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The Gluten Lie:

And Other Myths About What You Eat

Alan Levinovitz

A version of an old joke goes like this: How do you know if someone is Paleo? Don't worry, they'll tell you. Not to pick on Paleo eaters; you can easily swap in just about any other diet and the joke works just the same. The enthusiasm some people have for the way they eat can sometimes seem a lot like religious fervor, complete with heartfelt conversion stories and earnest attempts at proselytizing. And that's no coincidence, argues Alan Levinovitz, a professor of religion at James Madison University and the author of the new book The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat - understanding the way people think about faith goes a long way toward understanding the way people think about food.

The more Levinovitz looked into it, the more parallels he discovered between religious and dietary beliefs, going as far back as the ancient Chinese texts that are his scholarly specialty. -Two thousand years ago, there were these Daoist monks who decided that if you avoided these five grains - and these were the staple crops of China, what the everyday person subsisted on - you'd live forever, you wouldn't get any diseases,- Levinovitz said. These monks also came up with intricate recipes for nutritional supplements, which they then distributed with similarly spectacular promises of immortality. 'I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, You know, this sounds a lot like the kinds of promises that modern, secular so-called diet gurus make to their followers,' Levinovitz said.

Crucially, Levinovitz isn't arguing that everyone who sticks to a diet is kidding themselves. There are many, many people - with Celiac disease and without - who've experienced physical and mental improvements after they've stopped consuming gluten. (For that matter, there are many people whose lives have been sincerely changed for the better through the church.) 'I am so sympathetic to them - I wish they were not marginalized, and I wish they were not mocked,' Levinovitz said. In his view, the trouble starts when one given becomes popular and the people who are truly benefiting from it start to blur with the people who've simply jumped on the bandwagon.

What accounts for this bandwagon effect? Levinovitz has found that there's something about the concepts of diet and nutrition that brings out people's more credulous instincts. In his research, he's found that 'when it came to diet and health, people were prone to irrationality and they were susceptible to promises that in other contexts perhaps they'd be more critical [of],'he said. Note the past tense he uses there. This isn't a modern phenomenon; it's a human one.

Levinovitz recently chatted with Science of Us about some of the surprising connections between food and faith:

There's something comforting about picking a plan out of the chaos and sticking with it.

Religion helps people make sense of a chaotic world: Suddenly, there is order, and there are instructions. All you have to do is follow them. 'You have a certainty about the choices you make,' Levinovitz said. 'That gives you a way to make decisions, and it makes for a comforting world.' Likewise, nutrition science is a chaotic discipline. Eggs are bad for you until they're not; MSG is a dangerous food additive until it's not. It's understandable why people would pick a way of eating and then stick to their guns; it gives them some solid ground to stand on amid ever-shifting recommendations.

But what about when diets aren't comforting? Many of them, after all, suggest worlds in which modern life is overflowing with toxins, even in safe-seeming foods - shouldn't these beliefs be aversive rather than attractive? Not so, said Levinovitz. He used the Food Babe, the very popular food blogger who sees terrifying chemicals everywhere - and who is frequently wrong in her doomsaying - as an example. 'One thing I realized - why would you want to live in a world filled with toxins? Why would you follow the Food Babe - isn't that a terrifying world to live in?' Levinovitz said. You could easily make the same statement about religion: Why would you want to believe in a world where humans are inherently sinful creatures? The idea sounds upsetting from a nonreligious perspective. 'But it's not. It's a comforting one ... The only thing scarier than a world full of toxins is a world in which you don't know what the toxins are.' If the choice is a nuanced, complicated understanding of the world that contains some uncertainty or a more clear-cut and sharply defined approach, the latter vision is often going to win out.

The idea that 'past is paradise' is an alluring one.

Think of one of the most famous Biblical stories, the Garden of Eden. 'We were all extremely happy and healthy - well, all two of us - and then we ate the wrong food ... and we fell from grace,' Levinovitz said. The Eden story provides an apt narrative structure for 'demonizing foods of modernity,' as he phrases it. Paleo enthusiasts, for example, strongly believe that to return to the caveman's pre-agricultural diet is the most natural way of eating. The narrative is easily applied to some of the major objections many people have about genetically engineered foods, too - the idea that using modern technology to alter the foods we eat is new and, subsequently, unnatural or something to be feared.

