THE TRUTH ABOUT SPINACH — AND MORE FAKE FOOD NEWS DEBUNKED

Fake news — a term that’s been on everybody’s lips since the Trumps and Bolsonaros of this world took over — is, it turns out, nothing new. Not even the more pleasurable things in life (like food!) are resistant to it. We uncovered five too-good-to-be-true stories from the world of food which either tell sweet little lies or flat out defame entire cuisines and food groups. Sometimes, we discovered, it is those who yell FAKE NEWS! the loudest that might actually be the ones bearing it…

SUGAR

You’d be well-advised to keep in mind that sincere words are rarely sickly sweet — but, of course, we tend to believe what we like to hear. A trade group by the name of the Sugar Research Foundation must have known that too, when they paid three Harvard scientists in 1967 the equivalent of about 50.000,- USD in today’s money, just to tell some sweet little lies. In the nineteen-fifties, as the United States appeared from the rubble of World War II as a fully-formed consumer society, it became increasingly clear that the country was fast developing an obesity and heart disease issue. A culprit was needed, and no one was ready to hear about the numerous social and dietary changes that had played into creating the problem. Instead, two camps formed: The first saw the evil in sugar, while the other pointed toward saturated fats and dietary cholesterol. Researchers at the University of California discovered in 2016 that what at first had seemed like bad news for Big Sugar was soon turned into an opportunity. Back in 1954, the president of the Sugar Research Foundation pointed out that if Americans could be persuaded to consume less fat for health health reasons, they would likely replace those calories with something else — ideally sugar, which could mean a thirty percent growth for the sugar industry. And, so, they handsomely paid some researchers to do just that: throw shade on research that suggested sugar’s role, while highlighting research that implicated saturated fat. In the decades that followed, it led to health officials promoting low-fat, high-sugar diets, which scientists now believe is what really caused the massive scale of the obesity problem in the United States today.

 CARROTS 

Carrots are pretty divisive: some people adore them, others push them to the side of their plate. In the cold, dark, early days of the second World War, however, they had a lot going for them. As the German Luftwaffe targeted London in its Blitzkrieg, the Brits issued city-wide blackouts during which no one could see a thing — except, miraculously, the Brits themselves. They were able to shoot enemy planes from the sky in the dead of night, even before they crossed the Channel. As the myth goes, the Brits made the Germans believe they were able to do so because their soldiers ate lots of carrots, improving their night vision, and not, as was the truth, because of their newly developed radar technology. But historians today don’t actually believe this is true, and it seems that the idea that carrots could improve night vision was more so propagated towards the British population itself. As almost everything was on ration, including sugar, many new-timey recipes and ideas for the humble-but-sweet carrot were developed — and so it needed an image change. A carrot on a stick as a substitute for ice cream has — to our knowledge — not survived the test of time, but the idea of a link between eye health and carrots has. So is it true? Yes and no. Vitamin A, which the body produces out of the beta carotene contained in carrots, is good for eye health — but that doesn’t mean it improves eyesight. Carrots are also far from the only vegetable which contains a vitamin A precursor, so really, they just got caught in the eye of the storm. Excuse the pun. 

MSG

The trail of destruction the coronavirus left in its wake as it swept across the planet not only encompasses sickness and death but also other ugly truths. For one, it once again proved how little it takes to awaken racial biases; it also served as a reminder that when pseudoscience disguises as real science, they become hard to distinguish. This same interface of racism, pseudoscience and health concerns is at the root of one of the saddest food myths of the past century, which started with a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968. In it, Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok describes feelings of general malaise after eating at Chinese restaurants, and links these symptoms to their usage of MSG. A mere six weeks later, the New York Times published an article in which Dr. Kwok’s personal experience was now taken for scientific fact, and Chinese restaurant owners were interviewed to defend their use of MSG — all the while, the article completely ignored the fact that the additive could be found in pretty much all supermarket food too. Some scientists went on to “prove” the existence of “Chinese restaurant syndrome” by injecting huge doses of MSG into people’s bloodstream and noting adverse effects. When professor Jennifer LeMesurier studied the origin of the MSG controversy in the twenty-tens, she was contacted by a Dr. Howard Steel, who told her he had written the letter fifty years earlier as part of a bet. Steel died soon after, and later still, it was discovered that he had lied. Confusing. Either way, the letter added fuel to the fire of Chinese immigrants having to defend their cuisine and culture against racist stereotypes. The substance has long been proven to be completely harmless when consumed in normal quantities — but signs saying “no MSG” can still be found on the windows of Chinese restaurants the world over. 

BLUE FOOD

We learn early on that there are three basic colours from which all others stem: red, yellow and blue. What makes blue stand out among those three is the fact that it’s so volatile. The sea is never really blue, nor is the sky — it’s just a play of light. Blue pigments are almost nonexistent in nature. And, so, it would make sense for people to have an aversion to blue food: it’s just so unnatural. For half a century, most studies that tried to prove that fact have cited an experiment conducted in the early nineteen-seventies. In it, several people were invited to eat a meal of steak, peas and chips served under a kind of “special light” that made the food appear colourless, but once that light was switched off, it became evident that the steak was blue, the peas were red and the chips green. Instantly, almost everyone became violently sick. Exactly how the take away from that study became that people hate blue food (and not, more generally, food in unrecognisable colours) remains unclear, but the experiment itself was assumed to be solid science. Except — it most likely never took place. When scientists went digging for the original findings, it turned out that the earliest mention of it showed up in a trade magazine for marketeers, written by an editorial writer named Jane Wheatly. There was no data, no source, just an anecdote of a few sentences. Her article became ground zero for fifty years of flawed science — as it soon became known as “Wheatly (1973)”. Not even the take away seems to be true at all: under the right circumstances, people, and especially children, can find blue food incredibly exciting. 

POPEYE

Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end — every good party story also includes a shocking fact or big twist, or will make you doubt something you always knew to be true. One such story goes like this: In the late nineteenth century, a German scientist studying the nutritional value of vegetables misplaced a decimal point on his notepad and thus increased the iron level contained in spinach by a tenfold. This wrong belief then spread like wildfire by way of Popeye in the nineteen-thirties, which, in turn, caused spinach consumption in the U.S. to increase by a third. While most of us hold the belief that spinach is a good source of iron, it is, in fact, a very poor one — not only because it does not contain that much of it, but also because it does contain oxalic acid, which inhibits the body from absorbing iron. But here is where the myth gets the story wrong: Popeye never ate spinach for its iron, but, as he says in a comic from 1932, because “spinach is full of Vitamin A, an’tha’s what makes hoomans strong an helty”. Which is absolutely true. Moreover, the increase in spinach consumption around that same time was likely caused by agriculture policies, as farmers were encouraged to grow more diverse, healthy crops — such as spinach. Anyway, what everyone was right about is that eating spinach is a pretty smart thing to do. It’s super yum and it’s good for you too. 

Text & Food: Yannic Moeken
Photography: Junshen Wu 
Creative Production: Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain