Every day, new nutrition and health information saturates magazine racks, bookshelves, and news reports. Heralding the food police anthem "According to the latest study…" advocacy groups cite this unremitting research to campaign for taxes, restrictions and government-mandated guilt trips. For Barry Glassner, a professor at the University of Southern California, warnings surrounding these "new" reports are growing old.So he’s sounding off about modern food nags in his new book, The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong. In it he reviews over 1,000 studies to discredit popular food myths and the people who perpetuate them, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Julie Gerberding.In a review in yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer Glassner takes on one of the most common nutritional-kaisers’ propaganda:
This notion that fast food is to blame for the obesity epidemic just doesn’t hold scrutiny … Obesity rates barely budged during the 1960s and ’70s when the fast-food industry was growing by leaps and bounds — and was already huge … The bottom line …is that the true causes (of the obesity epidemic) are, I think, a lot more interesting and a lot less obvious.
