Noom: Helping us live healthier lives? Or just starving for growth?

myself first thing in the morning. New is a digital health platform. Their flagship product is an app that promises a long term approach to weight loss, one based on psychology and personalization. To help us understand if they're living up to that promise, Haley volunteered to try it for thirty days and document or experience. So I just got back from my run. I am trying to run three times a week and this was my third run this week, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. And I logged

it in noon. I listened to some of the lessons about the different foods that like. It was saying, like a cheeseburger and arugula are a pound of arugula are the same calorie density, and they'll both fill you up the same, but you obviously won't gain as much weight if you're eating a pound of arugula, which like, who was eating a pound of arugula versus eating a cheeseburger. But anyways, I'm a little nervous to start tracking my calories, Like, I feel like this is going to be difficult, but uh,

let's see how it goes. Welcome to Calling Bullshit, the podcast about purpose washing, the gap between what an organization says they stand for and what they actually do and what they would need to change to practice what they preach. I'm your host, Time Montague, and I've spent over a decade helping organizations define what they stand for, their purpose and then help them to use that purpose to drive

transformation throughout their business. Unfortunately, at a lot of institutions today, there's still a pretty wide gap between word and deed. That gap has a name bullshit. But, and this is important, bullshit is serious, but it's also a treatable condition. So when our bullshit detector lights up, we're going to explore everything the organization should do to fix it new is popular.

It has two fifty million downloads ads that pop up everywhere from podcasts to the Super Bowl, an evaluation of over three point seven billion dollars, and as they explained in this promo video, Noon claims to have been purpose led from the start thirteen years ago. Save Young and Art and Patakov founded Noon with one mission to help as many people as possible live healthier lives. Noon was created because healthcare has really become sick care and inefficient

system designed to treat patients after they're already sick. Today, Noon is a trusted, consumer led digital health platform helping people around the world live healthier lives. Guided by principles of proven behavioral science. We've discovered the right combination of psychology, technology, and human coaching that empowers people to change their habits and take control of their health. I can fit in close that I've never been able to where before I

lost eighty pounds on New. There's a much bigger connection with my mind and body now with New that I didn't have before, and I think that's the biggest difference. By pairing the power of the individual with proven science and psychology, we're building products that change behaviors for good and create transformational health outcomes. At Noon, we believe that better health begins with you, and behavior change starts with us co founders who spent years working towards their goal

check tackling a real problem double check. At a glance, Noon looks fairly low BS. But digging a little deeper, I learned that health is incredibly complex and equating weight with health this puts New in murky territory where they risk harming the very people they say they exist to help.

So have founders Artem and Saves You created an app that truly focuses on long term health or is now just another one size fits all diet that promises the unattainable while luring users into a cycle of failure, all in the name of wellness. Get out your BS detectors, folks, and join me as we weigh now on the bullshit scale. Alright, I see NOOM Healthy Weight Loss. It has seven hundred thousand reviews five star reviews, so well, it has a four point seven out of five, so it sounds great. Okay,

it's downloading. It's like a little orange glow. So it says, Noon creates long term results through habit and behavior change, not restrictive dieting. Do you have an important event coming up? I mean one of the events is just summer, so don't choose that. How how confident are you in reaching one pounds by August? I'm uncertain. Why are you uncertain? I haven't had success in the past. Previous plans were

too restrictive. There's a bun I'm going to say, I haven't had success in the past, and I will try to stick with it for a month. Noon I believe considers itself to be a wellness app, not a diet app. Why do you think our culture has moved away from the word diet and toward wellness? I think there's two reasons. The less cynical reason, the positive, let's be generous to people reason is because diet is a negative thing that

people now think about. Diet means eating less, it's stigmatizing people that are overweight, and it's telling you to impose unreasonable, unhealthy restrictions on your eating behavior that aren't going to be good for you. So we're moving away from a diet culture because we're recognizing that dieting is problematic and we're using another term to try and capture something which is more positive and that's you know, that's a good thing. Yeah, that sounds like it's at least the right idea. It's

the right idea behind that. Anything which is about changing your diet or eating less in your diet to lose weight is still really a dieting culture. My more cynical hat says that it's actually still the same old thing, it's just being slightly rebranded. Dr Gene Ogden is a professor of health psychology at the University of Surrey in the UK. She spent the last thirty years teaching, researching and writing about the intersection of psychology, food and health.

Her six books include Health Psychology, The Psychology of Eating and Fat Chance The Myth of Dieting explained. My key area is to look at how psychology in terms of the perception of hunger, the meaning of food, the lives that we live, the childhoods that we have, the experiences we have in the world that we live in shape our relationship with food and make it very hard for

us to actually eat less and to stay well. So, can you talk about some examples of unhealthy diet fads, either past or current, Just to give us a little context. I mean, there's an endless slimming products, which are just drinks really that you have as meal substitutes. There was the Beverly Hills diets, which said you just eat lots and lots and lots of fruits. You have constant diarrhea, and there was a quote from it which said something like the more time you spend on the toilet, the better.

