David Allison

So you could tell them not to drink sugar-sweetened beverages.

You could tell them not to eat fettuccine Alfredo because it's a heart attack on a plate.

All these things have a small effect for a while and usually not so much for a long term.

But it might help.

We need to study that.

That says nothing, however, about the effects of the food per se.

If you said, no, David, my goal is to tell people about the foods they should eat if they actually ate them, what the effects would be.

Or my goal is to determine the effects of foods.

Then I would go back to a statement from a wonderful book

called A Fly in the Ointment, by someone named Joe Schwartz.

And Dr. Schwartz, who's a food scientist, says something like, there is a motto, repeat after me, the effect of substances in the body depends on their molecular structure, not their ancestry.

So if you give me this molecule, or a collection of them, to eat, and you extracted that molecule from

some berry, and it's natural, or you synthesize that molecule in a laboratory, but in the end, it's the same molecule.

We agree, I mean, you could try to synthesize, it might have some slight difference, but let's assume it's literally the same molecule, and it's the same structure.

You give it to me in liquid form, in liquid form, or gaseous form, or whatever it is.

If you say these are going to have different effects because of where they came from, seems to me we're in homeopathy now.

This makes no sense.

I think it's a mixture of deliberate marketing shenanigans, but it's also the marketing of ideas, not just food products, by people with particular philosophical and other bents who are anywhere from the interest to make themselves famous, to push a philosophical thing, to push an anti-industry thing.

whatever it is.

But yes, I agree with that.