Maintenance Phase - Halo Top Ice Cream

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is low in intellectual nutrition,

00:00:17.660 but only because the serving size is small.

00:00:20.980 How's that?

00:00:22.480 I like it.

00:00:23.180 Been working on that for days.

00:00:25.220 I am Michael Hobbs.

00:00:26.360 I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.

00:00:27.920 I'm Aubrey Gordon. 0.90

00:00:29.100 I am a writer, author, and fat lady about town.

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00:01:11.460 Yeah, that's right.

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00:01:44.780 And we know that times are tough and weird. And if supporting us isn't right for you right now,

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00:01:58.080 money, great. And if you don't, totally no sweat. You know what that reminds me of, Aubrey? It

00:02:02.500 reminds me of our thoughts on eating ice cream. If you want to eat it, eat it. If you don't,

00:02:08.160 don't. I'm transitioning into the core content of this episode. Seamless.

00:02:12.940 So what are we talking about today? So we are talking about a diet food product that is very

00:02:20.160 popular right the hell now. And that is Halo Top ice cream. Do you know what I think is the

00:02:25.480 fundamental difference between us. What is that, Michael? I am not on Instagram.

00:02:30.040 I know that Halo Top is a thing, I guess, because I hear people refer to it. But I have not been

00:02:36.340 privy to any of the sort of Halo Top hype in the wild. The diet hype train goes through Instagram

00:02:43.660 now. Like that's what Instagram is. Yes. I think before we get into Halo Top, it's worth saying

00:02:47.860 this is not a Halo Top ruiner episode. Just so people know, if you like your Halo Top,

00:02:54.820 you can keep your Halo Top in the parlance of the Affordable Care Act.

00:02:59.680 And if you're under 26, you can stay on your parents' Halo Top.

00:03:04.680 Halo Top is kind of an encapsulation of contemporary diet foods and attitudes toward

00:03:10.200 dieting. And as a window into our cultures around disordered eating and particularly

00:03:16.980 disordered eating in men. Oh, I mean, I'm disappointed that you're not just going to

00:03:20.820 describe ice cream to me for an hour. Sorry. I'll come along for the sociological dissection

00:03:25.240 of trends that are encapsulated by Halo Top.

00:03:28.380 So you have – have you tried Halo Top at all?

00:03:31.340 No. Okay. I had never even heard of it before you said you wanted to do an episode on it.

00:03:34.580 What? Yeah, I had to Google it.

00:03:35.940 Oh, my God. It was, in 2017, not only the most popular ice cream in the U.S.,

00:03:41.980 but the most popular packaged food in the U.S.

00:03:45.480 What? Uh-huh.

00:03:46.840 No way.

00:03:47.560 So here's how Halo Top describes itself. This is from their website. Halo Top is a light ice cream that actually tastes like ice cream, which sounds silly. But when Halo Top first found its way into grocery store freezers, boasting fewer calories, less sugar and higher protein than traditional ice cream, it became the first of its kind and created an entirely new category in ice cream.

00:04:09.060 But we'll back up a second. Why did we want to make a light ice cream that tastes like ice cream?

00:04:14.080 Well, it's pretty simple. We like ice cream so much that we wanted to eat it more.

00:04:18.520 So we created delicious, creamy light ice cream that's 280 to 380 calories per pint so we could

00:04:24.520 do just that. Oh, we're doing snack wells again. This is like the next bullet in my notes is just

00:04:30.220 like, it's the 2010s answer to snack wells. Right. I would also say they're saying that

00:04:35.240 they created something totally new in a light ice cream. Light ice cream is absolutely not

00:04:39.600 anything totally new. Skinny cow was a big deal in the 90s. It was sort of a low fat ice cream,

00:04:45.900 low fat, low calorie. And a staple of the Hobbs household. Because as I mentioned,

00:04:51.160 my mom was a constant dieter. So all I ever ate growing up was low fat and no fat ice cream.

00:04:56.540 Totally. Same in the Gordon household. It was not good. It was only as an adult that I was like,

00:05:03.400 oh, ice cream is actually rich and creamy and nice. So, Skinny Cow was low-fat. Breyers launched

00:05:09.320 CarbSmart in the 2000s. CarbSmart was low-carb, and Halo Top is attempting to do both.

00:05:17.020 Oh, okay.

00:05:17.960 It really plays into this sort of deep desire and this refrain that we hear a lot about dieting,

00:05:24.400 certainly in the US and certainly in the 90s and 2000s, which is eat whatever you want and stay thin.

00:05:31.220 So what is the origin of this weird brand?

00:05:34.960 So Halo Top was founded in 2012 by two attorneys, actually, Justin Wolverton and Doug Boughton or

00:05:43.660 Booten. I'm not sure how you say it. Justin Wolverton, who is the guy who came up with

00:05:48.660 the recipe, he was sort of miserable practicing law. He spent a lot of time sort of like looking

00:05:56.420 for joy elsewhere he tried stand-up comedy he spent a lot of time writing like spec scripts

00:06:03.840 he wrote a spec script for the league what there's just a lot of like straight dude-ness

00:06:09.080 this is becoming like the first 25 minutes of the joker where is the story going audrey hang on i'm

00:06:15.300 gonna um pull up a picture of him and send it to you because that's where it gets out of joker

00:06:21.140 territory is when you see this actual dude and you're like oh no no no i hope he's not hot

00:06:26.400 oh he's kind of hot

00:06:29.760 but also like i what i see when i sort of see this dude is i'm like oh you look like a

00:06:38.780 like a tech bro kind of look yeah he looks like he's like in his late 30s but then he has the

00:06:45.220 haircut of like a 17 year old yeah he one of his sort of like number one kind of hobbies

00:06:50.940 is intermittent fasting, avoiding sugar and carbs. Quote, he'd regularly skip all food until 4pm

00:06:59.060 and then ingest two high protein entrees such as a chicken burrito bowl from Chipotle and a pork

00:07:04.160 shoulder omelet. He felt this kept his mind sharp and his beach body taut. Okay. So this is what is

