At the weekend, the Observer published a feature by ‘nutrition expert’ Joanna Blythman in which she made some odd health statements comparing fruits and vegetables less favourably to meat, eggs and dairy. Claire Hamlett deconstructs some of Blythman’s bizarre claims.

A few years ago a study came out showing that drinking coffee was associated with a decreased risk of death from various causes. My mother, a self-proclaimed coffee addict, gleefully referred to the study as a vindication of her five-a-day habit, ignoring the fact that she gets antsy without a regular hit of caffeine.

My point is, you can almost always find a study to validate your dietary choices on health grounds. But a positive association between health and a certain food doesn’t mean everyone needs to start consuming that food, nor that you can start making all sorts of spurious claims on the back of that one study.

Yet this is what food writer Joanna Blythman has done in the Observer over the weekend in what should have been classified as an opinion piece but somehow got away with being published as an ostensibly objective feature. Blythman - a cheerleader for meat and dairy and vocal critic of vegans - used a new study from Sweden showing that the fat in dairy products may help to protect against cardiovascular disease to claim that dairy, meat and eggs have been unfairly vilified by government nutrition guidance, and that fruits, vegetables, and carbohydrates have been wrongly promoted as healthy.

Let’s look at some of the wilder and more tenuous arguments Blythman makes in the article, which she promoted on Twitter as a rebuttal to claims, made by no one, that “real food is bad for you”.

CLAIM 1: There is a causal connection between avoiding “natural” animal products and obesity

Blythman tries to pin the blame for the fact that a majority of British people are overweight or obese on official recommendations to cut back on what she describes as “whole foods in their natural forms” or “unprocessed” animal-based foods. 

Blythman is right that increased consumption of highly processed foods - those with added salt, sugar, and fat, for example - contribute to weight gain, but she doesn’t provide evidence for her claim that the increased consumption of these foods is due to being told that “unprocessed” meat and dairy are unhealthy. There are many factors that contribute to this increase, including busier lifestyles leaving less time to cook from scratch and a culture of ‘on the go’ food. People being overweight is also partly down to more sedentary activities like sitting in the office for long hours and driving more. Furthermore, Blythman presents eating more “unprocessed” animal products as the only option available for people to be healthier, which is far from true.

Some of the very foods Blythman is promoting can also reasonably be described as processed. Milk, for example, must be pasteurised to make it safe to consume. So even the full-fat milk that is, according to the Swedish study that Blythman cites, is not in its “natural form”. Nor is cheese. The processed/unprocessed distinction is not always a good guide of what’s healthy. 

Blythman also presents certain animal products as unprocessed while failing to acknowledge that there are plenty of unprocessed plant-based foods people can and arguably should eat too. But this is because she has an axe to grind with any food that doesn’t come from an animal, a point we’ll get to later.

CLAIM 2: Eating animal products is “time-honoured” and right on “evolutionary grounds”

Appeals to the diets of our ancestors as a guide to what’s healthy for us now are always tenuous, whether they’re used to support eating more meat or eating more plants. Which point in history should we look to? And shouldn’t we take into account the vastly different lifestyles we now live? If, as appeared to be the case at some points in history, our ancestors had meat-heavy diets based on hunting wild animals, how do advocates of evolutionary-based eating propose we replicate this? Surge explored this issue earlier this year.

• A study claims Stone Age humans were 'hypercarnivores', but what does that mean for our food choices today?

Never miss an article

Stay up-to-date with the weekly Surge newsletter to never miss an article, media production or investigation. We respect your privacy.

CLAIM 3: The “Five a day” slogan is misused and not adhered to properly, so let’s not bother trying to eat more fruits and vegetables

Blythman claims that the recommendation to eat five a day is just a marketing tool that came out of meeting of U.S. fruit and vegetable companies in 1991. In fact, the World Health Organisation made the recommendation a year before that.

Blythman also claims there is no evidence to back up the recommendation. “A major study in 2010 involving 500,000 people across 23 European locations for eight years could not establish a clear association, let alone causation, for this recommendation,” she writes. But that study was only focused on whether consuming five a day had any impact on cancer risk, not on whether it was a healthy amount of fruits and vegetables in general.

Another criticism Blythman makes is based on the slogan often being applied to questionable products. “Five a day logos now appear on many ultra-processed foods, from baked beans to ready meals, imbuing them with a questionable aura of health,” she writes. She isn’t the only one to ask whether such foods should count as one of your five a day, and in fact the NHS advises caution when it comes to assuming the nutritional content of ready meals. But just because some foods are inaccurately labelled doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t still strive to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Likewise, the fact that the five a day campaign hasn’t succeeded in getting people to eat more fruits and vegetables doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t bother trying, as Blythman implies when she writes, “Perhaps we should face the possibility that the five a day dogma has actually prompted us to eat more sugar” because (she claims) people are eating more sweet potato and squash than leafy greens. 

If anything, the failures of the campaign should make us ask how the government can more effectively encourage higher consumption of fruit and vegetables. Especially since a 2017 meta-analysis by Imperial College London researchers found that we should actually be eating ten portions a day for a longer life - but Blythman simply ignores that research.

CLAIM 4: An egg is nutritionally superior to a banana because it has no sugar

As part of her bid to undermine the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables, Blythman claims, without citing evidence, that people who manage to get their five a day do so by eating more fruit and that fruit is more sugary than eggs. “Fruit contains lots of sugar. A small banana has the equivalent of 5.7 teaspoons of sugar, whereas an egg contains none.”

This is a weird statement. Eggs don’t contain vitamin C or potassium, while bananas do. Eggs not having sugar in them does not make bananas devoid of health benefits.

Fruit contains vitamins and fibre, so consuming sugar through them is not the same as just eating a chocolate biscuit, which imparts no other nutrients. Added and processed sugars are the ones that should be avoided for health reasons. Plus, dairy products that Blythman promotes, like milk and yoghurt, also contain naturally-occurring sugars. One cup of milk contains about 12 grams of sugar, so about the same as a small banana.

CLAIM 5: “Unprocessed” meat is unfairly lumped in with processed meat as unhealthy

Blythman argues that studies about the healthiness of red meat don’t differentiate between processed and unprocessed meat. But as point 4 above indicates, she doesn’t extend the same view to fruit or plant-based foods. If whole foods are good and processed foods are bad, there are plenty of plant-based foods that she could also point to as healthy but declines to do so. She accuses those who advocate for meat-free diets as “ideological”, failing to acknowledge that she herself is promoting an ideology, one based on killing and destruction.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

Your support makes a huge difference to us. Supporting Surge with a monthly or one-off donation enables us to continue our work to end all animal oppression.

LATEST ARTICLES