Food Science? Best Taken with a Pinch of Salt
Why the politics of food science needs to change
Food has rarely been under so much scientific scrutiny. The West is convulsed by an ‘obesity epidemic’ blamed on sugar and oily snacks. At the same time, much of the developing world is being robbed of its best farmland to grow cash-crops for Western consumers. Yet one aspect that seems to be immune from criticism is the quality of expert food advice.
But don’t get me wrong. It’s not the quality of the experts that’s the big issue here, even if, to go by TV and the newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking that celebrities, be they chefs or models, have more of a handle on the key food issues than government advisors or nutritionists — let alone philosophers. No, the worst thing about food science, the elephant in the room, is that it’s not just the opinions that are changing — but the ‘facts’ themselves shift too.
To get to the bottom of the food question requires a less hierarchical and more holistic approach, it requires us to tease apart the strands of diet science and biochemistry, and add an ounce of economics and a dash of human psychology. And it requires a recognition that food issues are very, very, political.
To illustrate the political nature of food policy, consider for example, the bizarre tale from the first half of the 20th century of the Italian Fascist attempt to shift the public away from pasta and towards foods like rice. A central plank for this was ‘health advice’ that included (bogus) warnings about the deleterious health effects of eating pasta.
In 1932 Mussolini delivered a speech to medical doctors at the inauguration of the National Congress of the trade unions of Fascist physicians. The speech has been overlooked by researchers, but provides a sharp example of how, not only the Italian dictatorship then, but governments more generally now, see science and the role of scientists. Mussolini explicitly appealed to the doctors for their support in what he presented as a public health issue, as people that the public trusted, that the public believed. The Italian physicians, he told them, had the power to decide what was right or wrong for Italians’ bodies and minds. Mussolini reminded the doctors of their role in an earlier public health initiative in which grape production had quintupled. At the time, Mussolini rightly focused on doctors as the ‘food gurus’ to win over, but today the medical profession is joined by a much wider network of experts including biochemists and nutritionists.
In an article called ‘Food and the Futurist ‘Revolution’ (for the Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas) Roberto Ibba and Domenico Sanna note how the Italian Fascist government promoted a ‘high carbs’ diet, that left out animal protein, vegetables, olive oil and citrus fruits. If today, many societies are obsessed with reducing snack foods, sugar and cakes, it is revealing that back then the ‘high carbs’ diet was symbolically linked to nationalism, as being influenced by 19ᵗʰ century habits and by the Italian “Risorgimento”, the Italian movement towards creating a single state out of the patchwork of regional states.
Each age has its own political doctrines, and diet tends to follow them — if only after a struggle. In fact, as the Second World War bit harder, the food situation in Italy (as in most of Europe) became dire, and Fascist food priorities became quite literally a matter of life and death to the extent that during the German occupation of northern Italy in the last phase of the Second World-War (1944–45), people would starve due to food rationing. By the end of Italy’s Fascist experiment, the ‘scientifically sanctioned’ drop in the intake of calories and proteins had affected both the Italian population and the outcome of the war.
But of course it’s not just fascist regimes that dabble in food politics. In the United States of the 1950s ‘dietary fat’ became a great public health issue, accused of causing an ‘epidemic’ of heart disease. Out went butter and real cheese, in came modern, manufactured margarine and substitute foods such as soya. Even when large-scale surveys dealt body blows to such dietary orthodoxies of the twentieth century — with research published in 2005 and 2006, convincingly demonstrating that “low fat” diets actually increased the individual’s risks of heart disease — the official advice hardly changed.
And now, in the new millennium, social democrats and liberal governments have decided that sugar has taken over as food enemy number one, considered to be the primary driver of the obesity crisis and accused not only of knocking several percentage points off global GDP but actually killing a staggering 3 million people a year. Yet sugar is one of the most natural parts of our diet, celebrated by the Ancients as honey and inseparable from most of our favorite fruits. Its role as a source of energy is perfectly real.
All of which underlines that ‘scientific advice’ is often not so much science as a distorted misrepresentation of the facts.
Misapplication and over-reliance on ‘scientific advice’ drove food manufacturing to eliminate bacteria and germs from the daily diet, a drive that continues to target things like unpasteurised milk and cheeses — even as scientists are increasingly exploring the unexpected ways by which microscopic organisms are beneficial to human health. Even as, today, researchers explore the many ways that our bodies rely on “good bacteria” for our basic functioning.
The most telling example of the politicisation of food safety comes from an issue that ‘science’ seems to have removed from the arena of public debate — the promotion of oil made from rapeseed for cooking.
