> According to Galen, food “is probably the most important of all medical subjects,”

Just remember that in medieval times growing food was the job of the majority of men. Men also were the people most likely to be educated and actually write and talk about things and so food would be something on their mind. They would be growing it and thus writing about it. contrary to modern ideas men actually appeared to have done a lot of cooking: women were not common in the army (different cultures had different perspectives on women with the army. Some would have more than others, but in any case, you would have men as the vast majority) so men would have had to do at least some cooking. Even your common peasant farmer man would likely spend a significant amount of time out in the field at lunchtime where the women are not around and so would have to fend for themselves for their lunch.

I bring the book up to point out that no one has ever asked what women were doing and what was important. This is something historians are looking at now when trying to piece together what must have been happening. As a general rule, you can say that every woman was spending the vast majority of their working hours making thread so they could have clothes, but since women were rarely the ones who were writing, we have almost no historical record of clothing. What we do have is often from tailors who would be a male and thus something that occasionally a man would write about.

The article kind of misses the forest for the trees: just as today, diet was associated with various conflicting theories and advice - some reasonable, some pure fabrication. In absence of much hard evidence food becomes a playing field for "systems" that assign values to foodstuffs. Also, obviously, sugar played a different role in societies in which the calorie requirements of physical labour were a much bigger challenge than obesity.

Also: "beans, which were thought to cause flatulence"? I'm pretty sure that bit is factual.

> "Fish Bad, Sugar Good"

> "Similarly, some fruits were safer than others: citrus fruits improved digestion, especially in hot weather, while raisins were good for the stomach, lungs and liver. And nuts were nutritious and good for the brain."

My impression is that refined sugar was extremely rare in medieval times and into the renaissance. But everybody loved raisins, and they were used extensively, even though they were usually imported from Italy and other Mediterranean regions. Various forms of raisin bread (often with dried figs, citrus peels, and currants,) were the definitive medieval festival/feast-day food. Their distant descendants are the stollen, panettone, etc., still popular as holiday treats in Europe.

Certain regions of medieval Germany (and presumably France) grew grapes but had to resort to ingenious methods to dry them into raisins: https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/27/raisins-in-a-cold-cli...

> lettuce was dangerous because it was so cold and moist

Joke's on us, I guess.

https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...

It's interesting how some of these came to the right conclusions (given sanitary standards at the time) but for entirely the wrong reasons. A lot of the food that was unhealthy was food that could go bad quickly or carry illnesses

Considering how quickly poultry and fish go bad, they weren't entirely wrong.

You can base an entire food brand on that article. The Tik Tok channel alone would be massive.