There was the cabbage soup diet, where you just drink and eat cabbage soup, which gives you the most horrendous wind. You spend a lot of your time bloated. It's very unsociable, but friends have no friends, No one ever wants to be near you. But eventually you lose a lot of weight because you're just eating cabbage soup. I mean, that's the thing, you know. If you eat cabbage soup for six weeks, you're loot weight. If you have diarrhea for six weeks, you will lose weight. And that is the

problem with the diet industry and always has been. Is there anyone can invente anything to get you to lose weight, but you cannot maintain that for any length of time, So all weight pretty much goes back on again. That's also the money making fabulousness of the diet industry is it's designed to fail. So if you design a product which fails, people keep coming back and buying more of

the product. So we're here to talk about Noon, the weight loss app that seems to be sweeping the world, and it's an app that promises to help as many people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change, and their flagship product, as best I can tell, is essentially a diet and psychology app rolled into one. And I understand that you've actually downloaded NEWM the past and and taking a look at it. What were your initial thoughts or impressions of new I mean, I like the idea

that they're trying to bring psychology into it. I think that they're trying to take a holistic view of the individual, which is also a really good thing. My feeling when I've had a look at it is that it probably hasn't got as much psychology in it as I would like, and also it's not as careful about not doing harm as I think it probably should be. So anybody can go on it unless you've got to be am I under eighteen point five which includes an awful lot of

people that don't need to lose weight. I would say, if you'll be a eyes between twenty and twenty five, don't try and lose weight. Why would you try and lose weight, because you're fine as you are. Growing up, Like I remember, we'd get US Weekly and Cosmopolitan magazine and like just the women in there, It's like, yeah, celebrities were just so thin. And we were obsessed with celebrity culture when I was growing up, and I'm not

so much anymore. But we would just like inspect these magazines and like to say, how good these women looked. And we always talked about like we want to look like them, Like how do we look like them? I feel like the way I look is the most important thing. Sometimes. I used to have a certain body that I don't have anymore, and I'm always trying to get back to that body. Like I've stayed the same way for the past two years, and I've been trying to like lose

the same five pounds for that that time. But I'm also wondering, like maybe I'm just getting older and my metabolism slowing down, and this is just what I weigh now and it's just what I look like now, which I might just have to come to terms with. But um, yeah, so I'd love to hear you talk about out the connections between physical health, mental health, and emotional well being

when it comes to food. So for me, it's very very clear that the mind and body are related, absolutely interrelated, so that how we think, our emotions, our childhoods are learning have a direct impact upon our physical bodies and our physical health, and our physical health has a direct relationship on how we think and how we feel and our emotional well being. So those two things are very

clearly interrelated. Everybody has a very personal relationship with food, a personal relationship with their physical bodies, and also a meaning around the body size that they have. That is why trying to change somebody's eating behavior is so incredibly difficult, because food means something to each person in a very

different way. And what you need to do to get someone to change their eating behavior is to first understand the role that food plays in their lives and then help them see that role of food and then help them change that. And that's a very difficult thing to do, right, So can dieting. Lest we just curse the darkness. Can dieting ever actually benefit a person's health, Like, is there

such a thing as a beneficial diet? Absolutely? And that's where the word diet, you know, has been kind of I don't know, has has got so much kind of negativity around it where it's ruined. There's nothing wrong with deciding to eat more healthily, to change your diet and to make healthier choices, and that's got to be a

good thing for you. And if that involves reducing your calorie and take eating fewer snacks, making sure that you have more fruit and vegetables, or that you have brown bread rather than white bread, or that you don't deep fry your foods, those are all dietary choices and those are sustainable. And if that's called a diet, so be it. But that's sustainabul and that can work. I started on Friday.

It's been good. I don't hit it. There's like these little mini lessons that I have to complete every day and it starts out like newm one oh one. So it's kind of just trying to tell you about the psychology of what you're eating. One of the first lessons was like start eating less dense, so it categorizes like fruits and veggies are green. It like encourages you to

eat as many fruits and veggies as you want. Then there's like a yellow category, which are things that you are supposed to eat moderation, and then there's an orange category, which are things that you're not supposed to eat a lot of. It hasn't been as hard as I thought to track calories. There's a weight loss though, So if you're in the zone, you're good. I'd love your take on on some of the more technical aspects of the program. So, first of all, New employs a traffic light system for

categorizing all foods. What is your perspective just on that kind of categorization. I think actually that quite effective. You're not saying these are good or bad food, so I think sometimes that kind of dichotomized demonizing a food can be quite problematic. But you're giving people fairly simple information saying these are the foods to go for fill your plate up with these, So it's a fairly simple way

of doing that. When you drill down into the nitty gritty of that, it can become a little bit problematic because things like nuts, which are good for you are also really high fat, so you know where do they belong. It's not like smoking, where you can say don't smoke cigarettes are bad for you. There's very few just bad foods. I'd love to get perspective on a couple of other new strategies here. So one is to weigh yourself every day.

