Bonus: Fad Diets

Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the bonus episode of a podcast that will teach you how to lose. Ten pounds a day for three weeks straight. It's safe, we promise. This is the episode where we finally launch our fad diet. This is it. Mask off. Wait, no, now I want to know what your fad diet would be. It would be biking around all day.

getting really hungry but not eating anywhere because you're a huge food snob and then coming home and roasting like thirty one sweet potatoes and eating all of them. What would yours be? Crash diet probably for the summer only. That is like you can only eat what you grow. Ooh. I have Seven patty pan squash.

From my garden in my fridge right now, and do I have a plan for them? No, I do not. That's too many. That's the most Portland sentence you've ever said on this show. I really am just a caricature. You're actually a sketch that I've been doing. I'm doing both voices on this podcast. This whole time. Surprise, it's me. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I totally forgot that we hadn't introduced ourselves. Well, we don't have to do this because everybody's a Patreon supporter. I'm just trying to figure out how to transition into the actual content of the show. Sure. Good job. Good job. You're doing it. Thank you. Today we're talking about fad diets. I'm so excited. Me too. So we asked you all to uh write in to us about your wildest fad diets and you all did.

Um we got last I checked it was over five hundred. My guess is that now it's closer to six or seven hundred. Thank you all. I literally thought we were gonna get like at most like seventy. I was like, I don't know if anybody's gonna actually do this, Aubrey. Totally well and you were also like, uh look, I don't want you to get I I uh

am the person who checks our email address most frequently and you were like, I don't want us to get flooded and I was like, We are not gonna get flooded. I am not worried. And then we totally fucking did. And then we totally did. Which is great. Yeah. It's totally great. What was your like overall impression? Like, what were the themes that emerged?

Well, first of all I will say I I'm I'm gonna guess that like fifteen percent of the emails alone were about the cabbage soup diet. Wild and everyone who wrote in thought it was just a their weird family thing. Oh wow. Someone wrote it and was like, I don't know if this made it outside of Germany and someone else was like, This was a real Australian sensation. And like people really thought it was like just

Like a number of people were like, My family did this thing where we just ate cabbage soup all the time and it was terrible. We need to do an episode because this is like the platonic ideal of a fad diet, the cabbage soup thing. Absolutely. And I don't have a sense of why that one caught fire and other ones didn't because like it's not like people even like cabbage soup that much.

Like, at least on Atkins you could just like eat a bunch of bacon. I mean, I think it's the same kind of thing as the Master Cleanse and like a bunch of other things where it's just sort of like If it's restrictive and you hate it, it probably works the best. It has to be good for you. Yeah. It's sort of the belief system that goes along with it. Yeah. I think what struck me the most is that folks tend to there were very few people who were like, I tried one fad diet once.

And very many people who were like, I tried ten or twenty fad diets. That's interesting. One of them is sort of becomes a gateway drug to all the other ones. And that there's a little bit of like a sunk investment fallacy, right? That's like, well, this first one didn't work, so I gotta keep at it until I find the one that does. Right. There were lots of folks who wrote in about something called a rotation diet, which we'll talk about a little bit today.

A rotation diet is used to describe like that phrase is used to describe like five different approaches. One of them is straight up just you rotate through different diets a week at a time. Oh at least it's honest. So it's just like paleo for a week, keto for a week, Jenny Craig for a week, Nutrisystem for a week, like whatever the things are. And I kind of think like I sort of appreciated that one because it felt like at least like you say, like kind of like honest. Yeah. Nothing's gonna work.

