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years later, none of the assumptions have held up. Fat in the diet, studies found, made no difference for breast cancer. Fruit and vegetable fiber had a weak effect, or no effect, on colon cancer. Dr. Meir Stampfer, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, explained: “People drew inferences that were in retrospect over-enthusiastic.” In fact, “[y]ou could plot G.N.P. against cancer and get a very similar graph…. Any marker of Western civilization gives you the same relationship.”14 Researchers spun persuasive tales of how the beta-carotene in fruit might work as a cancer preventive, and the tales made everyone confident, but studies showed that the relationship did not exist. Studies showed that fruit and vegetables did not offer any protection.15 Dr. Barnett Kramer, deputy director in the office of disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health, said: “Over time, the messages on diet and cancer have been ratcheted up until they are almost co-equal with the smoking messages. I think a lot of the public is completely unaware that the strength of the message is not matched by the strength of the evidence.”16

A quarter of a century ago, Dr. Tim E. Byers, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, had high hopes for the diet and cancer hypothesis. He recently told the New York Times he is “sadder now, but wiser,” adding, “The progress has been different than I would have predicted.” He now believes that although specific foods can affect health, diet does not seem to have a major role in cancer; he thinks food quantities, however, may make a difference. “I think the truth may be that particular food choices are not as important as I thought they were,” Dr. Byers said.17

In February 2006, researchers completed the largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease.18 What they found was that the diet had no effect. The $415-million federal study followed some forty-nine thousand women for eight years. The result was that those assigned to a low-fat diet and those who ate whatever they wanted had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks, and strokes. Dr. Rowan T. Chlebowski, a medical oncologist at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and one of the study’s principal investigators, described the low-fat diet as “different than the way most people eat.”19 It allowed for no butter on bread, no cream cheese on bagels, and no oil in salad dressings. Michael Thun, director of epidemiological research for the American Cancer Society, said the study was so big that it is likely to be considered definitive. Of the several teams, the researchers who worked on the correlation between low fat and breast cancer seemed the least ready to give up the whole hypothesis. In the conclusion of their article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they suggest that maybe eight years isn’t enough, and promise to follow up on the women (though no longer be on their diet). Most experts, however, seem convinced. Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City and a world-renowned investigator of diets and health, called the studies “revolutionary,” adding that they “should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy.”20 Consider how many times you have been told that fruit and vegetables do, in fact, protect against cancer. I would find it difficult to exaggerate how many times I have heard or read that. I have eaten a lot of fruits, vegetables, and fiber in order to be well and not get cancer. I want to note the moral pull that this unscientific idea has had on us, and the accreditation of value and honor to the slender broccoli eater—who, of course, is also imagined as happy. It is quite amazing.

Science has taken as one of its major tasks the tracking down of what kills us, and one result is that it comes off as a morbid scold to much