Here is the first book to debunk today’s food myths with actual science. Written in an engaging style for the general reader, the book tells stories about how scientists made their discoveries and reassures the reader about why the rumors about food “dangers” are silly and what science really says.
Nearly every day people come upon scary but questionable claims about food in the news and online. After reading these claims day after day people begin to believe things that just aren’t true and begin feeling that all of their food is somehow dangerous and suspect.
This book reviews what actual scientists do and what science is all about and tells stories about the major discoveries that make out food system the safest and most productive in the world. It debunks the extreme claims of the “food zanies,” and explains what scientists actually know.
Some of the topics covered include MSG, HFCS, artificial sweeteners, GMOs (biotechnology) organic farming, BPA, trans fats, gluten free fads, bee colony collapse, raw milk and artifical colors.
Excerpt
It is simply amazing how scary food has become. Everyplace you turn you are bombarded with questionable claims about this food or that one. How can I decide what to eat? How can I decide what to buy?
A whole industry of “Food Alarmists” has developed to scare you about the food you eat. There are so many rumors and superstitions and misinformation about foods that make everything pretty con-fusing. Some of these “crazies” genuinely believe the misinformation they are peddling, and a lot of others are peddling hogwash to sell their products.
In this book, we go through many of the shibboleths of the food industry and tell you what the science actually says. We’ve re-viewed a whole lot of recent scientific papers to get the most recent facts and in this book we explain them to you.
You might think that you would need to know a lot of biology, physics and chemistry to understand all the myths we’ve encountered, but really all you need is a little logic and a tiny bit of chemistry that we provide. I put in a few chemical drawings for fun, but you can skip over them if you prefer.
For the most part this book was fun to write because so much of these myths just aren’t true. We have a very safe food system, and there is very little to be concerned about.
The symbiotic pattern of evolution is everywhere and allows us a very different and fascinating window into the way symbiotic viruses work, since all viruses are symbiotic, including those involved in our human reproduction.
