It has been a funny old week. On Tuesday I was in The Sun newspaper (link here) talking about alkaline diets, detox smoothies and the like. I only started writing this blog a few months ago and to be in the UK’s biggest selling newspaper so quickly is a little bizarre. Clearly I owe a debt of thanks to the excellent Amanda Ursell, who is just as passionate about this stuff as me, but a little less sweary (at least in public). Thanks also to Catherine Collins who does an amazing job, is many times brighter and better qualified than I am and clearly has my back. I am proud to know them both and amazed that they think my rantings are worthy of their interest. I will endeavour to fight for their cause and profession and to always spell dietitian with an extra t in defiance of my spell check.

I thought it was an excellent piece (well done Amanda), made some very important points and pleasingly contained the much-underused word ‘twaddle’. By being a double page spread in The Sun, it will hopefully have reached a large audience, many of whom might be susceptible to the lies of fake nutritionists in the media, so I like to think we have done some good. It is exactly the reason why I started writing Angry Chef, and why I will continue. This is a start, there is more to come.

It will not have escaped people’s notice that the article did contain a picture of me (I had a tabloid photographer in my house – my dog nutritionist was not happy) and my real name. Clearly this means that I am a little less anonymous than I used to be, but I think the coverage was worth it. Previous to the Sun article Angry Chef was completely anonymous, so being in the paper has meant that I have also had to tell friends, colleagues and family about my bullshit fighting alter ego. Some have commented that the real me is actually one of the least angry chefs they know, but then David Banner was pretty mild mannered from what I remember.

So on to this, a bonus mid week blog. Not much real content today as I am working on a couple of things (GAPS diet as promised, plus something on fitness bloggers coming soon), but I thought I would throw this one out there as it will inform the next few bits of writing I do. I also want to put a few bullshit spotting tricks into people’s armoury and this is one of the most important…

Do hares lay eggs?

It will be a surprise to many that Angry Chef is occasionally capable of joy. Mostly this is achieved through cooking and eating, but sometimes life just makes me smile. Although my head does get splattered by the clocks changing, I do love this time of year. I live out in the country, surrounded by farmland and forest, and I can see across a generous expanse of open fields from my back garden. Throughout March and April I am often lucky enough to see hares doing their crazy March hare thing across the open land. Much as in life, the poor stupid males line-up to win the affections of a single female who beats them away one by one with deft boxing skills. Seeing them takes me back to a staggeringly beautiful hare dish I ate a few years ago at Marcus Wareing’s restaurant at the Berkley, the memory of which is firmly engrained in my mind. It is one of a handful of enduring lifetime culinary highlights, eclipsed only by The Hand and Flowers roast pork, the Chocolate Bar dessert at Heston’s Dinner and some freshly caught mackerel cooked by me and my daughter on a Cornish beach.

The first sight of the March hares is always a joy and a welcome sign of winter’s end. If you can get close enough, you often see them sat next to tiny scrapes in the ground full of colourful eggs. The scrapes look for all the world like they have been made by the hares and it is perhaps not surprising that a number of legends across various parts of Medieval Europe declared that the hares delivered these eggs as gifts to celebrate the coming of spring. Somehow across the years, the hares became Easter bunnies and the eggs became cheap foil wrapped chocolate nestled in branded mugs, but the legend of the March hares and their shiny, colourful gifts endures to the modern day.

I hope that most of you reading this will be aware that hares do not lay eggs. The scrapes in the ground are of course the nests of Lapwings who like to lay their eggs in the same open fields that hares enjoy. They also lay them at roughly the same time that hares appear and as they have a slightly more nervous disposition than their lupine neighbours, when approached they will usually flee the nesting areas long before the hares do. Without binoculars it would have been very difficult to see lapwings in close proximity to the eggs. On approach, it would have looked exactly as if it was the hares had left them (or at least it would have been easy enough to convince a child this was the case). If you had little grasp of biology or animal classification, it is easy to see how this false assumption could come about. Lapwings and hares favour the same open pasture environment and appear at the point in the calendar. The hares and the eggs appear close together and at the same time. A logical conclusion could be that one caused the other - the March hares caused the colourful eggs.

I have not gone mad.

Before you stop reading, I have not lost my mind and the Angry Chef has not become a natural history blog. My reason for the hare anecdote is to underline the most important thing that my science education taught me. Correlation does not imply causation. Just because the hares and the eggs appear close together in space and time, this does not mean that one causes the other. There is a confounding factor, in this case the coming of the spring, which causes both to appear. The eggs are actually caused by the lapwings, but if they are not as easy to see as the hares, this might not be obvious.

There are countless other examples. If I were to draw a graph of primary school children’s shoe size and reading ability, there would be very strong correlation. Children with larger shoes tend to have a higher reading ability. This can be replicated in schools across the country and around the world with spectacularly similar results. Looking at the graphs it would be easy to draw the conclusion that big feet cause children to be able to read. Once again, this is clearly not the case and the confounding factor here is age. Older children have bigger feet, but they also tend to be better at reading. If it is possible draw a graph with data only from children of the same age we would find no correlation between shoes size and reading. Because the data was collected from children of different ages without adjustment, the study is flawed and it is easy to draw a false conclusion. The experiment had failed to spot that age is a confounding factor.

As logical humans we are drawn to find meaning. We want to understand cause and effect in order to make sense of our world. It is deeply engrained in us to try to make logical sense of the complexity around us, but in a confusing world sometimes we will make mistakes. All too often we see correlation and immediately imply causation. We see a big, stupid, obvious hare sat next to a pile of eggs and we think ‘thank you hare for leaving us those shiny eggs’. If people are going to get better at spotting pseudoscience they need to stop and think for a moment. Am I looking at a hare or a lapwing? The difficulty in spotting the difference between the two is a good reason that pseudoscience flourishes. Once you can spot it, or at least spot when something is definitely a hare even if you can’t work out where the eggs are coming from, the majority of fakery simply melts away.

But beware. People can become very passionate about hares. If someone becomes certain hares lay eggs it can become very firmly engrained in their belief system. Often it will become something they will fight tooth and nail to defend. If you challenge it, you are challenging their very essence. However wrong they are, until they can be shown a lapwing laying the eggs with their own eyes, they will never be convinced. And sometimes even then they will hold on to the hare.

Come on Angry Chef, get to the point...

And so it is with food and health. Most food and health bloggers websites are full of big fat hares. The most common is contained in my previously mentioned (and now patented) health blogger template –

‘we were living our impossibly glamorous lives as a model/PR/marketer life at 100 miles an hour, eating all sort of junk and not caring what we put in our bodies. Our health was really suffering. When we started our insert name of made up diet plan here it revolutionised our lives and our friends just begged us to share our recipes with them’

This is common to almost every health blog so I will refrain from examples, but the clear message is always – ‘a dramatic change in my diet caused my health to improve’.  Even it their story is true (they can’t all be) they are deliberately blurring the line between correlation and causation. They are seeing a hare and making us think that it left the eggs. Scroll further down any randomly selected health blogger website and you will see lots of testimonials saying much the same – ‘I took your smoothie, detox, low carb, vegan bullshit plan and I lost two stone and felt better than ever. I no longer feel tired or have the urge to kill'. In the world of health blogging, testimonials are evidence, but usually they are just hares sitting next to colourful eggs.

There are sometimes comments on my blogs, some positive, some negative. I do enjoy the negative ones (although please keep on being positive) and one day I will get round to writing some replies (I can’t do this at the moment due to an IT issue that my limited technical knowledge cannot sort out, but I will do soon). Here is a quote taken from the reply of the very passionate contributor Gearoid Laoi. ‘If the British people who were slim in the sixties are fat as pigs now, is it not blatantly obvious that the nutritional advice which was drastically changed in early 70s is at fault?’  Hopefully by now you will have spotted the hare and realize that the answer is no. It is not ‘blatantly obvious’ and this is a near perfect example of someone seeing a hare and shouting ‘it must have laid the eggs’. I am not saying that the nutritional advice had no impact (although given that nobody followed the advice, blaming seems a bit harsh), just that it is not definitely the cause. There is correlation, but that does not prove causation.