00:07:11.660 I think popularly referred to as biohacking. Yes. For folks who are sort of unfamiliar with

00:07:16.700 the concept of biohacking. There are some folks who refer to it as DIY biology, which is sort of

00:07:22.440 a horrifying concept to me. I'll just call it a fucking diet. They don't want to call it a diet 0.99

00:07:26.440 because like diets are associated with women. Right? That's exactly it. Vox has a great 1.00

00:07:30.940 explainer on biohacking. They define it as quote, the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in

00:07:37.140 order to optimize performance outside the realm of traditional medicine. The idea is that you are

00:07:43.240 experimenting with your own body and you are sort of taking down the data of like how does this

00:07:49.940 thing make you feel a huge portion of this sort of like quote unquote biohacking world is around

00:07:56.600 food restriction it's all fine like technically this stuff is fine if you like to eat chipotle

00:08:03.940 omelets like have a chipotle omelet it sounds totally fine i just uh i just hate the like

00:08:10.020 pseudoscientific approach of this and the sort of weird universalizing that always comes along with

00:08:15.080 this. Absolutely. Like there's nothing necessarily wrong or bad about this, except that I really do

00:08:20.600 think there are many cases where this is cloaking and eating disorders. Yeah. It's also wrapped up

00:08:25.720 in this bullshit culture of overproductivity. So much of this is about having energy so that like 0.99

00:08:31.480 you can stay up late all night coding and like you can have energy to work. Absolutely. Biohacking

00:08:37.180 Biohacking is also what got us things like bulletproof coffee, where you like stir butter

00:08:41.420 into your coffee, right?

00:08:42.980 And it's like eight bucks.

00:08:44.480 Yeah.

00:08:44.660 And neither coffee nor butter are expensive.

00:08:46.920 And yet together, they're like really expensive.

00:08:49.020 And I don't know why.

00:08:50.060 Vox also has this great quote about biohacking that feels like it sort of encapsulates a

00:08:54.660 bunch of stuff.

00:08:55.860 Quote, what differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it's a different genre of activity,

00:09:01.800 but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset.

00:09:04.660 The underlying philosophy is that we don't need to accept our body's shortcomings.

00:09:10.300 We can engineer our way past them using a range of high and low-tech solutions.

00:09:15.820 And when somebody else talks about their experience of chronic illness or fatigue,

00:09:20.960 I can write a very long email to them telling them,

00:09:24.420 have you tried biohacking, miss?

00:09:26.860 Because I have about four pages of weird blocky text that I need you to read.

00:09:32.680 Yeah, that's right.

00:09:33.600 In addition to being sort of like 2010s snack wells, this sort of biohacking stuff is sort of the straight men's equivalent of what we talked about with moon juice, which is sort of the idea that there's something amorphous that's just not right with your body.

00:09:49.340 And if you just eat the right things or do them in the right order or at the right time, you can and will feel like you're in sort of this optimal state and a bunch of other things about your life will fall into place, right?

00:10:00.340 It's also very Silicon Valley in that it's very apolitical. There's nothing in the biohacking

00:10:06.420 rhetoric about sort of the foods that we subsidize, prices, subsidies, food stamps,

00:10:11.420 all of the other systems and political decisions that go into the kind of food that makes it onto

00:10:16.300 our shelves. It's fundamentally creating a two tiered food system where it's like the good

00:10:21.420 stuff, quote unquote, is available to people who can afford it.

00:10:24.340 100% also. Halo Top is in no way a tech company, but it has very techie vibes.

00:10:31.720 Oh, yeah.

00:10:32.020 They have 75 employees. Everybody works from home. They all chat on Slack. And if they need

00:10:36.880 to meet, they are members of WeWork, which like, of course, they're members of WeWork.

00:10:42.060 I know there had to be a WeWork cameo in this episode.

00:10:44.520 They also like Justin Wolverton also talks about how, like he starts his day at 1030

00:10:49.920 and only works in three-hour blasts, is how it's described in this piece.

00:10:54.940 It's high-intensity interval training for working.

00:10:57.560 It's intermittent fasting of work.

00:10:59.180 Yeah.

00:10:59.680 I also feel like WeWork is such a perfect metaphor for this because WeWork's entire

00:11:03.380 business model is literally just renting out an entire building and then subcontracting

00:11:08.440 out that building in sort of little tiny units, right?

00:11:11.400 You rent out one cubicle at a time.

00:11:13.320 And yet WeWork sells itself as some sort of tech company or some sort of innovator when

00:11:17.760 it's doing this extremely traditional business thing. And I feel like it's kind of the same

00:11:22.280 with Halo Top, where they're like selling themselves as like this innovative, unprecedented

00:11:26.440 thing. And it's literally just like, it's a diet food, man.

00:11:29.800 Yeah, totally. And I think it's worth knowing that Halo Top is also like, there's a ton of

00:11:34.700 business journalism around Halo Top because it has this sort of rags to riches story.

00:11:40.260 That is, this guy, Justin Wolverton, came up with this recipe using a $20 ice cream

00:11:46.080 maker from Amazon. He came up with it in his house. And when he came up with it, and sort of

00:11:52.980 when he started the company, he just two years before their biggest year in 2017, they were,

00:12:00.400 as they say, sort of on the verge of collapse, they had massive debt. And what ended up happening

00:12:05.680 is that they fundraised from family and friends, right? Which is like,

00:12:10.200 tell me tell me i was just gonna say every single business rags to riches story goes through i got

00:12:20.420 money from my parents and my friends yeah every single one yeah they raised like i think it's

00:12:25.660 like a million dollars from like family and like they raised sort of an astronomical amount and

00:12:29.960 which makes sense right like they're both coming from very high-end law firms yes whenever you hear

00:12:35.700 one of these we started our business in our garage stories. Control F for parents. Intergenerational

00:12:42.660 wealth is the key to understanding these stories. Yeah. What ends up happening is that Halo Top

00:12:48.820 redesigns its packaging. Halo Top looks very – like its packaging is very sort of like

