National Post (National Edition)
Why clean eating is a dirty word
INVESTIGATION LOOKS AT ‘NONSENSE’ BEHIND ALKALINE DIET
Obesity and other dietrelated illnesses are easily the greatest public health problem of our time. But losing weight and keeping it off is incredibly difficult; it is not what we are evolved to do.
Over the past 20 years, my research at the University of Cambridge’s MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit has focused on the genetics of why some people get fat and some don’t. Science is set up to get to the truth eventually. It does not provide quick answers.
As a result, there are many desperate people looking for a way out, a silver bullet. Over recent years there’s been a proliferation of, by and large, skinny and attractive food gurus armed with dietary advice that is not based on serious scientific evidence.
Much of this new advice goes far beyond healthy eating, and in some instances argues that food can make you well. Welcome to the world of “clean eating,” which I have spent the last few months investigating for a BBC documentary, to understand just how scientific these claims are.
It became clear that many hundreds of thousands of people are more likely to believe the advice of these food gurus — buying their books and following their social media feeds — than listen to scientists and other experts who are taking an evidencebased approach to nutrition.
For healthy-eating devotees, Instagramming everything that passes their lips, the term #clean reigns supreme. Clean eating is not one way of eating, but encompasses many different dietary approaches. In the documentary, we focused on three of the big beasts: giving up gluten, an alkaline diet and a plant-based diet.
What rapidly emerged was that “post-truth” science permeates the culture. This troubling narrative was best illustrated by my surreal visit with so-called doctor Robert Young, father of the “alkaline diet.” If you ignore the pseudo-babble, then what an “alkaline diet” encourages is lots of vegetables with little to no meat. Where’s the harm? Well, when I drove into the hills outside San Diego to see Young on his “pH miracle ranch,” I found out.
A manicured millionaire’s paradise, the ranch sits at the epicentre of his “alkaline” empire, and was built on the proceeds of his “pH Miracle” book series, which has sold more than four million copies. As Young welcomed me in, he began to share his alkaline view of the world: “The human body in its perfect state of health is alkaline in its design.” The pH of our blood is 7.4, which is slightly alkaline, so Young is broadly correct, although different body parts, such as our stomach, function at very different pHs. Everything else about “alkaline living,” however, is complete fantasy.
Young believes that in order to maintain the alkaline pH of our blood, we have to eat alkaline foods. The problem is, there is no evidence that your blood’s pH is influenced by what you eat. Your stomach, at around pH1.5 (akin to battery acid), is the most acidic environment in your body. So whatever you eat, will arrive in your intestine at the same acidic pH. In fact, nothing, apart from almost dying, will change your blood’s pH. So if it does change, you’re probably about to die.
Young’s food categories don’t make any sense. Meat is considered acidic, yet all mammals have alkaline blood. Equally, certain citrus fruits are considered “alkaline,” when they are by any measure acidic. Don’t waste time trying to wrap your head around this nonsense. It doesn’t stand up to even casual scrutiny.
Young goes further still, claiming that disease emerges from acidity — which he believes transforms blood cells into bacteria by a process he calls pleomorphism — and that, by extension, disease can be reversed with alkalinity. Young’s view goes against all current scientific understanding. When I posed this to him, he said this is “a new thought, a new consideration.” In other words, this is his “post-truth” fantasy.
A large part of the pH Miracle ranch has been set aside as a “clinic” to treat cancer. Young uses “cancerous” as an adjective, to describe a state of acidity, rather than as a noun. He brings terminally ill patients to stay for months at a time and intravenously infuses them with an alkaline solution of sodium bicarbonate. He does not have a medical degree, and there is no evidence that infusing baking soda into your bloodstream will do anything against cancer.
In 2011, Young’s activities at the ranch attracted the attention of the Medical Board of California, which began an undercover investigation. Investigators established that at least 81 cancer patients had been treated at the ranch since 2005. None of the 15 whose prognosis could be documented outlived it.
One patient, Genia Vanderhaeghen, died from congestive heart failure – fluid around the heart – while being treated. An invoice, which we obtained, documented 33 intravenous sodium bicarbonate drips, each charged at US$550, over 31 days; some administered by Young himself.
Another patient was Naima Houder-Mohammed, a young captain in the British army. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, and told she had six months to live. Naima came across Young on the Internet and he encouraged her to come to the ranch for a “healing program.”
Naima’s treatment cost more than US$120,000. After three months at Young’s facility, her condition worsened and she was taken to hospital. She died in the U.K. with her family. She was 27.
Last year, Young was convicted of two charges of practicing medicine without a licence, and faces up to three years in prison. I asked him if he felt remorse. He said: “I don’t have remorse because of the thousands, if not millions, of people that have been helped through the program.”
When pseudo-science goes beyond advising people to eat more vegetables, and is used to manipulate the vulnerable and most ill in society, it becomes a true problem. The gurus of clean are doing nothing wrong encouraging healthy eating, but they have a responsibility to ground their promises in proof. We’re often advised to eat a balanced diet including fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and dairy, while limiting meat. And the simple — if unfashionable — truth is that science has, so far, discovered nothing to prove otherwise.