00:02:27.080And they were saying that it was sort of the first cookie that they could recall that was a sort of quote-unquote diet cookie that was not set apart in a separate aisle.
00:02:39.840The box looked like Keebler cookies, right? That it was sort of like marketed alongside. It was like a cookie, but this cookie is better for you rather than this is a diet food and this is the cookie version of that diet food.
00:02:51.420I mean, this is all wrapped up in the uniquely rock bottomage of 1990s American food culture. But yeah, did you eat Snackwell's cookies? Did you remember them?
00:03:02.200Oh my god, absolutely. So we always had them in our house. We were a dieting household through
00:03:08.220and through. And one of the things that I remember most clearly about snack wells was that there
00:03:13.340would be many people in and around my family who would be like, I didn't eat lunch, or I didn't
00:03:18.620eat all day. And now I'm going to eat some snack wells. That's my treat for not eating. People
00:03:22.960were using it in a way that was sort of incentivizing some degree of disordered eating,
00:03:27.040right? Totally, totally. The other thing I will say that I remember about snack wells
00:03:30.940is I distinctly remember as a fat kid being like okay these are the cookies that I'm gonna have
00:03:36.500access to which means I had better totally savor them and love them and you know what I mean like
00:03:43.260really make it count with the cookie time that I have and I remember eating them and I remember
00:03:49.480them being so dry yeah that's the other thing that I remember really distinctly about snack
00:03:54.900yeah they're like deeply unsatisfying yeah did your family worship at the altar of
00:03:59.600no fat and low fat foods 100 slim fast yes weight watchers yes carnation instant breakfast no because
00:04:09.420it had fat in it oh yeah but we would have a box at all times of potato buds those like instant
00:04:17.940potato flakes so you're just like healthy it's like astronaut food it's so upsetting it was this
00:04:25.820really weird approach to health. In order for something to be healthy, it had to be engineered
00:04:30.680in some way. And also like this idea that what eating a low fat diet is, is eating exactly the
00:04:37.600same, but just low fat versions of everything and you'll be healthier, right? That they were like
00:04:43.060low fat pop tarts and like low fat TV dinners. And the most like distinct food image of my childhood
00:04:50.860was reduced fat peanut butter. Like it doesn't make any sense. There's not like some other
00:04:56.260species of peanut that has less fat, right? Like all you're doing is you're replacing
00:05:01.780about 40% of your peanut butter with sugar.
00:05:05.640Right. It's sort of this weird zero-sum thinking.
00:05:08.600Yeah. Do you want to find out how we got to this place?
00:05:11.240I want to know every single thing about snack rolls.
00:05:13.840So the story begins with basically the discovery of heart attacks before like the 1940s and the 1950s.
00:05:23.840And this happens with most countries that go from being poor to developing relatively rapidly.
00:05:28.700The mortality rates shift from infectious diseases to non-infectious diseases.
00:05:34.340so for most of american history people were dying of like cholera and things that you could catch
00:05:41.460from like dirty water or the lack of antibiotics people weren't thinking about cancer and heart
00:05:47.640disease before the 1940s because like those were not on the radar right there's sort of this idea
00:05:53.140now it feels like that like those are new ailments right because we have failed in some way as a
00:06:00.280society to like, quote unquote, stay healthy, by which folks usually mean stay thin. And that
00:06:05.920misconception feels like sort of pretty fertile territory for diet companies and for folks who
00:06:11.960are sort of inclined to, for whatever reason, kick up a sense of panic around public health.
00:06:17.520Oh, totally. Yeah. And so heart attacks were actually discovered or heart artery blockage
00:06:23.740was discovered in the 1800s by this guy in Berlin, who was just really fascinated by corpses
00:06:29.940and he would just get dead bodies and cut them open and the most amazing thing about cholesterol
00:06:35.300the waxy substance that blocks arteries is that like you can fucking see it that like if you take0.98
00:06:41.720a dead person who has a bunch of heart disease and you open up their heart you can see like oh0.98
00:06:46.580there's all this yellow shit in there huh this doctor in berlin in the 1800s was like huh some0.99
00:06:52.000people have this yellow shit in their heart tubes and some people don't have this yellow shit but1.00
00:06:57.200But because, you know, it's the 1800s, everybody's dying of fucking like pneumonia and stuff.1.00
00:07:01.500People are not interested in heart disease.0.99
00:21:31.280I feel like that's going to be a recurring theme.