00:12:54.780 millennial-y. And one of the most prominent features on that packaging is in the middle

00:13:00.060 there's a giant outline of an ice cream scoop that includes the calorie count for the entire

00:13:05.200 pint. Oh, right. It is the largest print on the entire package. It's larger than the name. It's

00:13:12.300 larger than the flavor. Right. Underneath the lid, it also has sort of that foil on top that's often

00:13:18.980 on those sort of like premium ice cream pints, right? Theirs has slogans that say things like

00:13:24.460 guilt-free zone. Oh, no. Or stop when you hit the bottom. Oh. That's also sort of part of the

00:13:31.560 Halo Top mystique, right? Is that there's all this stuff about it sort of implies a loss of

00:13:37.100 control around food and then celebrates that loss of control. When the only correct thing to have

00:13:42.800 on the bottom of the lid is to do it like the Snapple container and have fun facts. Oh my god,

00:13:47.600 I would love it. The seahorse is the only animal where the male gets pregnant. That's right. That's 0.99

00:13:52.120 what you need. Seahorse facts. So in addition to sort of billing itself as low calorie,

00:13:57.760 it is also a very low sugar ice cream it uses two sort of sweeteners primarily stevia which is like

00:14:07.040 a plant natural it's natural it's natural it's plant-based it's whatever

00:14:12.140 yeah and it uses erythritol which is a sugar alcohol it's a byproduct of fermenting starches

00:14:19.940 and yeast i've never even heard of this erythritol and xylitol and all of these different sugar

00:14:25.860 alcohols show up a lot in keto diets. Oh, really? Okay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Because there are ways to

00:14:33.520 get some level of sweetness without sugar. Oh. Regular consumption of erythritol has been linked

00:14:40.900 to weight gain. Paradoxically, it can also cause headaches and diarrhea. It's also very interesting

00:14:48.220 because part of the whole biohacking thing is rejecting quote unquote traditional medicine,

00:14:53.480 Western medicine, however they're framing it. And yet, it includes all of these ingredients

00:14:58.020 that are like extremely technological. There's this weird dichotomy in these sorts of diet foods

00:15:03.160 where it's always presented as natural, but they always include all of these unnatural,

00:15:08.820 like very scientific-y ingredients. Right. And it's like, which one do you want, man?

00:15:13.440 You're not picking some erythritol off of an erythritol tree. Right.

00:15:17.740 So there's also like a number of nutrition professors weighed in in a number of the pieces that I read. One from NYU had this to say about both erythritol and stevia and sort of like artificial sweeteners. Since sweet taste is normally a signal to our bodies that the food product contains calories, some researchers have hypothesized that eating a sweet product that is calorie free may result in appetite dysregulation and unfavorable metabolic responses.

00:15:46.700 Snack wells.

00:15:47.540 Yeah.

00:15:47.980 You eat a bunch of this diet food because you think it will satisfy you and because you think it's low calorie and it doesn't satisfy you.

00:15:55.800 It sort of messes up your appetite and may also mess up your metabolism to a degree, right?

00:16:01.620 You're not necessarily any better off than when you started.

00:16:04.620 Right.

00:16:04.780 And it's overlooking what we actually need to be healthy, which is adaptogens.

00:16:11.060 Guys.

00:16:12.100 I genuinely didn't see that one coming and it was a real delight.

00:16:15.360 I was mid-sip of water. I was trying to get a little Aubrey giggle out of you.

00:16:20.880 That was goal-oriented behavior. I like it. I like it.

00:16:26.340 So in addition to marketing itself around sort of calories and sugar content,

00:16:31.460 Halo Top has this sort of claim to fame that is being a high-protein ice cream.

00:16:36.240 Oh. A lot of diet foods that are marketed toward men

00:16:40.000 are marketed under the guise of being high-protein. Dude, yes.

00:16:44.380 I feel like it's all based on this myth that somehow, like, men are not getting enough protein when, like, most men are already getting twice the daily recommended amount of protein.

00:16:55.380 Like, there's no lack of protein in the American diet, but we've been told over and over again that we need to be eating as much protein as humanly possible.

00:17:03.380 The sort of like example that I have, right?

00:17:07.320 Like the archetypal like dude and protein thing that I'm aware of.

00:17:11.100 There is an absolute nightmare of a dude who's like truly horrific on Bachelor in Paradise,

00:17:17.520 which is one of the Bachelor spinoffs.

00:17:19.420 His name is genuinely Chad.

00:17:22.420 Bachelor in Paradise is filmed on a beach in Mexico,

00:17:25.420 and he brought a suitcase of clothes and a whole other suitcase of protein.

00:17:31.020 No way.

00:17:31.640 What, just like jars of peanut butter or whatever?

00:17:33.040 It was protein powders, but it was mostly just lunch meat.

00:17:38.380 He's just brought a suitcase full of like sliced turkey.

00:17:43.440 That's so sad.

00:17:44.480 It's so sad.

00:17:45.980 He's being the opposite of a Chad.

00:17:48.320 He's being like kind of a beta right now.

00:17:50.840 Anyway, as it turns out, Halo Top has the same amount of protein as any other ice cream.

00:17:55.360 Milk has a sort of standard amount of protein.

00:17:59.100 You can't increase or decrease that.

00:18:00.900 Right. And other ice creams aren't marketing themselves as sources of protein. They're

00:18:06.040 marketing themselves as ice creams. That's like the yogurt that advertises itself as gluten-free.

00:18:10.520 That's right. The co-founders of Halo Top are aware that they have the same sort of protein

00:18:16.880 profile as other ice creams. And Doug Booten said, quote,

00:18:21.920 Nobody's going to eat 1,200 calories of Ben & Jerry's for the 20 grams of protein.

00:18:26.600 We've maintained the protein while bringing the calories and sugar down.

00:18:30.000 ice cream has milk and milk has protein. We don't add protein powder. It's for milk,

00:18:34.760 eggs and cream, just like Ben and Jerry's. Okay. The other thing that they do add to Halo Top

00:18:39.700 is fiber. Oh, they add prebiotic fiber is how they sort of bill it on the ingredients list.

