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Anthony Warner (The Angry Chef was appearing under his real name) was at The Star and Garter to treat us to, not a sumptuous feast alas but, an hour long talk entitled The Truth About Fat - Why obesity, weight gain and health are more complex than everyone thinks. With a pint of Stella Artois on the go and a belly full of delicious pie'n'mash from nearby Goddards I had a suspicion I'd be made to feel more than a little guilty about my poor dietary habits.
Or maybe not! The aim of Warner's talk was to explode some of the myths about nutrition and fad diets and though he promised us that, at the end of the talk, he'd reveal to us the golden bullet regarding health, diet, and issues of weight, he also made very clear (even in the talk's title) that things are a lot more complex than the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow (the mere mention of her name elicited a huge laugh from the audience) would have us believe.
As well as being a chef, Warner works in food development and has been involved in taking measures to make the food we eat healthier. Lessening the amount of salt and sugar that comes in the food we buy in supermarkets for example. But clean eating fads and pseudoscientific Instagram bloggers are what led to him adding the angry adjective to his job title, and inspired him to start his own blog.
One that soon became popular (I looked him up on Twitter, he's got 22.5K followers - I've got 279) and led to a Sunday Times column, articles in New Scientist, and a trilogy of books, the second of which - The Truth About Fat - gave both its title and much impetus to the evening's talk. He also volunteers for Sense about Science and their Ask for Evidence campaign.
Warner believes that we're all particularly susceptible to false beliefs when it comes to food and that people feeling guilty about their eating habits is absolute nonsense. He firmly believes we need to get back to eating for pleasure and that no food, in moderation, is particularly bad. On digressions into alcohol, birthday cakes, and giving children ice cream he postulated that the advantages gained by these pleasant social activities and the personal bonds forged while carrying them out were far more important that the negligible health damage any of these things cause if taken in moderation.
I sipped my Stella a bit slower! Warner had broken down what he felt were the three main areas of concern and difficulty when it came to changing people's ideas about nutrition. Firstly, he suggested, a lot of it is down to our dislike of complexity. If you ask a qualified dietician they will tell you that healthy eating is complex and differs for different individuals in different environments. If you ask Gwyneth Paltrow, or others like her, they'll give you a simple answer (cut out sugar, go gluten free).
A simple answer that is very often incorrect and hasn't taken into account the fact that you are, we all are, individuals who live different lives and have different metabolisms. With this there was very little disagreement with Warner but when he started laying into locally grown produce and veganism he was on shakier ground.
Although, on the former at least, he won me over. His contention was that locally grown produce can be good but if you're heating a greenhouse to grow tomatoes in Norfolk in the middle of winter then that's more likely worse for the environment than shipping them over from Spain or Italy. The arguments about veganism not being the answer to health problems or sustainability were less clear and in defence of my many friends who have gone vegan, the main reason they have done so is because they don't want to be responsible for inflicting cruelty on animals rather than health or sustainability.
I get bored when people rant on about vegans. I suspect it's usually the same kind of guilt on their own behalf that informs their, it's often the same people, impassioned diatribes about people doing exercise. To be fair to Anthony Warner, that wasn't the route he went down. In fact he spent very little time on veganism at all and was soon on to what he considered the third side of the triangle of trickery when it comes to dietary concerns.
Tribalism! Which sounds far more dramatic than it actually is. That's how you get 22,000 followers on Twitter! Oftentimes, these days, dietary choices are used as a form of identification. Many Twitter bios begin with 'vegan', 'carnivore', 'clean eater' or something else that suggests the first thing a person wants to tell a complete stranger on the Internet about their life is what they didn't have for dinner!
If your prime form of identification, of self, is down to your dietary choices then when people attack those dietary choices you will feel personally attacked. Warner was keen to point out that while he wasn't keen on vegans, he had equally lukewarm feelings to those who identify as carnivores. He wasn't talking about meat eaters per se but a new subculture that has grown up who profess to consume only meat, salt, and water.
In a world where you can buy coffee enemas, vampire repellent, and 'detox hair straighteners' nothing's too bonkers for those prepared to believe it so a diet of salty meat and H2O is hardly the daftest thing out there. The third factor Warner asserted we need to take into consideration was the appeal to antiquity. The belief that there was once a time in the past when we ate so much better. When things were so much better.
It's not an idea that's unique to the food industry. Most religions play on the idea of lost Edens that we must, somehow, return to and our politicians, now almost as free from the shackles of truth as religious leaders have been for centuries, also play on these ideas. They say they can Make America Great Again or they can take back control but their past utopias are as distorted, or imaginary, as the enemies they dream up to make us feel so unsafe that we'll vote for their pernicious agendas.
