Aaron CarrollRecensioni

Received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Let's talk about sex baby, let's talk about you and me...oops, sorry Salt n Pepa...Anyway...This book was a fun read. Each "chapter" was a basically an entry on a different sex myth. They covered myths about men, women and then just sex in general. The authors wrote the book in an easy to read and relateable way. Would have been a great bathroom read but I read it in one sitting in an afternoon. Definitely makes for great conversations.

Excellent, readable summary of the case for and against various foods. His bottom line is that most anything is okay in moderation, that we should focus more on unprocessed "real" food and less on the specific nutrients they contain.

MSG, Cholesterol, GMOs, Diet (vs. sugar-containing), alcohol, gluten, coffee are all fine.

On the other hand, don't go out of your way to consume more milk, don't pay more for organic food.

Meat is fine (but fish is better), but avoid regularly eating red meat. "Eaten in moderation and in a thoughtful way, it isn't going to kill you. Nor is completely avoiding it going to save you."

He says almost nothing about the microbiome, except in the context of the Suez-Korem study that found aspartame changes gut bacteria (he doesn't put much credence on non-human study results).

No real surprises here. The best diet is unprocessed food. Processed food is fine in moderation. Most studies about nutrition are actually inconclusive.

THE BAD FOOD BIBLE: HOW AND WHY TO EAT SINFULLY by Aaron Carroll, M.D. is a careful, measured and well reasoned look at many of the foods we have been told are bad for us. Dr. Carroll is a professor of Pediatrics and the director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He has coauthored three prior books about food and nutrition. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times UPSHOT blog and is host for “Healthcare Triage” on YouTube. In short, he is well versed in his field, respected by many, and a leading voice in clarity in all things medical.
With THE BAD FOOD BIBLE, Dr. Carroll takes on eleven different foods, reveals what has been said about their positive or negative effects on the health of those imbibing, and reveals the truth as to what should be said about them. Coffee, and sugar (diet soft drinks), MSG, meat butter and eggs as well as a few others are discussed. He talks about the prior research done into the study of these foods, and looks at the people who funded a lot of the studies, and presented their “facts” and “conclusions”.
As with most things that get spread through the news, it is the sensational that makes the headlines. When there is a small link that shows giving product A to lab rats produces a negative effect three out of seven times, it is easy to translate that into fast breaking news that product A causes cancer, tumors, lesions or any manner of nasty, nasty things.
Perhaps it is the lab environment itself that produces such a stressful environment on the poor rats. Could it be that the “negative effects” are caused by the cages, the antiseptics, the rationed food and any of a thousand external things rather than the inclusion of the experimental food. I know if I were caged up long enough, seen others like me experimented on, dissected and discarded, I would have plenty wrong with me.
In reasoned arguments, dealing with all the facts, Dr. Carroll explains why these foods will not kill you and do not lead to terrible diseases, obesity, and the decline and fall of Western Civilization. But as with everything else, moderation is the key. A measured amount of alcohol is good for you, but not three bottles of whiskey a day.

You aren’t what you eat

There are two points to The Bad Food Bible. Medical studies should not be used to make food decisions, and you should go ahead and eat whatever you want.

Dr. Aaron Carroll says there is a hierarchy of food studies, and the most reliable are the rarest. But regardless, their results are not to be taken at face value. The media misinterpret the findings, and you can find a study to prove just about anything you desire. There are no definitive answers. The state of our nutritional knowledge seems to be worthless.

As for food, everything is fine in moderation, so don’t bother worrying about what you eat. With cow’s milk, for example, Carroll says we need it for our breakfast cereal, and cookies without milk is just not supportable. Save meat with a lot of fat for special occasions. He allows his own children “four or five” sugar-free soft drinks a week. He says with mercury-laden tuna, you must decide for yourself how much poison you and your children can handle, and adjust your consumption as desired: “Think for yourself and eat accordingly”, he says. This is extraordinarily strange advice in the nutrition field.