It's you know, theoretically it's a good motivational strategy because you get instant feedback. So the thing about behavior change is quite often the goals are in this short term, but the rewards are in the long term. So you know, you want to lose weight now, but the reward is that you won't have a heart attack when you're saying ext or that you will not get diabetes in the future years, and that steels such a long way in the future that people just ignore that and they really

want immediate benefits. The problem with weighing yourself every day is a weight naturally fluctuates, and from our studies, weighing yourself every day was good and reinforcing if your weight went down. But if your weight goes up because of whatever else is happening in your life, then that can lead to kind of catastrophizing and thinking oh god, it's hopeless. All the effort I put in yesterday, why bother? And

I still didn't lose weight. So you're far better off getting the reinforcement not on the body weight, but the reinforcement on the behavior. So it's andy, do I four and yesterday and to do? I wait in at one one five points six, which is the lowest I've been in time. I'm happy about it. Another thing that the new map asks for actually is for you to enter a goal weight, and in some cases with a timeline attached, so a goal weight for an upcoming event, a wedding

or a vacation something like that. How do you feel about that? Well, again, it's double edged. Sorry, this is going to be my answer to everything. So the research shows that it's good to plan and it's good to set goals. So it's no good saying to yourself I will eat well or I will lose weight. You need to say I will eat well tomorrow, and I will eat this, this and this, and I will lose weight

by next Saturday or lose weight by June. So goal setting is really good if that goal setting is based around, you know, stereotypes of having to be thin for your wedding, or stereotypes of wanting to go to a party and looking attractive by having lost a bit of weight, or wanting to be beach ready and get onto the beach in your bikini. That's not great because that's really forcing the stereotypes that you know, the only way to be attractive is to be thinner. And the other problem is

that when goals fail, we then feel worse about ourselves. Okay, today with one eighteen point for which I'm a little disappointed in um. The other day I was like one sixteen something, So I will lock that in newm now. And one of the things I assume you'll think this is a good thing, but I don't know. One of the other things the app asked you to do is ten minutes of what they call CBT cognitive behavioral therapy per day. Well, if that's kind of encouraging mindful eating,

that's probably quite a good thing. If it's encouraging being kind to yourself, that's a good thing. And if it's encouraging changing the way you think about food, I think that's a good thing. The problem with that is that again, all those thoughts that we have and the role of food in our lives is so personalized. It's quite good to have someone to help us do that really, just to ask you how does food feature in your life and then try and change the way that we think

about foods. So I think it's you know, it's slightly easy just tossing that out as a kind of psychological bits to do a bit of CVT, you need to properly support and structure that process. The reason I'm making this audio diary is because I just got a new one on one coach and I just, what's a little

confused about what she said to me. She just sent me an intro message and it says, I'm your coach, Catherine, And she read my Big Picture survey, which is like the big thing I want to complete at the end of noon, And I said that I want to run ten miles um. But she said, after reading a Big Picture survey, it sounds like you were motivated to give yourself what you know that you deserve, making yourself a priority. It can be tough to live life to the fullest

when you do not feel comfortable in your body. What excites you the most about the possibility of hitting those ten miles um? I thought That was a little strange, that message, because it starts with saying that I'm not comfortable in my body, and that is not something I said in my big picture. Running ten miles is a fitness goal and it really has nothing to do with how other people see me. I think it would just make me really proud if I could do it without walking. Yeah,

I'm I'm confused about her message. So is this just a bump in the road that leads to a healthier life or is there something fundamentally flawed about noons approach the conclusion the Hayley's Thirty Days of New and News final BS score right after the break definitely falling behind on the lessons. They're feeling a little repetitive, so it's

kind of a challenge to do them. I was frustrated this weekend because I pizza and ice cream on Friday and I weighed myself and I it like one up, like two pounds, like almost back to where I started. And it was just like frustrating and annoying because I want to be able to enjoy pizza and ice cream sometimes, but my weight is not really going down. I mean,

I guess we'll see, but it's almost three weeks. But I do feel like healthier overall, Like I'm definitely When I want to snack, I'm like, oh, eat a handful of cherries instead of a handful of chips. But it is getting harder to do it, Like it's getting harder to track everything I eat. Eat and New makes you obsessive because I constantly have to do the lessons. I can't have to lick my food. I have to put

in my exercise like you're always in New. One of the other things that the app asked you to do is track all of your food and count all of your calories. Well, so there's also attention. All of this is so problematic. It's all problematic because a good thing is to eat mindfully. It's a fine line between eating mindfully and becoming obsessed with what you're eating. The chances are if you're a bit that way inclined, you will slip across into food obsession. And I think that's the problem.

You know, what you really want is for food to be a bit of your life, but not everything in your life. I got a new phone, and yeah, my new all my new progress is gone. My one on one coach has been super unresponsive. She only answers like every three days. UM, so she really hasn't been helping me much. And I contacted support and they said that

she's the only one that can reset my progress. So it's been four or five days that I haven't been able to like do my lessons, which I'm realizing our big part of the motivation for me to be in the app. I feel like I definitely had a plateau recently. I am definitely not as good about portion sizes. I'm definitely going back to some of the bad habits that I had before I started. Now. I think I was so excited in the beginning, and now it's just like

this is getting old? Is new? Getting it right? Would you say? Or do they have some work to do? I think the thing about any app, including Noom, is that they are only as good as the people who carry on using them. So you have to carry on using an app in order for it to work. And any app, including Noom, has got a high drop out rate. So I think that's the first problem, is that it's not helping as many people as it perhaps would like to do because people are dropping out of the actual app.

