While watching the crockumentary What the Health on Netflix, I wondered where my life had gone wrong that it had come to that, but that’s not important right now. I also wondered about the way people use mental shortcuts when thinking about nutrition, which inspired this blog post.
Natural is Good, Modified is Bad
After watching What the Health followed by an unhealthy dose of YouTube nutrition channels, I’m convinced that the Appeal to Nature fallacy is the most widespread belief among nutrition vloggers. Doesn’t matter which system a particular vlogger follows—the vegan diet, the ketogenic diet, paleo, or whatever—the all mention the word natural with reverence. Accusing a product of lack of natural-ness is akin to accusing an Orthodox Jew of raising hogs. One particular vlogger tortured herself over whether the three months the cows milked to make Kerrygold butter were fed grain tainted the product. (For the record, I think Kerrygold is great).
Genetic engineering served as another good excuse to unleash an unhealthy dose of Appeal to Nature. To be blunt about: all genetic engineering is bad. Except the genetic engineering practiced by our ancestors through the process of selective breeding. Somehow that’s usually all right. Kudos to the Paleo people for recognizing that selective breeding is still unnatural.
The main problem with that kind of thinking is that, well, different ways of processing of food yield different results. Hydrogenating vegetable oils has been shown to be a bad idea, though we still do it. Meanwhile, irradiating foods with gamma rays, a harmless process that extends the shelf life of perishable items, is hardly used in the United States, because people fear ‘radiation’. The fact that the radiation in question literally dissipates at the speed of light, cannot compete with the rule of thumb that proclaims all radiation is bad.
Tradeoffs do not Exist
A second theme that continuously appears in the nutrition vlogger channels is that, it seems, trade-offs do not exist. The vegan vloggers rallying against genetically modified organisms do not seem to realize that there is a trade-off to their preferred “organic, non-GMO” model: namely, that only the rich globally could even begin to afford it. Watching the prices in farmer’s markets pushes me to my car with an unexplainable desire to drive to Wal-Mart. And that’s not the only trade-off either; organic farming is one of the drivers of zoonotic (animal-to-human) diseases. SARS, for example, is a zoonotic disease. A recent outbreak of Q-fever in the Netherlands started and spread from an organic farm.
Now, if you are among the globally rich, as almost every person reading this blog post surely is, go ahead and eat in whichever way is best for your family. You may need to cut in other areas of your spending, but there are many people who can’t do that. In this life there are hardly ever solutions; most of the times, we settle for trade-offs.