Everything's gonna work a little bit. Nothing's gonna work great. And these are like fundamentally all arbitrary. Yeah. Like it doesn't really matter which one you're doing. Just pick one. Just fucking pick one. It's fine. It's the process of transitioning to a new diet that is probably giving you like a lot of the benefits quote unquote of a diet anyway. So you might as well just switch to a new one constantly. Yeah. We also got a bunch of stuff that we're not actually gonna talk about today.

like the HCG diet or like herbalife or things like that. that are way meatier than just like a quick touch, which is what we're gonna do today. Yeah, those are episodes. Those are full on episodes. Like we are going to get into it about herbalife at some point. Yeah. And and we should say We're gonna dig in on some fad diets today, um, and we're gonna include some listener emails, both the fad diets themselves and the listener emails.

reference specific weights, they reference calorie counts. If those are things that are gonna be hard for you to listen to, this might be one to skip. Yeah. It's all of the stuff. It's all the same shit that's always on our show. You know

Uh, so where should we dive in? Do you wanna do one of yours? Should I do one of mine? What do we what do we have? You know what? I'll start us with the rotation diet. How about that? Yeah, do it. Okay. So a listener named Dawn wrote in to us about the rotation diet. Dawn says, Picture this, nineteen eighty seven, I'm twenty two years old, and I probably weigh around a hundred and fifteen, but felt that I was too fat to wear a bikini. Jesus fucking Christ.

Yeah. I heard about this great and new best thing called the rotation diet. This diet was the first I ever went on and was my gateway into disordered eating. That diet worked so well that I quit menstruating and was severely underweight. The premise was that you rotated a three week

Eating cycle. During the first week, days one through three were six hundred calories, days four through seven were nine hundred calories. You then lived it up at twelve hundred calories for one week. And the third week was a repeat of week one. I remember eating veal and maybe broccoli. I love I love that like the cheat days are like twelve hundred calories.

Our starvation levels. Like two pieces of pizza for like an entire day. Yeah, I mean six hundred calories is such a fucking bummer, man. Yeah, dude. Sadly

I see that the book still exists and the cover lied. I gained back all the weight plus an extra one hundred pounds. I am now fifty six and working through my food shit. Your podcast is brilliant and helps me find the humor as I wade through the crap. Thanks, Dawn. Dawn Don also says I have a pin I'd like to wear on my jean jacket that pictures a burger saying, Fuck your diet because frankly if I have one more person tell me about their intermittent fasting keto

Weight Watchers, Paleo, and a multitude of other shit, I will gouge my eyes out. Yep, I'm fat. All the best, Dawn. Guys, I like Dawn. Dawn seems great. What if this show was a bait and switch and then we just told Dawn to get on the paleo diet? We're like, sorry, Dawn, that one actually works. It's real. Sorry. We're bearing the lead this entire show.

Almost a year. We're actually really into paleo, Don. So totally surprised. The end of this podcast is us just being like, the best diet is Drummerl, please. So I looked into the rotation diet a little bit. It was developed by a psychology uh professor named Martin Catan, who was the head of the Vanderbilt University Weight Management Program. I wanted to read to you from the official book description. So this was a number one New York.

New York Times bestseller of the rotation diet. Of course. Like so many absolute garbage diet books that promise a miracle. So here's the official book description. Lose those unwanted pounds and keep them off once and for all with an easy three-week diet. The rotation diet's unique and simple plan varies the daily calorie intake over a three week period, leading to an average weight loss of thirteen pounds.

Users who have had a great deal of weight to lose may drop up to a pound a day in week one. When the Rotation Diet was first published, more than seventy thousand Nashville. went on the diet and weighed in weekly at supermarkets. What? The results showed this is Michael Hobbs cat name. The results showed that the city became almost a million pounds lighter. Whoa.

This new updated and revised edition of the Rotation Diet offers a scientifically proven maintenance plan that requires only small changes to establish a permanently healthier lifestyle. Wait, did they just say small changes? And Dawn was eating six hundred calories a fucking day? Small changes. Yeah, small changes. Cut your caloric intake by at least a third. This is copy that's written by a marketing person who's trying to sell this book.

But it also becomes how the diet itself gets talked about, right? It's not written by a science communications person. It is reflective of like what's the most impressive sounding thing that we can do that will make people buy this book. And then it becomes sort of the reputation that the diet itself has. Right. Which is like woof a woof. What do you okay. As an accidental scholar in this, what do you think of this thing

of like rotating and changing. Like it's interesting to me Then it's like six hundred calories one day and then twelve hundred the next and then six hundred the next. eight hundred calories every day. Like why is it important that it changes constantly? I mean, I think there's this whole thing around like quote unquote kickstarting weight loss, which is not really a thing.

