Maintenance Phase - Bonus： Fad Diets

00:00:00.000 hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the bonus episode of a podcast that will teach

00:00:15.680 you how to lose 10 pounds a day for three weeks straight it's safe we promise this is the episode

00:00:23.080 where we finally launch our fad diet this is it mask off wait no now i want to know what your fad

00:00:29.020 diet would be it would be biking around all day getting really hungry but not eating anywhere

00:00:33.240 because you're a huge food snob and then coming home and roasting like 31 sweet potatoes and

00:00:39.100 eating all of them what would yours be crash diet probably for the summer only that is like

00:00:45.460 you can only eat what you grow i have seven patty pan squash from my garden in my fridge right now

00:00:52.620 and do i have a plan for them no i do not that's too many that's the most portland sentence you've

00:00:57.520 ever said on this show i really am just a caricature you're actually a sketch that i've

00:01:03.100 been doing i'm doing both voices on this podcast this whole time surprise it's me

00:01:10.020 i am michael hobbs i'm aubrey gordon i totally forgot that we hadn't introduced ourselves well

00:01:17.380 we don't have to do this because everybody's a patreon supporter i'm just trying to figure

00:01:20.420 out how to transition into the actual content of the show sure good job good job you're doing it

00:01:24.780 Thank you.

00:01:25.380 Today, we're talking about fad diets.

00:01:27.580 I'm so excited.

00:01:28.660 Me too. 1.00

00:01:29.380 So we asked you all to write into us about your wildest fad diets, and you all did. 0.99

00:01:36.120 We got, last I checked, it was over 500. 0.87

00:01:39.560 My guess is that now it's closer to 600 or 700.

00:01:42.600 Thank you all.

00:01:43.180 I literally thought we were going to get like at most like 70 emails.

00:01:48.660 I was like, I don't know if anybody's going to actually do this, Aubrey.

00:01:51.440 Totally.

00:01:51.820 well and you were also like uh look i don't want you to get i i uh am the person who checks our

00:01:57.460 email address most frequently and you were like i don't want us to get flooded and i was like we 0.89

00:02:02.000 are not gonna get flooded i am not worried and then we totally fucking did and then we totally 0.85

00:02:06.540 did which is great yeah it's totally great what was your like overall impression like what were 0.77

00:02:11.940 the themes that emerged well first of all i will say i'm i'm gonna guess that like 15 of the emails

00:02:17.720 alone were about the cabbage soup diet wild and everyone who wrote in thought it was just a their

00:02:22.860 weird family thing oh wow someone wrote it and was like i don't know if this made it outside of

00:02:28.540 germany and someone else was like this was a real australian sensation and like people really thought

00:02:34.160 it was like just like a number of people were like my family did this thing where we just ate

00:02:38.340 cabbage soup all the time and it was terrible we need to do an episode because this is like

00:02:42.600 the platonic ideal of a fad diet the cabbage soup thing absolutely and i don't have a sense of why

00:02:49.460 that one caught fire and other ones didn't because like it's not like people even like

00:02:54.480 cabbage soup that much like at least on atkins you could just like eat a bunch of bacon i mean

00:02:59.820 i think it's the same kind of thing as the master cleanse and like a bunch of other things where

00:03:04.120 it's just sort of like if it's restrictive and you hate it it probably works the best it has to

00:03:09.380 be good for you. Yeah. It's sort of the belief system that goes along with it. Yeah. I think

00:03:13.860 what struck me the most is that folks tend to, there were very few people who were like, I tried

00:03:18.340 one fad diet once and very many people who were like, I tried 10 or 20 fad diets. Yeah. That's

00:03:25.300 interesting. One of them is sort of becomes a gateway drug to all the other ones. And that

00:03:30.140 there's a little bit of like a sunk investment fallacy, right? That's like, well, this first

00:03:34.020 one didn't work. So I got to keep at it until I find the one that does. Right. There were lots

00:03:38.420 of folks who wrote in about something called a rotation diet, which we'll talk about a little

00:03:42.060 bit today. A rotation diet is used to describe like that phrase is used to describe like five

00:03:47.660 different approaches. One of them is straight up just you rotate through different diets a week at

00:03:54.240 a time. Oh, at least it's honest. So it's just like paleo for a week, keto for a week, Jenny

00:04:00.600 Craig for a week, Nutrisystem for a week, like whatever. And I kind of think like, I sort of

00:04:06.780 appreciated that one because it felt like at least like you say like kind of like honest yeah

00:04:11.660 nothing's gonna work everything's gonna work a little bit nothing's gonna work great and these

00:04:16.180 are like fundamentally all arbitrary like it doesn't really matter which one just pick one

00:04:20.920 just fucking pick one it's fine it's the process of transitioning to a new diet that is probably

00:04:25.560 giving you like a lot of the benefits quote-unquote of a diet anyways you might as well just switch to 0.98

00:04:30.040 a new one constantly yeah we also got a bunch of stuff that we're not actually going to talk about

00:04:34.320 today, like the HCG diet or like Herbalife or things like that, that are way meatier than just

00:04:43.580 like a quick touch, which is what we're going to do today. Those are episodes. Those are full on

00:04:48.100 episodes. Like we are going to get into it about Herbalife at some point. Yeah. And we should say

00:04:54.360 we're going to dig in on some fad diets today. And we're going to include some listener emails,

00:04:59.420 both the fad diets themselves and the listener emails reference specific weights they reference

00:05:04.980 calorie counts if those are things that are going to be hard for you to listen to this might be one 0.83

00:05:08.780 to skip yeah it's all of the stuff it's all the same shit that's always on our show you know uh 0.81

00:05:15.900 so where should we dive in do you want to do one of yours should i do one of mine what do we what 0.75

00:05:19.420 do we have you know what i'll start us with the rotation diet how about that yeah do it okay

00:05:23.080 so a listener named don wrote into us about the rotation diet don says picture this 1987

00:05:33.040 i'm 22 years old and i probably weigh around 115 but felt that i was too fat to wear a bikini 0.73

00:05:38.660 jesus fucking christ yeah i heard about this great and new best thing called the rotation diet 0.96

00:05:45.400 this diet was the first i ever went on and was my gateway into disordered eating 0.98

00:05:49.860 that diet worked so well that i quit menstruating and was severely underweight

00:05:54.100 the premise was that you rotated a three-week eating cycle during the first week days one

00:05:59.400 through three were 600 calories days four through seven were 900 calories you then lived it up at

00:06:06.540 1200 calories for one week and the third week was a repeat of week one i remember eating veal and

00:06:12.920 maybe broccoli i love i love that like the cheat days are like 1200 calories are starvation level 0.99

00:06:21.820 it's like two pieces of pizza for like an entire day yeah i mean 600 calories is such a fucking

00:06:28.460 bummer yeah dude sadly i see that the book still exists and the cover lied i gained back all the 0.98

00:06:34.780 weight plus an extra 100 pounds i am now 56 and working through my food shit your podcast is 0.88

00:06:41.120 brilliant and helps me find the humor as i wade through the crap thanks don don don also says i 0.99

00:06:46.560 have a pin i like to wear on my jean jacket that pictures a burger saying fuck your diet because 0.98

00:06:51.120 frankly if i have one more person tell me about their intermittent fasting keto weight watchers 0.99

00:06:56.560 paleo and a multitude of other shit i will gouge my eyes out yep i'm fat all the best don 0.96

00:07:02.440 guys i like don don seems great what if this show was a bait and switch and then we just 0.97

00:07:10.560 told dawn to get on the paleo diet we're like sorry dawn that one actually works it's real

00:07:14.980 sorry we're bearing the lead this entire show almost a year we're actually really into paleo

00:07:21.460 dawn surprise the end of this podcast is us just being like the best diet is drum roll please

00:07:29.360 so i looked into the rotation diet a little bit it was developed by a psychology uh professor

00:07:37.900 named martin katan who was the head of the vanderbilt university weight management program

00:07:44.640 i wanted to read to you from the official book description so this was a number one new york

00:07:49.960 times bestseller of the rotation diet of course like so many absolute garbage diet books that

00:07:56.220 promise a miracle so here's the official book description lose those unwanted pounds and keep

00:08:03.360 them off once and for all with an easy three-week diet the rotation diet's unique and simple plan

00:08:09.680 varies the daily calorie intake over a three-week period leading to an average weight loss of 13

00:08:15.500 pounds users who have had a great deal of weight to lose may drop up to a pound a day in week one

00:08:21.840 when the rotation diet was first published more than 70 000 nashvillians went on the diet and

00:08:29.400 weighed in weekly at supermarkets what the results showed this is michael hobbs catnip