00:18:46.320 What the fuck does that mean, Aubrey? It's it truly is a kind of fiber. 0.96

00:18:52.260 Prebiotic prebiotic. So they're probiotics, right? Which are the actual bacteria that

00:18:56.460 folks are trying to add to their gut. Right. Prebiotics are fruits and vegetables and whole 1.00

00:19:02.020 grains. What? They're the things that feed good bacteria in your gut. Oh, it just means it's

00:19:07.700 bacteria food? Yeah. There's like making up a scientific sounding term for just like every

00:19:12.560 banana you've ever eaten. It is found in chicory root, which is where many of these sort of low

00:19:17.500 carb foods actually get theirs. So a lot of low carb foods are a little bit lower in carbs,

00:19:23.060 but they pump in a bunch of fiber, which is a carbohydrate. But in diets, people subtract the

00:19:29.460 fiber from the overall carb count. So they talk about net carbs, and net carbs means total

00:19:36.860 carbohydrates minus the number of grams of fiber. So it's sort of like, it doesn't really count,

00:19:41.780 even though it's totally a carbohydrate. This is also very Silicon Valley in that there's this

00:19:45.940 drive toward quantification. But then food manufacturers also know about the quantification

00:19:52.200 rubrics that you're using. And so they can very easily game that system. You can pump in a bunch

00:19:57.040 of fiber and they know that that's going to be subtracted from the carb count. So it's going to

00:20:01.000 make it seem as if this is sort of carb friendly when it seems like they're just sort of like

00:20:05.120 juking the stats a little bit. A little bit. The other like real secret ingredient in Halo Top

00:20:11.300 is air. Oh, what's it? They're whipping the cream? Yeah. So all ice cream gets churned and

00:20:17.500 gets some air churned into it. It's part of the reason that it's sort of light and fluffy and you

00:20:21.420 get that kind of ice cream scoop texture. Yeah. Each pint of Halo Top, two cups of ice cream,

00:20:27.220 right, is three quarters of a cup of air. Nice. Yeah. So if you let Halo Top melt,

00:20:35.500 you will have like, you know, a little more than half a pint. I mean, the pint that I bought is

00:20:39.740 light. I did notice that when I was putting it in my backpack. This feels like it has a stuffed

00:20:44.180 animal in it or something. It doesn't feel like it's full of liquid. Absolutely. So the average

00:20:48.960 Halo Top pint weighs 256 grams. And the average Ben and Jerry's pint weighs 428 grams.

00:20:57.560 Oh, wow. So almost double.

00:20:58.860 Yes. It's really a significant difference.

00:21:01.720 I mean, I'm not going to talk shit on foods that are mostly air because that's 0.96

00:21:05.240 meringue erasure. 0.99

00:21:06.340 Yeah, souffles.

00:21:07.480 Oh, yeah. I'm pro souffle.

00:21:08.460 So a number of dieticians were quoted in a lot of the stories that I read about Halo Top.

00:21:15.040 Basically, their whole thing was like, it's only healthier if you eat a regular serving size.

00:21:20.740 So it's only comparable to other ice creams on volume terms.

00:21:23.840 Right. That's exactly right. The nutrition facts and sort of the calorie count and fat and all of

00:21:29.160 that kind of stuff for a whole pint of Halo Top really is comparable to like a single serving

00:21:35.120 of existing ice cream. So even if you are counting calories and fat and carbs and all of that kind

00:21:40.660 of stuff, you really could just have a scoop of ice cream.

00:21:44.720 But that's not biohacking, Aubrey.

00:21:46.180 That's just like eating food.

00:21:47.540 I will say Halo Top is actually like a more accessible option for people who are diabetic.

00:21:53.100 Like if you can't eat sugar, having a low sugar ice cream is like probably your shot

00:21:58.880 at having more than one spoonful of ice cream.

00:22:02.660 So there are uses for it, like almost any diet food, right?

00:22:06.520 It ends up creating more accessible foods for people with chronic illnesses when we should probably actually just be creating foods for people with chronic illnesses without being like, and it'll make you thin and you can eat a whole pint and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

00:22:19.980 Like, these are not bad products in and of themselves necessarily, but they're contributing to really weird cultural attitudes.

00:22:27.940 Okay, so before we get into the next part, let's actually just taste some Halo Top.

00:22:32.160 Thank you.

00:22:32.960 You got some Halo Top, yeah?

00:22:34.340 Yes.

00:22:34.960 Okay.

00:22:35.160 I was specifically instructed by my co-host to get the peanut chunk, something, something flavor.

00:22:42.560 But then my local Walgreens did not have that and only had salted caramel.

00:22:47.340 Oh, great.

00:22:48.000 That is what I have in front of me. 1.00

00:22:49.000 God, the fucking ingredients list. 0.99

00:22:50.580 It's like the paragraph of a Jonathan Franzen novel. 1.00

00:22:53.520 It's massive.

00:22:55.260 Here are the ingredients in vanilla Halo Top.

00:22:58.340 You ready?

00:22:58.800 Give it to me.

00:22:59.220 Skim milk, eggs, erythritol, prebiotic fiber, milk protein concentrate, cream, organic cane

00:23:08.700 sugar, vegetable glycerin, organic carob gum.

00:23:13.340 Oh, no.

00:23:14.360 Carob.

00:23:15.320 Our old nemesis.

00:23:16.740 Organic guar gum and organic stevia leaf extract.

00:23:22.300 Okay.

00:23:22.720 Meanwhile, vanilla Haagen-Dazs is cream, skim milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, vanilla.

00:23:28.280 Ice cream stuff.

00:23:29.220 Yeah, ice cream stuff. So I got peanut butter cup because it is the most popular flavor in

00:23:34.460 the US. The good news is you got salted caramel, which I believe is the most popular

00:23:38.200 flavor in the UK. I feel deep solidarity with our British listeners right now.

