Does Coffee Cause Cancer?
And 8 More Myths about the Food We Eat
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this fascinating, refreshingly clarifying book about food, food myths, and how sloppy science perpetuates misconceptions about food, a medical doctor on his way to a conference gets drawn into conversations that answer the following questions:
• Does vitamin C prevent the common cold? And if it works, why does it only work in Canadian soldiers, ultramarathon runners, and skiers?
• Was red meat really declared a carcinogen by the WHO? Does that mean I should become a vegetarian? And who decides what gets labeled as red meat and white meat?
• Is salt really not that bad for you and did a group of researchers really want to experiment on prisoners to prove the point?
• Does coffee cause cancer or heart attacks? Why did a California court say coffee needed a warning label?
• Is red wine really good for your heart, and what makes the French Paradox such a paradox?
• Why did the New England Journal of Medicine link eating chocolate with winning a Nobel Prize?
• Why were eggs once bad for you but now good for you again? Does that mean I don’t need to worry about cholesterol?
• Should I be taking vitamin D?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Numbers don't lie, but they can be misleading," according to cardiologist Labos's meandering debut. Relating fictional conversations between a doctor and various interlocutors he meets while on a business trip, Labos busts such myths as "red wine is good for your heart" and "caffeine can trigger heart attacks" and explains how readers can spot misleading or overhyped food and medical research. The author pushes back against the belief that "vitamin C fights the common cold" by noting that one of the only studies supporting the claim found vitamin C's efficacy limited to marathon runners, skiers, and Canadian soldiers. According to Labos, this dubious result shows how scientists can inadvertently manufacture positive findings by chopping up data in ways that concentrate among arbitrarily chosen subsets of participants the inevitable false positives that accompany any study. Corporate interests, Labos argues, also influence which scientific results are published; for example, the myth that "breakfast's the most important meal of the day" originated in a magazine owned by cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg. Unfortunately, the book's narrative format can make it hard to follow Labos's arguments (an interruptive barista leads the narrator on disruptive tangents while they discuss whether coffee causes cancer), and the surfeit of extraneous detail further distracts ("A flight attendant admonished me for not buckling my seat belt"). This struggles to stay on task.