00:08:36.120 the results showed that the city became almost a million pounds lighter well

00:08:43.500 this new updated and revised edition of the rotation diet offers a scientifically proven

00:08:50.660 maintenance plan that requires only small changes to establish a permanently healthier lifestyle

00:08:56.880 Wait, did they just say small changes? And Dawn was eating 600 calories a fucking day? 0.99

00:09:02.280 Small changes? 1.00

00:09:02.820 Yeah, small changes. Cut your caloric intake by at least a third. This is copy that's written

00:09:09.400 by a marketing person who's trying to sell this book. But it also becomes how the diet itself

00:09:15.220 gets talked about, right? It's not written by a science communications person. It is reflective

00:09:20.000 of like, what's the most impressive sounding thing that we can do that will make people buy

00:09:23.840 this book and then it becomes sort of the reputation that the diet itself has right which

00:09:29.600 is like woof a woof what do you okay as an accidental scholar in this what do you think of

00:09:35.900 this thing of like rotating and changing like it's interesting to me that it's like 600 calories one

00:09:42.880 day and then 1200 the next and then 600 the next like why not just 800 calories every day like why

00:09:48.440 is it important that it changes constantly? I mean, I think there's this whole thing around

00:09:53.540 like, quote unquote, kickstarting weight loss, which is not really a thing. But as you and I

00:09:59.180 have discussed, like, there are lots of diets that will lead to short term weight loss. And

00:10:03.700 there's some evidence that shows that our bodies sort of seek and find stasis after a couple of

00:10:08.640 weeks on a diet, which is what leads to what we call plateauing, quote unquote, right? In some

00:10:13.560 ways it feels at least kind of honest right yeah just be like just fucking pick a diet and cycle 0.97

00:10:19.300 through or just like 600 calories and then 800 calories and i don't care i suspect there's 0.94

00:10:24.860 something about it that keeps people a little more on their toes than just like if you're on

00:10:29.620 the same thing all the time right like this is developed by a psychology professor um so i have

00:10:34.440 no doubt that there's some amount of sort of like quote-unquote life hacking right of like human 0.65

00:10:40.300 psychology blah blah blah that kind of shit but mostly this one just felt like a kind of diet 0.61

00:10:46.680 that you and i have not talked about a ton which is just like extreme caloric restriction yeah which 0.98

00:10:52.320 is sort of like the classic right yeah if there's a classic kind of diet it's just like stop eating

00:10:58.100 like get as close to not eating as you can and this one sort of dresses itself up with like

00:11:03.780 psychology and a university and it's a private university whoa so maybe all of the rotation is

00:11:09.820 just to like trick your body into like the extreme just monotony and discomfort of eating

00:11:16.620 that little every day yeah and i also think like a core part of diet marketing is being like we know

00:11:23.600 you've tried everything nothing worked until and people have been saying that and using that sort

00:11:31.620 of communication formula for like a good 30 or 40 years at this point probably longer they're going

00:11:37.280 after the people that wrote you emails and have like 10 bullet points yeah absolutely they're

00:11:41.520 going after the repeat offenders yeah which historically is also me i was a repeat offender

00:11:47.020 for a long time well most people are i mean like most most fat people have tried everything it's

00:11:51.940 not like you've reached like 37 and you're like wait am i fat wait yeah right we're not all ed

00:11:57.280 mcmahon a lot of us do in fact know that we're fat uh so that's the rotation diet okay how about

00:12:07.260 you tell me about some of the uh tell me about some of the fad diets you found okay i have a

00:12:11.860 funny one and a bittersweet one and i'm gonna do the bittersweet one first okay so okay have you

00:12:17.380 heard of the shangri-la diet i've heard of the shangri-la diet through these emails but also i

00:12:23.240 have the diet book in my diet book collection but i haven't read it it sounds really boring it sounds

00:12:29.320 honestly like super padded out like my understanding is that the book is almost entirely anecdotes of

00:12:35.600 people who lost weight on the diet it sounds really boring oh do you know what it is though

00:12:40.540 my recollection about the shangri-la diet is that it's like you're supposed to like

00:12:45.000 drink oil or something before is that right yes yes that is true so uh so i will let listener

00:12:53.820 john explain it he says my most ridiculous diet was the shangri-la diet the method was to swallow

00:13:00.820 one to two tablespoons of vegetable oil morning and night. The boredom of flavor-free calories

00:13:06.560 was supposed to suppress your appetite. I couldn't handle the sensation. Not to be indelicate,

00:13:11.460 but it's like swallowing snot. So I'd swallow dozens of flax oil capsules each day instead.

00:13:17.180 I did this for summer and lost 20 pounds before moving on to another diet. In the years since,

00:13:21.940 I put all the weight back on and then some, of course. I heard about the diet either in

00:13:25.640 the Freakonomics book or podcast around 2009. The Shangri-La Diet is a book by a psychologist.

00:13:31.780 It's basically permission not to eat. I've never felt more gullible.

00:13:35.840 Woof. So my mom did Weight Watchers off and on for a long time. And in one iteration of it, 1.00

00:13:43.800 in one of the phases of Weight Watchers, you were supposed to eat liver every day. 0.89

00:13:49.200 sure and my mom truly hates liver um so she would cut it up into little pieces and freeze it and

00:13:57.060 then swallow it like a pill oh my god the flax oil capsules sort of reminded me of that i i have to

00:14:03.900 imagine that the author of the shangri-la diet would take issue with capsules versus like actually

00:14:09.580 swallowing oil there would be something about coating your throat and stomach and blah blah

00:14:14.300 blah yeah as soon as you hear the parameters of this diet you're like oh are there gonna be like

00:14:18.520 a bunch of arbitrary rules put on this so that when it fails for people you can blame the people

00:14:24.100 and not the diet yeah so what did you learn about the shangri-la diet so first of all this stuck out

00:14:30.440 to me because i did the shangri-la diet mike i am ashamed we have this is the first time this has 0.66

00:14:36.740 happened on the show i one of the reasons i feel so strongly about like this nudge bullshit and 0.61

00:14:41.840 like freakonomics bullshit that we talked about in our brian wansink episode is that like i fell for

00:14:48.020 right? Like I was into this stuff in the 2000s. I like watched TED talks. I read both Freakonomics 0.83

00:14:53.520 books. I listened to their podcast religiously for years. It was like one of the first podcasts I

00:14:58.040 listened to. And so I read this infamous column in 2005 about the Shangri-La diet. And like I did it

00:15:07.500 like a lot of other people. I did it for a couple of days and it actually worked really well. Like

00:15:13.700 remarkably well i know this is the diet that works here it comes aubrey i'm about i'm about

00:15:20.560 to pitch you an mlm that i'm selling you recruit three friends and we're all gonna tell people

00:15:26.540 about this diet look i got a garage full of shit that i gotta move so i was living in copenhagen 0.67

00:15:31.620 at the time and i did this diet for like three days and it worked super well and then i a friend 0.65

00:15:38.420 of mine was living in singapore and i was going to visit him and i went to singapore and i just

00:15:42.080 like obviously didn't care about the diet because like Singapore is one of the great food cities of

00:15:46.060 the world. And I ate a bunch of great food. And then I came back to Denmark and then like a week

00:15:49.880 after I came back, I was like, Oh yeah, I was trying this diet before I left. And then I started

00:15:53.160 again and it just like, didn't work. It was neutralized by chili crab. That's the thing.

