Angry Chef....

We are on the Telegraph Food Power List, voted one of the top 50 influencers in the world of food.

Ohhh. Get us. Feel our awesome power. We really do have the right wing media sewn up, don’t we? We’ve been in the Telegraph, the Mail and the Times.

Yeah, strange isn’t it. One day, maybe the Guardian and Observer will come calling with that lucrative restaurant review column we dream about. Weird that they’ve never been in touch.

Our gimmick could be that we give everyone a terrible review, no matter what the restaurant is like. That way, readers will never be disappointed.

Not the worst idea, although we would have to keep our identity secret, just in case we annoy any chefs that are more powerful than us.

Yes, no one likes to see a powerful chef getting cross.

But I think it would be hard for anyone to discover our true identity. Unless they click on the ‘Book Available Now’ link at the top of the page.

While they’re there, they could pre-order The Angry Chef – Bad Lies and The Truth about Healthy Eating, by some random no-mark called Anthony Warner. Available at a very reasonable £12.99.

I hear that it has been getting excellent reviews.

Hang on. If we are on a list of the top 50 food people, that means we are not necessarily the most powerful chef in the universe. That’s a shame. Who else makes the list?

The usual suspects. Lawson, Stein, Oliver, Mills, Wicks. That’s the sort of company we roll with these days.

Oh, that’s awkward. We’ve written about some of them before haven’t we.

Can’t remember.

Anyone else?

Well, Joanna Blythman’s on there. She said she was honoured to be named in such esteemed company.

I doubt she meant us. Didn’t we once compare her to Michael Gove?

Can’t remember again. But during the fall out, I was drawn to her Twitter feed, where I noticed that she was sharing an article about the dietitian Carrie Ruxton. There were calls for Carrie to stand down from her position on the board of Food Standards Scotland because in 2010 she had published a review paper that downplayed links between sugar consumption and obesity, something that Joanna described as ‘deeply unacceptable’.

I found all this slightly odd, mostly because the review paper in question did little more than repeat the generally held scientific consensus, that sugar can be a facilitator of excess calorie consumption, but does not have a unique link to obesity. In fact, the same conclusions were drawn in the 2015 SACN (Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition) review on carbohydrates, and the 2012 WHO Meta-Analysis on the same subject. Joanna, clearly a talented investigative journalist, must have chosen to ignore this when she commented that the study had ‘unsuccessfully attempted to downplay the very real damage that sugar does to public health’.

Now, I am no fan of diets that contain huge amounts of refined sugar, as I feel that anyone who gets a large proportion of their calorie intake from that alone is unlikely to be embracing a wide variety of different foods in their diets. But despite the rhetoric played out in the media, there is clear evidence that sugar is not the single cause of heart disease or obesity, any more that fat is, despite what the low-fat diet gurus of the 1980s spent years telling us.

But balance and moderation is not an appealing message to the media, and the few outliers claiming that sugar is the devil tend to get a disproportionate amount of coverage. As a result, the largely unsupported narrative that sugar is uniquely evil/toxic/addictive is far more available to most people’s minds that the boring WHO line, largely because it receives so much press.

To make things worse, for many public health campaigners it is tempting to have a laser focus on a single cause of poor health. The demonization of a lone ingredient is a far better vehicle to effect change than any sort of balanced view. Nuance, they say, is the enemy of marketing, with fear, certainty and shameless drug analogies highly likely to motivate people. For this reason, the truth is often jettisoned, because ‘something must be done’.

So, when Joanna Blythman says that reports like Carrie Ruxton’s are biased because of funding issues, it seems that this must be the case, because in the public’s eyes, sugar definitely is evil. The quality of the science contained in the report is ignored, and the money trail becomes the only concern.

EW Wait. Stop right there.

Ah, hello Evidence Warrior. Haven’t seen you for a while. Where have you been?

EW Our existence is nothing but spiritual energy. Time is a formless void, constrained only by our minds. I have merely existed.

