The Gluten Lie by Alan Levinovitz

Author:Alan Levinovitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regan Arts.

CHAPTER SIX

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Nutrition Myth Detox

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Do You Drink Magical Elixirs?

It’s time to revisit the Daoist masters from earlier in the book. Like today’s diet gurus, the grain-free monks of ancient China were obsessed with avoiding illness and living forever, and they believed proper eating was the key to both. But back then, like today, no one could agree on what constituted proper eating. Monks recommended grain-free diets, meat-free diets, alcohol-free diets, and even food-free diets, claiming to survive entirely on water and air. And like most of today’s diet gurus, they endorsed a variety of dubious dietary supplements: peach sap, coptis root, cassia root, “stony honey,” fuling fungus, pine resin, the “five metals,” the “eight minerals.” These were often used as ingredients in health-food recipes, like this one for “Master Halewind’s Elixir”:

It is prepared by taking some blood from the chick in a crane’s egg and the juice of aconite from the Lesser Chamber and mixing them to make the elixir. Place in a swan’s egg, seal with lacquer, and submerge in mica solution.

Sure, Master Halewind’s elixir isn’t easy to make, and it probably doesn’t taste great. But according to ancient testimonials, drinking “a gill” of it increases your longevity by a hundred years; a quart will increase it by a thousand. In addition to increasing your life span, Daoist elixirs supposedly granted incredible vision, preserved young-looking skin, and expelled “the Three Worms.”

This kind of nonsense belongs in a fantasy world. Yet even today, under the influence of myths and superstitions dressed up as science, otherwise reasonable people continue to believe in miracle elixirs just as nonsensical as Master Halewind’s.

Take Bulletproof® Coffee, cooked up by self-proclaimed “bio-hacker” Dave Asprey, a beverage many Paleolithic dieters swear by. The recipe:

Brew 1 cup of coffee using filtered water, with freshly ground Bulletproof® Coffee Beans. Add in 1–2 tablespoons of Brain Octane® to the hot coffee (It’s STRONG—start with 1 tsp. and work up over several days). Add 1–2 tablespoons grass-fed, unsalted butter or ghee. Mix it all in a blender for 20–30 seconds.

Asprey has claimed that normal coffee is loaded with “toxins” that “steal your mental edge and actually make you weak,” whereas “clean coffee actually fights cancer and provides antioxidants,” bestows “powerful energy and rock steady focus,” and “programs” your body to “burn fat for energy all day long,” allowing you to “lose 100 pounds without using exercise” and “upgrade your IQ by more than 12 points.” (Incidentally, The Bulletproof Diet is published by Rodale Books—“I will live to be a hundred!” *cue heart attack*—and enthusiastically endorsed by Dr. Mark Hyman.)

If you buy into food myths, this is the kind of life you can end up living: Scared that your coffee, along with the rest of your food, is filled with toxins. Seeking refuge from the modern world in the reassuring illusion of Paleolithic living. Hopeful that some biohacking savior will tell you how to make genuine cave-brewed java, the kind of java that Java Man would have made for

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