Advocates of a paleo diet conveniently overlook the fact that people are eating healthier, and living longer, now than ever in the Earth's history. That's one thing that can hardly be disputed - but is still ignored by adherents who eulogise in favour of the paleo diet. Elsewhere the science is a lot trickier. A lot of the data is based on dietary recall surveys that are vague at best.
Controlled experiments on the long term effects of various foodstuffs are both impractical (they'd take years, decades) and unethical (you can't keep somebody a prisoner and watch everything they eat for years on end). The surveys that are done are often funded by those with vested interests and, as with most things funded by those with vested interests, tend to find the results they were looking for. Many would not stand up to a simple peer review process.
I'm uneasy about animal experimentation for ethical reasons anyway but, it seems, where experiments have taken place the results are anything but decisive. If you get the result you're looking for following an experiment on, say, a mouse you'll simply have your confirmation bias strengthened. If a result goes the 'wrong' way it can easily be dismissed. You're not a mouse. You're a human. Why would what happens to a mouse be relevant to you?
Other problems arise with generalisation of foodstuffs. Potato consumption is often treated as all one thing but it doesn't account for how we eat our spuds. There's virtually no style of eating a potato that doesn't appeal to me but a lot of people are very fond of chips and those people might eat their chips with a burger and a fizzy drink. Those people might also lead quite unhealthy lifestyles and not just at meal times.
Conversely, those who eat more organic food often have more money, they can afford gym membership, they're less likely to be affected by the 'lifestyle drift' (or even 'shit life syndrome') that afflicts the less well off. Who are gaining in number following nine years of cruel Tory austerity. Mental health, socioeconomic factors, contaminated water, and austerity DO affect people's diets. If you're so stressed about money and so anxious about the future you can barely face it there's a much larger chance that you're less likely to take care of yourself, to have the capacity to take care of yourself, or to be able to seek help to take care of yourself.
Anthony Warner didn't go into any party political stuff but it's my blog and I genuinely believe the Conservative government, all Tory governments but this current administration is particularly vicious, don't care about the poor. You only have to hear Jacob Rees-Mogg saying that the victims of Grenfell died because they didn't have enough common sense to realise that. Therese Coffey, MP for Suffolk Coastal, has even Tweeted to say that the people on Benefits Street should be 'put down'.
So, yeah, the Tories are a bunch of nasty shits. But I digress (there's a general election soon, we can't have enough reminders of how vital it is to vote these bastards out). Warner's point here was that we tend to reduce everything down to diet when, in reality, there are many contributory factors and the biggest of them all is wealth.
That's the golden bullet that Warner promised at the start of the talk. While he suggested that a balanced diet rich in broccoli, peas, beans, lentils, olive oil, and oily fish (something others would completely disagree with) is advantageous for our health, he said the best thing we can do for our health is simply not be poor. Host Chris French popped up with a quote from Coronation Street barmaid Bet Lynch:- "whether you're rich or whether you're poor - it's always better to be rich".
That doesn't mean we should take chips off poor people. Chips are one of the few pleasures in life for some people and certainly an audience debate during the Q&A about which kind of chips are best was pretty lively. Obviously if someone has a spectacularly poor diet that's making them, or is about to make them, seriously unwell a gentle intervention is a good idea. But, more pertinently, Warner suggested - and I witnessed nobody disagree with him, there needed to be structural change to our society and work needs to be done to end poverty and inequality.
Which has been widening exponentially in recent years. Arwa Mahdawi, writing in yesterday's Guardian, pointed out that the world's twenty-six richest people have as much money as the poorest 3,700,000,000. That's just not a workable way for a planet to go on. Jeff Bezos doesn't need, and shouldn't have, $110,000,000,000 while others starve to death in doorways. It's obscene and it needs changing. People should vote to change it. Ideally. But if that doesn't work it seems highly likely people will soon resort to more direct, and possibly very ugly, methods to ensure a redistribution of wealth.
Anthony Warner, unlike me, didn't go down this direct political route. Instead he ended on a metaphorical tale - but one that certainly had a political undercurrent. Suppose you were walking by a river one day and you saw someone drowning. You'd try to save them, of course. Suppose that happened the next day, the day after, and continued to happen everyday. Some days there would be several people drowning in that river. Obviously you'd try to save as many as you could but, eventually, at some point you'd venture further upstream and try to find out why people kept falling in the river. If you found a broken railing on a bridge that people kept falling through, you'd try and get that railing fixed. Poverty and inequality are the broken railings of our society that so many are falling through and somebody, somewhere, needs to fix it. You can bet every single penny in Jeff Bezos' offshore bank account that it most definitely won't be Boris Fucking Johnson.
Thanks to Anthony Warner and thanks to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub for yet another great night.
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