00:23:43.660 All right, you ready? All right, here we go. Let's go.

00:23:47.500 God damn it. It's pretty good. I'm livid. 0.99

00:23:53.740 I mean, I think it's fine. It's pretty convincingly salted caramel flavor.

00:23:57.680 Yeah. Although it does sort of have the texture of like a sorbet. Like it doesn't have the sort

00:24:02.380 of dense, rich creaminess of a real ice cream. Totally. So I will say, as someone who makes

00:24:08.500 ice cream at home from time to time. Oh, you are a white woman in your 30s in Portland. 0.94

00:24:15.520 One of the hardest things about making ice cream is making sure that it doesn't crystallize. 0.99

00:24:20.740 Oh, yeah. They seem to have done a pretty good job avoiding crystallizing.

00:24:24.200 Yeah. I would not say that if I were in the mood for ice cream, I wouldn't be like,

00:24:29.900 ooh, somebody give me some Halo Top. Yeah, me either.

00:24:32.040 But I wouldn't necessarily turn it down. I'm eating more because I can't stop and I have

00:24:35.940 to get to the bottom of the thingy. You're following instructions.

00:24:39.660 I think if I was like at a party at somebody's house or something and somebody gave me just like

00:24:43.480 a bowl with a spoon and this ice cream, I think I would eat it. But I would also think that there

00:24:48.580 was like something off about it. Yeah, it doesn't taste like Tillamook

00:24:52.320 ice cream or ben and jerry's or whatever right but it doesn't taste bad i think what we're deciding

00:24:56.600 now is that the rest of this episode is just gonna be us finishing the pint and it's gonna be asmr

00:25:00.780 just quiet mouth sounds and us not speaking wait what does your um underneath the lid say mine

00:25:06.360 says you had me at halo oh that's actually pretty good god damn it yeah it's cute mine says i love 0.62

00:25:11.820 to love you baby or something what i threw it away already but it was something along those lines

00:25:16.160 It definitely wasn't like a pro binge eating, like, come see my bottom message.

00:25:21.100 Come see my bottom.

00:25:22.980 That was actually pretty good.

00:25:23.960 I should be pitching this to the Halo Top people.

00:25:25.840 You genuinely should.

00:25:27.220 You know what it really needs? 1.00

00:25:28.580 It needs some fucking nuts. 1.00

00:25:30.120 Like, it needs something to balance out the treacly over sweetness of it because it's 1.00

00:25:35.500 basically just like air and sugar.

00:25:37.360 Yeah.

00:25:37.640 But then you can't add nuts to it because that adds a ton of fat and a ton of calories.

00:25:42.140 And fiber that is not necessarily prebiotic. 0.99

00:25:44.920 God damn it. 0.99

00:25:46.160 This postbiotic fiber? Fucking bullshit-ass fiber? 1.00

00:25:50.060 Okay, so here's where it gets fun. Are you ready? 1.00

00:25:52.200 Give me fun.

00:25:52.660 The reason that Halo Top got as popular as it did is that there was an immensely popular piece

00:25:59.540 in GQ magazine in January of 2016.

00:26:04.060 It was written by a guy named Shane Snow, who's another dude who seems very focused on this kind

00:26:09.540 of biohacking stuff. Like, he takes his measurements every day and weighs himself

00:26:14.420 every day and calculates his own body fat. He was talking to his super ripped trainer in LA

00:26:21.180 who started telling him about Halo Top, this ice cream that he'd been eating that was like

00:26:25.340 healthy ice cream. This writer, Shane Snow, starts sort of doing the math in his head

00:26:30.660 and says, oh my god, I could actually get to my protein goals per day if I only ate Halo Top.

00:26:38.880 Wait, only ate Halo Top like ice cream or like only ate Halo Top like three meals a day?

00:26:44.420 More than three meals a day, as we will get into.

00:26:47.040 What?

00:26:47.740 So he creates what he calls the Halo Top Diet.

00:26:51.440 What?

00:26:52.220 He subsists exclusively on Halo Top for 10 days. 0.99

00:26:56.800 Shut up, Aubrey, no. 0.97

00:26:58.780 I told you this is where it gets fun. 1.00

00:27:00.260 Ah.

00:27:00.980 So he says in his piece for GQ, he says, quote,

00:27:04.080 For 10 days, I would do what surely a number of homo sapiens, primarily World of Warcraft addicts, have done before,

00:27:10.900 but never in the name of research and certainly never with the hopes of getting skinnier

00:27:15.720 i'd be eating nothing but ice cream okay which also like i don't know what people who play world 0.97

00:27:22.300 of warcraft ever did to this dude yeah let's leave the world of warcraft they're not fucking 0.55

00:27:26.920 with anybody those people are nice i know those people so perhaps unsurprisingly within a few 0.96

00:27:31.960 days he starts to experience some pretty profound side effects because he's only eating fucking ice 0.99

00:27:36.940 cream. He has these lingering headaches, sort of constantly. They're ice cream headaches. 0.98

00:27:44.820 Are we sure they're not ice cream headaches? No, they're not ice cream headaches. They're like,

00:27:48.980 you haven't been eating real food headaches. He also gets a really big canker sore that keeps

00:27:54.540 getting bigger and bigger. Oh my god. He talks about being constantly shivering. He lives in

00:27:59.420 Los Angeles, constantly shivering. Well, don't eat cold stuff all the time. He figures out that

00:28:04.060 he needs to eat a pint of ice cream every two to three hours to keep from having a headache.

00:28:10.300 Why do people do this? It's like those videos on YouTube where people just set these absurd

00:28:16.260 challenges for themselves. They're like, can I beat Super Mario Brothers with my feet? And it's

00:28:20.740 like, why would you want to do that? Right. Totally. Why would you want to do that? Yes.

00:28:24.800 And the problem here isn't that it's ice cream. The problem is that he's only eating one food.

