SUNDAY, 25 MAY 2025

I have to admit I’m a sucker for YouTube videos on the subject of food and nutrition. It’s a weird and wacky world which mixes genuine scientific research with kooky, off-the-wall claims, populated by ideologues in white coats with a stethoscope hanging from their breast pocket (subtle semiotics, uh?). They all claim to be doctors, and I’m not so cynical that I think they’re bare-faced lying: I believe they really are doctors, but doctors on a mission. They have discovered the truth that no one else has discovered: the wonder food that will prevent us from ever falling sick or the devil’s brew that is rotting us inside without our even suspecting it. It’s also, I imagine, a very lucrative world for the handful of superstars at the top of the tree, who can get over a million subscribers, but I don’t want to impute financial opportunism behind what they do. Most of these guys come across as a bit swivel-eyed but sincere.

They usually glorify or demonise a food or a group of foods. But whereas once, whatever the individual vlogger’s particular obsession might have been, a lot of the general advice they gave was similar and sensible (quit smoking, eat your veg, drink lots of water, cut down on the booze), I now get the impression that there’s been a recent sea-change. The market is getting saturated and you can no longer enter it by being something so passé as merely vegan or carnivore or keto. You need a controversial USP. So lately I see people who say fruit is ‘evil’ and far more deadly than table sugar, that we are drinking water the wrong way and this is killing us, that the Mediterranean diet is a major cause of cardiac disease, extra-virgin olive oil is worse than lard or tallow, walking every day despatches people of pensionable age to the graveyard before their time is due, and I’ve even witnessed chilling diatribes against those good old health-promoting standards, broccoli, avocados and nuts.

It’s not that the hosts are stupid: on the contrary, they are smart enough to have qualified as doctors and many of them boast a PhD, and presumably not the kind that you get by sending off ten package tops in the post. Nor are their vlogs anti-science: they are eager to parade the scientific research that proves their pet thesis. What we cannot know as a lay viewer is how much of this research has been cherry-picked and where the balance of evidence lies. They certainly know how to sweeten their nuggets of food wisdom with a sprinkling of science. They realise that randomised clinical trials are considered the gold standard in studies involving nutrition, more trustworthy than any amount of epidemiological number-crunching, so they single out a recent paper from a journal as hard proof of their case. But is this superiority of RCTs inevitably true? The research that these vloggers put forward may indeed come from a RCT, but it is often a trial involving twenty-three individuals split into two groups and followed for a month. And on the basis of this tiny, time-limited sample we are told to ignore Japanese longevity or lower rates of heart disease in Greece.

Although this online world is dominated by the obsessive and their adamantine certainties, there are a handful of sceptical voices, hosts who take a measured approach and try to look at more than one study before they reach conclusions about a specific food or diet regime. Their problem is that they come across as worthy and tentative and dull compared to those who shriek. And much too complicated. They think and behave as good scientists should, pinpointing the limitations of an individual piece of research, questioning the methodology and stats, and repeating again and again the truism that correlation does not prove causation. Their videos often end with the oldest academic cliché of all: ‘more research is needed’. But how can that compete with a claim that if you eat blueberries every day for a month you will never get cancer or that every glass of wine you drink takes ten minutes (not nine or eleven) off your life?

Maybe part of the problem is that this is all happening on video, with its temptation towards sensationalism, especially in an online environment that is adversarial, and in which these competing gurus scrap it out to fight for their cause. Hosts who are willing to challenge someone from their own food tribe are rare (and deserve a huge amount of praise). Also, these vlogs must be short because almost no one is going to watch a video that lasts for two hours or more, so they tend to focus on just a few details which ‘prove’ what they are claiming and look only superficially at the paper they are championing. The data presented is complex, and those hosts who make the laudable effort to go into detail risk losing the viewer, either through lack of comprehension or through boredom. In addition, the data is hard to present on screen in a simple visual fashion that doesn’t reduce its complexity, and viewers are unlikely to click on links provided below to the paper under discussion. Consideration of material as nuanced as this is much better left to textual forms of communication if our intention is to aim for knowledge rather than to proselytise, but books are dropping out of fashion since they require levels of effort and concentration greater than those when watching a video.

These vlogs, however, share many of their weaknesses with reports of nutritional science in newspapers, even the broadsheets, which, as Ben Goldacre shows in his wry, debunking books, are frequently written by reporters who have no scientific background and simplify, exaggerate, fail to understand, and often merely copy word for word what is written in the researchers’ press release. Which brings us to the scientists themselves, who are not always lofty academics whose only interest is truth but sometimes careerists who are competing for future funding, so they are not immune to sexing it up (my example of the glass of wine taking ten minutes off your life, not nine or eleven, came from a genuine paper). They realise that a press release which has the word ‘inconclusive’ in the heading will end up in the rubbish basket faster than you can say ‘boring’, and know exactly what to do if they want to accumulate clicks and earn a further tranche of lolly.

