New Yorker throws in the fact-checking towel for health reporting
16th July 2009
The New Yorker is reputed to have legendary fact-checkers. That state of affairs obviously died some time ago, and now it reads just like the rest of the media — a doe-eyed journalist who sees their role more as a conveyor of what someone told them than as an investigator trying to figure out what’s going on.
In the latest issue, there’s a risibly clueless article on what makes us fat. First it confuses two levels of explanation — ultimate or evolutionary causes that made our bodies the way they are today, and proximate causes like “junk food adds pounds.” At the level of mechanisms, the author makes no mention of what causes fat to be stored in fat cells rather than flow into the bloodstream to be burned as fuel. It’s not very complicated — it’s hormonally regulated, and almost the entire story is how much insulin has been released. The word “insulin” does not appear once in her 4000-word article.
Easy access to fast food, potato chips, and the like is not necessary to drive up obesity rates, since plenty of other groups have been plagued by metabolic syndrome without any such food. There is a common factor, however: foods that are high in carbohydrates. She ends the article by ominously noting a new offering from Burger King that has lots of beef, bacon, and cheese. But of course, what everyone eats when they go to Burger King, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Olive Garden, or any other cheap human feed lot, has almost no meat or cheese at all. Most of the “hamburger” is the bun, and the rest is fries and soda. Let’s see, carbs, carbs, and more carbs — but that teensy ration of beef is what’ll get ya!
Contrast this with what you get when you eat at a place with Michelin stars — it’s animals, animals, and more animals, with a token portion of vegetables on the side or to enhance flavor. And not sissy animal products either — foie gras and caviar have some of the highest concentrations of saturated fat and cholesterol of any food. Yet somehow well-to-do French, Spanish, and Italians seem to be much thinner and freer of heart disease than lower-class Americans. Not only that, but their food — loaded with fat — actually tastes like something!