00:28:29.860 Yeah. Even if you were eating something quote unquote healthy, if you were only eating kale

00:28:33.460 for 10 days, you'd also have weird side effects because that's not how humans are supposed to

00:28:37.300 live. Yes. Here's actually a quote that I was like, Oh, Lord. He keeps a food diary of this

00:28:43.040 whole 10 days, right? Of course. At 9.30pm, I headed over to a lady friend's house reluctantly

00:28:48.160 carrying the ice cream cooler pack with quote unquote breakfast. I remembered a story a friend

00:28:53.360 told me about a guy she went out with. He was training for a bodybuilding contest and busted

00:28:58.520 out a can of tuna fish every two hours nice at least i wasn't the tuna fish guy well what's the

00:29:03.880 difference bro you're the ice cream guy yeah bro it's such a good metaphor for the reasons why fad 0.92

00:29:09.140 diets don't work is because any fad diet that requires you to bring a fucking cooler over to 0.92

00:29:15.940 the person's house when you're gonna go get laid is not a sustainable plan you can't just expect 0.97

00:29:21.620 to have a cooler with you at all times for the rest of your life so partway through the halo

00:29:25.820 Top Diet. This guy consults two nutritionists. They say that his canker sore that keeps getting

00:29:32.280 bigger is probably due to a vitamin C deficiency because you're not getting vitamin C.

00:29:38.520 So he's getting scurvy.

00:29:41.760 Yeah. They want to know whether or not he's caught a cold yet because cutting calories

00:29:46.700 this significantly often weakens your immune system. They did say that they were pleasantly

00:29:52.800 surprised that he wasn't experiencing more sort of gastrointestinal distress particularly that he

00:29:58.640 hadn't had diarrhea because of the volume of erythritol so on the underside of the lid on

00:30:04.260 halo top it should say surprisingly little diarrhea there is something okay this is unfair 0.98

00:30:10.740 but there's something so fucking male about this idea of finding out about something that you 0.93

00:30:15.720 didn't know about before and this thing is healthy and it's good and you're excited about it and then 0.98

00:30:20.520 eating only that thing. It's not enough to just be like, well, sometimes I like ice cream. So next

00:30:26.180 time I buy ice cream, I'm gonna try this Halo Top stuff. Right? No, no, no. It's like, this is good

00:30:30.440 for me. Therefore, it must be good for me if I only eat this thing. I mean, it's just deranged

00:30:35.920 thinking, right? It's also there's also something sort of childlike about it. Yes. So at the end of

00:30:41.840 the Halo Top diet, here is how he sort of closes it out. Quote, after 50 straight pints of ice

00:30:48.640 cream. I clocked in at 143.5 pounds down 9.9 pounds and 12% body fat down 3%. I'd lost some

00:31:00.720 water weight, but no discernible muscle mass. I'd added half an inch of muscle to my chest and

00:31:05.920 slimmed my waist. My canker sore was still massive and I had a cold. He also talks throughout this

00:31:12.340 where he's like, a friend of mine ate a hot dog and I thought about murder. It's like pretty,

00:31:16.960 like, he does a good job of being like, this is not a good experience. But I'm like, then why are

00:31:22.660 you writing about it, though, my guy? Yeah, exactly. Then why should we publish this? And

00:31:25.880 you know that people are going to take the message from this, hey, look at this miracle ass ice cream. 0.64

00:31:30.700 Yes. The trick with all of this stuff, and with all of these sort of fad diets, 1.00

00:31:35.060 is that folks will then go out and evangelize the diet that they're on, right? This is part of the 0.77

00:31:39.960 sort of cycle of dieting, right? If you lose weight quickly on a pretty drastic diet, you go

00:31:45.560 and start recommending it to people they also don't necessarily do the math on like it took

00:31:49.560 me 10 days to lose nine pounds and i felt like shit the whole time right so they're also just 0.89

00:31:55.400 recommending like you too can shiver and be mean to people and have a giant canker sore and a 0.98

00:32:00.920 headache all the time and keep a fucking cooler with you at all times which i'm sure is very easy 0.81

00:32:05.640 to incorporate into your busy life super sustainable they also does he say anything 0.99

00:32:10.320 about what happens to him once he goes back to a normal ass diet he probably just gains all the

00:32:13.660 weight back uh he does not say i think this is a short-term project but he does say as soon as

00:32:19.100 he's off the diet he's like i just wanted to eat eggs and spinach and i was like i get that this

00:32:23.340 is the thing with fad diets is fad diets work as long as you are on them yeah and then once you go

00:32:27.600 off of them guess what you're on a new diet now and then you have a new body to go with it totally

00:32:32.320 and also i think like look man if you're trying to lose more than five to ten pounds even if you

00:32:38.920 match the pace of a diet like this someone like me would have to eat nothing but ice cream and be

00:32:45.560 like a mean canker sore monster for like nine to ten months straight right i would have to have

00:32:52.640 it would be like my year of eating ice cream yeah but think of how much weight you would lose when

00:32:57.460 they have to cut off your gangrenous foot from having scurvy for seven months i remember after

00:33:02.860 super size me came out which is a movie that we have to do an episode on some nutrition professor

00:33:07.500 went on the like Twinkies and Doritos diet

00:33:10.320 where he literally just ate

00:33:11.640 like the worst imaginable processed food for 30 days

00:33:15.320 and he lost weight

00:33:16.300 because he just, he restricted his calories.

00:33:18.820 So he would only eat like 1500 calories a day, 0.99

00:33:20.780 but it was all just shit food 0.98

00:33:22.360 and he ended up losing weight. 0.99

00:33:23.840 And it's like, yes, any diet

00:33:26.760 where you're just restricting the number of calories

00:33:28.900 you're taking in per day,

00:33:30.220 you're going to lose weight on it.

00:33:31.620 So he could have done this with anything.

00:33:33.380 Yeah, totally.

00:33:34.020 This entire experiment says nothing about Halo Top.

00:33:37.500 So here's where it gets a little dark again.

00:33:41.780 The canker sore eventually ate him alive.

00:33:45.740 No, the darkness is that a bunch of media outlets replicate this.

