Today’s post will just be some musings of personal observation.
If you follow any online “health influencers,” you will notice that they often attract a rather passionate set of followers and detractors. For example, you will commonly find influencers in the low-carb community (and their followers) denigrating anybody who disagrees with them as not just wrong, but as stupid or corrupt. I commonly see commentary around such influencers that doctors have “lied to” the public about sugar; that the data linking high cholesterol to heart disease is based on only a few flawed studies from the 1950s; and that Ancel Keys (one of the early leading proponents of reducing saturated fat and cholesterol) made up his research results – none of which is true.
On the vegan side of things, one can find the same tendencies. I’ve seen interview clips of Michael Gregor (a prominent vegan physician and author) for example promoting the idea that a vegan diet is the “only” diet shown to reverse heart disease (it isn’t). And as a resident I once took care of a patient in the hospital who refused to believe – despite all evidence to the contrary – that she had had a heart attack, because she was a vegan and “if you don’t eat animal products, you can’t get heart disease.” (In fact, cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of all Americans – vegans included).
I’m not knocking keto diets or vegan diets. As I’ve blogged about previously, I’ve seen both diets do wonderful things, and many other diets besides. It’s why I’m “diet agnostic” and work with patients on whatever eating plan works best for them.
What I’m noting rather is the almost religious type of feeling that many people attach these days to their lifestyle choices. I believe that the fundamental reason for this is the fear of our own mortality. Let me explain.
We all know that – however much we take care of ourselves, and however lucky we are – we will eventually die. (If we’re really lucky, we’ll grow old and frail before this happens.) Obviously, this can be a frightening thought, and it’s one we all have to deal with.
It’s comforting therefore to think that we’ve discovered a unique formula that guards against this: “if I adopt diet/lifestyle habit x, then I will not get dread disease y,” is an appealing thought. And if you succumb to the temptation of this thought, anybody that challenges your belief becomes not just a person with a different point of view, but a threat to your very sense of safety.
If you follow a vegan diet because you believe it will prevent you from getting cancer, then anybody following a different eating pattern and doing well is a reminder that, in fact, you might be wrong. If you follow a keto diet to prevent heart disease, then mainstream medical thinking around topics like red meat and cholesterol is not a nuanced set of scientific data to be integrated into your worldview. It’s a threat to that worldview, and is most comfortingly dismissed as the end-product of a corrupt system. (Yes, our system is often corrupt – but that to me is an invitation to further nuance of understanding, not to dismiss wholesale any lines of scientific evidence that I don’t like).
As an aside, I believe that some of the same misdirected passion is affecting our national political life. We all have a deeply ingrained need to “belong” somewhere. Historically, this meant belonging to a religious group, a family, an ethnicity, or a nation. But in our modern world, many of these anchors of emotional life have dissolved. If the “tribe” you most passionately identify with is your political party, then that neighbor of yours who votes differently than you isn’t just someone with whom you might have a friendly disagreement at the neighborhood barbecue. No, they are a grade A jerk who represents a threat to our very way of life, and hence must be ostracized.
All of which is to say, in this week of holidays (Happy Easter or Passover), that we are inherently religious beings. We seek groups to belong to, ideas that help us transcend our existence and feel like we are part of something bigger, and a sense of control over disease and death. So by all means adopt whatever health habits work for you. But do your best to be humble and to keep an open mind.
