Dispelling 'misleading' food ideas

There is no such thing as junk food and the hype about salt being bad for you "goes beyond any reason", a visiting scientist, nutritionist and author has said.

Professor Vincent Marks, co-author of the best selling book Panic Nation, also says that there is no such thing as bad food just food that has gone bad.

And while many people think obesity is caused by eating certain food, in reality it is caused by eating too much food, he says.

The common saying "you are what you eat" is a misquotation. It should be: "You are made from what you eat."

The UK-based Marks is in Durban as one of the VIP keynote speakers at this week's South African Food Science & Technology (SAAFoST) congress at the International Convention Centre.

As the organisers aim to address "the very poor and incorrect communication on food and nutrition in all media today", he is the perfect international speaker to bring out.

The high profile Marks, together with anaesthetist, researcher and physiology examiner Stanley Feldman (and their independent contributing writers), have now produced a second edition of Panic Nation which aims to debunk many of the myths about food.

Hailed as the "most comprehensive debunking exercise ever mounted", the book turns many serious misconceptions on their head. It covers such topics as binge drinking, GM crops, worthless dieting fads and school lunches.

Marks has long felt that the public was often misled by incorrect and sometimes dishonest claims by self-appointed health professionals, many of which who had not bothered to get themselves qualified.

Generally, most people got their information from advertisements and advertorials, he said.

"We are being scared witless by a mixture of half-truths, tendentious beliefs and unsubstantiated opinions presented in the media as incontrovertible, scientifically proven facts," the authors wrote.

"Many of these ideas have originated from overzealous pressure groups, from presentations by special interest lobbies or from self styled gurus.

"The more improbable the story, the more attention it receives - many of these ideas have become accepted as self evident truths, by the public and by responsible official bodies who lack the knowledge or the political will to challenge them."

Contributing writer Mick Hume, a columnist for The Times, says people often appeared to be unhealthily obsessed with looking on the dark side of life and worrying about their health, and that when there were no major health problems, there was a veritable epidemic of experts who assured people that they were storing up problems for the future, warning of the supposed "time bombs": the ageing time bomb, the obesity time bomb and even the cellphone time bomb.

"As yet, these alleged health time bombs have failed to explode as predicted, and the current list of potential health risks runs from A-to-X", the last being X-rays.

Marks, known internationally for his research on hypoglycaemia and diabetes, has appeared as an expert witness in some of the world's most famous trials.

He appeared for the defence in the case of Claus von Bulow, who was accused of the attempted murder of his wife Martha (nicknamed Sunny), allegedly by an insulin overdose in the late l980s.

Von Bulow was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but won his freedom on appeal.

Marks has just written another book on insulin murders, detailing 14 such murders, eight of which he was "involved" in as part of the subsequent court cases.

"Fiction writers like to use insulin to kill off their characters, believing it is undetected and very quick. But they are wrong on both counts," he said.

Writing about sugar, he said the myth was that sugar causes coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, gout, tooth decay and obesity, whereas "it really contributes only to tooth decay and its adverse effects can be offset by the addition of fluoride to drinking water and toothpaste".

Sugar has had a bad press, and while people can live perfectly good, healthy lives without it, they liked it.

"There is no doubt that sugar makes food palatable and in this sense contributes to obesity, which is an important cause of diabetes and heart disease," he said.

He personally did not use sugar in his coffee and tea, but was not against sugar or sweeteners. There was nothing he did not eat "because of this or that".

As to junk food, his coauthor writes that the myth is that it caused ill health, whereas the fact is "there is no such thing as food that is bad and food that is good for you."

"The term junk food is an oxymoron. Either something is a food, in which case it is not junk, or it has no nutritional value, in which case it cannot be called a food. It cannot be both," Feldman says.

There was no doubt that snobbery and cost contributed to the perception of what was called junk, he said.

• This article was originally published on page 5 of The Daily News on September 03, 2007