The Gluten Lie And other myths about what you eat

Alan Levinovitz, PhD

If you have friends like I do, this book has been in and out of your feed for a while now. If you are like me you’ve been waiting for it from the library eagerly looking forward to it the way you did Salt Sugar Fat, Paleofantasy, and other books about nutrition, diets, and obsession over both.

Alan Levinovitz is different than the other authors in that he is not an anthropologist or a nutritionist, but rather a specialist in ancient Chinese religions.  Which sounds terribly wrong at first, but oh so right when you think about it. He brings a slant that the ‘modern’ craze for dieting (going back a few hundred years) has many similarities with religion. I really liked the way he explained that the myth (in this case a diet) remains but the logic supporting it changes.

He also uses his expertise to clear up that no, a 5000 year old tome of Chinese medicine does not talk about using salt to control blood pressure. He says that the line “from the Huangdi Meijing, aka The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine: “Hence if too much salt is used for food, the pulse hardens….”
”This line, widely repeated in the literature on salt and blood pressure, has a great deal of persuasive power. Even the ancient Yellow Emperor knew this stuff would kill you! Compelling evidence, right? Wrong. Wrong in so many ways.
”First: the Huangdi Meijing says no such thing. The origin of the quote is actually a 1956 anthology called Classics in Arterial Hypertension, compiled by Arthur Ruskin, MD, of the University of Texas. One wonders where Ruskin got the quote, since it’s nowhere to be found in the Chinese text. When I checked the original, the only passage that could be construed as referring to high blood pressure— excess yang qi— recommended treatment with increased salt.”

Well, he can mike drop on that one.

The Gluten Lie covers not just gluten but all the recent dietary demons that we’ve been taught to avoid: Salt, sugar (including high fructose corn syrup), fat (barely touching cholesterol) and carbs, concentrating on gluten. He effectively covers Michael Moss’ 350-page Salt, Sugar, Fat in 220 pages. Moss’s work took me a bit to read, and was fascinating (and introduced me to Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal, which I loved). The Gluten Lie took hardly any time to read. It reads like a blog, friendly and simple. He isn’t negative or skeptical about either celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, so those criticisms are out. However, if you are like me, you may have some issues with his footnotes and references. I know, I should be glad that there are footnotes at all, but I can’t be. Now these are what just jumped out at me, not a definitive list. He supports a statement about meat not being bad for you twice, once with the BBC, and once with a doctor’s quote. He neglects to mention that the BBC article is about that doctor, and that doctor’s quote is from the article.

The second one is when he quotes three full paragraphs of a 1922 herbal medicine pamphlet, and there are no records in his note of what that pamphlet is. Admittedly, a Google search allowed me to find it (it’s The Herb Doctor and Medicine Man by the Indiana Herb Company, published in 1919) but it doesn’t bode well for what I didn’t research.

Now, that’s important to me, and it may not be to you. In any case, it’s fairly negative towards people like Vani Hari and things like low sodium diets, but fairly positive towards people suffering from real diseases. I do like his facetious diet at the end. I highly recommend if you like skipping around a book (like I do) you don’t mistake it for a serious recommendation.