very difficult to establish the role of each one in the health of an individual.
To make the confusion worse, factors unrelated to diet also influence a lot: sedentary lifestyle, smoking, depression, in short, everything called lifestyle. Gualano uses as an example studies that attributed the incidence of cancer to coffee consumption – it was later concluded that cigarettes were the real culprit (in case you didn’t know, smokers love to have a cup of coffee before they smoke).
The article fails to address – and should not address, for the sake of brevity – two other aspects of the construction of the functional food lie: the perverse direction of many studies and the role of the press in propagating myths.
One important thing that is largely ignored: not every scientist is exempt. Scientific data is manipulable, and this is relatively easy when there is a huge universe of people unable to interpret it.
In the United States, especially, there is a very powerful lobby for every sector of the food industry: milk, beef, eggs, bakery and so on. These lobbies fund research to find benefits of this or that food. When not found, the study goes to the drawer. When you get data that can be interpreted the way the customer would like, you juggle rhetorically to highlight the benefit of drinking orange juice or eating bacon.
And then press releases are fired.
So, in any newsroom, two characters come together. The reporter who reads (when he reads) the study but doesn’t understand anything. And the editor is eager to give titles that catch the reader’s attention.
The press thrives on news, and news that says that pasta with juice prevents prostate cancer is something every editor loves. Too bad it’s a lie.
It’s no use eating tomatoes, drinking wine, stuffing yourself with chia and amaranth to fight cancer, heart disease, cholesterol and the foursome. Food is not medicine. Functional feeding is a fraud.
In its most perverse version, it’s the scam that sells “healthy” stuffed cookies and box juices, sugar and fat due to the addition of vitamins and other junk.
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