Now I can spot a hare, how can I find the lapwings?

In the world of science, when someone sees a hare, they need to prove that it laid the eggs before they act. This is difficult. Hares sit in the middle of the field shouting ‘look at me, I'm a massive hare’, whereas lapwings (at least my metaphorical ones) are usually more elusive, complex and nuanced. For instance…

• Why does someone’s health improve when they go on a detox diet? Who knows? But maybe the detox diet was not the cause. Maybe they are just benefiting from eating a bit of fruit and veg. Maybe previously they only ate Gregg's sausage rolls. Maybe there was a placebo effect. Maybe just getting some advice on health and nutrition made them feel better. Maybe they are just self-reporting a load of vague symptoms and want to make the health blogger/nutritional therapist feel good. Maybe they haven’t been on the diet at all and are just after retweets from someone with lots of followers. Maybe the testimonials we see are carefully selected. Let’s face it, if someone contacts the blogger to say they felt exactly the same, or that they became violently ill, it is unlikely to make it on to the site or Twitter feed.
• Why has obesity increased massively over the past 30 years? The changes to nutritional advice in the seventies? Maybe. But it is perhaps more likely that the reasons are hugely complex. Maybe it is not just because we are eating too much sugar. Maybe there are complex societal reasons for our changing behaviours and altered relationship with food. If changing nutritional advice was the massive hare that caused all the problems, obesity would be a very easy problem to address – just change the guidelines back and everything would be sorted.

The world of food is full of examples. For some excellent ones on vitamin supplements, have a read of this piece by Ian Marber (link). Many health businesses thrive on the difficulties people have spotting the difference between hares and lapwings. A big obvious hare can make a lot of people lots of money. It can be a great tool for persuading consumers to part with their cash.

In the world of food, there are very strict rules governing what you can and cannot say on packs. If you want to claim that a product has specific health benefits, that claim needs to be proven by scientific study. Unlike the claims that health bloggers make for their special diets or recipes, hares are not allowed, only lapwings. And companies need to prove that they are really lapwings in a strict and regulated way. Made sure you read the language on pack though. There are many claims made on packs products like ‘detox tea’ or ‘gut cleansing herb infusions’ that are really just hares sat next to colourful eggs. Be vigilant. There is money to be made in tricking you. A well know brand sells its Sleep Easy tea as being specially formulated to help you get a good nights sleep. I wonder what special ingredients that help promote sleep it contains? None. The 'special formulation' refers only to the fact that it does not contain caffeine.

Science needs evidence. Next time you see a big fat hare sat in a field, ask for the evidence. Did it definitely lay the eggs? Can it be proven? Is there experimental data? Is there potentially a confounding factor? Scientists dedicate their lives to discovering if correlation is in fact causation. Once they have evidence, that evidence is constantly tested and challenged.

Just give up and watch TV

I am a just chef who happens to know a tiny bit about science. I am in no position to test evidence. I can usually spot a hare, but that doesn’t mean I know where the eggs come from. Often the information is complex, confusing and contradictory. But fear not, science is there to make sense of it. Usually it is not as easy as spotting a lapwing laying the eggs. It takes study, experiment, analysis and many arguments. There will be different points of view, often between equally respected people. The extent of our knowledge will constantly change and evolve.

Angry Chef does not have time, intellect or ability to analyse all the information every time I spot a hare. I have cricket to watch and episodes of Pointless building up on my Sky Planner. There are people around to do this for me. That is the beauty of science and is the reason I am passionate about defending it and fighting pseudoscience in all its forms. I am the attack dog of science and truth, and I know from experience that dogs are pretty good at chasing off hares, but less effective when it comes to finding out who really laid the eggs.

This is why I take the unfashionable path of trusting health professionals. It is why I believe in the scientific consensus. It is why I preach about freely available public health information from trusted sources. If I want to know what is healthy I talk to dietitians, registered nutritionists, medical doctors. To do anything else is way beyond my skill set. It is also beyond the skill set of the many health bloggers and untrained nutritionists filling up our media.

I believe we can all spot a hare when we see one and it is important that we continue to do so, but finding the lapwings is hard. We need to trust in science to do it for us.