But as you and I have discussed, like there are lots of diets that will lead to short term weight loss and there's some evidence that shows that our bodies sort of seek and find stasis after a couple of weeks on a diet, which is what leads to what we call plateauing, quote unquote, right? In some ways it feels at least kind of honest, right? To just be like, just fucking pick a diet and cycle through or just like six hundred calories and then eight hundred calories and I don't care.

I suspect there's something about it that keeps people a little more on their toes than just like if you're on the same thing all the time, right? Like this is developed by a psychology professor. Um, so I have no doubt that there's some amount of sort of like Quote unquote life hacking of like human psychology, blah blah blah, that kind of shit. But mostly this one just felt like

A kind of diet that you and I have not talked about a ton, which is just like extreme caloric restriction. Yeah. Which is sort of like the classic, right? Yeah. If there's a classic kind of diet, it's just like Stop eating! Like get as close to not eating as you can. And this one sort of dresses itself up with like psychology and a university and it's a private university. Woo. So maybe all of the rotation is just to like trick your body into like

the extreme just monotony and discomfort of eating that little every day. Yeah, and I also think like a core part of diet marketing is being like We know you've tried everything. Nothing worked until ba ba-da-ba. Uh and people have been saying that and using that sort of communication formula for like a good thirty or forty years at this point, probably longer. They're going after the people that wrote you emails and have like ten bullet points.

Yeah, absolutely. They're going after the repeat offenders. Yeah. Which historically is also me. I was a repeat offender for a long time. Well most people are. I mean like most most fat people have tried everything. It's not like you reach like thirty-seven and you're like, wait, am I fat? Wait. Right. We're not all Ed McMahon. A lot of us do, in fact, know that we're fat.

Uh so that's the rotation diet. Okay. How about you? Tell me about some of the uh tell me about some of the fat diets you found. Okay. I have a funny one and a bittersweet one.

And I'm gonna do the bittersweet one first. Oh, okay. So okay, have you heard of the Shangri-Law diet? I've heard of the Shangri-La diet through these emails, but also I have the diet book. in my diet book collection, but I haven't read it. It sounds really boring. It sounds honestly like

Super padded out. Like my understanding is that the book is almost entirely anecdotes of people who lost weight on the diet. It sounds really boring. Do you know what it is though? My recollection about the Shangri diet is that it's like You're supposed to like drink oil or something before is that right? Yes. Yes, that is true. So uh so I will let listener John explain it.

He says my most ridiculous diet was the Shangri La diet. The method was to swallow one to two tablespoons of vegetable oil morning and night. The boredom of flavor free calories was supposed to suppress your appetite. I couldn't handle the sensation. Not to be indelicate, but it's like swallowing snot. So I'd swallow dozens of flax oil capsules each day instead. I did this for summer and lost twenty pounds before moving on to another diet.

In the years since I put all the weight back on and then some of course. I heard about the diet either in the Freakonomics book or podcast around 2009. The Shangri La Diet is a book by a psychologist. It's basically permission not to eat. I've never felt more gullible. Woof. So my mom did Weight Watchers off and on for a long time, and in one iteration of it, uh in one of the phases of Weight Watchers

you were supposed to eat liver every day. Sure. And my mom truly hates liver. Um, so she would cut it up into little pieces and freeze it and then swallow it like a pill. Oh my God. The flax oil capsules sort of reminded me of that. I I have to imagine that the author of the Shangri-La Diet would take issue with capsules versus like actually swallowing oil. There would be something about

Coating your throat and stomach and blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah. As soon as you hear the parameters of this diet, you're like, Oh, are there gonna be like a bunch of arbitrary rules put on this? So that when it fails for people you can blame the people and not the diet. Yeah. So what did you learn about the Shangri-La diet? So first of all, this stuck out to me because I did the Shangri-La diet. Mike!

I am ashamed. We have this is the first time this has happened on the show. I th one of the reasons I feel so strongly about like this nudge bullshit and like freakonomics bullshit that We talked about in our Brian Wonsink episode is that like I fell for it. Like I was into this stuff in the 2000s. I like watched TED Talks.