Up that mountain again? Getting in touch with your inner self?

What can I do for you?

EW You are ignoring something obvious and important. The inconvenient truth is that financial conflicts of interest do seem to introduce a systematic bias. See here and here.

Ah. OK. Fair enough, but there is perhaps a difference between saying that research should be questioned because of a conflict of interest, and saying someone is unfit to do a job because they were part of a report that received funding 7 years ago. And it did seem to be quite a coincidence that the story came to light now, at a time when Joanna is involved in a long running campaign against the FSS, for reasons too boring to talk about here.

It is true that financial conflicts of interest can create bias, and in a perfect world with limitless funding for scientific studies this would never happen. But alas the world is not perfect. This causes many problems, not least that the likes of Joanna Blythman and her long term admirer Aseem Malhotra use it as a stick to beat existing dietary guidelines, dismissing any scientific studies that don’t agree with their views as the product of a broken system.

Aseem who?

Aseem Malhotra, the doctor who according to his website is ‘successfully leading the campaign against sugar consumption’ and is apparently ‘one of the leading doctors in the world’ (citation needed). Previously Joanna has described him a ‘brave and principled'.

Oh. His website does make him look very important. Was he on the Telegraph food power list?

No, although he did tweet his congratulations to Joanna about her place (although it may have been through gritted teeth).

We must have missed his message congratulating us.

Asseem has a level of smug self-satisfaction that makes me feel uncomfortable (even in photographs), as does Blythman, so viewing congratulatory communications between them made me feel a little nauseous and in need of a lie down. This renewed my determination to write a piece on the axis of bullshit that seems to be developing between these two, and various low carb cultists in the UK and abroad. So, I held aloft my magic whisk, and called upon my collaborators in chief, Captain Science and Evidence Warrior. It was time to shine light upon darkness.

And then miraculously, the stars of bullshit aligned. Aseem appeared in the papers once again this week, talking about a piece he had written for the British Journal of Sports Medicine. I had been saying for a while that the next time he stuck his head above the parapet, it was time for a full on, both barrels, Angry Chef take down.

So, fans of fury. Get ready.

Here.

 It.

Comes.

Things that make Evidence Warrior lose his fucking shit.

Although Malhotra is largely associated with sugar shaming, his lack of understanding of science runs far deeper than that. For many years he has latched on to deluded conspiracy theorists everywhere, cosying up to Angry Chef's favourite Candida quack Zoe Harcombe, and even retweeting articles by the repugnant, anti-vax, bullshit-monger Dr Mercola, a man who claims to be able to cure autism with supplements, and has been repeatedly fined by the FDA in America for making unsubstantiated claims for the products he sells.

The Public Health Collaboration, the organisation that Aseem sits on the advisory board of, has links to BANT, and recommends working with BANT registered therapists on dietary health interventions. It is worth remembering that BANT endorses people who practise pseudo-scientific and abusive autism ‘cures’ like GAPS, as well as various new age stupidity like homeopathy and crystal healing. This is perhaps a curious collaboration for the PHC, an organisation with a number of legitimate medical professionals on board, purporting to be serious public health campaigners with influence at government level.

It is clear that Asseem Malhotra loves saturated fat. I have heard that he is sometimes seen publically eating butter straight out of the packet as a lunchtime snack (true story), perhaps an indication that he is prone to the affected, attention seeking behaviour of a small child. Either that or he is often really drunk at lunchtime, which might also explain him retweeting Mercola.

Didn’t we once eat half a pack of butter for a bet? It made us very ill if I remember, and Mrs Angry Chef said we should take a good look at our life choices.

Aseem has long held the line that dietary guidelines are flawed and saturated fats have been wrongly demonized, believing that they are actually protective when it comes to heart health. These claims are generally based on a handful of cherry-picked studies, and have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere many times.

