Alan Levinovitz

The same truth for organic food.

So organic is just sort of kissing cousins with natural.

And they say, well, back in the day when people didn't get sick, there weren't any inorganic foods or there weren't GMOs or whatever.

So GMOs, another really good example of that.

And interestingly, again, to focus a bit, I know it's a long answer on GMOs in the diet world,

I think part of what's going on is also religious, which is that genetic engineering is seen as playing God.

And what I actually don't get to talk about in the book, but which is really important, is the same kind of resistance to nuclear energy happens as well.

So in the naturalness world, there's this idea that if we're splitting atoms or engineering genetics, we're playing God and that's necessarily wrong and therefore extremely dangerous.

And so you get...

real problems with the actual ability to assess, you know, is which foods are actually dangerous for us, which there are obviously processed foods that are extremely bad for our health for a variety of reasons.

There are forms of energy that are really bad.

But once you have that kind of religious slash metaphysical framework in the background, it can be very difficult to actually talk about what's driving people's arguments.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, it's funny.

Looking at the history of this, I spent a lot of time looking at the history, especially of dietary things, but now also health trends in general.

People, you would be shocked, or people who aren't familiar with this history, there was this guy, Horace Fletcher.

He was popular in the early to mid-20th century, the great masticator.

So his theory was that you were supposed to chew food, I forget exactly, 100 times, 200 times before you swallowed it.

He would mail envelopes of his shit

to people and he would say, look, my shit, literally my shit doesn't stink.