I read both freakonomics books. I listened to their podcast religiously for years. It was like one of the first podcasts I listened to. And so I read this infamous column in two thousand five about the Shangri Law Diet. And like I did it, like a lot of other people, I did it for a couple days. And it actually worked really well. Like

This is the diet that works. Here it comes, Aubrey. I'm about I'm about to pitch you an MLM that I'm selling. You recruit three friends and we're all gonna tell people about this diet. Look, I got a garage full of shit that I gotta move. I was living in Copenhagen at the time and I did this diet for like three days and it worked super well. And Then I I a friend of mine was living in Singapore and I was going to visit him.

And I went to Singapore and I just like obviously didn't care about the diet because like Singapore is one of the great food cities of the world and I ate a bunch of great food. And then I came back to Denmark and then like a week after I came back I was like, Oh yeah, I was trying this diet before I left. And then I started again and it just like didn't work. It was neutralized by chili crab. That's the thing I was so In Singapore

I was so full of crab at that point. The crabs canceled it out. But so, okay. Instead of me explaining how this diet works, I'm just gonna read to you from this.

This this column appeared in the New York Times magazine in like one of the most popular, most credible publications in the country. This is under a headline that says, Does the truth lie within? In the book for economics, the subheading is One Professor's Lifetime of Self-Experimentation, but in the column, the subheadline is The Accidental Diet. Oh. Here's how it starts out.

Seth Roberts is a fifty-two year old psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. If you knew Roberts twenty five years ago, you might remember him as a man with problems. He had acne, and most days he woke up too early, which left him exhausted. He wasn't depressed, but he wasn't always in the best of moods. Most troubling to Roberts, he was overweight. At 5'11, he weighed 200 pounds.

When you encounter Seth Roberts today, he is a clear-skinned, well-rested, entirely affable man who weighs about 160 pounds, I know. Pardon me. Fuck off. And looks ten years younger than his age. How did this happen? So then it sort of it it describes his methodology of like his his big innovation is using himself as a guinea pig.

And like tracking things, like tracking what he eats, tracking what he weighs, tracking how he feels. And so this is how he solved like all of his problems, basically. Like this is the story that they're walking us through. It took him more than ten years of experimenting, but he found that his morning insomnia could be cured if on the previous day he got lots of morning light, skipped breakfast, and spent at least eight hours standing.

Stranger yet was the fix he discovered for lifting his mood. At least one hour each morning of TV viewing, specifically life size talking heads, but never such TV at night. So I think he's like watching Good Morning America and stuff. Like something with lots of faces in the morning. This is just somebody who took every like take home point from every TED talk and just did all of it at once.

He's like a living embodiment of like life hacking. I know. Oh god. Once he stumbled upon the solution, Roberts, like many scientists, Looked back to the Stone Age for explication. Anthropological research suggests that early humans had lots of face-to-face contact every morning, but precious little after dark. A pattern that Robert's TV viewing now mimics.

I hate this and I want like a heavy bag with like a face on it that I can punch for a while. I actually have like ever since the paleo diet, I have such a pet peeve. For people like invoking the Stone Age. Right. The Stone Age is a period of like two million years of human history.

And like different human populations in different parts of the world with like very different climates. Yes. So whenever people are like, did you know in the Stone Age they used to I'm always like where? When? Yeah. It's never people who actually study the Stone Age and who know about it. It's people that had like expertise in completely different fields and like read on a fucking Snapple cap one time. Like a little fun fact that like they saw lots of faces in the morning.

Like how would we know that about Stone Age populations? Truly and also like Sorry. Once again, like there's all this shit that's like We have to go back in time to find the optimal diet or way of being or whatever.

And every time that shit comes up, the voice in my head is just going like, What was the life expectancy? Dude, I know. Nineteen? I don't know. What the fuck are you talking about? So then the article transitions into like some relatively true stuff. It talks about how like because of evolutionary adaptation. We all have

metabolic mechanisms that make us hold on to fat, right? Like we're our bodies are set up for like times of feast and times of famine. And so when your body goes into like famine mode, i.e. dieting It holds onto fat more tightly and that makes it really hard for you to lose weight. And like this is something we've said on the show, this is more or less true. Then It goes into this guy, Seth Roberts, his like idea that this mechanism, like our bodies have this kind of set point.