I think the second thing is that it's always in danger of doing harm. So that's always a problem with weight loss. Always a problem with food is that we can slither into doing harm very quickly. If it works, some people feel better about themselves. If it stops working, then people feel worse about themselves. So it's it's always getting that balance, really, And I think the other thing is it's dealing with people who don't necessarily need to

lose weight for their health. That's problematic. It needs to target people who I would say, you know, be am I thirty and above, maybe twenty seven and above, nobody else, and then those people can benefit from it, but no one else is potentially harmed from it. Hello. Today is Friday, July twenty two, and it's been a week now since I lost my progress um and someone at support said, why don't you try deleting the app and reinstalling the app. So I did that and now all my progresses back

to where it was. I can see my lessons, So I'm really excited to start doing lessons again. I'm looking at my weight graph, excited to have it back so I can see my progress, and yeah, it looks like it's mostly going down. I mean it's definitely fluctuated. A lot um started at one one point four, then a week later I went back up to one one eight, then it went back up to one one seven point eight, and now it's been declining for a couple of days. And I see this little red at the one one twelve.

It looks pretty far away, but it looks like it's trying to get me there by mid August. So maybe I can do it. And So if says you Jong, the co founder and CEO of the company, we're here, what kind of advice would you give him about changes that he ought to consider making to the app in order to serve and help as many people as possible. What I would say is that it's about building in as many short term rewards as possible really into the system, and you should always focus on the behavior and the

feeling and not the weight. The problem is is that this goes back to our initial discussion about whether it's a diet app or a well being app. We still live in a dieting world, and a dieting world is

people who want to lose weight. So you need to find a way of saying will make you happy, we will help you develop healthier habits and have a good relationship with food and being more active and then and by the way, you might also lose some weight, but you take weight out of the picture really right, exactly, I mean the focus of the app. It puts weight right at the center, and that does feel like the

emphasis is wrong. If they truly believe in helping people live healthier lives, so the ideal app would actually not address food at all in a way and make it or or at least try to de emphasize it. It would emphasize weight. I would de emphasize weight. I think right, Hello, it's Saturday, July four, Um, I think for my thirty days is tomorrow, and I am being less restrictive than I was at the beginning of this, and my weight is not my weight is kind of plate towing because

of it. Just thinking about what I was about being less restrictive with my diet, I think, I'm I'm pretty proud of the way I've lost and I worked out four times this week, and um, I also feeling good about the way I've been eating, um and hoping to continue to all this weight, but but pretty happy with the with the results so far. So you know with an app like noomor with Noom, you're going to set a goal. If you meet it, you feel great. If you fail, you feel like you've failed. If you lose weight,

you feel great. If you haven't lost weight, then you feel rubbish about yourself. And so it only works for those people that it works for, and then it could possibly do harmful all the people that it doesn't work for, which is why they drop out. Today I weighed myself and I weighed one one eight point four, just the same weight when I started new and I don't know what happened. I feel very frustrated. I'm just I feel like I put a lot of effort into it. I

put a lot of time into it. I really wanted to be I've been like steadily at and I wanted to end this on that note like, oh I had lost three pounds, like I did it um, but no. One of my big goals was to just work out more. I basically have been running three times a week for the past month, which I feel so good about. And I can just tell that I'm getting stronger, so I am really proud of that. I just find like the scale very confusing because I like literally just jumped from

one seven yesterday and then I jumped again today. So I'm like, did I actually lose three pounds? I don't think I did. I think this is just like the way I am, and I'm just I'm just thinking that I really don't know what way it means. And I don't want to put so much pressure on losing five pounds because there are some good habits I've learned from Noon, and yeah, and I want I want to take that away. Okay,

this is my last question for you, Jane. We have something on this show we call the BS scale, and it goes from zero to one. On our scale, zero is the best I eat zero BS and a hundred is the worst total BS. So, given that Noon's mission is to help as many people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change, what score would you give New And I'm allowed to justify this on tie of course you are yes, very interesting and why well, okay, I

would give them probably a forty I think zero. Okay, So I admire some of what they're trying to do. I admire that they are making it more psychological, admire that they are bringing in goals. I admire that they are trying to get people to do a bit of CBT, and I admire their their big picture thinking. I mean, how wonderful to change as many people as possibles relationship with food and well being and health and and all of that. I think that's fabulous. At the same time,

I think they're setting their sites far too high. I think they're underestimating the possibility of doing harm to those people that they include in it. And I think they're including too many people. I think they need to be more selective in who they collect in their little group so that they can minimize how much harm they do. But I mean, as a marketing strategy, fabulous. I mean, let's have world health and peace and the rest of it. That's as goal, isn't it, which you know isn't going

to be met. Yeah, Jane, thank you. I've so enjoyed talking to you today. Thank you for coming on the show. You're very welcome. You're very welcome. Everybody has a complex relationship with food, and helping users to understand this relationship and ultimately make choices that will serve their health is a massive goal for any company, and a noble one to so. In some ways, I understand newmes approach here.

