The pseudoscience of nutrition and the great chocolate hoax

Separating the wheat from the chaff? It’s no easy task when it comes to the science of nutrition says Russ Swan

You are what you eat, they say, which is patent nonsense from the start. Lions eat zebras, but by the end of their little snack they're still lions.

I wonder if there is any other area of science where genuine research butts up against pseudoscience in such a manifestly unhelpful way as in nutrition? It's obviously an important area, as the epidemic of obesity afflicting the richer countries of the world makes clear. And the clue is in the places most affected – those richer countries are where people eat high-calorie food and don’t get up and move around as much as they should. This much, as they also say, is not rocket science.

But what we now have is an epidemic of a different kind, of new industries promising new cures for problems that are, for the most part, pretty obvious.

The whole sorry business was thrown into sharp relief in June with the revelation that a story picked up by newspapers around the world was a hoax. German scientists had purportedly found that a daily bar of chocolate helped their research subjects lose weight more quickly than those who eschewed the stuff.

It was of course bollocks from start to finish, but the research was real. It was a deliberately badly-designed experiment whose real purpose was to highlight the shocking complacency of both the general news media and some sectors of the scientific publishing market. It wasn't so much a dietary experiment as a sociological meta-experiment, in which the lab rats were journalists, editors, and publishers.

In proper science, of course, we’re not supposed to say that experiments are a 'success' or 'failure'. We're not supposed to set out to prove something, but merely to impartially observe whether a conjecture is supported by experimental evidence.

In this case, the conjecture that some journals will publish any old rubbish as long as you pay for it, and some newspapers will report the findings without doing the most basic of background checks, was indeed supported by the evidence.

Given that this was a dietary science story, it's no surprise that it was lapped up. Scarcely a week goes by without some new diet fad or 'scientific evidence' that a certain comestible either causes or cures cancer or is the latest miracle food.

Don't get me wrong, there certainly is genuine and valuable dietary and nutritional research taking place today. A personal friend has MRC money for an important project that is trying to raise awareness of the evils of sugars, which she tells me has been overlooked recently as all the attention has been on fats.

But there is a whole parallel pseudoscience industry based on made-up findings and fashionable approaches. The paleo diet might work for you, and if so that's great. But if it doesn’t you might try the 5/2 diet, or the Atkins, or the raw food. How about the alkaline, or the werewolf, or the Marie Antoinette?

I've made one of those up. For a bonus point, which one?

Many of these fads are promoted as being from some official-sounding organisation, often calling itself an 'institute' or 'academy'. And most of these have about as much scientific credibility as that most famous of food ‘fadionistas’, Gillian McKeith. This TV presenter started calling herself doctor, and made a fortune studying people's poo.

It really is time that the evil and misleading cults of dietary and nutrition fads were treated with as much contempt as their close relative, homeopathy. Both of these things owe more to magic than actual science, and frankly it's a disgrace that here in the 21st century they can still purvey their snake oil remedies to a gullible public.

The only homeopathic recipe I've ever heard of that made any sense was my father-in-law's cocktail technique. He was fond of his gin, but less so of vermouth, a fortified wine which is the other key ingredient in the standard martini (the cocktail, of course, not to be confused with the brand-name beverage using the same name). He would fill a glass with gin to within a centimetre or so of the rim, drop in an olive, and then hold the vermouth so that the sunlight would pass through the bottle and fall onto the glass. This, he averred, added just enough essence of vermouth to make it a martini cocktail. "Don’t want to overdo it" he would grin, before downing the contents and repeating the process.

Still wondering which fad diet I made up? The answer, sadly, is none of them. I lied. Those are all genuine diets, which is not to say that they aren’t also entirely made up and also a pack of lies.