He has also been highly vocal in spreading the belief that dietary guidelines are manipulated by a corrupt food industry. In a 2015 article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) he stated that the food industry used tactics that involved ‘buying the loyalty of bent scientists at the cost of millions of lives’, a fairly outrageous and unsubstantiated claim that had to be retracted shortly after publication.

He has a history of such nonsense, but everything came to a head last year when the PHC published a report in collaboration with the National Obesity Forum. This created a storm (link, link), with Malhotra at the heart, a position in which he clearly revelled. Often he seems to be a man wondering around the world of nutrition and public health, desperately looking for a piece of limelight to stand in. And nothing creates limelight and media interest more effectively than allegations of widespread corruption.

The conspiracy theory that evil lobbying by an all-powerful sugar industry has killed millions has long seemed curious to me. As someone who has worked for ‘Big Food’ for half his adult life, I can only say that if saturated fat could be eaten with impunity, and if calories did not matter as Aseem has stated in the past, the food industry would rejoice as it would make our job developing recipes many times easier. I also imagine it would make lobbying forces within the meat and dairy industry extremely happy, as well as the many large companies that manufacture fats and oils. And if the sugar lobby did have full control of dietary guidelines, they have done a pretty good job of shooting themselves in the foot in the last few years, as the market for sugar is in terminal decline, and a huge proportion of industry resource is currently focused on reformulation to meet new guidelines. Within the food industry, we accept the consensus of scientific opinion, even though it often makes our lives very difficult. We accept that although some studies might be biased, guidelines are developed based on the weight of all evidence, something so vast it would be impossible to significantly influence with a few well placed back handers.

Reviews from organisations like SACN or the WHO look at thousands of papers, with strict frameworks in place to select which evidence is considered, and a pre-defined hierarchy to grade the relative importance of each. An audit trail exists in accordance with the Code of Practise for Scientific Committees, recording exactly how each decision is reached, with any conflict of interests fully declared, and swathes of regulation designed to ensure objectivity is maintained. SACN’s 2016 report on Vitamin D took over 5 years to produce, with a working group sitting 15 times.  It involved sifting through a vast array of evidence, looking at everything from the effect on musculoskeletal diseases such as rickets and osteomalacia, through to a huge number of other outcomes such as pregnancy, lactation, cancers, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, all-cause mortality, immune modulation, infectious diseases, neuropsychological functioning, oral health, age-related macular degeneration. And that was just to help set the guidelines for the consumption of one vitamin. This is a million miles away from the sort of cobbled together, cherry-picked nonsense that organisations like the PHC spew out to confirm their pre-existing views, and any thought that the food industry is sculpting dietary guidelines to suit its evil needs is so far from the truth as to be laughable.

And yet this week Malhotra surfaced again, this time in the BMJ’s equally bullshit prone sister publication, the British Journal of Sports Medicine. A short editorial piece entitled ‘Saturated fat does not clog the arteries’ claimed once again that saturated fat has been wrongly vilified by dietary guidelines and that a ‘high-fat Mediterranean diet’ (whatever that might mean), combined with 22 minutes a day of exercise is the best way to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. The report is shamefully poor, a thorough misunderstanding of data, and an insult to the world of evidence based medicine. Expert reaction ranged from scathing to dismissive, but to its credit, the one thing it did manage to do was get a lot of media attention.  

It is deeply curious why a scientific journal felt the need to publish such a pointless opinion piece, nothing more than the ego-stroking musings of an evidence-illiterate, god-complex medic, expressing opinions he has voiced many times before in an area in which he has no expertise. It is PR fluff, a Goop special feature with references, appearing in supposedly august peer reviewed journal.

Then, the day after the BJSM editorial, a Malhotra penned Sun article appeared, where he helpfully translated his science terminology for the proletariat, unequivocally stating that saturated fat is ‘good for you’, and explaining that swapping full fat milk for low fat has led to consumers eating products ‘stuffed with sugar’, which will be news to milk manufacturers everywhere.