We do need to have some way of measuring health, but his body weight or body size the right metric. Newmes stated purpose is to help as many people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change, and there's no doubt that the app has helped tens of thousands of people. But as Jane points out, they've set their sights too high.

After following Haley's journey, I will say that Noon certainly seems to be pulling off the behavior change part of their purpose, but their end goal of health is at odds with some of their tactics. Overall, I have to say my PS detector is pegged higher than Jayne's Noons approach to eating and health is definitely more similar to the diets that preceded than it is different. But Noons

position certainly doesn't feel hopeless. We'll be back right after the break to talk through some concrete ways that Noon can close the gap between word and deed. Okay, I am very excited to get into today's panel. I want to ask you both to first introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your work. Let's start with you. Sure, um, Hi, everyone, my name is Ealings. Hi. I'm a registered dietitian based in Brooklyn, New York, and I currently provide nutrition counseling

through a private practice. UM. I have a special interest in supporting those with eating disorders or anywhere along the spectrum of disordered eating, as well as those with endocrine related conditions like diabetes. I practice nutrition through the lens of weight inclusivity, and I do my work informed by the theories of intuitive eating, mindful eating, health at every size, and other non diet approaches to nutrition. M love that. Thank you. UM Okay, Taylor your turn. Hi. Everyone, I'm

Taylor Madjuski. I am a journalist based in San Francisco, California. I started my career writing about technology, but over the past couple of years have really started to cover health and science more in a out of my work touches on those topics through a gender lens. And I'm so excited to be here. Awesome, let's jump right in. Each one of you has come prepared with an idea to help new better live up to their mission, which is just to remind folks to help as many people as

possible live healthier lives through behavior change. Taylor I'm gonna let you go first, this time in two minutes or less. What's the one thing that you would change about now? Sure?

So last year I wrote an article on newon. I investigated them for a couple of months, and I think that the biggest thing that stands out for me is that new claims that it's grounded in evidence based science, and to their credit, they have published a number of scientific, peer reviewed articles, but I think that none of these studies support its central marketing claim, which is that it will help you lose weight and keep it off for life. And that's sort of the ultimate claim in the diet

weight loss world. And the study that they cite to support this was published in and that tract users for seventy two weeks. And so I think that my suggestion is quite simple, and it's simply to conduct a longer and more robust scientific study because they need academic research on long term behavior change to support their claims. Great idea, and that makes a ton of sense, right, If you're going to say it, you've got to be able to

back it up. Thank you, link. I'm gonna ask you to go, now, what's the one thing that you would do to help newm better do their story. Yeah, I mean I have so many issues just with the mission statement just starting there. You know, in my opinion, it's pretty steeped in health is um, which is this idea that health is a within someone's control and their responsibility is something that they have a moral obligation to fulfill.

You know, the fact that they focus just on behavior change really leaves out some of the structural systems that can really impact someone's health, like economic status, housing status, employment rachel by us in the healthcare SISM. I could go on, and so I think the mission statement itself

is already pretty faulty logic. I think once we get into the meat of the product, it's a weight loss tool, and we also know that there's a lot of physical and mental emotional harm that comes with intentional weight loss and weight cycling. So my suggestion for new to better improve their company and just do better in general, is to scrub all of the diet and weight related messaging

from their platform. I know it sounds extreme, but the way they're currently conducting business is perpetuating a lot of harm, particularly for people who have vulnerable relationships with food and their body. To be in with so I would invite them to untie the cognitive behavioral therapy part from the

promise of weight loss and improved health. Maybe maintain a platform that's educational and allows people to learn about how they each have developed their own relationship with food and body, but not make this promise that by acknowledging some of the psychological components of eating that you'll automatically lose weight and become a healthier person. That's a very valid idea. My fear has always been that we're all going to come up with the same ideas, but I think we

have slightly different takes on this. So um, I'm very curious to know what the experts think. I I submit this humbly because I know very little about this, but it's fair to say that there are a lot of folks in the medical community who seem to believe that the measurement that matters more to health is your body mass index. And the other relevant fact to my idea is that we have an obesity crisis in the US, and all the science agrees that obesity causes a bunch

of health problems. So here's my idea. If Newon really is a health and wellness app, then it should be guiding us to a place where getting your b m I into the healthy range is the goal. So for reference, a healthy b m I is supposedly between eighteen point

five and about twenty five. So if you're already in the healthy range, let's say up to five, it should discourage you from even setting a weight loss goal and discourage you from counting calories, and maybe that functionality is actually turned off in the app below a b m I of to really discourage it, because the current apps obsession with weight goals and calorie counting feels so much more like a diet app than a health app. So that's my idea. I would guess that they've emphasized dieting

because it's the ultimate sort of business model, right. It's super hard to lose weight and keep weight off, so they know you're going to fail and you keep paying, and that's kind of the special sauce. I mean, the diet industry has thrived for years on that dynamic. So I guess my question is do we think that there is a viable business model that isn't about losing weight?