00:21:34.180But what's really interesting about the American Heart Association report and the institutional reports that start to come out in the 60s and 70s is that they don't recommend a low fat diet for all Americans.
00:21:43.880they say if you're in a high risk group if you have high cholesterol if you have a history of
00:21:50.640heart disease in your family then you should eat less saturated fat but this is not everybody
00:21:56.380should eat less fat interesting this is when ansel keys shows up on the cover of time magazine
00:22:01.560and they call him mr cholesterol and even though the american heart association doesn't go this
00:22:06.320far ansel keys says you should cut fat from 40 of calories to 15 this is i mean this also gets it
00:22:13.520like the beginning of the stigmatization of weight that comes like obviously comes along with all
00:22:20.440this one of the quotes in this time article he says people should know the facts then if they0.99
00:22:25.960want to eat themselves to death let them oh no it's like oh fuck you seriously he also i mean
00:22:32.520i don't know how much we're like allowed to roast him for this but he also mentions in this time1.00
00:22:36.760article sort of like offhand he's like oh yeah i eat a steak with my wife three times a week and
00:22:41.100like, I have eggs and bacon for breakfast. It's like, if the guy whose entire life's work is
00:22:46.460built around reducing saturated fat can't reduce saturated fat in his own diet, why does he feel
00:22:52.420qualified to tell everybody else to do this? Yeah, the whole thing. I mean, it's also sort
00:22:56.220of the logic of anti-fat bias is what's happening here, right? Yeah. The idea here is if you appear
00:23:03.480healthy, you can tell people who appear unhealthy to you what to do without scrutiny, right? That
00:23:12.940there is sort of this idea that like your own health is beyond reproach because look at you.
00:23:17.840But so this all gets worse in 1977 when for the first time, the US government gives dietary
00:23:24.660advice. It's called the Dietary Goals in the United States. They say Americans at risk,
00:23:30.620again, should reduce fat to 30% of calories and saturated fat should be 10% of calories.
00:23:37.100And they also said you should increase your carbohydrates from 55% of calories to 60%
00:23:41.700of calories. So that's like the official, super duper official advice from the US government.
00:23:47.180They also mentioned, this is actually the following year, but they also mentioned
00:23:50.680that like as a tip, Americans should try to eat 13 slices of bread every day so that they can get0.99
00:23:56.880their carbohydrates uh that's like a lot of fucking bread0.97
00:24:02.540sorry michael i'm sorry i can't proceed with this podcast unless i know if you've eaten your daily0.98
00:24:11.100loaf of bread it's almost noon i should have had like six slices by now have you had your 10 a.m
00:24:19.120piece of toast so between this dietary goals publication and the sort of like mid to late
00:24:24.74080s. In this weird, imperceptible way, the recommendation to eat less dietary fat moves
00:24:32.320from high-risk groups to everybody. No one ever says it like, oh, we're dropping this high-risk
00:24:38.560recommendation. It just becomes like a cultural understanding that everybody should try to reduce
00:24:44.000fat in their diet to the extent possible. So the American Heart Association by 1981
00:24:48.980One is recommending that men limit themselves to 300 milligrams of cholesterol and women
00:24:54.300limit themselves to 225 milligrams of cholesterol, which is one egg.
00:24:59.340And the National Institutes of Health starts recommending that all Americans over two
00:25:07.060If you're under the age of two, you can eat whatever you want, apparently.
00:25:09.960Under two, if it's possible, use the slim fast version of formula.
00:25:14.500And then in the midst of this miasma of just like everybody trying to reduce their fat, we get a 1984 Time Magazine cover story that has the headline, sorry, it's true, cholesterol really is a killer.
00:25:27.960And so all of this information is sort of telling us that we should change the way we eat, right?
00:27:01.640However, there is no proof that dietary changes can actually reduce heart disease.
00:27:06.280Before we're telling people to change their diets and reduce heart disease, shouldn't
00:27:10.180there be some evidence that this works?