00:15:57.080 I was so full of crab at that point. The crabs canceled it out. But so, okay. Instead of me

00:16:05.580 explaining how this diet works, I'm just going to read to you from this, this, this column appeared

00:16:10.380 in the New York Times magazine, in like one of the most popular, most credible publications

00:16:16.060 in the country. This is under a headline that says, does the truth lie within? In the book

00:16:23.500 Freakonomics, the subheading is one professor's lifetime of self-experimentation. But in the

00:16:30.640 column, the subheadline is the accidental diet. Here's how it starts out. Seth Roberts is a 52

00:16:37.780 year old psychology professor at the university of california at berkeley if you knew roberts 25

00:16:42.500 years ago you might remember him as a man with problems he had acne and most days he woke up

00:16:47.520 too early which left him exhausted he wasn't depressed but he wasn't always in the best of

00:16:52.240 moods most troubling to roberts he was overweight at 5 foot 11 he weighed 200 pounds when you

00:16:58.960 encounter seth roberts today he is a clear-skinned well-rested entirely affable man who weighs about 0.86

00:17:05.640 160 pounds i know pardon me fuck off and looks 10 years younger than his age how did this happen

00:17:13.300 so then it sort of it describes his methodology of like his his big innovation is using himself 0.96

00:17:20.160 as a guinea pig and like tracking things like tracking what he eats tracking what he weighs

00:17:25.140 tracking how he feels and so this is how he solved like all of his problems basically like this is

00:17:29.840 the story that they're walking us through it took him more than 10 years of experimenting but he

00:17:34.360 found that his morning insomnia could be cured if, on the previous day, he got lots of morning

00:17:39.140 light, skipped breakfast, and spent at least eight hours standing. Stranger yet was the fix he

00:17:44.280 discovered for lifting his mood. At least one hour each morning of TV viewing, specifically

00:17:49.300 life-size talking heads, but never such TV at night. So I think he's like watching Good Morning

00:17:54.880 America and stuff, like something with lots of faces in the morning. This is just somebody who

00:17:59.320 took every like take home point from every ted talk and just did all of it at once right he's

00:18:06.120 like a living embodiment of like life hacking i know oh god once he stumbled upon the solution

00:18:11.480 roberts like many scientists looked back to the stone age for explication anthropological

00:18:17.480 research suggests that early humans had lots of face-to-face contact every morning but precious

00:18:22.960 little after dark a pattern that robert's tv viewing now mimicked i hate this and i want

00:18:29.300 like a heavy bag with like a face on it that i can punch for a while i actually have like ever

00:18:34.260 since the paleo diet i have such a pet peeve for people like invoking the stone age right the stone

00:18:40.500 age is a period of like two million years of human history and like different human populations in

00:18:45.900 different parts of the world with like very different climates yes so whenever people are

00:18:50.280 like did you know in the stone age they used to i'm always like where when yeah it's never people

00:18:54.540 who actually study the stone age and who know about it it's people that have like expertise

00:18:59.640 in completely different fields and like read on a fucking snapple cap one time like a little fun

00:19:05.560 fact like they saw lots of faces in the morning like how would we know that about stone age 0.99

00:19:10.120 populations truly and also like sorry once again like there's all this shit that's like we have to 0.99

00:19:17.720 go back in time to find the optimal diet or way of being or whatever and every time that shit comes 0.93

00:19:25.660 up the voice in my head is just going like what was the life expectancy dude i know 19 i don't 0.95

00:19:31.080 know what the fuck are you talking about so then the article transitions into like some relatively

00:19:36.400 true stuff it talks about how like because of evolutionary adaptation we all have metabolic 0.99

00:19:43.360 like mechanisms that make us hold on to fat right like we're our bodies are set up for like times

00:19:47.760 of feasts and times of famine and so when your body goes into like famine mode i.e dieting it

00:19:53.820 holds on to fat more tightly and that makes it really hard for you to lose weight and like this

00:19:57.720 is something we've said on the show this is more or less true yep then it goes into this guy seth

00:20:02.740 roberts his like idea that this mechanism like our bodies have this kind of set point he then

00:20:09.380 adds this like little addendum where he says that what triggers your body's mechanism to hold on to

00:20:15.300 fat is flavor what when your body tastes something that's familiar and that you like so you eat like

00:20:20.900 a bowl of lucky charms it like switches you to like fat storage mode and it's gonna like bank

00:20:27.440 those calories because it could taste them so the key is to ingest calories without tasting them 0.95

00:20:35.660 this is the most puritanical bullshit so you have to drink flavorless oil twice a day like a 0.96

00:20:43.260 tablespoon two tablespoons he says that you should like whatever experiment and you should plug your 0.99

00:20:48.380 nose so you can't taste it and when i was on it i couldn't drink coffee within an hour of taking

00:20:55.660 the tablespoon of oil or like afterwards because you don't want to have any flavor in your mouth

00:21:00.700 at all you want to like take in these calories but your body like doesn't know you're taking 0.94

00:21:04.280 in the calories what the fuck man i know and so the idea is that because you're taking in calories 0.93

00:21:11.600 but your body isn't like banking them as calories your body doesn't know to want more fat so you're 0.97

00:21:17.940 just not hungry the rest of the day so the the sort of the promise of the diet is just that like

00:21:23.100 you're taking in an extra i don't know 500 calories of oil but then you end up eating like

00:21:28.660 a thousand calories less of normal food. This feels like if you are a person who is predisposed

00:21:34.920 to have a disordered eating patterns, boy, oh boy, come on down. The water is fine. Get ready

00:21:41.300 for your next eating disorder. Woo. And I also think because it's sort of coming at you from a

00:21:47.220 much more like dude focused sort of set of media outlets, right? Like Freakonomics was not anything

00:21:54.760 that was like come on down ladies yeah so i think because there's so much less discussion of men's

00:22:00.820 body image and men's eating disorders and all of that kind of stuff it's a conversation about a

00:22:05.300 diet that happens in kind of a void of a broader conversation about food and human behavior and

00:22:11.860 psychology and all of that kind of stuff and also what what frustrates me about this is that it is

00:22:16.420 like this whole thing is so male-coded and like that whole kind of world like the ted talk world

00:22:21.300 was just like a lot of dudes with like overconfident ideas that like hadn't really been

00:22:27.120 tested. Like this entire Freakonomics column talks about Seth Roberts doing self-experimentation

00:22:33.360 as if it's some sort of fucking revolutionary new methodology. Like no one has ever fucking 0.98

00:22:38.700 altered their diet and like monitored what their weight does before. That's dieting. That's the 0.98

00:22:44.400 experience of like 80% of dieters it's also fucking irresponsible honestly dude to be like 0.63

00:22:51.700 i came up with this thing that works for me and only me i've tested it on absolutely no one else 0.82

00:22:56.300 i don't have any sense of how it interacts for people who have chronic illnesses or people who

00:23:01.200 have different body types it just works for me therefore everybody drink vegetable oil and stop

00:23:07.180 watching tv at night if you read the comments on any of these posts or like the new york times

00:23:11.140 article there's the like it worked for me people there's the like i tried it and it didn't work for

00:23:16.000 me people and then there's the like i puked immediately upon taking a tablespoon of oil

00:23:20.660 people which is like not a small number of people i feel certain to my bones that i would be an

00:23:28.080 immediate puke person yeah i have like a pretty weak stomach so it would really just yeah i should

00:23:35.700 have arranged a taste test like the halo top i should have made you do this i'm boycotting our

00:23:40.040 show but i mean i do think there is a very frustrating journalistic side to this where

00:23:47.500 like this was not tested it's still not clear to me how the freakonomics guys found this random

00:23:53.580 psychology professor who had like found a weight loss technique that works for him they also let

00:23:58.520 him be a guest blogger on their website they promoted his book when it came out like this

00:24:03.860 was a huge sensation like after this column came out like it became such a big deal that seth

00:24:09.080 Roberts appeared on Good Morning America. And Diane Sawyer famously ate a tablespoon of vegetable

00:24:14.820 oil. This was a big deal. And the Freakonomics guys had this weird tone toward the whole thing

00:24:21.920 where they're like, well, we're not promoting a diet. We're just talking about this like scientific

00:24:25.440 finding that this guy had. And it's like, this is not science. It's a thing that worked for one guy.

00:24:30.980 It's never to this day. There's never been a study of this. God damn it. So it's like, it's weird

00:24:36.600 for like what is ostensibly a science column and like is always using the language of science and 0.91

00:24:43.420 like all we're doing is telling you the science it's literally a fucking anecdote yeah this guy

00:24:47.780 did a thing a weird thing that worked for him but it's dressed up as if his like quote-unquote 0.78

00:24:52.720 self-experimentation is like real experimentation and it's not well it's also like one of those

00:24:59.420 things where you're like oh this is the lengths that the world will go to to validate things that

00:25:05.240 white dudes come up with exactly it worked for exactly one white dude and now it's capital s 0.97

00:25:10.700 science like fuck off there's a good column by a guy named john ford who's a medical professor at 0.97

00:25:16.380 ucla who writes a whole column basically just like calling out the freakonomics guys for shining a 0.98

00:25:22.800 spotlight on something that hasn't not only has it not been tested but like seth roberts never even

00:25:26.680 attempted to test it and so john ford says in this column he says presenting a highly speculative

00:25:32.520 idea as proven science to an audience unlikely to appreciate the difference is misleading at best

00:25:38.060 and disingenuous at worst. This is a massively popular platform that millions of people read.