I would argue there is because people do have a desire to learn and have insight about their relationship with their body and food, But the only way we've ever talked about that is in relation to weight, and so I think neutral information would then help people make informed decisions about how they would like to eat and maybe even connecting that to how they feel when they eat different foods. So I don't think we're losing an opportunity to have people engage with the company if we were

to eliminate weight loss as the goal. Yeah, that makes sense, Taylor. Do you have any any thoughts about that? Yeah, so many thoughts, Like there's two things happening here. It's a business that's targeting your health, and I think that those things often are just in conflict with each other. You kind of maybe get roped into that education piece of Okay, I want to kind of start to learn, like how

the things that I eat affect me or whatever. But then what they're capitalizing and it is all of the different signals that are all around us all the time that are saying beef in lose weight. At the end of the day, their business, they're trying to make money, so they're trying to sell you something. When I reported on them, the sort of growth at all costs mentality

came up all the time. And I think this is a larger problem with like health tech in general, which is that, like these are businesses, they have to grow at all costs. There is venture capital dollars behind them,

and so they have pressure to do so. And I think that we need to be very wary of that when it comes to like actually using these products to address health concerns that we might have, Because wanting to lose weight or wanting to take some control over your health is a perfectly valid thing to want to experience, Like we all care about our bodies. It's our vessel for living. It's so hard because health and capitalism aren't

conflict with each other on a fundamental level. Yeah, I very much agree that this sort of the big like health and tech and and and capitalism, how do they work together? So newm is making money off of people being promised to lose weight, not necessarily if they are you know, um, sustainably. I think that goes back to what Taylor said about getting a study going. We just don't have the evidence, necessarily, num or otherwise that weight

loss can be sustained. But I did want to address this thought about um tie your idea of b m I. That's what That's what I was going to bring up, is that is that a valid measure? Yeah, I don't fault you at all for thinking b m I first, Right, my backgrounds in public health, so all of the research we had to read use b m I as a way to categorize people and then learn about different outcomes.

But actually there's been a lot of dialogue recently, and not not just recently, but I think it's gaining steam that really can see all of the many faults within the b m I too. So just to clarify what it is, it is just a mathematic, full equation of height and weight that was developed by an astronomer a long time ago, UM to just generally understand the average man and also Caucasian man. Right. It's also very it's

a very non inclusive measure exactly, That's exactly right. And so the b m I does not do a good job of giving us any indication of somebody's health. The truth is that in my experience counseling people in lots of different settings, is that people can uh work through ways of changing parts of their behavior to better manage

a medical condition. It doesn't mean the lose weight or that their b m I will change, but indicators of health like their blood pressure, or like their cholesterol, or like their feelings of well being, our stamina and all those things can still be improved. So I would invite us to just think more broadly about what other ways we can define health and make sure people are defining that for themselves. Some thoughts on that, and I think

this also comes back to health tech. Health apps like new who promise personalization because health is personal when you sign up for an app, how much can a questionnaire really gather about your health when it's trying to appeal to that large of an audience. I think actually being honest about the limitations of your technology and what you can deliver to improve people's health can help to earn trust, to be like, you know, we can't offer this right now,

but we're working on it. Or take this information, bring it to your doctor. There are companies that do that sort of thing, and I think it really from a marketing perspective at least, like really helps to build that trust. That's another thing is if if their body language as an app was we're constantly learning, We're trying to improve all the time. And so, for instance, to your your idea, Taylor, of them fielding a study to get at a better grip on you know, what works and what doesn't in

weight loss, that could be an ongoing thing. In other words, there could be a drop down that says, these are the ten studies that we have going right now, would you like to participate in any of them as a user?

And you know, maybe they pay you to participate, or maybe the app is free if you participate in studies, or and so that the relationship that you forge with people is you're both learning together as opposed to we are the people who know everything and you are just going to count your calories and and lose four pounds, right, mm hmm exactly. I think I would like that app better.

Maybe I think I would to. I also think it would be so interesting in such an opportunity for a company to talk about health in terms that are not so so quantitative. It's not necessarily something that can be

boiled down to one number. But for example, maybe there could be encouraging someone to go to the doctor and make all their fallow up appointments I think it'd be interesting to think about actual actions that people could take that just connect them to their health without saying and then now you're also going to be rated or even pitted against yourself. Here's where you were last year, look at where you are now. That type of thing. Yeah, I think it comes down to the value system that

they're enacting. Kind of as it stands right now, there's a lot of value on Thinness because, for example, again even going through that onboarding today, they were asking questions that I had seen before around you know, do you want to lose weight for an upcoming event like a vacation or a wedding. That's not weight neutral. That's valuing Thinness.

