Fuhrman has been in the business for a while. His first quack book, Fasting and Eating For Health, appeared in 1995, and promotes fasting and his own diet as something that is supposed to (but of course doesn’t) “relieve and even cure such maladies as psoriasis, high blood pressure, diabetes, hypoglycemia, sinusitis, and chronic fatigue.” His most popular book, however, is presumably Eat to Live, which lays out his idea of “toxic hunger”, the inaccurate idea that people are addicted to toxins that build up from nutrient-poor foods. Other titles include Super Immunity, The End of Dieting and The End of Heart Disease.
The central element of his ‘nutritarianism’ is nutrient density and his “Health Equation” H = N/C, i.e. that Healthy Life Expectancy equals Nutrition divided by Calories. Accordingly, Fuhrman (falsely) claims that “food choices are the most significant cause of disease and premature death” and that eating foods with lots of micronutrients can reduce not only the risk of obesity but of diseases such as cancer. It cannot. And since the entities in his equation cannot be quantified or the terms be precisely defined, Fuhrman’s ‘health equation’ is a “parlor trick” and not a serious principle for anything. Fuhrman, however, uses his own children as anecdotal evidence that his nutritarian diet will prevent health problems; as for cancer, his claim is that “the immediate impact is that cancer rates might decrease by half. But the long-term impact, over generations, if we get kids eating right, we could decrease cancer rates by 90 percent.” (You don’t need to ask where the numbers come from – Fuhrman has his own science, one that doesn’t need the input of naysaying scientists who fetishize truth, evidence or accountability.) Another common trick of Fuhrman’s is the popular one of incorrectly assuming that association studies show causation, which is a useful trick for finding apparent support for anything you want. His own diet has of course not been tested in controlled trials. There is a good rundown of his diet and its scientific foundations here.
Though it seems that his nutritarianism has evolved over time, at least Fuhrman’s version used to be a type of raw food faddism, and Furhman himself would take a pseudo-religious vitalistic view of food preparation, according to which cooking destroys and kills the living antioxidants, phytochemicals, and so – and no, don’t ask whether that’s actually the case: it’s a tenet of a baroque pseudoreglious system – and according to which processed food are “foods whose life has been taken out of them”. And the micronutrients you (mythically) miss out on in this manner, make you exposed to magical toxins that accumulate in your cells and that you need to “detoxify” through some religious ritual.
The core assumption, however, is the central lie of so many quacks and charlatans with something to sell you: that all disease is preventable if you just choose the right strategy. (And that strategy is, of course, hidden from you by the powers that be; fortunately, a few brave maverick doctors like Fuhrman are willing to let you in to the exclusive cult of the enlightened). You can read a discussion of that particular falsehood and its role in pseudomedicine here. One particularly pernicious consequence of the idea is that it puts the blame for getting sick on the victims of disease – that those who get sick chose their fate by failing to recognize the strategy of the enlightened.
Even more ominously, Fuhrman also suggests that healthy people don’t need antibiotics, and he has been caught trotting out alt-med type tropes against chemotherapy. He has even more than toyed with antivaccine nonsense, e.g. claiming (completely bonkers falsely) that shots aren’t “effective at all – it doesn’t work”.
Another important element of his ‘nutritarianism’ is his “Aggregate Nutrient Density Index” (ANDI), a ranking of foods based on micronutrients that has subsequently been adopted by the Whole Foods marketing department.
Then there’s the grift – of course there’s a grift! Fuhrman sells his own line of nutrition-related products, and he also hosts his own ‘Weekend Immersions’ for which people pay up to a thousand bucks to be “immersed” in nutritarianism with a weekend of lectures, cooking and exercise classes and something akin to a religious awakening where converted nutritarians get up on stage to talk about the miracles associated with having nutritarianism in their lives and how they believe it helped them overcome rheumatoid arthritis and stage-four ovarian cancer or what have you. And like functional medicine advocates are wont to do, Fuhrman has hawked expensive and useless tests that are suitable for convincing people that they suffer from conditions they do not suffer from, such as iodine tests.
Diagnosis: Yes, there are a few sensible claims sprinkled on top, but Fuhrman’s nutritarianism is rotten from below the surface and to the core. Yet his ideas easily find traction in a culture where diet has become a pseudo-religious practice, and he is not afraid to fuel the trend. His influence can hardly be overestimated.
Hat-tip: Rationalwiki
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