Friday, May 6, 2016

The Cult of the Diet: Or How the Waning of Religion in the West has been Replaced by the Food Inquisition

I haven't written a blog post on here in how long?! I got busy, and I decided that I was bored with critiquing all these studies, because really they're all the same crap. There's something wrong with all of them. They're either underpowered, or funded by special interest, or the researchers are unethical sacks of shit. You get the idea.

But I got with the 21st century and got a smart phone late last year. I made the mistake (only in that it takes up too much of my time) of following some very genius people on twitter like Woo, and it came to my attention that the ridiculous cult of personality that is people like Richard Nikoley and Carbsane and others have come into a veritable classical age. Why are these idiots even still around? Why have they not scurried off into the nether regions of the Interwebs? What's more, why do they care what I eat? Why do they care what you eat? No, I'm serious. You have to ask yourself why these people care so damn much whether you ate bacon for breakfast or potatoes. You can't tell me it's because they're altruistic or something. They're all really rude people with no manners and I find it hard to believe they are doing what they do out of the goodness of their hearts. So, why don't you do what makes you feel good, keeps your blood-work healthy, and keeps the weight off? If eating potatoes and bananas does that for ya, well, more power to you.

This is tangential though to what spurned this blog post. You see, in the West, formal religion has been on the decline for decades. A lot of people may identify as one religion or another, but many don't go to church or even socialize with others who share their beliefs. And that is why we have the rise of the 'gurus', people like Nikoley, and Carbsane, and the thirty-bananas-a-day guy (is he even still alive?). You're all looking for something that has meaning. Something to be a part of. You don't want to do the old school thing where you join a church. So you jump on, and sometimes fall off, bandwagons of cult personalities. This doesn't help you at all. All it helps are the ad revenues of people who really don't give a fig about your health, but were very happy that you brought traffic to their site and maybe even bought whatever they were hawking.

The 'gurus' have spawned something worse though than wasted time, wasted money, and perhaps inflicting ill health on people. They have spawned what I call the Food Inquisition. Excuse me, but when did it become okay to comment about what I eat? When did it become okay to comment on what is in my grocery basket? You see, when you think that the diet you are following is the One True Diet and all others are anathema, then the next logical step is we must squash the unbelievers! Burn the heretics! We can't allow them to eat bacon, don't they know it's going to kill them? We must get the government to intervene, make them tax everything that is bad for people, to protect them from themselves. Just like in the Medieval period, the Inquisition only functioned with the cooperation of the civil power.

Yes, it's that absurd. You see, evolutionarily speaking, we are really no different physiologically than our medieval ancestors, and I do think that some of you have taken a leaf out of their books. You need to stop it. Just stop it. Next time you feel compelled to comment about what someone is eating. Don't. If they want your opinion, they'll ask you. And chances are, they don't want your opinion.