And to be fair, they are trying the cognitive behavior therapy functionality in there that that's maybe a place where I'd give them credit is like they are trying to differentiate themselves as a company by saying we're not just wait last you know, you're you're gaining insight into yourself, but we we shouldn't be equating those two that gaining and say into yourself means you need to lose weight and will right, Taylor, just I want to delve into

for a moment. The comment that you made about growth, that impulse seems to be a very common impulse in let's call it Silicon Valley startups. There is a culture of rapid growth. So what would you do to address that? Yeah, so it's tricky because it's systemic. Silicon Valley is often funded by venture capital dollars, and that's where the growth had all costs come from. Because again, these are businesses.

You know, it's very common within a tech company to also call people who use your product users, like that's just the thing. And so I think that also, like us reducing us reducing people at the end of the line to users also serves to abstract that there's a harsh reality to the kind of end experience of these products. Makes sense. Healing a question for you. I'd love to hear you just talk a little bit more about how

class income play into health issues. For instance, it feels like inherently there may be an unmet opportunity for new to reach out to a more diverse set of people to begin with, if they, you know, really want to

build a healthier world for everybody. Yeah, I mean, what does strike me about news branding is it it's extremely whitewash, and you can see just from the onboarding the graphics they use that it's meant for a very narrow demographic and that really is in conflict with their mission of a healthier world or as many people as possible, you know.

But you know, in my experience it's just working in a couple of different settings all around New York, we ignore so many of the systems that impact people's health and just keep laying it back on to the individual and saying you're just not eating well enough, when really we're leaving out sort of just to name a few, you know, employment status, how many people are you feeding off of your paycheck? How are you getting to work?

And the other thing that comes to mind for me is just how much bias exists in the medical community. I'm including the dietetics field, the field that I work in.

If someone is coming in in a larger body, there's an automatic assumption that they're not healthy before a provider can even check a single vital and so you know, this is it's all wrapped up, and I think when we talk about health, we really really have to be including that, including racial bias too, in terms of how much we believe people are in pain when they say they are, or how much do we believe them when

they say they eat vegetables. I think there's just a lot of bias that gets integrated into the healthcare process um that we have to be really honest about. That brings up another thing for me, which I'd love to hear either of you have an opinion about. You know, it's a really hard thing as I think about it, but I was watching Bill Maher talk about it the other day. There's the body positivity movement, which seems like a really good thing, just helping people feel better about

where they're at physically. At the same time, there are real implications, like health implications for obesity, and we also have created a a system where if you are lower income, it is much harder to find and be able to afford healthy food. And so it's like there's this vortex of forces all in opposition to one another, Like where does body positivity meet the medical need to a void obesity? You know what I mean? How do you how do

you adjudicate that? You know, the obesity crisis. It sounds scary when you talk about it, but really what we know through the research is that we actually cannot draw a causal relationship between weight status and health outcomes. Things are correlated, I'm not saying they aren't. In the research, we're always looking at correlation verse causation, because that's really where we can understand true relationships and how to improve

the health outcome. And so when we talk about the obesity epidemic, it continues to perpetuate this idea that it's about losing weight when we really want to acknowledge that there's no single disease that someone in a larger body gets that someone in a smaller body doesn't get. People in smaller bodies get high blood pressure, they get cancer, they have strokes. This so absolutely exactly, So I really

feel it's important like to pull back on that, but don't. Yeah, and if forgive me if I'm wrong about this, but maybe I've been brainwashed, Like I have the strong impression that people who are to use the term obese are at higher risk for some of those things like diabetes.

Is that not true or is that true? What we do know is that they can manage their diabetes and they can improve um the way there condition shows up in their body in ways that don't necessarily lead to the weight loss that they're told they need to achieve. You know, we could be talking about gentle movement, we could be talking about stress reduction, medication management, and eating. But if we were to frame it like if you just were to lose twenty pounds, I'm pretty sure your

blood suckers would even out. This is not helpful language to the person who's trying to manage their condition, and it doesn't really give them the tangible information to take control or feel empowered. As I think about that, it maybe it's about essentially the value exchange between them and

its customers that feels off. It's like Noon could be doing more to add value for people beyond just helping them count calories and lose a few pounds, right, They really could transform the relationship that people have with food and with their bodies. But they're not really doing that yet.

And my hunch would be that they're not doing that because maybe they haven't figured out a way for that to serve their bottom line of making money and growing, and maybe there's an opportunity just to add like for Noon to not just give information but also offer support as they're attempting to do right now at their newon coaches because just as many people who have attempted a diet, I'm guessing that's the same number of people who have been burned by a diet and are looking for other

ways to connect with food and people who have gone through similar experiences them. So perhaps it's an opportunity to be UM kind of like a like a support network where you could, I don't know, create a community in his innocence UM. So it's not just information exchange, but as connected to each other. Yeah, I think there could

be valid that's interesting. Yeah, Okay, So are there any other questions or ideas or topics that we have not touched on that you think our listeners should should know about. The one thing that I think when I reported on newm that stuck out to me was the sort of tactics they were using, at least for me, felt very triggering for someone who struggled in my adolescence and beyond with an eating disorder and disordered eating. I felt a

little like, oh, it must just be me. When I first tried the app and then I started to report on it months later, and going through the app store reviews and seeing so many folks echo the experience that I felt when I tested it out, or even going so far as to say like this triggered, like this started and needing disorder. I think that those apper views are really alarming, big red flag. I was really pleasantly surprised to see when I went through the onboarding today

that they now screen for. They asked you if you actively have an eating disorder. My my other idea, and I think it's a quick fix, is just also screening for anyone with a history of an eating disorder. Agreed? Okay, So on this show, we end every every session with a tool that we call the BS Index, and the way it works is it goes from zero to a hundred, zero being the best, zero bs on being the worst.

