Our daily bread (and other dangerous substances)

Your dinner doesn’t need an app or a PhD, just something to eat, something to drink, and a little gratitude. This is a story about science, food, and how we’re ruining both in the name of wellness.

Norman Rockwell-Freedom from Want

Once upon a time, people simply ate. They didn’t worry much about it. They didn’t log it in apps, weigh it on digital scales, or assign it ethical value. They ate what they could afford and what they grew up with. If they were lucky, they ate dinner around a family table. And, if they were really lucky, there was food enough for everyone.

Then came nutrition science.

In principle, the idea seems sound. Food affects health, and health is good, so we should understand the relationship between the two. But nutrition science—at least in the public sphere—did not stop at simply understanding. It veered, at speed, from description to prescription. From “we’ve observed this correlation in rats” to “you must eat this or perish”.

The result is a landscape of confident dietary claims built on foundations that, if not quite sand, are certainly unsettled soil. Most nutrition research is short-term, observational, and based on self-reported food intake. It rarely measures actual health outcomes. Instead of tracking whether people live longer, avoid disease, or age well, studies tend to focus on biomarkers—cholesterol levels, blood sugar spikes, and inflammatory markers. These are treated as proxies for health, but they don’t always align with what matters: how long people live, how well they function, or whether they still remember their grandchildren’s names.

This is not because researchers are lazy. It’s because nutritional research is hard. You can’t ethically assign a thousand volunteers to an all-kombucha diet and wait for their autopsies to clarify its health effects. Even if you tried, life would intervene to confound your results: people would drop out, give up smoking, take up bungee jumping, or quietly substitute red wine for the prescribed kombucha.

In practice, many dietary studies rely on the infamous “food frequency questionnaire,” which asks participants to recall what they ate over the past week or even month. Pause and try it yourself. Did you eat fish last Thursday? Was it grilled? Breaded? A fragment in a sushi roll? Did you have one glass of wine or two? And was that before or after the three, or was it four, chocolate-covered almonds?

It is not surprising that the findings derived from nutritional research are equivocal. One month, coffee is a carcinogen; the next, it’s the secret to longevity. Red meat is either a ticket to colon cancer or a misunderstood source of ancestral vigour. Eggs were once heart attacks in a shell; now they are nature’s powerhouse—unless you’re vegan, in which case they are murder.

The reversals are dizzyingly frequent, but they rarely dent confidence. Each study is published with solemn headlines. “New research shows…” “Scientists reveal…” “Experts say…” You must go to the footnotes of nutrition journal articles to find the caveats: small sample size, short duration, funded by a food company, correlation rather than causation, and “mice fed the equivalent of 700 cups of green tea”.

Meanwhile, we are told to fast intermittently, hydrate constantly, snack never, graze always, and avoid eating after 8 p.m.—unless it’s the Mediterranean diet, in which case late-night dining with red wine and sardines is a required part of the experience. We are warned against sugar (a poison), dairy (a scam), gluten (a curse), and processed foods (a moral failing). And if we falter, we must atone with turmeric, leafy greens, fermented soybeans, or something called “adaptogens,” which, it is said, taste like lawn clippings.

All of this would be comic if it were not so earnest—and profitable. The modern food economy is driven less by sustenance than by signalling. To eat kale is not merely to consume nutrients; it is to join a tribe. The raw foodist announces purity. We no longer eat to live—we perform our virtue with every bite.

And yet, for all this, the outcomes are disappointing. Lifestyle diseases abound. Disordered eating—once the domain of fashion models and teenage ballet dancers—now afflicts middle-aged professionals who have read one too many wellness blogs. The very effort to eat “correctly” seems, paradoxically, to have made us more anxious, not healthier.

There is no harm in studying food. But there is harm in pretending we know more than we do, in mistaking fashion for fact, and in turning meals into moral test cases. The next study will be along shortly. It will tell us that we were wrong, again, about lectins or linoleic acid or low-fat yogurt. It will be based on a small sample of people followed for a short period, and the outcome measures will not include life expectancy or specific diseases—only proxies. And the results will be breathlessly reported and earnestly shared.

And behind all this? A business model.

Confusion is profitable. If you’re unsure whether you need more protein, more fibre, or fewer carbs, there’s a product waiting. A snack bar with a few grams of added whey becomes “performance fuel” and triples in price at the gym counter. Green powders promise to replace vegetables without the inconvenience of shopping, chopping, or chewing. New wellness kits hit the market monthly. They offer to test your microbiome, rebalance your cortisol, and understand your “personalised nutritional genome”.

This isn’t a grift, exactly. Much of it is well-intentioned. But it thrives on uncertainty. The less we know, the more we buy. The modern nutrition economy is built not on clarity, but on the feeling that we’re probably doing it wrong—and that someone, somewhere, knows better.

What is needed, perhaps, is a return to modesty—not just in portion size, but also in tone. A willingness to say: we know some things, but not everything. A recognition that individual variation is real, that cultural tradition carries wisdom, and that the best diet may be the one you can live with, not the one you can’t pronounce.

Dinner should not require a PhD, a Bluetooth monitor, or a side of spirulina (look it up). Our ancestors, after all, lived without the benefit of food pyramids, glycaemic indexes, or wearable glucose monitors. They boiled turnips, drank beer, ate cheese, and survived—somehow—to produce us. They did not bio-hack their breakfasts. They did not tweet about flaxseed. They did not weigh their vegetables.

When they sat down to dinner, they simply gave thanks.