Nutritionism and Guilt vs Coffee

This is some weapons-grade nonsense:

... Coffee is a toxin that shuts down the cleansing process of the body and locks other toxins such as fat inside the body. Therefore, it is wise to quit drinking coffee if you are serious about losing weight.

Just a day ago, I was reading about how my beloved (yeah, I'm objective) coffee can help reverse the effects of dementia in old age, some toxin,* and this relates sidewise to understanding why describing fat as a toxin is just plain ignorant.

In fact, fat has a lot of bearing on the proper function of the brain and our bodies, notably in the myelin sheathing that surrounds our nerve cells.

Myelin is made primarily of fats and lipids and its destruction in diseases like multiple sclerosis slows nerve impulse transmission so badly that victims begin to lose all functions mediated by the brain and spinal cord. It's the electrical insulation properties of fat that are responsible for the fact that "nerve impulses in unmyelinated neurones have a maximum speed of around 1 m/s, [while] in myelinated neurones they travel at 100 m/s."

A human body that regarded fat as a toxin would destroy its own nerve casings. Therefore, if coffee really prevented your body from recognizing fat as toxic, the proper response would be to have it all the time.

But does caffeine affect fat retention one way or another? As a stimulant, and stimulants are generally appetite suppressants, you might even expect it to cause weight loss. Katherine Zeratsky, a registered dietitian at the Mayo Clinic, says coffee has no measurable effect on long-term weight, except that excess consumption of high calorie coffee drinks has the same likely effect as consuming lots of other high calorie foods.

So, to recap - Fat isn't a toxin. Coffee doesn't seem to affect weight, but the things you add to it might.

So what's left to say? That there's an endless market for hashing over every little facet of people's diets looking for hidden guilt using unsupported assertions that can contradict basic biological principles. That it's humorously easy to jump the gun and assume that something people like, coffee, is by definition bad for us. Meh.

Take away some of those unfounded assumptions and there isn't anything to that article but the idea that a person needs to be 'cleansed.' Sounds like a bunch of distracting, pseudo-religious claptrap to me. You want to worry about a toxins that improperly accumulate in the body, worry about bisphenol A or pthalates, or any of the other weird chemicals that leach out of our ubiquitous plastic food packaging.

Again, again and again: Guilt culture and nutritionism act as a hindrance to sensible discussions about food and sustainability. They are wasteful diversions from serious questions concerning recent declines in public health, which you would think people would know better than to blame on foods that humans have been ingesting for millenia.

* To be extremely clear: Dementia is multi-causal and I found no mention in publicly available news articles linking coffee's anti-Alzheimer's effects to fat regulation. When causation is first established in health studies, it can take quite a lot of work to determine the mechanism because living systems are complicated and we don't understand them as well as we'd like. It wasn't my idea to connect these concepts together, hence, the debunking.

(Photo credit: Il Quoquo on Flickr.)