Referring to his PR fluff, bullshit opinion piece in the BJSM he says…

‘Research I had published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine this week…’

…which indicates that either he does not know what the word 'research' means, or that his doctor-god-complex delusions have taken over his fragile ego to such an extent that he genuinely believes that a poorly reference 1000-word opinion piece citing 10 articles, most of which he does not seem to fully understand, actually constitutes research. To describe it as research is an insult to the word, a slap in the face to every genuine researcher on the planet, every sensible voice that tries to help inform the public about dietary choices. It probably even pissed Zoe Harcombe off. ‘Research’ my hairy fucking arse. This isn’t research, it’s fucking PR.

Later in the article, he says -

‘Action between the sheets counts, too. Sex raises the heart rate and gets the blood pumping.’

Oh god, a bit of sick just came up.

And repeats one of his favourite phrases –

 ‘you cannot outrun a bad diet.’

...despite the article containing a table showing the amount of running you need to do to burn off calories from different foods (which incidentally shows quite clearly that foods high in fat have a higher calorie density than those high in sugar, so requiring more exercise to burn them off).

There is little point in me pulling apart the scientific inaccuracies in the Sun piece, or the BJSM article, as many others have done so quite eloquently and comprehensively. I did ask Captain Science and she said this –

CS Oh, fuck off. Can’t be arsed. I’m having my boiler serviced today and haven’t got time (and no, that’s not a fucking euphemism, I really am having my boiler serviced, so don’t include that bit). I've already said a hundred times that the BMJ is a dumbed down piece of shit, and that medics pretending to be researchers are infuriating. The science angle on why he's so fucking wrong has been thoroughly covered, so I'm not sure what I can add. Besides, the cricket season’s started, so fuck off and leave me alone.

Which is indeed part of the problem. We have been here before, this has been thoroughly and comprehensively debunked, and yet here we are again. Sometimes, with Brandolini's law in mind, it barely seems worth bothering.

Not just bad science

But there is more here than just bad science. There is something darker, something motivated not just by ignorance, arrogance and a shameless desire for publicity. This is the post truth playbook brought to ruin the world of food, with Malhotra at its heart, and the BMJ playing the role of conspiracy theory mouthpiece. Once again it masquerades as a serious journal, driven only by the desire for click bait publicity stories, caring not for the embarrassment of later retractions.

After much time staring at the the tangled web of bullshit that Malhotra, Blythman, the PHC and their many associates have spun, I now see what they are doing. Perhaps I have not given them enough credit. It might just be that behind the mask of scientific illiteracy and publicity hungry narcissism, they are very clever indeed.

It is the closing lines of the BJSM article that interest me the most.

‘Coronary artery disease is a chronic inflammatory disease and it can be reduced effectively by walking 22 min a day and eating real food. There is no business model or market to help spread this simple yet powerful intervention.’

Here, the mask is pulled off, because the flat denial that a business model exists simply draws into focus just how much is being done to create one. This is evidence manipulation for commercial gain, and the more I look at what they are doing, the clearer it becomes. To say that the consumption of a diet high in saturated fat cannot be monetised is absurd and untrue.

Yeah, that Atkins Diet bloke did alright out of it.

Yes, he did. In fact, he did so well that he created a foundation. It just so happens that the Atkins foundation has a scientific advisory board, and you might think that anyone who was a paid member of that board would have a vested interest in pushing scientific thinking towards the health benefits of a high fat diet.

Yes, you would think that. I mean, if you were going to write a scientific paper and you had to declare conflicts of interest, you would think that might be fairly top of mind.

Well, apparently not, because when the previously mentioned paper about calories and exercise was printed in the BMJ, a paper that Asseem was the main author of, they forgot to declare that the co-author Stephen Phinney was being paid by Atkins as a scientific advisor, and had also co-written a number of books advocating low-carb dieting. Oh, and the other author was Tim Noakes, an author of similar books, which they also forgot to mention as a potential conflict of interest. This led to a retraction and eventually a corrected republication of the piece, although no conflicts of interest were listed for Malhotra.