BS so on a scale of zero to a hundred in terms of New really living its purpose to help as many people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change. What BS score would we give New I'll ask you to go first. Yeah, oh gosh, I know I'm going to be pretty tough on them. I would I would give them like an um uh, just because I think most of as we've talked about, it just sounds like they're trying to make money, and they have not been that creative in terms of a way to make money.

I mean, I give them a couple of points credit because they do try to do it. I have an educational component, but I just think they actually weaponize that further into saying if you change this, then you would just eat less. So I think they're pretty full of it. Okay, Taylor, Yeah, I think I have to be tough to and be somewhere in the nineties. I'll give them like a ninety four. When I think about a lot with new is that people wanting to take control of their health and wait

is not a bad thing. I think that for many people it can improve their mental health, it can improve their actual health like physical health. So I would never fault people for using it. For certain people, it might be delivering on the promise, which is why I would give them a couple of points. But I think as a company they have a lot of things to work on. Yeah, great story, they just need to do it right and they're not doing it yet. So I think those scores

are I mean, they're tough, but they're fair. Okay. I want to thank you both for being on the show today. This was a great conversation, thank you. Definitely alright, folks, it's time for Noon to officially step on the BS scale. On the one hand, they do take a more holistic approach to weight loss that some people find genuinely helpful.

On the other hand, we still live in a world that values thinness, and instead of changing that conversation, Noon is profiting from and in some cases, exacerbating the insecurities of the people who use it. You heard our two panelists give new really high scores, while dr Ogden gave it a more diplomatic forty. And there's one more opinion to consider, Hi, TI. If I were reading NEWM on the B S Scale, I'd say the food portion tracking of the app definitely changed my relationship to food for

the worst while I was using it. But the mindfulness and the CBT portion and the slowing down when I eat and realizing why I'm eating what I'm eating if it's because I'm stressed, I really liked. So if I were giving them a B S score, I would give them a sixty five because I did learn a lot of good things on there, But ultimately it was detrimental for my mental health. I was really caught off guard by her reaction. Haileyway into this with an open mind,

but also with a healthy skepticism. We are called calling bullshit after all, and still was profoundly impacted by going through the new process and another factor in the final BS score. In August, NEWM announced several changes. They've increased their calorie flexibility and done away with the red food rating, making all previously red foods orange and saying that quote changing the color signifying high density foods to orange is just as intuitive for our numbers, but doesn't carry the

same emotional or cultural influence as the color red. They've also added a new feature that allows NEWM users to manually change their daily calories to meet the needs of a more diverse population, and they've become less rigid about daily weigh ins instead encouraging more flexibility around the scale.

To me, all of this says that new really listens to their customers and welcomes change, but the current experience still focuses too much on weight and too little on the attributes they claim to value in their purpose health, wellness and behavior change. So I'm giving now a score of sixty four that puts new in our red zone on the BS index, the zone where we believe it's already harming their reputation and will eventually harm their business.

Saves you Young and Artem Petakov. If either of you ever want to come on the show to discuss anything we've touched on today, please know that you both have an open invitation. And if you're starting a purpose led business or thinking about beginning the journey of transformation to become one, here are three things you can take away from today's episode. One, if you're a weight loss business, say it, and if you don't say it, don't be it. NOOM claims its purpose is to help as many people

as possible live healthier lives through behavior change. Great purpose, but a massive amount of the current new experience is devoted to weight loss. Not great. Two. Once you've decided what your purposes, be an activist. Beyond passively changing the app experience. There's an opportunity for Newon to lead a huge shift in our culture by getting busy educating people about where real health comes from. Three. Money is important. If your company is a body, then money is like blood.

Without it, you won't make it. But when it comes to money, be long term, greedy, trying to maximize your profitability in the short term is a playbook long followed by Silicon Valley vcs that we're now discovering has some deeply toxic side effects. Noom needs to be patient and build a real health company. As an entrepreneur, you need to be patient too. I want to give a really special thank you to our very own Haley Pascalites, who

was willing to thoroughly document her personal experience here. Haley, You're a shining star and we appreciate you. If this episode gave you a healthy appetite for detecting more bs, subscribe to the Calling Bullshit podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to people speaking to your ears. Please take a minute to rate us on iTunes and let us know what you think

of the show. More reviews help more people find us, and thanks to our production team Hannah Beale, Amanda Ginsburg, d s Moss, Hailey Pascalites, Parker Silzer, and Basil Soaper. Calling Bullshit was created by co Collective and it's hosted by Me Time onto you. Thanks for listening.