Points to ponder:
-Gluten-free is a pointless and expensive fad. One tenth of one percent have gluten issues.
-Genetically modified organisms have been around for as long we have farmed and there is no reason to even try to eliminate them.
-Alcohol is more beneficial than it is damaging. Red wine in particular raises good HDL.
-Eating fat won’t make you fat.
-Eating cholesterol won’t raise your cholesterol.
-Coffee is “shockingly good for you”; it’s practically a miracle drug. And it does not stunt growth or dehydrate you.
-The empty calories in diet soft drinks are better than the empty calories from added sugar drinks, because artificial sweeteners won’t kill you.
-MSG is a perfectly natural, and critically necessary body chemical, present in everything from tomatoes to breast milk. It has never been shown to be toxic as a flavor enhancer.
-Science is having no success telling organic from non-organic produce.
-Organic produce is not nutritionally superior.

Carroll doesn’t venture into two of the perversions in nutrition research. Rat studies take animals predisposed to certain diseases and overload them with foods or chemicals to see how they fare. By law since 1964, if cancer resulted, the chemical had to be banned. Thus saccharine became a carcinogen. Didn’t matter that a human would have had to drink a hundred diet sodas a day for two years to absorb the same amount they pumped into the rats, it was cancer and it had to go. This is the same reasoning that has led to zero new wonder drugs for tuberculosis since the 1960s. TB doesn’t manifest in rats the way it does it humans, so new drugs can never pass the mandatory rat test. But I digress.

The other is our near total lack of understanding of how our bodies work. We now think gut bacteria manufacture all the vitamins we need on demand, and consuming them as chemicals is worthless. The same goes for food-borne cholesterol. The cholesterol in our blood comes from our own livers, not eggs or burgers. Carroll also skims over the massive chemical content of meat, red or white. Meat might not be as harmful as some say, but the antibiotics and other medicines and hormones in them are. Carroll says enjoy.

That the state of nutritional medicine is this torn and uncertain should be worrying all by itself. Carroll makes a lot of good arguments, but they don’t add any degree of certainty about what to eat. And he admits that. (He is currently experimenting with a low carb diet for himself.) For those who believe if you don’t recognize the ingredient then it’s not food – this book is not going to go down well. If you’re open to rational analysis with a splash of adventure, this is for you.

David Wineberg

The beach version of Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. Also an interesting read!
(https://www.librarything.com/work/5024010)

For 20 years I've been telling my mom that you can't get a cold from sitting under the air conditioner. I almost had her 8% converted if it weren't for that darn SpongeBob SquarePants episode when SpongeBob caught a killer cold by, yup... sleeping with the air conditioner on.

I doubt I'll change her mind, but at the very least I can marinate in my smugness knowing that cold weather does not cause colds -- and in fact, it's actually just what we need during cold season. And eggs aren't the high cholesterol demons they've been made out to be. And hydrogen peroxide... well, I don't want to be a plot spoiler on that one.

Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked offers scientific proof in the form of a "yes... those old wives tales you hear about are true" or "no, stop drinking the Kool-Aid." Each (potential) myth is broken down into bite-sized reading portions, complete with respected journal studies to corroborate the authors claims.

I was kind of shocked by the studies they outed as being laced with shenanigans, as I've seen some of these references on a fair share of health websites.

For example, one major brand claimed their product had gone through a double-blind study. However it was later discovered that the "lab" (and I use that term very looesly) conducting this double-blind study consisted of two guys in a garage.

I'm no moonlighting beaker heater, but when I think of labs and double-blind studies and sterile conditions, I don't see a garage in the picture.

I'll just conclude this review by saying we are seriously satiated by the almighty placebo affect in so many different ways. This book was a real eye opener in that department.

About: Doctors Vreeman and Carroll tackle common beliefs about health and the human body including the Five Second Rule, double dipping and how much water one should drink. The book is organized into six groups of myths: the body, diseases, sex and pregnancy, babies and children, what we eat and drink, and myths that spark debate and controversy.

Pros: Quick read, interesting, lots of myths tackled, well written, references in back.

A Few Things I Found Interesting:

* Yellow urine doesn't mean you are dehydrated, neither does being thirsty

* You can't "beat" a breathalyzer

* A mosquito's buzz is just the flapping of its wings

* Once the irritating oils are washed off, you can't get poison ivy from someone's poison ivy rash

* Putting butter on a burn is a bad idea

* Green mucus from your nose doesn't mean you need antibiotics

* Poinsettias aren't that poisonous. No people have died from poinsettia poisoning

* Vitamin C doesn't prevent colds

* Sugar does not make kids hyper

* Twins don't skip a generation

Cons: No in-text citations, would have liked to see a further reading and other resources section.

Grade B+