00:25:45.980 If you put out a column that says like, this guy found this miracle new weight loss technique,

00:25:50.840 you don't think that's promoting the diet? Right, totally. We live in a country where like,

00:25:55.040 what, two thirds of the population is desperate to lose weight? Like, you're just going to throw

00:26:00.300 this fucking fish in the middle of like all these like hungry seals and just be like well it's not 0.98

00:26:05.040 our fault that they ate it like come on i actually think the onus is even greater on people marketing 0.99

00:26:10.260 or promoting diets to add more disclaimers to add more sort of parameters around what they're

00:26:17.300 talking about because of the sort of like ravenousness with which people will sort of

00:26:22.840 descend on a new diet diet marketers have a greater onus on them to be like very clear

00:26:29.120 very specific and very like assertive about what their diets will and won't do and ought to present 0.95

00:26:37.220 a great deal of evidence but none of them fucking can yeah and none of them can like i so much of 0.89

00:26:43.060 it lies with editors too of editors just being like sorry man you got one anecdote of one guy 0.97

00:26:47.840 with one diet like come back to us in three years when it's been tested yeah that's right so this is

00:26:52.840 where it gets bittersweet okay so this was like you know 2005 when this comes out there's this

00:26:57.720 massive wave of publicity and then seth roberts becomes like a pretty prominent blogger actually

00:27:03.240 like this was this was peak blog times like pre-social media and so i started reading like

00:27:10.620 a lot of posts on his blog and like he he just got like weirder and weirder over time

00:27:19.280 oh he was really obsessed with this idea of self-experimentation as a methodology he sort

00:27:25.680 of had like a chip on his shoulder of like why isn't self-experimentation taken more seriously

00:27:29.940 he started doing this thing where like he became convinced that eating half a stick of butter a day

00:27:37.580 just like with a knife and fork it seems would improve his brain function so i'm real mad because

00:27:45.180 this is copyright infringement because he's just stolen my actual diet i just sit down every day

00:27:50.200 with a plate and a knife and fork and a stick of butter it's how i maintain my girlish figure 0.98

00:27:56.460 that's why you're so smart you're just like it's all the sticks of butter i'm so fucking smart 0.83

00:28:00.740 aubrey you're a little slow this episode did you not have your butter today 0.97

00:28:04.200 i noticed you're a little sluggish classic brain food sticks of butter there's also some like

00:28:11.920 anti-vax adjacent stuff he gets really obsessed with omega-3s and there's all these posts like

00:28:19.920 crank posts about how omega-3s cure adhd he has this long thing about i guess pregnant women

00:28:28.620 are more likely to have gingivitis you know that thing where you floss your teeth and it bleeds

00:28:32.760 yeah and he was convinced that it's like because pregnant women aren't getting omega-3s

00:28:37.180 he kept saying like depression doesn't exist and what people think is depression is that they just

00:28:43.520 need to get more sleep like he was obsessed with sleep as the key to everything and like that

00:28:49.640 is what ails americans is that like we're not getting enough sleep he had all this stuff about

00:28:55.360 how fermented foods cure acne like it was just a bunch of like pretty standard crank contrarian

00:29:04.520 stuff and like all like dressed up as science right of the like i'm just asking questions or

00:29:09.860 kind of cherry picking it was very like covid denier uh-huh right it's like that sort of thing

00:29:14.980 where you're like a study out of prague found that people who wear masks always die and then

00:29:20.680 like you look and like that's not what the study found at all and it's some like weird journal that

00:29:25.020 you've never heard of and the people who wrote it aren't epidemiologists and you're like uh this

00:29:30.460 like looks like science if you don't actually look at it that's what happens when you try to

00:29:35.800 universalize based on a sample size of one this is a thing yes that's what happens when you're like

00:29:41.420 what's true for me is true for everyone which is also kind of how we get so much anti-fat bias

00:29:46.300 right is that thin people absolutely believe that they have done a series of right things

00:29:52.000 to become thin and that fat people are not doing those same right things because their belief is 0.99

00:29:58.440 fundamentally that like our bodies are the same and you just fucked yours up so let me help you 0.95

00:30:02.820 fix it and it's really easy to get down a super weird rabbit hole like my experience is everyone's 0.98

00:30:10.300 experience. I know. One of the reasons it's so bittersweet to me is that on some level,

00:30:14.440 I get it in that like he struggled with sleep his entire life. It seems like he always had

00:30:18.400 struggles with his energy levels. He thought that he solved it and then he would sort of

00:30:23.160 backslide and then he would try to solve it again. He was constantly tweaking. He was never quite

00:30:26.720 happy with whatever solution that he found. But he also started to believe that like lack of sleep

00:30:31.960 was this defining problem in the country as a whole. Yeah. And it's like, no, man,

00:30:37.080 you just struggle with sleep you clearly have some form of like chronic illness that you're

00:30:41.940 dealing with but like that doesn't mean that that's a problem for everybody like other people

00:30:47.080 have other things that they're dealing with yeah i don't know it just became it's like it became

00:30:51.180 this like kind of sad portrait of like where this obsession with self-experimentation and with like

00:30:57.080 yourself as the only test subject that matters like can take you yeah and i it's just like this

00:31:03.620 the same sort of cluster of beliefs that i feel like a lot of those like ted talky dudes kind of

00:31:09.420 like this is a this is like a very well trodden path that a lot of those dudes went down and i

00:31:14.240 was like oh man if this guy like if he was still blogging today he'd be like one of these like just 0.98

00:31:19.040 asking questions transphobes you know like this is where it leads everybody but then i kept fucking 0.99

00:31:24.720 scrolling and then it's like a bunch of transphobia came out oh come on he got this is so fucked up 0.99

00:31:32.220 He got super obsessed with this idea of autogynephilia, which is this idea that, like, trans women are actually just, like, men who are turned on by dressing as women. 0.98

00:31:43.660 I guess some trans woman wrote a memoir, like, a moving memoir about her experience of, like, coming out and transitioning.

00:31:49.440 And he wrote to her and was like, why didn't you mention, like, this theory?

00:31:53.960 Like, why didn't you mention this, like, fetish thing? 0.99

00:31:56.140 Jesus fucking Christ. 0.99

00:31:57.800 This is where, like, why does it always lead to transphobia? 1.00

00:32:00.320 It's wild to me.

00:32:01.380 it's well it's also like one of those things right where you're like oh you read a cis person's

00:32:06.880 description of what they imagine trans people to be that was written in like 1981 right it's just

00:32:13.940 like this dude got real hooked on like it's got to be about boners and you're like no but then

00:32:19.480 okay double bittersweet then in 2014 he dies what yeah he had a heart attack while he was hiking

00:32:27.520 in the hills above berkeley california this then triggers a wave of like extremely ugly speculation

00:32:35.560 that it was this diet that killed him or it was the butter that killed him it then became this

00:32:41.700 thing of like oh the guy with the fad diet died of a heart attack yeah and then his poor family

00:32:47.180 had to like put out a statement with his like medical records jesus at one point i think it

00:32:52.420 was his mom had to say like I don't know why I have to explain the death of like a 60 year old

00:32:58.620 who had a heart attack yeah that's something that happens a lot like don't sit around and be like

00:33:04.240 this is what really killed him it's like shut up you don't know his medical history you don't know

00:33:09.460 what about his medical status he wasn't disclosing publicly don't use people's public personas as a

00:33:15.940 way of diagnosing them with something and also even if you did know all of those things somebody 0.95

00:33:22.040 just fucking died and a mother just buried her son the whole thing just like got really gross at 0.65

00:33:27.640 the end one of the reasons i think i'm like slightly easier on him than like i would be if 0.99

00:33:34.100 he was still around is just because like there is this tragic ending that like makes him kind of

00:33:38.980 victim and like people were weirdly shitty to him in death but also like he did have a bunch of like

00:33:43.980 crank beliefs and it's not clear to me that like it was all that ethical to bring him national

00:33:50.300 attention and to like promote this diet when it's part of just like a much larger cluster

00:33:55.960 of like kind of just weird behaviors that this guy had like lots of people in america have weird

00:34:01.140 behaviors yeah totally they don't need their behaviors to be turned into like best-selling

00:34:05.780 books yeah nor do they need their to turn their own behaviors on other people with non-best-selling

00:34:11.540 books right like there's this question about like okay when someone like that dies who's the person

00:34:16.120 you want to be yeah for me personally the logic of like you did it to yourself or you should have

00:34:22.120 thought about that before you did x y and z kind of thing is a very convenient and tidy way to

00:34:28.140 dehumanize people that's the same kind of logic that gets leveled at people in prisons and why

00:34:33.600 we don't pay attention to prison conditions that's the same kind of logic that gets leveled at fat

00:34:38.320 people yeah all of that sort of like extremely unforgiving thinking is just like truly and

00:34:44.620 deeply not a thing i want to emulate in the world what uh what's your next one i have kind of a