And maybe going Paleo works for you, or your issues with genetically modified crops go beyond being squicked out by mixing tech with the things you eat. The point, Levinovitz said, is that it's important to untie that 'past as paradise' narrative from the scientific evidence. (Really, this is a point that can be applied over and over again when talking about the common themes between diet and religion.)

The vocabulary we use for food has strong undertones of morality.

Think of the words we use to talk about the things we eat: guilt, sinful, 'cheat' days, designating foods as 'good' or 'bad' for you. It's not the newest observation, but it's one that came up again and again when Levinovitz was researching his book, clicking down into the depths of healthy-eating message boards. Many people, he said, wrote about cheating or confessing in anguished terms. 'I would literally see the word redeem,' he said. 'It's like, no, your diet is not your spouse - you don't have to confess that you cheated on your diet. But I see people who come to believe that what you eat is so ethically charged, that they are like committing terrible sins' if they mess up. 'It's this idea that if you sin once it's the end,' he said.

Aligning yourself with a popular way of eating gives you a sense of belonging.

A few years ago, I switched to a vegetarian diet (for ethical, not health, reasons - as I pointed out to a group of friends shortly after making the switch, beer and French fries were technically a vegetarian meal). One of the things I've been surprised about is that changing the way I eat essentially came with membership to a secret club I didn't know about. I've become close with a group of vegetarian and vegan friends, and together we've formed an unofficial food club: We try vegetarian restaurants around the city and take turns hosting vegetarian potlucks. If I went back to eating meat, I would no longer quite belong in the group.

It's given me a sense of belonging, in other words, an idea that can certainly apply to devout churchgoers. 'I think you're right about the identity thing being super, super important to the persistence and the vehemence of which people defend their chosen diet,' Levinovitz said. He's said he's toyed with the idea of vegetarianism himself, also for ethical reasons. 'And I wonder if I found out that more animals died in the wheat thresher than if I were to just eat local meat - I wouldn't want to hear that,' he said. (And neither would I, frankly.) The point is that, though a sense of belonging is an undeniably wonderful thing - there are plenty of people who enjoy tremendous benefits from belonging to a church or synagogue, even if they don't believe in all of the theological details - people still 'shouldn't allow investment in their identity to get in the way of processing information.'

But there might be a straightforward way to untangle faith from fact when it comes to food.

The answer, appropriately, is itself inspired by a healthy-eating trend: It's time to detox. 'Don't read anything about nutrition or health for 30 days,' Levinovitz suggested. Don't visit the blogs, don't click the headlines, don't even read food labels. Instead, focus on preparing foods for yourself that make you feel good and that you enjoy. 'People like to say that sugar is addictive - well, maybe health information is also addictive, in a very broad sense of the word.'

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You're a scholar of classical Chinese religions. How'd you end up writing about gluten?


I saw this countercultural rejection of grains, and then I saw almost the exact same thing, with the same kinds of hyperbolic claims, happening again with books like Grain Brain and Wheat Belly. And I thought to myself, you know, it's funny, people are trying to debunk these fad diets with scientific evidence, but what they're not realizing is that really these beliefs aren't scientific at all. They're wrapped in scientific rhetoric, but ultimately they're quasi-religious beliefs that are based on superstition and myth.




It's terrifying to live in a place where the causes of diseases like Alzheimer's, autism, or ADHD, or the causes of weight gain, are mysterious. So what we do is come up with certain causes for the things that we fear.

If we're trying to avoid things that we fear, why would we invent a world full of toxins that don't really exist? Again, it's about control. After all, if there are things that we're scared of, then at least we know what to avoid. If there is a sacred diet, and if there are foods that are really taboo, yeah, it's scary, but it's also empowering, because we can readily identify culinary good and evil, and then we have a path that we can follow that's salvific.

