Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health

Author: Denise Minger

Rating: ⭐ 5/5

Date Read: 2014/07/21

Pages: 300

This is an interesting look at why we’re told to eat the way we do (more grains!! more vegetable oil! meat’s bad and butter’s bad but go ahead and eat all the cheese you want! pizza’s a vegetable! etc.). Author Denise Minger goes beyond politics and really digs into the current state of nutrition science. As a scientist myself, I appreciate the careful way in which she talks about empirical work: she hedges appropriately, doesn’t pull quotes completely out of context, and (most importantly) focuses more on what the data say than what the researchers say about the data.

Minger started thinking critically about health and nutrition when she started to become ill as a result of her raw vegan diet. Her blog, RawFoodSOS, cuts through the propaganda to explain why raw veganism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you want a bit of a teaser before you read the book, I highly recommend her debunking of the China Study, as well as the first and second responses by the China Study’s author, as well as Minger’s response to his responses. Spoiler alert: they both agree that we should be eating whole, unprocessed foods, and mostly disagree on the healthfulness of animal protein.

So, what should we eat? Minger encourages her readers to think about individual variation: what works for one person may not work for another, largely due to differences at the genetic or metabolic level. Beyond that, she recommends avoiding refined grains, refined sugars, and refined omega-6 rich vegetable oils. These recommendations aren’t surprising: nobody’s recommending that anyone eat white flour and white sugar with wild abandon. And, while a few people still think of vegetable oils and margarine as healthful, the science on PUFAs and omega-6 clearly shows that these purportedly “heart healthy oils” aren’t all they’re cracked up to be (praise the lard).

Because Death by Food Pyramid is not a book a la [b:Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health|11505008|Wheat Belly Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health|William Davis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1317793840s/11505008.jpg|16440712], which says “just stop eating this one thing and everything in your life will be perfect,”* it probably won’t become a best-seller, but it’s great reading for anyone interested in health and nutrition.

I think a great summary for the goal of the book is this statement, taken from Denise Minger’s (fantastic) blog:

“More than ever, I want to help demolish the tribalism existing within the nutrition world—to encourage us to learn from each other globally, instead of listening only to the voices tumbling around whatever dietary echo chamber we’ve locked ourselves into. I think that’s the only way to advance our collective knowledge. Among the rivaling diet communities, we seem to get stuck in a scarcity mentality where the success of The Other is seen as a threat to our own. But that shouldn’t have to be the case. We should approach dietary anomalies with curiosity and intrigue, rather than the knee-jerk reaction to defend our own kind.”