Dr. John Sloan, a B.C. family doctor, treats his coffee like dessert by adding lots of sugar, and fries his food at home in beef tallow. The coffee — genuine, full-caffeine espresso — gets heaped with sugar, 112 teaspoons of the real thing. Sloan, 68, has tracked down a rendering plant in Vancouver to supply him with the beef tallow, for that saturated, full-fat flavour. He also likes his food with lots of salt.
But he makes no excuses for any part of his diet.
“We should be eating things that taste good, said Sloan on the phone from Vancouver. “The only bad food is food that tastes bad.
“And the only empty calorie is the one that doesn’t bring you any inner delight.”
Sloan has written a book, Forbidden Food: How Science Says You Can Eat What You Like and Like What You Eat.
In it, he takes issue with what he calls “food propaganda.” It has compelled us to make our diets joyless, devoid of the three ingredients that make food so satisfying: salt, fat and sugar.
But Sloan’s biggest single problem is with the notion that eating any particular food or specialized diet, or forgoing something yummy, such as salt, fat or sugar, will somehow prolong life. The scientific evidence to suggest such a thing is non-existent, weak or suspect, he said.
“Evidence supporting the idea you can change your health outcome by altering how much of these three things [salt, fat and sugar] you eat, well that evidence just doesn’t exist,” Sloan said.
Inquiries to Island Health and the University of British Columbia Medical School yielded no doctor, dietitian or expert to take issue with Sloan’s argument.
However, Prof. James McCormack, of UBC’s pharmaceutical sciences department, agreed with Sloan. It is not true to say scientific studies back up the notion that any particular food is healthy or not, McCormack said.
He said it’s almost impossible to run a proper scientific study to determine whether any particular food or diet is good or bad for people.
Some small evidence suggests the so-called Mediterranean diet is reasonably good. But that evidence is not strong enough to justify a switch for a person who loathes olives and anchovies, McCormack said.
Also, few people seem to know what the Mediterranean diet truly is.
“It really depends on what levels of evidence you think we should have to make decisions about food,” McCormack said.
He suggested the best advice is to avoid extremes. Eat in moderation. Mix up your diet. Don’t eat too much or too little of any particular type of food.
Keep physically active, but it is probably a bad thing to run a marathon every week. But on no account should any person feel guilty about eating an occasional burger or slice of cheesecake, he said.
Last year, an analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which looked at 72 studies of 600,000 people in 18 countries, did not find any link between the risk of coronary disease and eating saturated fatty acid, which is in meat, cheese and butter.
Someone who eats 1,800 calories of pure fat every day will gain weight at the same rate as a person who eats 1,800 calories of a so-called balanced diet, Sloan said.
Calories are calories, and the only reason people gain weight is they eat too many of them, he added.
“Any five-year-old knows if you eat more you gain weight and if you eat less you lose weight,” he said.
Sloan admitted to writing the book because he is “a bit of a curmudgeon.”
“I’m just skeptical,” he said. “I don’t like common wisdom that has no substance to it.”
Sloan speculates there is likely something evolved in humans to seek community, or “tribal,” wisdom about what is good to eat. So, in simpler, village times, we learned from our community which berries or roots were poisonous, or what was too decomposed to be safe.
But now, Sloan believes, in places such as North America we live in unhappy, even guilty times and it has seeped into our tribal wisdom about food.
“There is this whole compelling ideology out there that says: ‘Oh, the world is frosted with
all these undeserved goodies,’ ” Sloan said. “ ‘What an awful thing it is to be eating all these things.’
“It may be a nice idea, but there isn’t any scientific basis to it.”
Even the craze about high-fibre diets is driven by the modern, unhappy tribal guilt, not scientific evidence, Sloan said.
“Like so many of these healthy-food myths, they become sort of metaphoric ideas,” he said. We think “that fibre, all this harsh, tough food, will somehow scour the moral nastiness out of our insides and clear away all the concerns.
“We love to think ‘you are what you eat,’ and that the food you put into your body has a profound effect. But the good scientific evidence isn’t there. It just isn’t there.”
Unfortunately, Sloan said, such ideas have also caused us to scrub all those things from our foods that make them yummy, the salt, the fat and the sugar. It is now almost impossible to find meat well-marbled with fat, unless you raise and custom feed an animal yourself, he said.
“We have lulled all the flavour out of our food,” Sloan said.
“Fifty years of anti-fat propaganda has led to a typical diet in the supermarket or in restaurants that is almost completely devoid of fat. And fat carries the flavour.”
Sloan speculated that the move to fat-free food had contributed, in a backhanded way, to today’s obesity crisis.
People are eating to gain emotional satisfaction. But there is no fat in the food to make them feel satisfied, so they load up on carbohydrate calories instead and gain weight.
Sloan admitted to forgoing certain foods that he loved to keep his weight down. But that is for his looks, not his health, he said.
“I’m not avoiding being overweight for health reasons,” he said. “I’m avoiding it because I don’t think I look good. It’s just about esthetics.”
Concerns about looks don’t stop Sloan, the admitted curmudgeon, taking issue with the current debate about an obesity crisis.
“The good scientific evidence suggests that mild, even moderate, obesity is unrelated to bad health outcomes,” he said.
“Now, when a person weighs 400 pounds, the heart is bound to be working harder and there is going to be more weight on the joints,” Sloan said.
“But I’m still a skeptic about this so-called epidemic of diabetes and obesity.”