00:27:11.760It also feels sort of like bizarre wishful thinking. Like I'm curious if anybody tried to do any like, here's what it would look like to eat this way, sort of guidance for folks or imagining of that. Because honestly, like, if you have whatever a bowl full of spinach, right, like raw baby spinach with salad dressing on it, that is like 90% fat.
00:27:35.140Yeah. Even though it's a tablespoon or two of salad dressing and a big pile of spinach, that is not by anyone's definition, as far as I know, an unhealthy meal. You're hearing this advice and you're like, okay, I guess I got to eat more salads. And you're like, well, no, actually salads are pretty fatty.
00:28:21.100it's been a minute since I read this report, the Coop report. The thing that I found really
00:28:24.840fascinating about it is that it's looking at and sort of trying to make a run at these population
00:28:31.540level determinants of health through these individual sort of mandates of like, when you
00:28:37.560go to the grocery store, you should buy this. Yeah. Rather than what if the government subsidized
00:28:42.520these kinds of foods or stopped subsidizing these other kinds? And also, I mean, I think the central
00:28:47.460sin of this report is that they didn't think of unintended consequences. So are you familiar with
00:28:54.000Marion Nestle? Yes, absolutely. This is a Marion Nestle Stan account. Like I've read her books.
00:28:58.940I've been reading her blog for more than a decade. She's one of the most preeminent like food and
00:29:03.100politics researchers in America. And she was actually one of the advisors on this report.
00:29:08.760And what she says later, and I think this is a huge mistake. She says the rationale, like we knew
00:29:15.620that we wanted people to eat less saturated fat. We knew the different types of fat. We knew about
00:29:20.880like HDL and LDL, cholesterol, et cetera, but we thought that was too complicated. So what we wanted
00:29:26.500to do was just tell people to eat less fat and then people would end up eating less saturated
00:29:31.100fat. That's not how people work. And that's especially not how capitalism works. I think
00:29:37.620that they just didn't think that like companies would take this advice and the media would take
00:29:42.780this advice and oversimplify it and basically exaggerate it to the point where it's going to
00:29:48.500make everybody sicker totally and also like if you're reducing fat in your diet saturated fat
00:29:55.580remains the cheapest kind of fat to get into your diet yeah what are the chances that when people
00:30:00.720are cutting out fat that they're cutting out like french fries that they can get for 99 cents at a
00:30:05.900drive-thru right like there's like convenience elements of this there's cost elements of this
00:30:11.660There's where does food show up in your sort of daily life?
00:30:15.720Where is the – like where do those stimuli pop up and when do you reach for them, right?
00:30:20.040Like there's so much going on here that the idea that you could just say cut all the – like I get where they're coming from.
00:30:27.240And also in retrospect, I'm like, no, of course that didn't work.
00:30:30.860So in 2003, Marian Nestle gives an interview to PBS where she talks about this kind of like at the end of the low-fat craze.
00:30:37.180And she says, what nobody realized, or at least I certainly never would have guessed, was that the food industry would substitute vegetable fats for animal fats in such a profound way and would also substitute sugars for fats and keep the calorie content of their products exactly the same.
00:30:51.060The best example is the Snackwell phenomenon.
00:30:54.500Snackwell cookies were advertised as no-fat cookies, but they had almost the same amount of calories.
00:30:59.040In fact, if you go to the store today and look at Oreos, they have a reduced fat Oreo cookie that has, I think, six calories less than the regular Oreo cookie.
00:31:07.860It's lower in fat, but it's higher in carbohydrates.
00:31:10.480And so I think all of this dovetails with really the expansion of the obesity epidemic and the construction of the obesity epidemic that Americans were getting fatter.
