The Bad Food Bible

The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully by Aaron Carroll, MD.     Audio Book:  7hrs. 11 mins    Hardback Book:  272 pages              

Really good book, I am so glad to have gleaned the knowledge that Dr. Carroll imparts here.   First of all, I fell madly in love with him when he admitted the dirty little secret of doctors is when diagnosing patients they give their best guess.     I realized this some years ago, but, to actually hear a doctor say it – he had me in the palm of his hand for the rest of the book.    And it is a good book.    He talks about the different types of studies and surveys that people tend to believe and why they shouldn’t      If a finding is based on animal testing he says like the saccharin studies that say saccharin causes cancer in lab rats, don’t give up coffee, msg, or any number of other foods, because in the labs they dose the animals with multiple mega doses of whatever it is the study is based on and besides the study tells you it is done on rats not people.    He says never believe any study done on animals.   Also, don’t believe short terms studies on small groups of people.    Only pay attention  to studies done on huge groups of humans that are blind, random procedures, ie. somebody gets the real thing, somebody else gets a placebo throughout the thousands of people with differing lifestyles, different cultures, different ages, different eating habits, those who are obese and those who are not, those who have type 1 Diabetes and those who do not have Diabetes in other words, really random like real life is and the study must go on over a long period to be of value.    If 7 people are studied for 1 week that is basically useless information.   The trial hasn’t gone on long enough to really make any type of evaluation other than speculation rather than causation.    In one of his classes at Indiana State University he asked his students to go online and find studies on 40 different foods that promote their beneficial and/or healing qualities, then he asked them to go back online and look for studies showing how each of these same 40 foods cause cancer.    Each of the 40 foods were said to make you live longer then each food was shown in other studies to cause cancer in various parts of the body.    A wise person told me once, you can’t get funding to study the same thing someone else did, you have to take the opposite approach if you want backing.   Hence why the assignment Dr. Carroll assigned his students proved that out.    He dispels the rat tests, the coronary analysis, and multitudinous other studies that are familiar from the media promotions over the years berating a thing one day then praising it for its benefits the next.   He says there is nothing wrong with enjoying a nice steak (red meat) or fish said to contain mercury that will poison you – it won’t.   Dr. Carroll says a person would have to consume so much each day for msg, aspartame, caffeine, alcohol, glutten, you name the offending ingredient, to do the outrageous claims made that it would be humanly impossible to do so.  He says salt is not bad for you, unless, your blood pressure happens to be outrageously high, then you might want to cut down, but, none of the foods we are told are bad for us can really hurt us unless like the poor beasts injected with mega doses we gorge ourselves to extinction which is not going to happen.    No one is going to overindulge every day for the rest of their life on any suspect ingredient.    He recommends savoring the food and beverages we enjoy until we come across a double-blind study of every human being following  the course of their eating habits for a couple of decades – that would be believable.   And he discusses the pros and cons of organic food and food grown wherever by whoever using pesticides, weed killers and more on their crops, and free-range verses factory farms/ slaughterhouses.      There is no real difference proven statistically that shows one is bad and one is good for you, nothing proving one is better for you than the other.   Natural honey is not better for you than sugar substitutes.    He is really entertaining and interesting in how he explains the ins and outs of the food trade, food myths and how the public has been force fed bad information so long that we come to believe it even though it is absolutely not true.   Dr. Carroll promotes enjoying Chinese food, eating a muffin loaded with glutten smothered in real butter, chased down by a diet soda or Scotch.     It turns out nothing is bad for you in moderation which is how most of us eat anyhow.   Dr. Carroll promotes enjoying life and savouring food and stop worrying about the latest food findings (information can be manipulated any way you want it to and statistics can be made to reflect whatever the person compiling them wants them to whether they are honestly true or not.    The one thing he says is true is that smoking is bad for you and yes, it does cause cancer.    So put the cigarettes down and treat yourself instead to your favorite meal guilt-free.