At one time, this ubiquitous yellow flowering crop (so bright that it doesn’t even look natural), was widely considered to be a health hazard, associated with heart lesions, vitamin deficiencies and retarded growth. It was only after millions of dollars were spent on artificially modifying the plant’s characteristics, and similarly huge sums on ‘proving’ that the new product was safe that, in 1985, the industry obtained GRAS, or ‘Generally Recognized As Safe’ status for the oil in the United States. The Europeans dragged their feet for several decades more.
Yet, today, canola oil is one of the most widely consumed food oils, second only to soybean. Today, billions of dollars hang on this product being safe. But is it? Science has obediently provided many reports that say that it is — but the lessons of recent history is that we should take them with a big pinch of salt. (Disregarding the health advice on that compound, of course.) For me, this anonymous cooking oil perfectly illustrates the hidden political context of power of scientific utterances intended to influence what we eat. Cooking oil is at once so ordinary and yet so highly political.
When, in 1985, the oil obtained ‘Generally Recognized As Safe’ status, it was still being called LEAR — for Low Erucic Acid Rapeseed oil — with the aim being to underline that it now contained much less erucic acid, and instead was high in omega-3s and heart-healthy monounsaturated fats. But the erucic acid still is there in smaller quantities, and it is still (presumably) a health risk. We’re not talking about tiny trace amounts, but significant percentages of the acid.
But step back a moment, what is all this chemistry talk doing in a food debate anyway? From the standpoint of chemistry, saturated fats are simply fat molecules that have no double bonds between carbon molecules because they are saturated with hydrogen molecules. The three main omega-3 fatty acids are alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). ‘Monounsaturated’ fats are fatty acids that have one double bond in the fatty acid chain with all of the remainder carbon atoms being single-bonded. Clear? Not at all. Does it matter? Yes, because this kind of expert talk effectively diverts debate onto certain preset lines where the food industry and/or the politicians want it.
A literature study by Nutrition Reviews (Lin 2013) entitled “Evidence of health benefits of canola oil” found that most of the health claims advanced for the oil were at best unproven and many were downright contrived. So, today, this anonymous cooking oil perfectly illustrates the power of scientific claims to influence what we eat. Not merely cash but lives hang on this product being safe and we have outsourced the issue to scientists who work is directed not by a love of pure knowledge but by commercial and political priorities.
My conviction, drummed into me by innumerable health ‘exclusives’ in newspapers, is that there needs to be a more sceptical approach to scientific claims made both for food dangers and for food safety. Consumers and public health bodies alike need to resolutely adopt an approach that treats science less as a final arbiter and more as an entity easily co-opted by the interests of both the food industry and politicians.
The change has to start with general public and definitely not the so-called experts. A keynote article for the influential journal Nature (published by Palgrave Communications) back in 2016, entitled ‘From paradox to principles: where next for scientific advice to governments?’ illustrates why. Its authors, Peter Gluckman and James Wilsdon, reflect a very common assumption when they seem to assume that scientific advice is an unalloyed good, a kind of philosopher’s stone that turns policy to gold. There is no recognition of the partisan nature of scientific advice, the internal disputes over the ‘facts’, and the very real problem of governments buying the science that they want to fit ideologically framed policies.
Unfortunately, it’s not just a few authors, but the whole academic structure that is perpetuating the myth of scientific impartiality. Two years later, I was actually invited to write a comment piece for Nature, giving examples of how scientific advice to governments was not delivered loftily from on high but was, on the contrary, very partisan and occasionally grubby too. Nature always gets pieces refereed so my commentary went out to some representatives of the usual consensus.
Sure enough one said that “The author appears to have no understanding of science or what scientific evidence is”, while another found my recommendation that “all policy advice should come with an independent, contrary view” and reiteration of Kuhn’s famous conclusion that scientific facts are never really more than opinions “naïve and even dangerous”. They added that it was “the sort of ‘both sides deserve equal attention’ position that drives much irresponsible journalism”. And so my call to open up food debates to more scrutiny never appeared — despite it being a call that in this case the journal itself had originally solicited. For me, it was a small but very real example of how the scientific consensus suppresses dissident voices.
This is a call for a very practical policy shift, where policy makers would automatically seek an expert, but contrary view, which is summarised alongside the main view. This would provide a reminder that scientific debates are invariably multisided. Unfortunately, it is usually useless to ask the partisans of one side to accurately present the issue as seen from the other.
Much scientific advice on food turns out not only to be wrong, but dangerously wrong. The public, and governments too, are in thrall to a view of science as impartial and monolithic, even though the reality is that expert advice reflects both the individual prejudices of researchers and the economic prerogatives of those who fund it. The food industry is no exception.
Martin Cohen is a writer and researcher who specializes in philosophy and the social sciences. His new book, ‘I Think Therefore I Eat’, is published by Turner this autumn.