I keep thinking of Mary Douglas' classic Purity and Danger - this idea that cultures declare things unclean not because they're actually dirty, but because people need to impose order on the world.

What Douglas would say, I think, when she looks at a lot of these diets, is that they're really about being able to divide up the world into categories - which things are morally pure, and which things are morally impure. It's so hard for us to understand how something that has an evil origin, such as factory-farmed meat, might not also actually be evil for us physically.


Should we respect that fear, even if the evidence doesn't always back it up? I feel like its acceptable right now to critique New Age eating habits, but I would never do the same about, say, kashrut or halal diets.

I have no problem with religious diets. What I have a problem with is religious diets masquerading as scientifically sound dietary advice. It's one thing to say, 'Hey, I just think it is immoral to genetically alter plants, and therefore I don’t eat them because they represent modern evil.' That's fine, as long as you stop there.

But when you try to bring in scientific evidence to show that actually your dietary choices are better for your health, that's where I think we get into a huge problem. It's the conflation of ideological diets with diets that are supposed to help cure cancer, for example, that's really dangerous.



Even if its scientific justifications are questionable, doesn't something like the Paleo diet help people eat more healthily? I mean, raw vegetables are probably better for you than TV dinners.

Well, I want to be very careful, right. Raw vegetables are not better for you than TV dinners, without any further context. If one person only eats raw broccoli, while you eat a lot of Amy's frozen enchiladas, you're probably better off than the person who only eats raw broccoli. I understand that's not what you're saying, but there's a lot of that oversimplification in diet rhetoric.

No, that's a good point. I guess I'm saying that we just need to have stories, sometimes.

I can tell you a familiar story: long ago, humans lived in an organic, all-natural, divinely-designed garden, free from pesticides and GMOs and processed grains and sugar. Then one day an evil advertiser came along and hissed at them, 'Eat this fruit.' And then, boom, we're cursed with mortality, marital strife, pains giving birth, and we have to do agriculture.

For paleo, the stars are no longer Adam and Eve. It's Paleolithic man. But Paleolithic dieting has a ring of scientific authenticity to it. They evoke evolution instead of God. It sounds very scientific, but just seeing the way in which it parallels this commonplace myth of paradise past should make us initially suspicious. When you start to look at the evidence for it, it falls apart. You realize there's lots of cherry-picked data.

But it's a lot harder to get a good story out of something like, 'Eat a lot of different things in moderation,' even if that's probably better advice.

Science is not great at constructing narratives. That's its virtue and its downfall. Scientific inquiry has to divorce itself from what makes the best story, and science writers, myself included, are in the business of making science compelling by telling stories.

It's true: we report scientific findings in a narrative form.

One important point: science is filled with conditionals and religious literature is not. Any religious literature, any revealed scripture, doesn't have lots of mights and coulds and maybes and further revelations are needed. There's nothing wrong with that kind of certainty in religious texts, though some people might argue that there is. But when you bring that kind of certainty to science, you end up lying about the certainty of the science, you end up exaggerating the scope of the claims. In science, exaggeration is just deception.

But exaggeration sells really well, doesn't it? Gluten is great business.

Absolutely. And the thing that's so troubling about gluten is that, like most things, it's complicated. There are many people with celiac disease for whom gluten is extremely dangerous, and the scientific story on non-celiac gluten sensitivity is far from settled.



I think there's a worship of nature, which ties to modern industrialism, but is slightly different. People have created a dichotomy between natural and artificial. In a time of hipsterism and crises of authenticity, no one wants to be artificial. There's a way in which I think an emphasis on natural foods grows out of an anxiety about disappearing standards of authenticity in modern culture.

That blend of nostalgia and anxiety reminds me of the main character in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris who romanticizes 1920s Paris, until he actually travels there and discovers that Parisians of the '20s are fantasizing about the 1890s ...and so on. We look to other times and other cultures for supposedly healthier, more authentic ways of eating.