00:33:50.080 Wait, what?

00:33:50.620 Yeah, so Yahoo News does the Halo Top Diet, Spoon University, which is sort of like a food website for college kids.

00:33:59.220 Wait, what? Instead of pointing out how trash this entire endeavor was, they decided to do it themselves?

00:34:05.220 even for online journalism that's shocking so each of these pieces talks quite a bit about

00:34:12.220 the side effects but the closing of all of these pieces is like but i lost a lot of weight oh my

00:34:18.200 god they're all like pretty amazing how much weight i lost it's this is uh this is 99 the 0.79

00:34:26.280 fault of the fucking editors as usual writers pitch pieces it's fine people do odd experiments 0.98

00:34:32.380 with their bodies. It's fine. But the fact that somebody working at these like pretty major 1.00

00:34:38.000 nationwide publications can't see a pitch like this and just be like, oh, it's a fad diet. 0.84

00:34:43.020 We publish a million articles like this. We've gone through a million fad diet cycles by now.

00:34:47.360 We're not going to publish this because it's not very responsible.

00:34:50.180 And the headlines for these are all like, there's a new diet. I tried this new diet

00:34:54.460 and I lost this amount of weight, right? Like, they're all sort of like enticing you into this

00:34:59.120 is a good idea. As all of this press around the Halo Top diet, quote unquote, ramps up,

00:35:04.800 so do the sales of Halo Top. I'm sure, yeah. It becomes a big enough deal that their chief

00:35:10.080 operating officer, Doug, who's one of the co-founders, makes a statement about it and is

00:35:14.860 just like, hey, don't do this. Okay, that's like a vague, that's vaguely responsible.

00:35:19.660 But at the same time, so like Doug is saying, don't do this, we don't recommend it.

00:35:23.380 Justin on the other side is saying, actually, we had this really fun GQ article come out.

00:35:28.240 And it sort of was really key to the brand's success is sort of how he talks about it.

00:35:34.160 Both of them talk about eating ice cream for breakfast most days.

00:35:38.360 What?

00:35:38.660 Yes.

00:35:39.260 So they're talking about this not as a dessert substitute, but they're just like, sometimes you can just eat it for a meal.

00:35:45.080 I don't know.

00:35:47.200 I don't necessarily object to these dudes.

00:35:50.820 I don't necessarily object to the existence of this product.

00:35:54.000 I do strenuously object to promoting it as a diet or as a diet food.

00:36:00.640 And I think the biggest thing is, and this is where they've gotten sort of

00:36:03.920 knocked publicly the most, is that advertising ice cream as you're going to eat the whole pint

00:36:11.340 of this is really hard to think of that as doing anything other than normalizing or promoting or

00:36:20.060 reaching out to specifically marketing to people with issues with binge eating. When they have

00:36:25.920 been sort of called out on this binge eating disorder thing, Justin Wolverton sort of issued

00:36:30.340 a response in one of the pieces that I read. And here's what he had to say, quote, everybody has

00:36:35.280 their own definition of healthy. For us, it means foods that are as unprocessed as they can be.

00:36:41.380 Halo Top is something where people can eat the whole pint, or a lot more than a quarter of a

00:36:46.000 cup of ice cream. Wait, listen to this motherfucker that just said unprocessed. 1.00

00:36:50.240 Read the fucking ingredients again. Carob gum, guar gum. 1.00

00:36:54.040 Yeah. What definition of unprocessed allows for all these ingredients that I've never

00:36:58.760 fucking heard of? And I'm a weirdo that reads about this shit all the time. 0.99

00:37:02.180 Yeah, totally. It just doesn't hold any water at all. 0.99

00:37:05.240 Yeah, because holding water requires processing, Aubrey. You have to process things to hold water.

00:37:09.800 according to the co-founders, they estimate within Halo Top that their customers are eating

00:37:17.460 between five and 10 pints of Halo Top per week. Their success isn't necessarily that everybody

00:37:23.560 under the sun loves Halo Top. Their success is the people who love Halo Top buy way the fuck 0.97

00:37:29.220 more Halo Top than any other brand of ice cream that they would get.

00:37:32.860 I mean, it reminds me a lot of the alcohol industry, where we all see beer ads everywhere.

00:37:36.640 and this idea of sort of having a beer with friends, but 60% of alcohol is consumed by

00:37:41.760 10% of the customers. Fast food, I believe, has the same structure where there's what are called

00:37:48.420 heavy users, people that are eating a lot of fast food. And that's actually the majority

00:37:52.560 of the market. I mean, I don't want to shame anybody that eats a pint of ice cream because

00:37:56.980 sometimes you need to eat a pint of ice cream. But also it seems like the company is taking on

00:38:01.800 the same structure as these other industries. 0.98

00:38:05.420 Yeah, this doesn't get from me a full-throated, like, this is fucked up and these guys need 0.99

00:38:10.820 to be stopped. 0.99

00:38:12.020 Do you know what I mean?

00:38:12.620 Like, I don't feel that way about it.

00:38:14.320 But it does not sit well with me.

00:38:17.060 Slate ran a piece about Halo Top.

00:38:19.840 And this quote, I thought, really sort of encapsulated the ways in which the line gets

00:38:24.620 blurred between dieting and disordered eating.

00:38:26.900 Hmm. All any dieting person really wants, and I am extrapolating from personal experience here,

00:38:33.300 is to eat a whole container of something. Preferably that thing will taste good or at least not bad,

00:38:39.320 but what's crucial in the end is getting to eat all of it. What Halo Top does so brilliantly

00:38:44.380 is tap into Americans' love of binging. This writer goes on to say that she doesn't blame

00:38:50.000 the creators of Halo Top for that love of binging, and I'm like, no, of course you can't pin it all

00:38:54.180 these two guys, but it doesn't seem frankly very ethical to me. The last piece that I want to talk

00:39:00.900 about in terms of Halo Tops marketing is its most recent ad campaign from last year. The title of

00:39:08.960 that ad campaign is Stop Shoulding Yourself. S-H-O-U-L-D. I like know where this is going. 0.81

00:39:16.800 It's so dark. Tell me where you think it's going. It's going to be pretending to free you

00:39:21.360 from diet talk when it's actually just another form of diet talk.