I said at the start that I find the far edges of this video world hilarious, and I do, but this doesn’t mean I think they’re harmless fun. I think they exemplify very clearly how, in the developed world at least, our relationship to food has become disturbingly dysfunctional. And we are all of us prone to seeing what we want to see: because I eat a lot of walnuts (for the pleasure of their taste), every time I watch a vlog that highlights their benefits for health, part of my brain lights up as I get a tiny kick of confirmation. And of course I love and accept without question any research that suggests the dangers of alcohol are massively overstated.

A glance at the world around us shows that our relationship with food is in crisis. Levels of anorexia and bulimia have sky-rocketed, while obesity is spreading over the globe like some blob from a 50s sci-fi movie. On our TVs we follow and worship celebrity chefs and yet few of us cook any more, or even have the slightest idea how to. We order takeaways instead because apparently we are so busy that we don’t have time to put together a meal between our fixes of mindless TV. This lack of time may be real for the poorest among us, who have to work three jobs merely to survive and whom we like to hide away and pretend don’t exist in our consumer paradise, people living in one of America’s food deserts where their choices of a meal are McDonalds, Taco Bell or KFC.  It’s hard to believe there are places where you can’t buy a carrot or an onion, but apparently they exist in the land of the TV dinner.

Meanwhile, the middle-classes neurose about essential amino acids, saturated fat, the glycemic index, and exactly how many olives they can eat if they want to avoid hypertension. They fret over things like gluten, which is a genuine problem for only a small minority, and fastidiously read the ingredients on labels (why not just avoid packaged food instead?), as if all food is poison. When exactly did food become perfidious, not something to nourish us or one of life’s greatest pleasures, but an assassin hiding in the bushes and pointing its gun at our heart? Or the opposite: a super-hero emerging from its phonebox to magic all our aches and pains away? Yes, it’s my turn to shriek, and I want to scream, ‘Just eat it because it tastes good: ditch the low-fat yogurt that tastes like wallpaper paste and the hydroponic tomatoes that are the closest thing to plastic you’ll find this side of polystyrene, and be guided by your taste-buds.’ And yes, I know those taste-buds can deceive us, but so can papers from journals reported in the press, especially if we only look at the headlines.

In general I suspect that these hang-ups about food are much deeper in Anglo-American culture with its half-buried puritanism and that countries with a proud and longstanding food culture can buck the trend, but perhaps this is naive of me as the world gets progressively more rotund. The hypermart is everywhere now, with its aisles and aisles of ultra-processed junk put together in labs and factories and deliberately constructed to addict us with its sugar, salt, flavourings, colourings, emulsifiers and e-numbers. Sadly, I doubt if anywhere escapes this trend in an age where America’s most significant export to the world is not what it likes to believe it is – democracy and freedom – but its Frankenfoods made for profit more than pleasure.

Which brings me to other things I could have mentioned in this essay, and probably should have, because there is a political dimension to this which I have ignored, notably the power of the huge food corporations. But while they perhaps are evil, unlike fruit, they are only producing this junk because we rush to buy it: if we demanded good quality food, they would have to provide it instead or go out of business. Also, to be fair, I should mention the flipside of their rampant lobbying and corruption: the ‘nanny state’ of governments which tut and wave their finger and do their best to fill us all with dread. They form an unholy alliance with the media and parts of the medical profession, stoking up our fears by using things like relative rather than absolute risk (depicting, for example, a tiny increase in the absolute incidence of a disease from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 500 as a terrifying percentage). In my opinion, there is a strong streak of puritanism in official guidelines and advice, at least in the UK and the US, a sense that the wages of sin (enjoying our food) is painful and well-deserved death.

I know my thoughts in the previous paragraph are contentious and this shows how controversial this subject of nutrition can be. Food is life and death after all, so it’s hardly surprising that it stirs up such strong emotions, and most of us gain our lifelong tastes in food in our childhood, so it is associated with fond memories of growing up and the warmth of familial love. But let’s agree on some obvious facts: nutritional science is an incredibly complex field where we are sure of very little, and in which good research is fraught with difficulties, very expensive, and therefore hard to find, so building a body of confident knowledge is fiendishly tricky (just look at how long it took us to be categorically sure that smoking kills). So perhaps we should temper our hunger for foods that are superheroes and others that are supervillains and take all of this online advice with a huge pinch of salt even if it’s bad for our blood pressure.