I wish we could trust the health advice we get in books and news media.

My sister has been reading The China Study, a book reporting results from a study of nutrition and diet in, well, I guess it's kind of obvious where. It argues for an essentially vegan diet as the healthiest, based on a very large study of self-reported diet habits by Chinese citizens. Here's the thing: it's a single study, based mostly on rural Chinese. Not only are they ethnically different from most Americans, they live substantially different lives in a huge number of ways that are hard to quantify and analyze.

Mostly, what bothers me is that people tend to find one book that suits their prejudices and attempt to follow the book's dietary arguments as gospel. If you follow The China Study as gospel on nutrition, you ignore findings on the so-called French paradox, the much-ballyhooed Mediterranean diet, and the findings about the Japanese diet, among others. My niece and I chatted briefly about this and I pointed out to her that the news media tends to report on these studies in isolation, failing to point out conflicts between the studies, or how they may not complement each other.

More broadly, I'm troubled by the continued move to think of food as a kind of medicine where you get heart health by eating oat bran and fish, brain health with soy, and healthy bones with cheese and milk, while yogurt will give you good digestion. Author Michal Pollan takes a more sensible look at the problem of what to eat and you can see good example of his thinking in this op-ed piece in the New York Times.

And is life really so great when you follow strict veganism and you can't sit down with friends or family and share food with them because they put butter in the peas or used a hamhock to flavor the beans?

CDs listened to today:

• Roger Sessions: Sonata for Piano
• A Tribe Called Quest: People's Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm
• Various Artists: Project Human (disk 1)
• Kevin Puts: Dark Vigil
• The Breeders: Cannonball
• C + C Music Factory: Gonna Make You Sweat
• Juraj Filas: Sonata For Trombone And Piano (At the end of the century)
• Konono No. 1: Congotronics
• Bill Watrous: The Tiger Of San Pedro