There are some excellent food reads out there right now, so a round-up post seemed in order.

The Carnivore Diet is the Latest Fad to Ignore that Food Does More Than Just Feed Us. Oh man, everything about this piece is so great. Especially:

After 13 days of the carnivore diet, I realized that focusing on physiology fails to capture what makes carnivory so extreme. One valuable lesson of the diet is that human bodies are remarkably resilient: You can shit without fiber and avoid scurvy without vegetables! But reducing food to physiology is as shallow as reducing culture to biology. It’s hard to overstate the sociocultural importance of culinary traditions. Breaking bread. “Comfort food.” Grandma’s recipe. Potlatchs. Wedding toasts. Birthday cake. Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t have to be a foodie for food to be meaningful—you just have to be a human being.

(Alan Levinovitz/Tonic)

Here’s why it’s impossible to get reliable diet advice from the news. Wonky but fascinating. (Emily Oster/Slate)

The moral panic around obesity is evident in eating disorder research — and that’s a big problem. (Gotovac et al/Health Journal)

How do we look at fat bodies? (Leehr et al/Obesity Facts)

Not precisely food-related, but also intrigued by this study on compulsive shopping and body image. (Harnish et al/Psychological Reports)

If you need even more food-related reads, check out Civil Eats’ list of 22 Noteworthy Food and Farming Books out this summer. We’ve got a few lazy summer weekends left in August — what are you reading?