00:36:04.540I want to look at the ingredients. Dude, I know. I wrote them down. What is it,
00:36:09.20017 ingredients? This feels like the science words label. Yeah. Oh, totally. Here's what I have for
00:36:13.680my ingredients in order. Wheat flour, corn syrup, invert sugar, which I choose to believe just means
00:36:19.720gay sugar. Yes. Hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is coconut and or palm oil, then coconut powder,1.00
00:36:27.180then glycerin, and then just leavening. Yeah, that's what I had to do. An action more than
00:36:32.040ingredient, but okay. But so now we know. Now we know. So apparently at Nabisco, first of all,
00:36:38.140they launched the Snackwell brand specifically to capitalize on this. When they were designing
00:36:43.480the cookies, they called it Project Zero because they wanted zero fat. Like they set out to make
00:36:49.060a zero fat cookie. Another thing I found at Old Marketing Digest of like how the Snackwell's
00:36:54.620cookies were marketed and they talked about how diet food at the time was fucking terrible. It0.97
00:36:59.720was like, you know, these Weight Watchers things and like SlimFast shakes. And most of the low fat
00:37:05.320stuff at the time was like fruit based. And this was the first time that it was like a chocolate
00:37:09.780low fat product, like a low fat product that looked like a normal product like that hadn't
00:37:14.220been seen before. There's like so much wishful thinking that goes into the creation of diet
00:37:19.500foods, right? Which is sort of like the idea that you could lose a bunch of weight and eat foods
00:37:23.800that are as decadent, if not more so. Yeah, you could lose weight, you could have a healthier
00:37:29.000your heart and you could eat these chocolate marshmallow sawdust cookies. It's also, I mean,
00:37:34.100I think it's also like, we've totally forgotten about this now, but Snackables cookies were one
00:37:37.900of the first snack products that were marketed to adults. That like snacks were, you know,
00:37:43.780seen as like gummy bears and stuff, like things that kids would eat. And this is really the
00:37:47.540beginning of like the snack industry. The idea of like, you know, 3 p.m., you're at work,
00:37:52.660you want to have like a little nibble. That as like a marketing category didn't really exist yet.
00:37:56.880And so another reason why the Snackwell's Cookies went so far is because they had like a year of lead time of like telling people that like it was okay to snack on something if you're an adult.
00:38:09.520Well, and also like now there are like whole – like as you're talking about this, I'm like, oh, right.
00:38:13.860There are whole ad campaigns now around adult snacking, right?
00:38:19.000That's like, grab this 100 calorie pack of almonds instead of the donut in the break room at work or the hungry grab a Snickers ad campaign, right?
00:38:30.100Where you're like, well, that's not – Snickers isn't for hunger, everybody.
00:38:33.800I mean, it's funny you mention that because they deliberately made the package of Snackwell cookies smaller so that, first of all, it would be under two bucks, which they really wanted it to be cheap.
00:38:43.160And secondly, they didn't want it to be seen as like a family package of stuff.
00:38:47.900Like, they talk about how, like, you buy Oreos, and there's, like, 48 of them.
00:38:51.180And it's very clear that it's, like, supposed to be in the cupboard.
00:38:53.640It's, like, a family thing that you bring out after the family has eaten dinner or something.
00:38:58.000But these were supposed to be, like, individual.
00:39:00.700You were supposed to get them yourself and take them to work with you.
00:39:03.520And so part of this thing of, like, eating the whole box, it's not clear that, like, they intended for that to be the outcome.
00:39:11.020Twelve cookies in a box was kind of an innovation.
00:39:14.340That's what they're counting on is, like, some level of binge eating.
00:39:17.480Whether or not that's the language that they have for it or the framework or whatever, right?
00:39:21.360Like they're designing something to be eaten in a single sitting or a couple of sittings by one person.
00:39:26.680This is also the beginning of what researchers call nutritionism, which I think has like taken over the U.S. food supply.
00:39:34.100This idea that the healthiness or unhealthiness of a product is related to whether or not it has a specific thing.
00:39:41.580The idea that like, well, it's low in fat, so it's healthy for me, or like it's high in omega-3s.
00:39:47.480This is something that is deliberately pushed by food companies so that they can put a like a nice label on their product.
00:39:55.440Like the really infamous one was that there used to be a little nutrition label on the front of the Lucky Charms box that said Lucky Charms boosts immunity.0.95
00:40:05.740I don't know how the fuck that came up.0.98
00:40:07.280Like I think it was fortified with like vitamin A or some shit.0.99
00:40:09.600Like something that like, you know, Americans are not getting like rickets at like large rates.0.92
00:40:14.420But it was like a way of being like, oh, well, it boosts immunity.
