Why paleo gluten-free sugarless diets smell of organic bullshit
If we are what we eat, it seems sensible not to base our diets on a great big load of bollocks.
People will swear till they break out in hives that monosodium glutamate (MSG) gives them terrible headaches; however double-blinded placebo-controlled studies show that their reactions are entirely psychosomatic.
Their headaches are, so to speak, all in their heads.
MSG is nothing more than glutamate, which is found in cheeses, tomatoes, and various other common foods, just with a bit of salt added, and so unless you’re actually allergic to glutamate or salt, it really can’t hurt you.
Although fear of MSG persists despite this evidence, the real zeitgeist of diet fad idiocy is riding a wave of sugarless gluten-free paleo hipster hysteria.
I walked into a bakery the other day, and every single item in their display cabinets was labelled gluten-free. Let me just reiterate that this was, in fact, a bakery.
Some people suffer from celiac disease and really can’t eat gluten, and there is also some evidence that a small percentage of people may suffer from sensitivity to short chain carbs called FODMAPs (not gluten). The much larger percentage of people who are all-of-a-sudden sensitive to gluten, however, seems to be more proportionate to our propensity for collective delusion and mass hysteria.
To be clear, it’s not that gluten doesn’t affect people, it’s that there doesn’t seem to be any physiological reason for it. When you consider the fact that women who believe they’re pregnant can develop the physical effects of pregnancy (including a protruding abdomen) without actually being pregnant, it becomes clear just how powerful the relationship between our perceptions and our physiology can be. The placebo effect isn’t just thinking that something has worked, it can also have real-life physiological effects. So the reality is that if you feel weird after eating gluten, it’s much more likely that it’s your brain being weird than anything really real.
Also on the food delusion menu today we have sugar; or, rather, the conspicuous lack of it.
Something important to understand about human physiology is that without sugar you will die. Your body requires sugar in order to survive, and when you eat a piece of bread, a potato, a piece of fruit, or an entire thing of chocolate, your body breaks down and converts that foodstuff into glucose, among other compounds. It then uses this sugary energy to do things like make your brain function, and think things like “hang on a minute — maybe I’m a mammal that has adapted to like sugar for an extremely good reason”. Your brain literally runs on glucose.
But isn’t it different for processed sugars? Aren’t they the baddies? Not really, no.
Processed sugars are made from crystallised plant sap. Like pretty much everything we eat, their energy comes from carbohydrates formed through photosynthesis, and the reason we like it so much is because it’s extremely good for us. I realise that sounds slightly unhinged, but let me say it again: sugar is healthy. We like it because it’s easy for us to process into energy.
An oft-touted sciencey-sounding morsel proffered by the anti-sugar crowd, is that the area of the brain that is active on cocaine, is the very same area that is active when we eat sugar! You know when else that area of the brain lights up? When we’re feeling love. Do you want to ban love too, sugar nazis?
Like anything, it’s the dose that matters. If you eat twenty tablespoons of sugar a day, you’re doing it wrong. Our bodies are not able to process a diet that replaces water with cola, or has breakfast cereals made almost entirely of sugar, with sugar on top. It’s true that there is too much sugar in most people’s diets, and that many may be unaware of the ‘hidden’ sugar in ‘healthfoods’ like yoghurt and nutbars. This is a valid criticism, however cutting out sugar from your diet entirely is an over-reaction to say the least.
It’s okay to give your kids sugary treats occasionally, you can continue to eat chocolate in moderation, and fruit juice is not attempting to kill you.
Taking out the award for the Most Ridiculous Newcomer is the paleo diet. The premise is that we should be eating the same kinds of things as our paleolithic ancestors, because that’s what we ‘evolved to do’. The thinking behind this idea is, fittingly, neanderthalic.
Contrary to popular belief we are not presently living in a dystopian nightmare of violence and disease; in fact we are living in the most prosperous, peaceful and healthy period in the history of history.
The romanticising of our ancestors is a great big appeal to nature fallacy: just because something’s natural, doesn’t mean it’s good.
It also suffers a common misunderstanding of how evolution works: we aren’t evolved ‘to do’ anything, because evolution is not a designed thing. That which confers survival benefits, survives, however this does not mean that everything natural is ideal. In fact, nature tends to be rather brutish and full of suffering.
Our paleolithic ancestors spent a lot of their life malnourished and eating anything they could get their desperate, dirty hands on — like insects and rotting carcasses. In short, life for a paleolithic era human being wasn’t very healthy. If they made it past childhood, they were lucky; and if they made it past 50 they were exceptionally lucky. Our paleolithic ancestors didn’t really understand very much about dietary science, and had very few options available to them, and so presuming to follow in their nutritional footsteps is a bit silly to say the least.
Human beings, like all mammals, thrive when they have a high caloric intake. Just like access to medicine and not being impaled by a spear is good for you, so too is eating well; and by ‘well’ I mean ‘a lot’.
For all of history, and to this day, the great global dietary super-villain is not gluten, nor sugar, nor grains, but, rather, a lack of all these things. Not getting enough food is a very bad idea as far as health is concerned, whereas eating quite a lot is a much happier and healthier problem to contend with, especially if you’re exercising regularly.
Of course it’s wise to eat whole grains, lots of fruit and vegetables, not go overboard on sugar and fats, and avoid too much processed meat.
Unfortunately though ‘Eat well and run around a bit’ is not a headline that will generate excellent click-through rates, nor is it the kind of thing that people feel compelled to talk about around the office water cooler.
Being sensible is seldom fashionable, but if someone’s offering you some dietary dogma du jour, you’d be well advised not to swallow it.