00:34:49.780 twofer oh do it um so this is a person who wished to remain anonymous who says hi aubrey and mike

00:34:55.420 huge fan of the show over here okay so two ridiculous fad diets i tried are the special

00:35:00.880 k diet and bethany frankl's naturally thin that's so cursed i have no idea who bethany frankl is 0.68

00:35:10.580 you don't know who bethany frankel is no but it's like the name of a female i guess influencer

00:35:15.780 and then something with like thin in it i'm already just like the hairs on the back of my

00:35:20.000 neck just stood up i'm gonna do you one worse mike it's not an influencer oh bethany frankel

00:35:26.580 is a real housewife oh holy shit wait which which jurisdiction new york roni oh she's one of the 0.98

00:35:37.820 okay this person goes on to say the special k diet was ridiculous and i need to know its origins 0.98

00:35:43.740 but basically i think all you ate was special k in any of its varieties all day long other than

00:35:50.820 i think one meal i was all caps starving like shaking and i'm pretty sure i gained a couple

00:35:57.580 pounds it was clearly just a ploy to get people to buy their cereal i was just desperate they just

00:36:03.300 like told you that their food was a diet food and to like eat a bunch of their food and called it a

00:36:08.160 diet like that's all that it was yes it was called the special k diet or the special k challenge

00:36:13.320 um there were a bunch of tv ads about it and they featured uh among other things like someone like

00:36:20.220 pulling on jeans and then sort of like pulling on one of the belt loops to be like look how loose

00:36:24.780 my jeans are and they would say you can lose a dress size in two weeks or there's a jean size

00:36:32.060 in two weeks the diet was this replace two meals each day with a bowl of special k and then over

00:36:39.800 time at some point it sort of segued into like eat any special k product including their like

00:36:46.440 cereal bars which were kind of like rice crispy treat kind of vibes this is demented it's just

00:36:53.500 like the oreo diet eat nothing but oreos like that's not a diet and it's coming from the oreo

00:36:59.220 people well also like listen special k has a larger serving size than many cereals the serving

00:37:05.120 size is one cup but one cup of breakfast cereal for two meals a day is not going to leave you

00:37:12.080 feeling like full happy and ready to take on the day right like all of the stuff has disappeared

00:37:18.340 from the kellogg's website and from special k website um it was up there for i'm gonna guess

00:37:23.780 a good 10 years web md wrote uh did a write-up on the special k diet quote there's nothing special

00:37:30.680 about special k products in fact most are not whole grain and they tend to be low in fullness

00:37:35.620 promoting fiber and protein it's cereal yeah it's cereal it's not gonna like hold you you're not

00:37:41.660 gonna feel like you ate an omelet you're gonna feel like you ate some cereal yes they also get

00:37:47.460 a little sciency for a minute which i was like there's a little parenthetical in here and i want

00:37:52.820 to see if you can sniff it out quote results of a 2002 study done at purdue university funded by

00:38:00.220 kellogg showed replacing regular meals with calorie and portion controlled cereal meals

00:38:07.020 could result in weight loss study participants took in an average of 1590 calories per day and

00:38:14.480 cut their fat intake in half quote substituting cereal for higher calorie meals can help people

00:38:21.040 trim calories and fat. In the study, we found those reductions were doable and resulted in

00:38:27.200 about a 4.4 pound weight loss over a two week period, says study author Rick Mattis, PhD.

00:38:35.000 Ridiculous. They're basically saying that like people lost weight because they ate less. Like

00:38:38.660 it has nothing to do with the cereal. No, it has absolutely fucking nothing to do with the cereal. 0.96

00:38:42.880 And also, here's the thing. They advertise this as lose 10 pounds in two weeks and then their own 0.96

00:38:50.520 fucking study that they fucking paid for was like you probably gonna lose four and a half pounds 0.98

00:38:55.160 and i think the wild thing about the special k challenge slash diet whatever you want to call it 1.00

00:39:04.180 is that it really it is the most transparent advertising campaign that has ever happened

00:39:11.580 which is like buy twice as much of our product yeah and you'll get thin by eating our food like

00:39:18.820 what the biggest scam that the cereal industry has ever perpetuated on the american people

00:39:25.220 is remember ads when we were growing up how they would say like part of a nutritious breakfast or

00:39:30.620 like part of a complete breakfast and then they would have like seven other foods they would have

00:39:36.020 like a whole other breakfast with a bowl of cereal and they're like now it's good for you

00:39:40.520 i was like in my 30s when i realized that it's basically just like if you eat this with some

00:39:46.040 healthy stuff it's a healthy breakfast like it's literally everything is part of a healthy

00:39:52.340 breakfast if you pair it with other things that are healthy like how were they allowed to do this

00:39:57.820 it's the most nonsense phrase well and from its inception cereal was designed as a quote-unquote 0.99

00:40:05.120 health food right yes but in a lot of ways like this is just the same shit that kellogg's has 0.96

00:40:10.500 been doing since it was kellogg's right all of the cereal brands do the same thing which is like 0.92

00:40:15.860 this is a health food don't look at the nutrition facts bye yeah

00:40:20.020 give me the uh give me the influencer lady perfect uh bethany frankel is one of the real

00:40:28.580 housewives of new york this is what our anonymous emailer has to say about that quote the second

00:40:35.620 diet i followed which was packaged as a quote-unquote mindset and lifestyle the anti-diet

00:40:42.260 is from bethany frankel's book naturally thin she claims that all quote-unquote naturally thin people

00:40:48.200 do all of these things without thinking about them famously scooping their bagels taking three

00:40:54.300 bites of an unhealthy food but not finishing it telling yourself you can have it all just not all

00:40:59.540 at once i guess it seemed sensible at the time but i always look back on it as disordered eating

00:41:05.540 light i'd love for you guys to read the book because it's probably severely unhinged lmao

00:41:10.400 so i'm glad that you don't know who bethany frankel is a little background on her she

00:41:17.180 started on the real housewives of new york in 2008 so she's been around for a minute 0.64

00:41:21.520 she had spent the early 2000s kind of trying to make it in hollywood she'd been a production

00:41:27.420 assistant she hosted one season of a daytime talk show called bethany in 2013 and she had

00:41:36.260 sort of made a name for herself on the apprentices martha stewart season okay she has also since

00:41:43.500 built a business out of her skinny girl brand of low calorie foods like they'll have like skinny

00:41:49.740 girl margarita mix and that sort of thing that's just like a lower calorie and relatively joyless

00:41:56.120 cocktail to have right this thing about scooping bagels is that a thing that you've heard before

00:42:02.080 i was gonna ask you about this what is that it's where you genuinely like usually take like a spoon

00:42:07.320 and you scoop out the bread out of the middle of a bagel so you're just eating the outside

00:42:12.300 of the bagel i've never seen somebody do that is this a thing that people do commonly it's part of

00:42:19.020 the like do you know joylessness of eating in this way right which is just like what if i had

00:42:24.820 a bagel but made it sad what if i took a delicious food and made it a bummer a bagel trench yeah yeah

00:42:31.960 Yeah. I am of the opinion that is like sort of aligned with our emailer, which is sort of like

00:42:38.040 it is sort of eating disorder light stuff. So the book is sort of organized around 10 rules for

00:42:43.180 living naturally thin. The concept here is that there are naturally thin people and they just

00:42:49.380 sort of know how to eat and that's how they're naturally thin. And they do things like scoop

00:42:53.860 out their bagels and they do things like they don't restrict and that sort of thing. The

00:42:58.560 interesting thing to me about the list of 10 rules is that they echo a lot of intuitive eating 0.71

00:43:04.720 principles but they like take a wild fucking turn like the first half you're like oh you're on the

00:43:11.580 right track and then it takes a gnarly turn and you're like no no no no no wrong um so for example 0.96

00:43:17.700 one of the rules is that you shouldn't diet or restrict because dieting leads to binging

00:43:22.400 and binging makes you fat and you're like well you were so close you were so close

00:43:28.180 she says eat more real foods and real meals um and less sort of quote-unquote processed stuff

00:43:35.580 sure which i'm like well that's just foods that poor people can afford and people who don't have

00:43:40.440 time can eat that sort of discourse around processed foods and clean eating is just another

00:43:44.800 way of stigmatizing foods that low-income people can afford and can eat right she also says eat

00:43:51.020 whatever you want but do it in moderation which if you ask folks who are sort of like in deep on

00:43:56.020 intuitive eating they're like yeah yeah moderation is a way to make restrictions sound sort of

00:44:00.120 sensible right right like if you are again like if you are a person who tends toward disordered

00:44:05.300 eating moderation becomes a a little like baby step back into restriction for you right i actually

00:44:12.940 have a little clip of her talking about her uh book this is a little promotional video from simon

00:44:19.140 schuster her publisher i thought it was gonna be a clip of her on real housewives throwing her wine

00:44:23.180 at somebody i mean i didn't look up that clip but i bet you it would take us 15 seconds to find if

00:44:29.200 you want to dude i've never watched real housewives but on like eight different occasions i've been

00:44:35.960 really bored and i'll go on youtube and i'll type in real housewives best fights looks like and

00:44:41.300 there's compilations and some of them are like 40 minutes long and i'll watch the whole thing

00:44:46.760 It's really fascinating because I was like, look, when I was sort of prepping for this one, I was

00:44:50.860 like, okay, there's like an 80% chance or an 85% chance that Mike has no idea who this is. And

00:44:57.640 there's a 15% chance that he is a dedicated viewer of Real Housewives. I have no idea.

