’Tis the season of wavering New Year’s resolutions, and 2024 might be an especially hard year to keep to a new diet because there are so many contradictory claims —and so little left on the menu that is not being vilified by someone with initials after their name.
Mainstream experts are still warning against eating meat, cheese, sugar and the ill-defined group known as ultra-processed foods. Now people are saying to avoid tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, and even one theory says that people are poisoning themselves with spinach.
On everyone’s good list? Cauliflower. At least, for now.
Illustration: Yusha
Spinach and kale are on the bad list of Sally K. Norton, who has a degree in public health, but has strayed from the mainstream by advising against foods high in substances called oxalates. Her bad list also includes beans, grains, almonds, potatoes, beets and chocolate — what she calls “toxic superfoods.”
Oxalates are real compounds and there is some scientific debate about their contribution to kidney stones. Norton’s hypothesis is that oxalates caused her chronic pain and might also cause nervous system problems, premature aging, hearing loss and eye floaters.
Meanwhile, heart surgeon Steven Gundry says that people might be sickened by a different group of plants — ones high in lectins, which are part of plants’ defense systems. He blames lectins for a host of problems from bad digestion to autoimmune disease to weight gain. In his diet, spinach and greens are acceptable, but not tomatoes, peppers, seeds, beans or whole grains.
The Office for Science and Society at McGill University has a nice write-up puncturing the oxalate theory. Chemist Joe Schwarcz, who heads the office, debunks the widespread dangers of lectins in a chapter in his diet-myth-busting book A Grain of Salt.
Schwarcz said that some plants contain minute traces of compounds that are toxic at vastly higher doses.
It makes no sense to talk about something as toxic without considering the amount, he said, adding that the preponderance of evidence suggests that the more fruits, vegetables and whole grains a person eats — and the less fat — the better off they are.
Even age-old assumptions about fats are now contested.
Olive oil is considered a good fat, and many now say that saturated fats found in meat and dairy are not the dietary villains they have been made out to be. Some recent studies suggest that those who ate full-fat dairy were healthier than those who went for low-fat or nonfat options.
Journalist Gary Taubes, author of Rethinking Diabetes, has been a longtime critic of the mainstream advice to eat a low-fat diet.
That recommendation is based not on rigorous science, but observations comparing people in different countries, he said.
Those kinds of studies cannot easily untangle which health differences might be due to socioeconomic factors and other variables.
Another reason for some of the conflicting evidence over which foods are healthy is that many studies simply ask study subjects to remember what they ate — that does not always make it clear which foods make a difference.
The studies aimed at finding long-term benefits from a particular diet are not all that rigorous. One of the most widely publicized studies of longevity — the “blue zones” — examined the diet and lifestyle of people in five regions of the world with purportedly unusual longevity. It is an intriguing observation and made for an entertaining Netflix series, but it is impossible to pin longevity in these regions on diet, let alone any particular kind of food.
However, out of all the contradictory claims, there is one area of agreement: Diet influences health, and it is possible to benefit from experimenting on yourself. Any individual might have food sensitivities that differ from the population at large.
A diet that makes you feel energetic and helps you achieve a healthy weight might indeed be better for you, as an individual, than what has been associated with longevity in large populations. Some people feel better avoiding gluten even if they do not have celiac disease, and others might feel better skipping dairy products. Maybe a few people are sensitive to lectins or oxalates and benefit from avoiding them. It would be easier to stick with any diet plan if it is giving you short-term benefits.
So instead of New Year’s resolutions, we could have New Year’s experiments. If a change does not make you feel better, you can still consider it a lesson learned — and there is always cauliflower.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the Follow the Science podcast. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
As Taiwan’s domestic political crisis deepens, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have proposed gutting the country’s national spending, with steep cuts to the critical foreign and defense ministries. While the blue-white coalition alleges that it is merely responding to voters’ concerns about corruption and mismanagement, of which there certainly has been plenty under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT-led governments, the rationales for their proposed spending cuts lay bare the incoherent foreign policy of the KMT-led coalition. Introduced on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the KMT’s proposed budget is a terrible opening
To The Honorable Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜): We would like to extend our sincerest regards to you for representing Taiwan at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump on Monday. The Taiwanese-American community was delighted to see that Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan speaker not only received an invitation to attend the event, but successfully made the trip to the US. We sincerely hope that you took this rare opportunity to share Taiwan’s achievements in freedom, democracy and economic development with delegations from other countries. In recent years, Taiwan’s economic growth and world-leading technology industry have been a source of pride for Taiwanese-Americans.
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS