Food Tribes
Most dietary exclusions are based on misinformation and a poor understanding of science
If you feel like it’s almost impossible to hold a dinner party these days — what with all the requests for glutenfree, salt- free and everything- under thesun- free foods — you’re not alone. More and more, we’re becoming a nation of food tribalists.
Can we all just agree that sugar, fat, wheat gluten, dairy, meat and salt are poisons that are killing us? If you read the newspapers, browse the Internet or watch television news, you could very well draw that conclusion. And there are large numbers of people who make the avoidance of one or more of those items a central element of their lives. We are becoming a nation of food tribalists, defined not by where we live or the language we speak, but by what we don’t eat.
Don’t believe me? Try planning a dinner party and ask your guests if they have any food allergies. The tribes will rise up and declare their intolerance for at least one or more of these poisons.
Real food allergies are relatively rare, but they do exist. My wife is deathly allergic to crustaceans, like about 2.3 per cent of North Americans.
But nearly everyone seems to belong to a food- avoidance tribe.
“A friend moved here recently and she and her partner decided to be social and invite people over,” recounted food researcher Judy McLean, when broached on the topic of food tribes.
“( The guests) sent their food restrictions by email. They decided to go to a restaurant.”
Opting to dine out might save the home cook from preparing several different meals to satisfy the exclusions of a dinner party, but it doesn’t speed things up. Sitting around while your fellow diners quiz the server endlessly about the contents of every dish on the menu and then dictate the list of items the chef is not to use in the preparation of their meal is enough to make a person pull their own teeth and go home for gruel.
“People do seem to identify as part of the gluten- free tribe,” said McLean, a nutrition professor at the University of B. C.
“It seems to have an element of superiority about it.”
Canadians and Americans suffer from the absence of a definable food culture or cuisine built on tradition and local ingredients, with the possible exception of Cajuns. People in most every other part of the world have a national, regional or tribal cuisine, a tradition that supplies them with a sense of comfort and belonging.
For example, “Jewish people have a very clear- cut set of rules to eat by, and they are happiest when they stick to those rules,” said physician John Sloan, author of the coming book Delusion for Dinner: Unmasking the Myth of Healthy Eating.
And in the Indian caste system, the higher and more exclusive the caste, the more strict the regime of food avoidance, McLean notes.
Humans use such rules to strengthen group bonds and foster a feeling of exclusivity.
But here in the New World, without tribal rules to guide our eating, we are simply forming our own tribes and making up the rules as we go.
“I talk in class about food restrictions in different cultures, but our culture seems to be inventing new ones at an incredible rate,” said McLean.
In many cases, people are twisting and extrapolating tiny bits of scientific knowledge to ridiculous extremes to justify their behaviour. Sadly, the weakest kinds of research provide the most headline- worthy results, fuelling this new food tribalism.
“Most diet studies are observational ... not randomized control trials. There’s room for error,” said Sloan. “When you compare people who answer a questionnaire that puts them in big- salt- eater category and other people in a small- salt- eater category, you’ve basically got two different kinds of people, who differ in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with what they eat.
“Similarly, if you were to compare people who are morbidly obese with people who are normal weight and find the obese people have more lung disease, you can’t conclude that obesity causes lung disease.”
The results of such studies ought to be ignored as vague and misleading and under no circumstances indicative of causality, he said.
The strongest and most robust experimental paradigm — the randomized control trial — seldom, if ever, shows any connection between what we eat and a better health outcome — that is, reduced risk of death or catastrophic illness.
How much we eat is a different story. Consuming too many calories and a lack of physical activity does lead to obesity, and reversing those problems does reliably lead to better health outcomes. Tinkering with the minutiae of what you eat, not so much.
“If you had to guess, a diet rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables is probably good for you, but beyond that, it’s just really hard to tell,” said James McCormack, a professor of pharmaceutical science at UBC and a gleeful debunker of scientific overreaching.