00:40:16.620so like of course i can have a bowl of lucky charms for breakfast it's this idea of like this
00:40:20.520very binary understanding of health that is completely like it benefits nobody other than
00:40:27.200food companies right it's a little bit like the sort of like freak out about gluten that happened
00:40:32.380maybe 10 years ago right those are like everyone's gonna get gluten out of their diets that there was
00:40:36.900grain brain and wheat belly and all of those sort of diet books totally our brains are gonna hang
00:40:42.220on to one thing. We're all freaked out about both our mortality and our appearance. And here's one
00:40:48.640element, omega-3s or gluten or sugar or carbs or fat or whatever it is that you can then just hang
00:40:56.620on to that allays all of those fears. I think the grossest example of this is the complete
00:41:02.040corruption of the American Heart Association, that they start allowing brands to pay them
00:41:07.520to put heart-healthy stickers on the front of their packages.
00:47:37.040That like you eat a box of fucking snack well cookies and you are not full.0.99
00:47:40.300You're just going to eat more like an hour later as if you haven't eaten anything because this food is like specifically designed to go straight through you.0.99
00:49:08.220It's not like Americans are like reading their copy of the Journal of the American Medical Association and being like, I believe I shall change my diet.1.00
00:49:16.220Like, no, it was another fucking fad diet, you guys.1.00
00:49:33.480Right? Like that's sort of the way that these conversations about health happen around diet are super duper duper imprecise, right? People aren't like we started out talking about this as like an issue of like heart disease, which is a very specific conversation.
00:49:48.220And the bigger these conversations get and the further they veer into diet land, the further they veer away from like useful data, useful practices, right? Like precise information, all of that. It just becomes every idea about health and beauty and desirability and size and everything. Like they all get sort of collapsed into one another.
00:50:08.480You know, we've clearly moved on from the low fat ideology, but the meta ideology of this stuff, I don't know if we've grown that much. Like, it's really difficult to do research on this, because a lot of the books about the rise of the low fat craze are written by people who are pitching their own diet.
00:50:25.380Gary Taubes who wrote the infamous What If Fat Doesn't Make You Fat article that basically launched
00:50:32.140the Atkins diet in the New York Times in 2002. He has now become this weird like eat nothing but
00:50:37.660bacon guy. I read his book but like you have to sort of like cut out the parts that are like
00:50:42.800and that's why sausages are the best right and you're like I don't know Gary and then there's
00:50:47.860other I read another book by Nina Teicholz it's all about how like fat is good for you and we
00:50:52.160should all be eating like a super high fat diet. And like, there's actually some interesting data
00:50:55.820behind that, whatever. It's just, it's difficult to get historical information about this stuff
00:51:00.060when every single source is trying to tell you that like, no, no, no, the new thing is like,
00:51:05.900fat is good, right? Like, it's simplistic to say fat is bad, but like, actually fat is good. And
00:51:10.220it's like, that actually sounds just as simplistic to me.