00:45:05.360 And interestingly, you seem to have managed to check both boxes. It's like I only watch

00:45:12.660 the wildest parts um are you ready to hear bethany frankel talk about her book all right let's do it

00:45:18.580 hi i'm bethany frankel i'm a natural food chef and my book is called naturally thin

00:45:25.120 unleash your skinny girl and free yourself from a lifetime of dieting which is exactly what the

00:45:29.460 book is it's basically a book that is the be all end all never diet again book i am a chef i want

00:45:36.740 to eat great food and i was going to italy on a trip a friend had recommended a bunch of restaurants

00:45:41.960 through Mario Batali and I said I'm done. I'm going to Italy. I'm going to eat everything. I'm

00:45:47.860 going to go to all these restaurants and I'm not coming back with my jeans one inch tighter.

00:45:52.540 And I sort of just figured out to not be afraid of food, to be able to eat what you want in

00:45:58.000 smaller quantities and to be able to use the 10 rules I talk about in Naturally Thin in different

00:46:02.560 situations to get you through that moment and to be able to really never have to worry about it.

00:46:08.340 And naturally, sin isn't necessarily for the person to lose 150 pounds.

00:46:12.100 I'm sure that they could, but it's for the person that wants to lose 20, 30, 5, 10 pounds,

00:46:16.460 the person that wants to maintain their weight.

00:46:18.500 A person like me who all through high school and college would struggle with their weight,

00:46:23.260 obsess, count what they ate, work out nonstop, and just every woman that I know. 0.75

00:46:28.700 Any nutritionist can tell you to eat a half a grapefruit and a quarter cup of cottage cheese for breakfast 1.00

00:46:32.300 and tell 700 people to eat the exact same thing.

00:46:35.200 but those 700 people had different childhoods, different parents, different environments,

00:46:40.520 different money. So this book is for everyone.

00:46:47.620 Not a single wine was thrown. I'm livid.

00:46:52.640 I was counting on a table flip in this promotional video.

00:46:57.100 You took me to YouTube under false pretenses.

00:47:00.340 So talk to me about your reactions to that, to that video.

00:47:03.820 I mean, I want to know what you think, but I mean, I'm of two minds. On some level, she seems to be like aware of fad diets. She seems to be aware of like the one cup of cottage cheese thing is total bullshit. I mean, it's better than the cabbage soup garbage we got for decades, I guess. On the other hand, she is straightforwardly selling a diet and explicitly calling it not a diet.

00:47:30.260 like it's right on the cover of her book it's like learn how to be a skinny girl and like leave all

00:47:36.980 the dieting behind it's like you're literally telling people how to become skinny without

00:47:41.380 being on a diet it's like that's what diets do so like it's an improvement on where we were but

00:47:47.420 it's still not good leave dieting behind with these tricks that i learned from eating disorders

00:47:53.360 is really is what it feels like to me where it's like it's not a capital e capital d eating disorder

00:48:00.160 right like that's not actually what she's selling here but it is sort of like okay but be weird

00:48:07.080 about food in public and only have three bites of something that you like yeah it feels like it's

00:48:13.860 sort of talking out of both sides of its mouth at all times right that there is sort of this like

00:48:18.820 don't diet but do become thin right don't restrict but absolutely restrict right like all of this

00:48:27.380 sort of stuff is kind of straddling a line the one thing that i will say that i really appreciated

00:48:31.160 about her approach was she was like this isn't for people who need to lose 100 pounds she did

00:48:35.020 say she did say everyone i know and it's like we know bethany you don't know any we know you don't

00:48:40.720 know fat we know you don't know fat people and we know that even if you do you're going to pretend

00:48:46.720 like you don't yeah you know what i mean like there's like a cousin that you don't talk about

00:48:52.520 or whatever yeah it just felt like this little window into sort of this world of like a way of

00:49:00.940 thinking about food that kind of masquerades as like healthy and neutral and i know like 0.99

00:49:06.200 psychologically healing but it's still like the same shit you are like america's greatest chronicler 0.96

00:49:13.460 of like this shift in diet discourse so like i i'm incapable of saying anything that i haven't 0.99

00:49:18.660 learned from you on this but there is like this weird sort of almost gaslighty thing they'll be

00:49:24.920 like this isn't a diet and then they'll just explain what is obviously a diet or like this

00:49:29.520 isn't about losing weight but then they'll tell you how to lose weight and you're like do you hear

00:49:34.900 yourself it is part of this thing that we're going through now which is just like a cultural

00:49:39.280 changing of the clothes that diets wear yeah without actually getting underneath and like

00:49:45.360 dealing with the actual sort of diets themselves or dissuading people from dieting itself

00:49:50.000 we're essentially at this point just dissuading people from calling what they do a diet i know 0.79

00:49:55.260 again is it an improvement on like the bullshit that we had to deal with in the 80s and 90s

00:49:59.880 sure but it's not it's not like a great leap forward no and i i think it likes to bill itself 0.98

00:50:07.020 as like a radical reorganization of how we live our lives and it's a fucking search and replace 0.74

00:50:12.900 is a command f yeah for diets and replace with lifestyle change or detox or cleanse 0.95

00:50:20.380 or health trend or like what the fuck ever right it's just using different words to do exactly the 0.81

00:50:28.460 same fucking thing yeah atkins was called a diet keto is now referred to as a lifestyle right they're 0.99

00:50:34.360 the same fucking thing at their core dude you know what it is it is kentucky fried chicken 0.99

00:50:40.100 changing its name to kfc when the word fried became like kind of stigmatized like a lot of 0.99

00:50:46.700 people weren't eating fried foods because they wanted to lose weight and so kfc saw the writing

00:50:50.980 on the wall and changed its name to like this acronym that like people don't even know what 0.99

00:50:54.860 it stands for and kept selling the same chicken yeah totally it's all the same shit it's just 0.97

00:51:00.240 like it's what these capitalist enterprises have done to survive a culture change yeah so you said 0.99

00:51:07.400 you had a funny one yes i could use a funny fad diet are you familiar with the blood type diet

00:51:13.140 yes we got a lot of emails about the blood type diet this was one of the ones that we got like a

00:51:17.720 wave of emails about it's fascinating to me it's eat right and then the number four your blood type

00:51:23.680 yes the number four i love that it's the number four it's the too fast too furious style of naming

00:51:30.660 things yeah i know absolutely nothing i have never read the eat right for your blood type stuff i

00:51:38.820 never did it i don't know anybody who did it so i am coming in 100 fresh so this is this is an email

00:51:47.280 from a listener who also wanted to remain anonymous it says the fad diet that i put myself on when i

00:51:53.980 was 12, was Dr. Peter Didamo's blood type diet colon eat right for your blood type. I would be

00:52:01.500 so interested to hear your views on this diet and whether or not there's any scientific credibility

00:52:05.700 to it. Knowing what I know now, I am so embarrassed that I ever believed any of this. This diet

00:52:10.800 prescribes what you can and cannot eat based on your blood type. The food lists are so detailed

00:52:15.540 and also seem so random. For example, my blood type is O, so I could eat apples but oranges

00:52:21.880 were forbidden i was on this diet for eight years and it is hard to know exactly what the impact was

00:52:27.140 i don't think it was physically harmful as i was not cutting out any major food groups as a whole

00:52:31.580 but i did become obsessed with the food list and felt guilty if i ever ate for example a mushroom

00:52:36.480 which was on the forbidden food list as you will probably not be too surprised to hear as an

00:52:41.620 indirect maybe consequence of this diet i did develop anorexia which lasted many years

00:52:46.620 this diet did also encourage me to substitute carob for chocolate which you could argue is

00:52:52.100 totally unforgivable so like listen before we get into this one uh i just want to name i know

