The more Levinovitz looked into it, the more parallels he discovered between religious and dietary beliefs, going as far back as the ancient Chinese texts that are his scholarly specialty. “Two thousand years ago, there were these Daoist monks who decided that if you avoided these five grains — and these were the staple crops of China, what the everyday person subsisted on — you’d live forever, you wouldn’t get any diseases,” Levinovitz said. These monks also came up with intricate recipes for nutritional supplements, which they then distributed with similarly spectacular promises of immortality. “I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, You know, this sounds a lot like the kinds of promises that modern, secular so-called diet gurus make to their followers,” Levinovitz said.

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But what about when diets aren’t comforting? Many of them, after all, suggest worlds in which modern life is overflowing with toxins, even in safe-seeming foods — shouldn’t these beliefs be aversive rather than attractive? Not so, said Levinovitz. He used the Food Babe, the very popular food blogger who sees terrifying chemicals everywhere — and who is frequently wrong in her doomsaying — as an example. “One thing I realized — why would you want to live in a world filled with toxins? Why would you follow the Food Babe — isn’t that a terrifying world to live in?” Levinovitz said. You could easily make the same statement about religion: Why would you want to believe in a world where humans are inherently sinful creatures? The idea sounds upsetting from a nonreligious perspective. “But it’s not. It’s a comforting one … The only thing scarier than a world full of toxins is a world in which you don’t know what the toxins are.” If the choice is a nuanced, complicated understanding of the world that contains some uncertainty or a more clear-cut and sharply defined approach, the latter vision is often going to win out.