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    The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully
    The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully
    The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully

    Written by Aaron Carroll, MD and Nina Teicholz

    Narrated by Jeff Cummings and Kate Rudd

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Physician and popular New York Times Upshot contributor Aaron Carroll mines the latest evidence to show that many “bad” ingredients actually aren’t unhealthy, and in some cases are essential to our well-being.

    Advice about food can be confusing. There’s usually only one thing experts can agree on: some ingredients—often the most enjoyable ones—are bad for you, full stop. But as Aaron Carroll explains, these oversimplifications are both wrong and dangerous: if we stop consuming some of our most demonized ingredients altogether, it may actually hurt us. In The Bad Food Bible, Carroll examines the scientific evidence, showing among other things that you can:

    • Eat red meat several times a week: The health effects are negligible for most people, and actually positive if you’re 65 or older.
    • Have a drink or two a day: As long as it’s in moderation, it will protect you against cardiovascular disease without much risk.
    • Enjoy a gluten-loaded bagel from time to time: It has less fat and sugar, fewer calories, and more fiber than a gluten-free one.
    • Eat more salt: If your blood pressure is normal, you should be more worried about getting too little sodium than having too much.
    Full of counterintuitive lessons about food we hate to love, The Bad Food Bible is for anyone who wants to forge eating habits that are sensible, sustainable, and occasionally indulgent.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateNov 7, 2017
    ISBN9781543663273
    The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully
    Author

    Aaron Carroll, MD

    Dr. Aaron Carroll is a Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Dean for Research Mentoring at Indiana University’s School of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Comparative Effectiveness Research. His research focuses on the study of information technology to improve pediatric care, health care policy, and health care reform. In addition to his scholarly activities, he has written about health, research, and policy for CNN, Bloomberg News, the JAMA Forum, and the Wall Street Journal. He has co-authored three popular books debunking medical myths, has a popular YouTube show called Healthcare Triage, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times’ The Upshot.

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    Reviews for The Bad Food Bible

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Very good information about many topics. I've been looking to improve my diet and as a result I've been through many books with authors recommending what to eat and mostly what not to eat. I felt the logic used by Dr.Carroll was solid and more importantly reasonable. I still have work to do in coming up with a diet plan for my self, but at least after listening to this book, I think I have a solid foundation in which to build.
    • 3/5
      No real surprises here. The best diet is unprocessed food. Processed food is fine in moderation. Must studies about nutrition are actually inconclusive.
    • 5/5
      THE BAD FOOD BIBLE: HOW AND WHY TO EAT SINFULLY by Aaron Carroll, M.D. is a careful, measured and well reasoned look at many of the foods we have been told are bad for us. Dr. Carroll is a professor of Pediatrics and the director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He has coauthored three prior books about food and nutrition. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times UPSHOT blog and is host for “Healthcare Triage” on YouTube. In short, he is well versed in his field, respected by many, and a leading voice in clarity in all things medical. With THE BAD FOOD BIBLE, Dr. Carroll takes on eleven different foods, reveals what has been said about their positive or negative effects on the health of those imbibing, and reveals the truth as to what should be said about them. Coffee, and sugar (diet soft drinks), MSG, meat butter and eggs as well as a few others are discussed. He talks about the prior research done into the study of these foods, and looks at the people who funded a lot of the studies, and presented their “facts” and “conclusions”. As with most things that get spread through the news, it is the sensational that makes the headlines. When there is a small link that shows giving product A to lab rats produces a negative effect three out of seven times, it is easy to translate that into fast breaking news that product A causes cancer, tumors, lesions or any manner of nasty, nasty things. Perhaps it is the lab environment itself that produces such a stressful environment on the poor rats. Could it be that the “negative effects” are caused by the cages, the antiseptics, the rationed food and any of a thousand external things rather than the inclusion of the experimental food. I know if I were caged up long enough, seen others like me experimented on, dissected and discarded, I would have plenty wrong with me. In reasoned arguments, dealing with all the facts, Dr. Carroll explains why these foods will not kill you and do not lead to terrible diseases, obesity, and the decline and fall of Western Civilization. But as with everything else, moderation is the key. A measured amount of alcohol is good for you, but not three bottles of whiskey a day.
    • 4/5
      You aren’t what you eatThere are two points to The Bad Food Bible. Medical studies should not be used to make food decisions, and you should go ahead and eat whatever you want. Dr. Aaron Carroll says there is a hierarchy of food studies, and the most reliable are the rarest. But regardless, their results are not to be taken at face value. The media misinterpret the findings, and you can find a study to prove just about anything you desire. There are no definitive answers. The state of our nutritional knowledge seems to be worthless.As for food, everything is fine in moderation, so don’t bother worrying about what you eat. With cow’s milk, for example, Carroll says we need it for our breakfast cereal, and cookies without milk is just not supportable. Save meat with a lot of fat for special occasions. He allows his own children “four or five” sugar-free soft drinks a week. He says with mercury-laden tuna, you must decide for yourself how much poison you and your children can handle, and adjust your consumption as desired: “Think for yourself and eat accordingly”, he says. This is extraordinarily strange advice in the nutrition field.Points to ponder:-Gluten-free is a pointless and expensive fad. One tenth of one percent have gluten issues.-Genetically modified organisms have been around for as long we have farmed and there is no reason to even try to eliminate them.-Alcohol is more beneficial than it is damaging. Red wine in particular raises good HDL.-Eating fat won’t make you fat.-Eating cholesterol won’t raise your cholesterol.-Coffee is “shockingly good for you”; it’s practically a miracle drug. And it does not stunt growth or dehydrate you.-The empty calories in diet soft drinks are better than the empty calories from added sugar drinks, because artificial sweeteners won’t kill you.-MSG is a perfectly natural, and critically necessary body chemical, present in everything from tomatoes to breast milk. It has never been shown to be toxic as a flavor enhancer.-Science is having no success telling organic from non-organic produce.-Organic produce is not nutritionally superior.Carroll doesn’t venture into two of the perversions in nutrition research. Rat studies take animals predisposed to certain diseases and overload them with foods or chemicals to see how they fare. By law since 1964, if cancer resulted, the chemical had to be banned. Thus saccharine became a carcinogen. Didn’t matter that a human would have had to drink a hundred diet sodas a day for two years to absorb the same amount they pumped into the rats, it was cancer and it had to go. This is the same reasoning that has led to zero new wonder drugs for tuberculosis since the 1960s. TB doesn’t manifest in rats the way it does it humans, so new drugs can never pass the mandatory rat test. But I digress.The other is our near total lack of understanding of how our bodies work. We now think gut bacteria manufacture all the vitamins we need on demand, and consuming them as chemicals is worthless. The same goes for food-borne cholesterol. The cholesterol in our blood comes from our own livers, not eggs or burgers. Carroll also skims over the massive chemical content of meat, red or white. Meat might not be as harmful as some say, but the antibiotics and other medicines and hormones in them are. Carroll says enjoy.That the state of nutritional medicine is this torn and uncertain should be worrying all by itself. Carroll makes a lot of good arguments, but they don’t add any degree of certainty about what to eat. And he admits that. (He is currently experimenting with a low carb diet for himself.) For those who believe if you don’t recognize the ingredient then it’s not food – this book is not going to go down well. If you’re open to rational analysis with a splash of adventure, this is for you.David Wineberg