00:52:57.700 this is not an uncommon experience it was also my experience to start dieting when you're like 0.97

00:53:02.740 before you even hit your teenage years but i also want to name like that's fucking horrible 0.97

00:53:07.980 and really really heartbreaking and the phrase i put myself on this fucking blood type diet 0.98

00:53:15.200 is like just sucking the joy out of life i know what happens uh and introducing like really really 0.96

00:53:22.740 harmful forces into people's lives so like before we do like we're gonna dig in i'm sure we're gonna 0.98

00:53:27.280 have a great time with it and also i just wanted to name like that fucking sucks and i'm so sorry 0.96

00:53:31.880 that this listener went through that yeah it's also just so important to forgive yourself for 0.97

00:53:38.640 falling for this kind of stuff yeah we could do a whole episode on all of the scams that i have

00:53:44.000 fallen for in my life and not like sophisticated scams, like super caveman, lizard brain level

00:53:52.480 scams. And, you know, the people selling these diets, whether they know it or not, they are

00:53:58.000 reaching back to a long tradition of making customers forget the last time they went through

00:54:04.860 this hope and disappointment cycle. They are playing on deep set anxieties. There's nothing

00:54:09.880 shameful about falling for this stuff it happens right the villains are not the people who fell

00:54:16.360 for these scams the villains are the grifters who are selling them absolutely and the blood type

00:54:23.720 diet is like one of the griftier ones so it's developed by this guy peter didamo he actually

00:54:30.760 got the idea from his dad there is a very good takedown of this diet on refinery 29 by kelsey

00:54:37.360 miller called why the blood type diet is a dangerous myth it's excellent she says he was

00:54:43.720 the son of another famous naturopath james didamo who first posited the idea that a diet based on

00:54:50.100 blood type might have health benefits the senior didamo prescribed a low-fat vegetarian diet to

00:54:55.920 all of his patients noting that some seem to exhibit improved health others remain the same 0.96

00:55:02.160 and some got worse could blood type be the cause god damn it could being a horse girl be the cause

00:55:10.560 could star trek fandom be the cause all of those i'm just asking questions i don't know i just got

00:55:17.520 real grump real fast with that one i just love that like the whole genesis of this is this doctor 0.65

00:55:25.520 who just gives the same fucking thing to everyone and is then like oh sometimes it works and 0.96

00:55:30.140 sometimes it doesn't i wonder if the problem is like the blood types it's like maybe don't 0.98

00:55:34.480 prescribe the same thing to everybody this is actually the person that bethany frankel was

00:55:38.200 talking about in that video like any doctor can give it tell everyone to eat the same thing

00:55:42.500 so i guess he comes up with this absurd typology and then his son peter didamo sort of runs with

00:55:49.820 it so kelsey also mentions in her piece that the sort of the main like the official headshot of him

00:55:55.860 on his website is of him in a lab coat, standing in a sort of quasi-clinical environment. But he's

00:56:04.160 not a doctor. He's like a naturopath with a degree from a naturopathic university outside

00:56:10.920 of Seattle. She says he is a naturopathic practitioner and, as he describes himself

00:56:16.260 on his website, a research educator, Ivesian, amateur horologist, budding software developer,

00:56:23.200 and air-cooled enthusiast i had to google like half of these i was gonna say i know

00:56:29.100 what like two of those terms are no he was a haberdasher

00:56:33.280 the basics of the diet are like exactly what it sounds it's basically that like

00:56:40.520 your blood type determines the kind of diet you eat the way that your body is able to break down

00:56:47.000 foods he has this typology of like the different blood types and each one of them has like a

00:56:52.600 little narrative with it because his idea is that like the blood types emerged at different times

00:56:58.260 in like human history what exactly so i'm gonna go through these so type o he calls the hunter

00:57:05.900 and this is like what our blood type was when we were like hunter gatherers so the idea is that

00:57:12.920 you should be eating a ton of like meat and fish and sort of like old fruits and vegetables but not

00:57:20.020 like new fruits and vegetables and you shouldn't be eating grains because this is supposed to be

00:57:25.000 like pre-agriculture old like they've been around for a long time or old like they've been sitting

00:57:31.400 in your fridge for a couple of weeks like old like they've like they're ancient or whatever 0.99

00:57:35.560 so you're not having pomelos you're not getting pluots you gotta eat the old shit yeah exactly 0.97

00:57:43.740 enjoy your quince so in kelsey's piece she says my veins were filled with type o therefore i was 0.98

00:57:50.660 instructed to renounce my vegetarianism and embrace a meat and fat heavy lifestyle among

00:57:57.020 other rules my fancy nutritionist ordered me to eat plenty of beef venison and pineapple juice

00:58:02.520 while avoiding things like strawberries lentils and almost all dairy though butter was okay

00:58:08.520 yeah you know how cavemen were always eating butter like like all the time that's why they 0.99

00:58:13.320 were so smart good lord he also apparently in his book has a bunch of like personality type bullshit 0.94

00:58:18.000 that goes along with the blood types this is from a harvard medical something something article about 0.79

00:58:23.620 this as this blood type is descended from hunters the fight or flight reflex is strong and can 0.98

00:58:28.940 translate to anger issues or manic episodes what the fuck is anything what are you talking about 0.95

00:58:35.740 like personality types go with blood types like no like absolutely not and also like as you're 0.96

00:58:42.580 reading through all of this i'm thinking about i have multiple diet books that are this kind of

00:58:49.500 eat right for your type thing but rather than being organized around blood type are organized

00:58:53.940 around no fucking joke astrological signs dude yeah i was the whole time i was reading this i 0.60

00:58:59.320 was like somebody absolutely did the zodiac diet didn't they multiple people did this yeah sure and 0.97

00:59:04.500 i have three of those books yes but this feels like if that diet put on a lab coat yeah yeah

00:59:10.720 so next we have type a which he calls the agrarian or cultivator this is from the harvard article

00:59:22.140 this blood type emerged with the rise of community living when thanks to the dwindling supply of game

00:59:28.060 to hunt human digestion was forced to adapt to carbohydrate consumption forced to adapt type a's

00:59:34.880 therefore should eat mostly vegetables and soy proteins being mindful of their highly sensitive

00:59:39.800 immune systems and increased risk of life-threatening disease as well as naturally higher

00:59:45.800 stress levels they should avoid crowds and corn and practice tai chi then there's type b which

00:59:54.940 he calls nomads because these are like there's like subtle societies and there's also like nomad

01:00:00.320 like nomadic hordes like roaming the steppes or whatever so he says that everybody with type b

01:00:05.400 blood is descended from like mongolians like he clearly read like one article in national geographic

01:00:12.400 about genghis khan and he's like yes like the the nomads like mongolian thing so but then he

01:00:20.180 translates this into like you can eat plants and meats but like not chicken or pork and you can

01:00:27.540 have like some dairy but you should never have wheat corn lentils or tomatoes which like tomatoes

01:00:36.060 i don't know why that would have anything to do with mongolia but like fine sure and then there's

01:00:42.640 also type ab blood this is like a mixture of like settled societies and nomadic societies i think he

01:00:49.340 ran out of like societies that he's familiar with and he's like oh this one was like part nomadic

01:00:53.560 part settled or whatever. This is from the Refinery29 article. It says,

01:00:57.940 The rarest and newest of the blood types is what Didamo calls the chameleon. It is the only one

01:01:03.940 that emerged not from environmental factors, but from intermingling, and it is somehow more

01:01:08.700 mystical than the others. Lamb, dairy, tofu, and grains are all good for ABs, while buckwheat and

01:01:16.340 smoked meats can be problematic. They are charismatic, have low stomach acid, and should

01:01:22.600 practice visualization techniques classic combination of lamb and tofu so as you would 0.95

01:01:30.860 expect this is like all of the sort of science behind this diet is just completely fucking wrong

01:01:35.960 yeah it's not true that the emergence like the evolutionary emergence of blood types has anything

01:01:42.940 to do with like agrarian societies so apes have exactly the same blood types as humans which

01:01:51.140 indicates that blood types probably evolved like 20 million years ago it's not even the case

01:01:56.780 necessarily that type o evolved first and then the rest burst off like apparently there's some

01:02:02.160 theories that say that but there's others that say that it was type a that evolved first we're

01:02:06.000 still figuring it out but the idea that we started to evolve to have different types of blood like

01:02:12.220 10 000 years ago when we started cultivating crops you don't get evolutionary adaptations

01:02:17.320 that happen this fast like that's completely ludicrous the only way in which this works

01:02:22.080 and the only reason that this would work is if you sort of believe that there is some like

01:02:26.280 unlocking the mystery of the past and of evolution and of blah blah blah right where you're like 0.82

01:02:33.560 no it's just fucking food exactly just let it be food and there's it's called abo grouping that's

01:02:41.040 the name of the typology of blood that we have there's actually like 30 other ways of classifying 0.97

01:02:45.860 people's blood the only reason why this is the most prominent one and that like is popularly

01:02:51.320 known is that that's what you need to know for transplants oh it's dangerous to give o blood to

01:02:57.440 an a person we should all know this because we need that for transfusions but there's blood has

01:03:03.840 like thousands of characteristics and there's all kinds of like weird antigens like some people are

01:03:09.620 like positive for this and negative for that and there's this really rare thing of people with like

01:03:15.820 it's called an RH antigen. And if like a woman who's positive for the RH antigen has birth to a

01:03:22.420 baby that's negative for the RH antigen, the baby can die. But like that, that has nothing to do

01:03:27.740 with like AB blood types. It's just like a completely different typology of blood. And so

01:03:33.140 it's really facile to be like, this is the only thing about blood that matters. It's like,

01:03:38.800 it matters for transplants, but like blood is complicated, my guy.

