Take it with a pinch of salt – the food marketing myths we’ve swallowed whole

Who says breakfast is the most important meal of the day? And why does spinach make you strong? It sounds like conventional wisdom, but most of it was cooked up by ad men

Following blindly ... Improving one’s vision by eating carrots is one of many food myths. Photograph: Fotosearch/Getty Images/Fotosearch RF

 

Arwa Mahdawi 

Tuesday 7 June 2016  - The Guardian

 

What came first, the chicken-is-healthy study or the eggs-are-unhealthy study? Nutritional advice is notoriously nebulous, and food groups regularly alternate between demonisation and deification. Fat makes you fat; fat makes you thin; carbs are basically crack; carbs are back. Corporate agendas are behind much of this confusion. But, more worryingly, they’re also behind many of the food “facts” we take for granted. Much conventional health wisdom is actually commercialised wisdom: the result of canny marketing campaigns or industry-funded studies. Even if you think you’re above advertising, immune to the seductions of pseudoscience, you would be surprised how many marketing myths you may have inadvertently swallowed.
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