There's this idea, and it makes a lot of intuitive sense, that if we're suffering, and we don't have solutions to our own problems, we must look outside of our culture for those answers. If we're powerless to solve them, maybe other cultures have the solution. So we look to Tibetans for bulletproof coffee, for example, or we look to the past where things are distant enough where we are able to romanticize them.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there's a huge push within China to reject Traditional Chinese Medicine. This romanticization of what is outside of one's culture, especially in order to deal with health problems, is something that is really common, and something we ought to avoid.

At the same time, our culture's eating habits seem to hurt people. Is looking outside of our own culture sometimes a good thing?

Sure. But I think it's dangerous to say 'our culture's eating habits.' Our culture's eating habits are extraordinarily varied. Yeah, it's great to look at another culture, break it down in all of its complexity, and see if there any specific things that these people do that can be of benefit not just to them, but to us.

What works for another culture might not work for our own culture. People ask me, what's the harm? Why not just go gluten free? And the answer is that going gluten free has all sorts of effects. It affects your relationship with your friends and family. It affects your relationship with your own past and foods that you love. While there might be some culture in which celebratory foods don't typically contain gluten, that's not our culture.

Do you think there's an incentive to setting yourself apart from the culture at-large? Uniqueness can carry its own social value.


But then to assert that your ascetic diet in turn makes you physically superior to others, in addition to being morally superior, is a step that I wouldn't want to take. Especially nowadays, people don't want to assert moral superiority over other people, so instead they assert physical superiority. But I think also that's a proxy for asserting their moral superiority. Saying that I'm living a healthier life is the only courteous way left of saying I'm living a better life.

We're so afraid, and rightfully so, of judging ourselves better than other people, that now we have proxy words like 'healthier' or 'longer-lived' to stand in for the desirable moral judgment that we are superior to others.

How much do you think fad dieting is a response to the massive expansion of food choices available to us? It can be a confusing world to navigate - so many options, so many ethically-fraught factors.

I think [fad dieting] is a reaction to the proliferation of science. The voices of science used to be largely monolithic. You couldn't go online and get 16 different authoritative declarations about what your diet can be. And now you have that.

People are picking and choosing from all of these dietary authorities to put together their own dietary faith. They don't necessarily think it's right for other people, but they also don't want other people to challenge them, either. And then, there's the fact that because of this proliferation of diet authorities, people want to seek refuge from that chaos in a single authority.


A deluge of information can actually complicate things, can't it? Will health-tracking apps like Fitbit make us even nuttier?

What we're doing with these trackers and these obsessive diets is giving ourselves an increasingly quantifiable way of saying that we are better than the other people. These things don't work. They're a marketing gimmick. They aren't going to help you lose weight. It's another ritual - a modern technological ritual that people are adopting in order to feel as though they're living better.

This takes us back to religion. There are a great many things about religion that are extraordinary. It helps us ask and answer questions about mortality, about beauty, about goodness, about truth, that really can't be addressed by scientific studies. I think that it is a pity when people start trying to answer those questions with the kinds of foods that they eat. It's kind of sad, right, that now the way we confront death is by avoiding Fritos. What a pathetic ritual, right? Strap on your Fitbit and shop at Whole Foods instead of, you know, sitting down and thinking about Job.

And the sad thing is, it's really easy to judge people on the basis of what they look like. We have this problem with race. In the same way, it's really easy to look at someone who's obese and say, 'Oh look at that person, they're not living as good a life as I am. They're not as good on the inside because I can tell their outside isn't good either.' Honestly, it's disgusting to me that we've taken the great rituals of religious traditions and swapped them out for Fitbits and weird prohibition diets, and we think that that's the best way to figure out how to be good and how to get back to a time when humans were better.

It's funny, in my notes on your book, I have written next to the section on Fitbits, 'perverted form of mindfulness?'

It's interesting you bring that up. Some of the academic work I'm interested in right now is on mindfulness, and the way in which mindfulness traditions themselves get perverted when we turn them into ways to lower our blood pressure or reverse aging or burn fat.

What's yoga good for? What's mindfulness good for? Well, it's good for - and then substitute whatever health condition you want to deal with. I just think it’s kind of sad that that's where we would invest so much of our ethical energy. It's an incredible amount of time and effort. And for what? And for nothing. To look better.

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