00:39:25.460 I mean, you just nailed it. 1.00

00:39:26.640 Damn it. I'm spoiling your episode. I'm sorry. You were going to lead me there by the hand and 0.99

00:39:31.940 I ran in front of you. No, no, no. It's perfect because you really can kind of see it coming a

00:39:36.300 mile away. This is their quote from their stop shooting yourself website. So the ad is essentially

00:39:43.660 it's a 30 second spot. It is a plus size woman dancing in her bra and panties. 1.00

00:39:50.120 I'm with you so far. 0.99

00:39:51.620 And while she's dancing around, there are these slogans that pop up on screen that say,

00:39:56.180 I should work out more, I should eat more salads, and I should skip dessert.

00:40:01.540 And she is eating Halo Top. 0.53

00:40:03.360 Oh, man.

00:40:03.900 At the end of the ad, she sees that one of her neighbors is looking in through her apartment

00:40:07.540 window.

00:40:08.500 And she's just like, whatever, I'm going to keep dancing, right?

00:40:11.180 It's just sort of like, I'm going to be free and easy, and I'm going to live my life.

00:40:14.200 Here we go.

00:40:15.260 Yeah.

00:40:15.460 So the idea here that this ad seems to be sort of like playing into is what a lot, a lot, a lot of diet companies and diet food companies are doing, which is sort of like, it's okay to be fat, so buy this ice cream that will make you thin. 0.97

00:40:29.380 Yeah, it's so gross to be using this stuff to sell people fucking ice cream. 0.99

00:40:33.260 It's so gross. Because essentially, like, if you look at the sort of track of what's happening here, like, fat activists and eating disorder advocates have done a shit ton of work to make sure that people understand that dieting is not a sustainable way of being that it doesn't actually lead people to lose weight, that it fucks up your physical and mental health. And essentially, what is happening right now, culturally, is that all of that stuff, like dieting is just getting a search and replace. 0.98

00:41:00.920 for like it's not about dieting it's about wellness and it's not about restriction it's

00:41:06.660 about empowerment so that you can restrict if you choose to restrict right what is the purpose of

00:41:12.840 eating halo top if not to lose weight right totally it's not like calories and carbs taste

00:41:16.640 bad and you want to avoid them for that reason so it's like you're telling this woman to lose weight 0.92

00:41:21.060 while you're being like you're fine as you are it's so fucking cynical and this is also a place 0.78

00:41:25.600 where people are like look the culture around food is changing the culture around fatness is 0.97

00:41:30.340 changing. And again, what they're talking about isn't concrete experiences of fat people or

00:41:36.220 people with eating disorders or people who experience a lot of food policing for any

00:41:39.640 number of reasons. What they're talking about is ad campaigns. Right. That feels like there's

00:41:44.180 more acceptance. And I would argue that means that there's more explicit policing of fat people,

00:41:49.440 not that there is more acceptance of fatness and fat people. Right. If only she ate Halo Top,

00:41:54.180 she wouldn't be so fat. Totally. Right. I mean, that's the message we're going to get. 1.00

00:41:57.300 and she and she is eating halo top so she's on her way she's doing the right thing she's becoming

00:42:02.640 thin you know what it reminds me of the ridiculous cynicism of those what was it winston ads that 1.00

00:42:08.340 were like you've come a long way baby totally it was like we're feminists and like look at how 0.97

00:42:14.240 great we are with women's rights hey here's a stick that's gonna kill you it's like just 0.99

00:42:19.940 immediately sucking up feminism into the fucking tractor beam of capitalism yeah using this like 0.99

00:42:26.340 genuine advancement of women to do it and it's exactly the same here it's like body positivity 0.99

00:42:31.540 is great look how happy you are with yourself take this thing that's going to make you different 0.99

00:42:35.640 totally also fuck them the whole thing came out of this biohacking intermittent fasting i'm gonna 0.99

00:42:40.880 tweak my body thing like halo top is another should i should be eating halo top instead of 0.99

00:42:46.820 this normal hagen does yeah absolutely i just saw that ad and i was like i feel gross and i hate it

00:42:52.120 and I don't know why. And I saw this like when I was not PMSing. So that was a genuine

00:42:58.500 neutral response. I just think by doing all this marketing, they're shooting themselves in the

00:43:04.120 foot. How was that? I'm sorry. I have to say, I'm like very delighted that you stumbled upon that.

00:43:11.800 And I'm also very delighted that we're almost at the end of this episode because there are so many

00:43:15.380 fewer opportunities for more shooting jokes. I know, could you save this for last? Otherwise,

00:43:20.860 the whole show would be full of these. Yeah, totally. So I feel like the thing that I want 0.97

00:43:26.920 to say to close this out is just like, totally eat what you want. But please don't conflate

00:43:33.780 marketing with nutritional education. Yes. This is one of those cases where like,

00:43:38.740 a brand is saying we're good for you for all of these reasons. So our brains go,

00:43:42.980 oh, these things are good. It's good to have erythritol. It's good to have stevia. Please,

00:43:48.920 please, please, please know that the people who are telling you that are trying to sell you

00:43:52.920 erythritol and stevia. Yes. The purpose of companies is to sell you as much of their

00:43:57.740 product as possible. Right. Anyone who's telling you like, this is the best probiotic, antibiotic

00:44:03.100 fiber, whatever, they have no incentive to tell you the truth. Right. As you say, Halo Top's job

00:44:08.840 is to make money and they are doing a bang up job of making money. They are not your source of

00:44:15.280 nutritional education nor is a fucking gq story about eating ice cream for 10 days 0.98

00:44:21.780 yes please please please please however if you're really interested in getting a canker sore 0.98

00:44:27.120 now you know where to go

00:44:45.280 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - January 05, 2021

Halo Top Ice Cream

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Transcript