There is a clear business model and plenty more people who stand to gain financially from the publicity of the low carb, 'real food' message. We have Zoe Harcombe, someone with strong links to the PHC whose publications and ‘research’ have been similarly criticised for failing to declare she is the author of a number of diet books, who sells subscription services through her website, and makes her entire living from peddling a low carb message. And Malhotra himself, co-producer of the documentary ‘The Big Fat Fix’, currently available to stream or download from his website for a small fee ($4.99 to stream, or just $19.99 to buy). Or maybe you could channel some money his way by means of some other potential conflicts of interest that he does not declare. Perhaps you could buy this book on Amazon, co-authored by him and available later this year for only £8.99 (happy to report that ‘The Angry Chef’ is killing him in the pre-sale charts, even without a supporting BJSM piece). The cynics among you might think that this is a clear indication that he has a strong financial interest in the low carb, real food diet ideology being publicised in scientific journals, although it does not seem to be declared in the BJSM.

Or maybe go to the website of the Public Health Collaboration where Aseem is a board member. This is an organisation whose supposed crowd funding is shrouded in mystery, presumably coming from the devotion of low carb cultists willing to pay for flashy conferences out of a misguided evangelical zeal for the low carb lifestyle. So it might perhaps be considered a conflict of interest to be a board member of such an organisation, given that its income depends on the acceptance of the low carb high fat dogma, something that articles like the one in the BJSM endorse. At the website you will find calls for donations, with t-shirts and cook books for sale, all under the ‘real food’ brand that Aseem Malhotra promotes at every opportunity.

Maybe we could look at the other PHC board members and their vested interest in spreading bullshit anti-carb rhetoric from a platform of seeming legitimacy, hijacking words like ‘Public Health’ to fool people into thinking that they are an official body. We have Sam Feltham, the director, with his health and fitness businesses, and a long history of suspect claims being investigated by Advertising Standards. Or Trudi Deakin and her X-Pert Health operation, peddling low carb diet advice for financial gain. Or Tasmin Lewis with her blood test diagnosis company. I see them all. I know their fucking game. This is business, a crowd-funded lobbying group created to manipulate public opinion, to twist the evidence and to undermine authority.

The PHC is nothing but a mouthpiece for a disparate group of ill-informed, poorly qualified individuals, with strong financial interests in perpetuating low carb diet advice. And as none of them have the skills or credentials to do any real research, they merely manipulate opinion through the media, passing comment and cherry picked data off as research and exploiting anyone who will give their rhetoric a voice.

To anyone who knows the first thing about brands, PR and the marketing of products it is quite clear what these people are doing. They repeatedly crowbar the words ‘real food’ into scientific journals, interviews, articles, TV appearances and websites. Repetition is the lifeblood of brand creation and they have it down to an art. Just eat real food. Real food revolution. Real food rocks. If only all those poor fat people ate real food, they wouldn’t cost our health service so much money. Ban fake food. Cut the processed junk. Stop being poor and eat real food. Cook everything from scratch. Butter is real food, so it definitely can’t do you any harm. Force the poor to eat real food. Force fat people to eat butter. Do what we say, let us control you, buy our product, buy our brand. Real food, real food, real food.

Well, real food can fuck right off. There is no coherent category of food that we can classify as real. What the fuck do you mean, eat real food? What the fuck are you talking about? When did sugar stop being real? Is this cake real because I made it at home? Is this Snickers not real? Why the fuck is a supposedly serious medical journal allowing someone to run a fucking advertorial for their brand? This ridiculous, ignorant, classist, and fat-phobic bullshit. Fuck off with your real fucking food.