He then adds this like little addendum where he says that what triggers Your body's mechanism to hold on to fat is flavor. What? When your body tastes something that's familiar and that you like, so you eat like a bowl of Lucky Charms. It like switches you to like fat storage mode and it's gonna like bank those calories because it could taste them. So the key is to ingest calories without tasting them. This is the most puritanical bullshit. So you have to drink flavorless oil.

twice a day, like a tablespoon, two tablespoons. He says that you should like whatever experiment. And you should plug your nose So you can't taste it. And when I was on it, I couldn't drink coffee.

within an hour of taking the tablespoon of oil or like afterwards, because you don't want to have any flavor in your mouth at all. You wanna like take in these calories, but your body like doesn't know you're taking in the calories. What the fuck, man? I know. And so the idea is that because you're Taking in calories.

But your body isn't like banking them as calories. Your body doesn't know to want more fat. So you're just not hungry the rest of the day. So the the the sort of the promise of the diet is just that like Like you're taking in an extra, I don't know, five hundred calories of oil, but then you end up eating like a thousand calories less of normal food. This feels like if you are a person who is predisposed to have uh disordered eating patterns.

Boy oh boy, come on down, the water's fine. Get ready for your next eating disorder. Woo. And I also think because it's sort of coming at you from a much more like dude focused sort of set of media outlets, right? Like Freakonomics was not anything that was like, Come on down, ladies. Yeah. So I think because there's so much less discussion of men's body image and men's eating disorders and all of that kind of stuff.

It's a conversation about a diet that happens in kind of a void of a broader conversation about Food and human behavior and psychology and all of that kind of stuff. And also what what what frustrates me about this is that it is like this whole thing is so mail coded and like that whole kind of world, like the TED Talk world was just like a lot of dudes with like overconfident ideas that like hadn't really been tested. Like this entire freakonomics column.

talks about Seth Roberts doing self-experimentation as if it's some sort of fucking revolutionary new methodology, like no one has ever fucking altered their diet. And then like monitored what their weight does before. That's dieting. That's the experience of like eighty percent of dieters. It's also fucking irresponsible, honestly, dude to be like, I came up with this thing that works for me and only me. I've tested it on absolutely no one else.

I don't have any sense of how it interacts for people who have chronic illnesses or people who have different body types. It just works for me, therefore everybody drink vegetable oil and stop watching TV at night. If you read the comments on any of these posts or like the New York Times article, there's the like it worked for me people.

There's the like I tried it and it didn't work for me people and then there's the like I puked immediately upon taking a tablespoon of oil people which is like not a small number of people. I feel certain to my bones that I would be an immediate puke person. Yeah. I have like a pretty weak stomach. So it would really just yeah. I should have arranged a taste test like the Halo Top. I should have made you do this. I'm boycotting our show.

But I mean I do think there is a very frustrating journalistic side to this. Or like you This was not tested. It's still not clear to me how the Freakonomics guys found this random psychology professor who had like found a weight loss technique that works for him.

They also let him be a guest blogger on their website. They promoted his book when it came out. Like this was a huge sensation. Like after this column came out, like it became such a big deal that Seth Roberts appeared on Good Morning America. And Diane Sawyer famously ate a tablespoon of vegetable oil. This was a big deal and

The freakonomics guys had this weird tone toward the whole thing where they're like, Well, we're not promoting a diet. We're just talking about this like scientific finding that this guy had. And it's like This is not science. It's a thing that worked for one guy. It's never to this day, there's never been a study of this. God damn it. So it's like it's weird for like what is ostensibly a science.

column and like is always using the language of science and like all we're doing is telling you the science. It's literally a fucking anecdote. Yeah. This guy did a thing, a weird thing that worked for him, but it's dressed up as if his like quote unquote self experimentation is like real experimentation and it's not. Well, it's also like one of those things where you're like

Oh, this is the lengths that the world will go to to validate things that white dudes come up with. Exactly. It worked for exactly one white dude and now it's capital S science. Like fuck off. There's a good column by a guy named John Ford, who's a medical professor at UCLA, who writes a whole column basically just like calling out the freakonomics guys.

for shining a spotlight on something that hasn't not only has it not been tested, but like Seth Roberts never even attempted to test it. And so John Ford says in this column, he says, Presenting a highly speculative idea as proven science to an audience unlikely to appreciate the difference is misleading at best and disingenuous at work.

