Eating Away at Science

On Jan. 28, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, wrote a wonderful piece in the New York Times titled, "Unhappy Meals." Pollan deconstructed modern food science and offered the type of simple-yet-obvious food advice that a grandmother might provide in lieu of all the diet crazes and micro-nutrient obsessions: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." The essay is an exhaustive, 10,000-word analysis of the downfalls of this brand of science and its relationship to our food culture that I will not try to rival here. Rather, I will investigate the impact of the consistent monumental failures of food science that Pollan catalogues on public perception of science in general.

Eating disgustingly unhealthful food is fun, so society tends to embrace drastic medical solutions like Fen-phen or stomach-stapling rather than simple healthy eating. Some suffer from medical conditions that require drastic actions, but for most, a lifetime of healthy food would do better than a medical fix. The problem is not simply the willingness of the public to damage its own health through poorly-considered diet crazes and miracle drugs, but is also the fact that, as people try a new "solution" being pushed by a man in a white coat every two years, they lose faith in science as a whole. It is the persistence of sensationalist food science-usually bad science, often pseudoscience-and its reductionist message that does the damage.

Every person doing serious research-whether on human metabolism or the Higgs Boson-suffers every time another "scientist" comes along promising a quick fix to America's obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc., then turns out a few years down the road to have been a fraud or just a moron. To those who do not themselves specialize in a scientific field, it seems as if those who study high-energy physics come from the same world as those who claim that calcium from coral is the fountain of youth. Can the general public be blamed for looking with skepticism on any sort of science when one type consistently fails so miserably?

My previous sentence will cause visceral alarm in every scientist because I have just suggested that skepticism might not be a good thing. There is a difference that deserves great attention between the skepticism valued highly in the scientific community-the belief that results must be extensively demonstrated and tested for any plausible shortcomings-and the skepticism that simply rejects scientific findings out of hand. The latter skepticism is the skepticism that I mean to criticize, certainly not the former (a bit more of the former might have prevented many of the problematic claims of "food science" from reaching the public in the first place).

Scientists have long been trusted to distill formidable problems for public consumption, so it is clear why the public might lose faith in science as a whole due to what Pollan labels "nutritionism." The average person might ask, "Where were the peer-reviewed journals and skeptical eyes of science when the National Academy of Sciences told me that all fats were bad, pure and simple? Where were they when I started jamming multivitamins full of beta carotene down the throats of my children every morning?" If these questions were asked of me, I would have to concede that scientists indeed failed. The NAS might argue that we did not yet know about different types of fats when that study was published. To this I would respond that that is exactly the point: we never know for sure what we might be missing, and we should frame every piece of advice in that way. The latest findings in the field of nutrition are not cause for a rejection of all knowledge that has come before, but are merely the newest piece of knowledge in a vast scientific construct that we hope will lead to a better understanding of our bodies. The only honest way to handle scientific data is to formulate its practical application slowly and continuously based on the cumulative body of scientific knowledge, not to issue sensationalist proclamations and create dietary religions around the results of each individual study.

As Pollan points out, traditional eating works remarkably well. We have adapted our food consumption over millions of years to best fit our needs while evolving to fit our food consumption. Modern food science is not a complete failure; our understanding of our bodies' relationship with food has allowed for an unprecedented rapid increase in the general health. However, a single five- or even fifteen-year study by itself should never outweigh the lessons of society over millennia. When so-called professionals like Robert Atkins pretend otherwise, they abase all of us in the vast scientific community. We understand those things best which we have tried to understand only in small parts over long periods of time. That is the real scientific approach. It means surrendering momentary certainty to the goal of eventual progress, but it also means astounding progress that has resulted from its application to the problems of humanity.