It is the demonization of perfectly sensible food choices, as ignorant, misguided and prejudicial as 'clean eating', creating a dangerous dichotomy of real vs fake, judging people for their choices, forcing guilt upon the blameless, and destroying people’s relationship with what they eat. I demand that everyone eats a fucking Twix right now and send a picture to the next real food activist you come across on line.

And to have the fucking nerve to claim there is no business model behind the message they sell. These fuckers literally sell T-Shirts on their website. And the message on those t-shirts is this –

‘We know what is good for you. We hate you because you are fat, weak-willed and poor, we hate the choices you make, we despise you and think we are better than you in every way. We hate fat, hate the poor, and enjoy passing judgement to make ourselves feel fucking superior. From a position of cosseted, middle-class fucking privilege, we offer redemption, a path into the light, a chance to be free from your stupid, fat, poor, lazy body. We will teach you that fat is weakness. The answer is simple and the only thing holding you fat fuckers back is that you are too stupid, lazy and weak to understand.’

But that doesn’t fit on a t-shirt, so instead they say -

‘Real Food Rocks’

Some Reality

All food is real. All food choices are valid. Obesity is a deeply complex and structural problem, driven by immense societal changes, so complex that they are too difficult for anyone to understand fully. That is why it is so hard to fix, perhaps a problem that cannot be 'solved' in any meaningful way. Saying such ridiculous, meaningless platitudes such as ‘Eat Real Food’ does not make the problem any better. The guilt, shame and feelings of inadequacy that this sort of rhetoric creates is far more likely to make things worse. The reasons why people become obese are as numerous as the number of people who are, and to proclaim that it is only because the food they eat is not middle-fucking-class enough to be considered ‘real’ is so full of ignorance and prejudice that it is beneath contempt. Aseem Malhotra has said in the past that ‘We must demonise junk food for the sake of our children’. He is as dangerous as he is deluded and should not be given a voice.

But if that ignorance and prejudice was not bad enough, he is part of a group of people willing to manipulate the world of science and to distort the meaning of the word evidence, just so they can monetise their ‘real food’ brand. And along the way they nurse their narcissistic desires, their vanity, superiority and god complexes. This is the playbook of Donald Trump’s post-truth world. They may appear to be brave outsiders, but they are just cynically manipulating a system, playing the victim card whenever they are criticised, managing to guide opinion to such an extent that universal reproach makes them appear ever more righteous.

Aseem Malhotra is the Donald Trump of food, positioning himself as a maverick fighting the establishment. Like Trump, he is ignorant, ill-qualified, impossible to like, motivated by money, vanity and power. The naysayers are dismissed as vestiges of a corrupt and broken system, nothing but fake news. The more he is attacked, the stronger he becomes, the predicted vitriol of the ‘establishment’ merely proving his point. His past digressions are simply ignored – the factual errors, the stupidity, the damaging associations - none of it sticks. To those who value science and truth, he is the devil incarnate, yet to his loyal supporters he is impervious to criticism. They cannot see that their emperor has no clothes.

And how about Joanna Blythman? Is she part of this strange low carb cult? Cynical manipulator? Or manipulated herself, the unwitting mouthpiece of a shameless low-carb PR operation? Given her anti-corporate, anti-establishment and anti-manufactured food agenda over the years, I suspect the latter. As an investigative journalist, maybe she should turn her talents to looking at some of the people she supports. As things are, I can only imagine the low carb cultists see her as an unwitting ally, someone that they can manipulate and control to suit their agenda.

For when you do not have evidence on your side, you need all the help you can get.

Thanks as always to Evidence Warrior and Captain Science (and others who helped along the way). We have much to share on this subject and will be returning to in the next few weeks.

Conflicts of interest

Angry Chef makes a living as a paid shill for the food manufacturing industry. He has never received money from the makers of Twix or Snickers, but would be happy to do so if they are reading (even just a multipack). Angry Chef Dog received a small number of treats when posing for photos. Evidence Warrior exists on a plane where money is an irrelevance. Captain Science says ‘fuck off and mind your own business’.

    

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