00:51:12.700And the fears that we are trying to allay or the solutions that we're trying to find as
00:51:17.380individuals are also pretty simplistic, right? You're afraid of dying, you're afraid of not
00:51:22.000having good health, you're afraid of, you know, whatever the things are, what you're doing in that
00:51:27.360moment, what you're looking for, arguably, when you reach for a box of snack wells, or for any of
00:51:32.540these sorts of things, is a way of allaying your own anxiety that may or may not have any relationship
00:51:38.340to what it actually does to your body or to your health, right? That has infinitely more to do with
00:51:44.620your feelings about your own body and your emotional state than it does to do with anything
00:51:50.100related to the science behind these products the nutritional value of them right it's it's much
00:51:55.420more individual like this quest for like this food is good and this food is bad and this diet
00:52:00.420is good and this diet is bad negates how much individual variation there is like i know people
00:52:06.160that are on low-fat diets and they love their low-fat diet and it gives them energy and it
00:52:09.980makes them happy and like i'm not interested in taking that away from them like if you're on a
00:52:14.400low-fat diet then like have a blast like if it's healthy for you then it's healthy for you i don't
00:52:17.900see any reason to say that like oh it's bad for everybody in the same way i don't see any reason
00:52:22.020to say it's good for everybody yeah and i know people that are on like super duper low carb like
00:52:26.980the people that have managed to keep atkins for like a decade like i know those people and they're
00:52:32.360happy with their diets yeah like if it works for you it works for you and you should have access
00:52:37.500to accurate information right as you're making the decision of like what kind of food you want
00:52:43.080to eat, if you want to subscribe to a model of a diet that someone else created. I think that's
00:52:49.380part of what makes this all so tricky is that folks are looking for very direct, very clear
00:52:54.180cut, and very tested solutions that for the most part don't actually exist in the universalized
00:52:59.660kind of way that we want them to. There's sort of you have to do the obligatory thing
00:53:03.820at the end of this episode where you read through all the literature reviews that have tested the
00:53:08.980low-fat diet compared to other diets. I can read you excerpts like there's been, there was one in
00:53:13.6602001, there was one in 2005, there's one in 2015, where it's like they test like the South Beach
00:53:17.840diet and a low-fat diet and Atkins and whatever. And most of these studies find like no real
00:53:24.180difference. Like, you know, you look at the actual data on each one of the diets and like every diet
00:53:28.960study finds the same thing that some people gain weight on the diet, some people have nothing,
00:53:32.640and some people lose weight on the diet. Yeah. There's no real evidence that like a low-fat
00:53:36.420diet in general like on a population level does anything yeah and let me end with like this
00:53:42.860extremely long but extremely good quote from ann laburge who's a professor who's written about the
00:53:47.660history of the low-fat diet craze she says low-fat recommendations competed with the reality of
00:53:53.500grocery stores and restaurants filled with fattening foods of all sorts and decreasing
00:53:57.360cost and increasing availability of food of all sorts food became widely available 24 7 americans
00:54:03.240ate more processed food. The changing social structure, for example, the two-worker family
00:54:07.020or the single-parent family, meant that families ate out more often. Low-fat made living and eating
00:54:12.280difficult, requiring both healthcare practitioners and patients to be counterculture. For some
00:54:16.960Americans, eating low-fat meant denying local or ethnic heritages. Following a low-fat diet was
00:54:22.080also expensive, inconvenient, and in fact elitist. One had to avoid most restaurants and most foods
00:54:27.820sold in grocery stores. The result was two cultures, fat and low-fat. Yeah. This is the
00:54:32.920problem with every single fad diet is that it competes with the reality of people's fucking0.97
00:54:37.660lives yeah i had this whole yoga teacher who would say that everyone should be upside down0.97
00:54:41.580for like one hour a day like doing a headstand or a handstand i think about it all the time
00:54:47.000because like she might have been right but also like i can't fucking do that i can't do that in0.65
00:54:52.100the office i can't do that at home it's not going to happen so it's kind of irrelevant whether she's0.72
00:54:57.160right or not because it's not going to work for anybody we clearly need to come up with something
00:55:00.420that will actually work for everybody. And the fact that this doesn't work, that you're hungry
00:55:05.180and like pissed off and like binging and tired and emotional all the time,
00:55:09.380that actually is like pretty relevant to whether or not we should recommend this to people. That's
00:55:14.420not some like footnote. So much of the sort of like dietary information that gets tossed out
00:55:19.360is sort of like assuming that humans are some kind of like processing plant and put something
00:55:27.220in at the beginning and the same product comes out every time rather than like no there are
00:55:33.300workers who work in the plant and sometimes they get sick and sometimes the machinery malfunctions0.95
00:55:37.720and also it's a person it's not a fucking processing plant and so yeah if you like your0.96
00:55:43.040low-fat diet you can keep it if you like snack well cookies eat them if you don't like them0.96
00:55:49.040don't eat them just like eat what's right for you yeah eat the things that you like if you eat a0.77
00:55:53.700whole box of snack well's cookies you're not a terrible person right totally don't shit on other0.93
00:55:57.660people's diets especially don't give unwarranted diet advice to people you do not know that well
00:56:02.680because their bodies are different from yours 100 and um if you see a snack well's delivery
00:56:07.600truck follow it to the store yeah it might be your only chance it's the last one in america