01:03:42.580 yeah and also i mean it does feel like it ties right in with the brian wansink episode which

01:03:48.840 is just like there's just such a great degree of certainty i know around what is fundamentally

01:03:55.840 either just made up or wishful thinking yes even the things we think we know for sure we don't even

01:04:02.280 really fucking know totally there's also some wansink stuff in it does appear that like blood

01:04:07.720 types are correlated with like certain disease outcomes like there are actually some links 0.97

01:04:12.920 between diseases and blood types but it's like it's tiny gradations people apparently people

01:04:18.660 b type blood are like at slightly higher risk for type 2 diabetes but like people read that and

01:04:25.240 they're like well if you have b blood you're gonna get diabetes and if you don't have b blood

01:04:29.240 you're safe but it's like we're talking about risks of like 4.1 versus 4.3 percent risk yeah

01:04:36.140 totally it's not all that meaningful on an individual level to tie these kind of broad

01:04:41.880 characteristics to your disease risk like it's going to come down to many other like much more 0.84

01:04:47.060 obvious factors than your fucking blood type like it's interesting at a population level and 0.89

01:04:51.740 understanding the mechanisms behind it but the idea that we can take these like tiny differences 0.98

01:04:56.840 in risk and be like this is the best way to eat for you it's just like that's not how these kinds

01:05:02.720 characteristics work well and if you follow these rules to a t you will go from definitely you're

01:05:10.260 going to get diabetes to definitely you're not going to get diabetes no diabetes is like an

01:05:16.300 extremely prevalent chronic illness in the u.s that we know shockingly little about people can

01:05:23.240 give you this sort of sense of certainty but ultimately what they're offering you is a security

01:05:27.580 blanket that may or may not actually do anything for you what's really fascinating to me about the

01:05:34.200 diets too is that it actually goes back to like his father's recommendation right that his dad

01:05:39.120 was like go on a vegetarian low-fat diet blah blah blah what a lot of people point out is that

01:05:44.680 all of the diets that they're recommending for all four blood types are like they're all just

01:05:49.060 like normal ass diets right they're like eat you know lean fish eat a lot of like i don't low-fat

01:05:55.260 dairy try not to eat processed foods there's there's been two systematic studies of this diet

01:06:01.880 and one of them is based on like food frequency questionnaires and like we've already talked about

01:06:05.980 how trash they are yeah so like massive grain of salt with this but like they basically found that

01:06:11.160 the kind of people who eat the diet for like type a had lower weights than people who didn't eat the 0.99

01:06:17.200 type a diet but it didn't matter what their blood type was i think the study is kind of trash and

01:06:23.860 methodology is bad but the idea is that like anyone can pick any of those four diets at random

01:06:29.780 and like you will probably lose weight because like you're restricting a huge amount of food

01:06:35.160 right if you like randomly restrict like half of the foods and you say like i can't eat that

01:06:39.820 you're gonna lose weight yep what drives me nuts about this and this is this is not really a

01:06:43.860 problem with science but it's like a problem with like the griftiness of this sector is that like 0.95

01:06:48.960 it's very clear that this guy just fucking made all of this up yeah he made up all the science 0.98

01:06:53.620 he made up the thing about like you you can't eat dairy but you can't eat butter he fucking made it 0.95

01:06:58.720 up right and he made it up in the 1990s and it's not until 2013 that like a decent study comes out

01:07:05.000 where they actually compare this to other diets good lord in the intervening 20 years of course

01:07:10.180 this you know i think the book is translated into like 70 languages it sold like 4 million copies

01:07:14.660 he's like, you know, New York Times bestseller, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, it takes a

01:07:18.540 really long time to actually investigate these things. And like, we shouldn't have to the guy

01:07:24.460 made it up. There's no basis. He's not he's not basing this plan on anything. And then it's like

01:07:30.820 all these other wheels have to turn for people to like actually apply a scientific method to it.

01:07:36.400 What is it? Mark Twain, who said the thing about like, a lie can make it around the world before

01:07:40.800 the truth gets its shoes on or whatever that saying is like, it feels very much like that.

01:07:46.140 And as part of this sort of thing about why, uh, folks who are sort of promoting diets,

01:07:51.160 I genuinely think ought to have a higher, like a ought to have any standards of evidence that

01:07:57.620 they present, which is not currently the case, but be that they also should have kind of higher

01:08:03.060 standards because what's going to happen is you release a new diet into the world.

01:08:07.960 a bunch of people are going to glom onto it because they feel shitty about their bodies

01:08:12.000 and they want a sense of hope that they aren't stuck with the body that they have and they'll

01:08:17.080 sort of develop this allegiance with a diet and then it'll take you know three or five or ten

01:08:22.800 years for clinical research to catch up and by that point you know however many thousands or

01:08:28.920 hundreds of thousands or millions of people will have done that diet exactly it's just shitty on

01:08:33.500 so many levels right and like i was i forget why but i was looking at celebrity diets this week too

01:08:39.940 and apparently christina aguilera was on some like weird like color diet where like for lunch 0.96

01:08:46.940 all of her foods had to be yellow and then for dinner all of her foods had to be green

01:08:51.760 oh we got an email about this the rainbow diet which is like mondays you eat red foods

01:08:57.180 tuesdays you eat orange foods wednesdays you eat yellow foods and so on and so forth but like 0.74

01:09:02.860 at least that one is like kind of up front about the fact that they're just fucking making it up

01:09:08.560 we're just picking colors it's completely arbitrary and like this one is also just

01:09:13.840 completely arbitrary it's just like pick any arbitrary food rule like only eat foods that

01:09:19.820 begin with vowels yeah totally and like you will lose weight because like you're restricting most

01:09:25.160 of the foods. Yeah, that's right. To me, it's like, I don't know that you even have to do

01:09:29.380 a systematic analysis of these things where it's like, it's a dumb thing that some random person 0.91

01:09:34.460 made up. Yeah, that's not real on its face. Right, right, right. The we sort of have this

01:09:41.740 like very ass backwards approach to diets, which is like, it's on if you're against it,

01:09:46.960 it's on you to prove why it doesn't. Yeah. Right. Yes. That's sort of where we're at with keto

01:09:51.400 right now is like a bunch of keto people are like, it worked for me. So prove why it's bad.

01:09:58.100 I know. I saw those emails. Yeah. But like, that's sort of the place that we get in. And

01:10:04.820 actually, I think the burden of proof should be on people promoting radical changes to your diet

01:10:10.500 that are completely unproven. That's who is responsible here. If you're going to evangelize

01:10:17.300 a bunch of diet changes you really should have some kind of evidence to back that up and everyone 0.96

01:10:23.980 else should probably just ignore you like the media should just fucking ignore you until you

01:10:27.400 have that evidence you should you should not be platformed yeah and even when there is evidence 0.88

01:10:32.560 as we have discussed that evidence is very sort of thin it's very unreliable and its uh methodologies

01:10:41.200 don't hold up to much scrutiny very often at all so uh yeah that's the lesson

01:10:46.740 everything's garbage eat what you want everything's garbage eat what you want 0.99

01:10:51.840 that's how we end every episode uh do it don't listen to charlatans don't platform weirdos 1.00

01:10:58.080 and uh if you really want some exercise throw a glass of fucking wine on somebody 0.99

01:11:02.580 if you really want some exercise avoid crowds do some tai chi do some tai chi 0.99

01:11:11.200 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - March 29, 2022

Bonus： Fad Diets

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