Mm-hmm. This is a massively popular platform that millions of people read. If you put out a column that says like, this guy found this miracle new weight loss technique. You don't think that's promoting the diet? Right, totally. We live in a country where like what two thirds of the population is desperate to lose weight? Like

You're just gonna throw this fucking fish in the middle of like all these like hungry seals and just be like, well it's not our fault that they ate it. Like, come on. I actually think the onus is even greater on people marketing or promoting diets. to add more disclaimers, to add more sort of parameters around what they're talking about because of the sort of like ravenousness with which people will sort of descend on a new diet. Oh yeah. Diet marketers have a greater onus on them.

to be like very clear, very specific, and very like assertive about what their diets will and won't do. and ought to present a great deal of evidence, but none of them fucking can. Yeah. And none of them can like I I so much of it lies with editors too. Of editors just being like Sorry man, you got one anecdote of one guy with one diet. Like, come back to us in three years when it's been tested.

Yeah, that's right. So this is where it gets bittersweet. Okay. So this was like you know, two thousand five when this comes out. There's this massive wave of publicity. And then Seth Roberts becomes like a pretty prominent blogger, actually. Like this was this was peak blog times, like pre-social media. And so I started reading like a lot of posts on his blog and like

He just got like weirder and weirder over time. Oh. He was really obsessed with this idea of self-experimentation as a methodology. He sort of had like a chip on his shoulder of like, why isn't self-experimentation taken more seriously? He started doing this thing where like he became convinced that eating half a stick of butter a day Just like with a knife and fork it seems.

would improve his brain function. So I'm real mad'cause this is copyright infringement because he's just stolen my actual diet. I just sit down every day with a plate and A knife and fork and a stick of butter. It's how I maintain my girlish figure. That's why you're so smart. You're just like, it's all the sticks of butter. So fucking smart.

Aubrey, you're a little slow this episode. Did you not have your butter today? I noticed you're a little sluggish. Brain food classic brain food, sticks of butter. There's also some like anti-vax adjacent stuff. He gets really obsessed with Omega 3s and there's all these posts, like crank posts. About how omega threes and

Cure ADHD he has this long thing about I guess pregnant women are more likely to have gingivitis, you know, that thing where you've lost your teeth and it bleeds. Yeah. And he was convinced that it's like cause pregnant women aren't getting omega-threes. He kept saying like depression doesn't exist. No. And what people think is depression is that they just need to get more sleep. Like he was obsessed.

With sleep as the key to everything, and like that is what ails Americans: is that like we're not getting enough sleep. He had all this stuff about how fermented foods cure acne. Like it was just a bunch of like Pretty standard. Crank? contrarian stuff. And like all like dressed up as science, right? Of the like

I'm just asking questions, or kind of cherry picking it was very like COVID denier. Uh-huh. Right? It's like that sort of thing where you're like, a study out of Prague found that people who wear masks always die. And then like you look and like that's not what the study found at all. And it's some like weird journal that you've never heard of, and the people who wrote it aren't epidemiologists and you're like, uh

This like looks like science if you don't actually look at it. That's what happens when you try to universalize based on a sample size of one. This is a thing. Yes. That's what happens when you're like, What's true for me is true for everyone which is also kind of how we get so much anti fat bias, right? Is that thin people absolutely believe that they have done a series of right things.

to become thin and that fat people are not doing those same right things because their belief is fundamentally that like our bodies are the same and you just fucked yours up, so let me help you fix it. And it's really easy to get down a super weird rabbit hole of being like my experience is everyone's experience. I know. One of the reasons it's so bittersweet to me is it on some level I get it in that like he struggled with sleep his entire life. It seems like he always had struggles.

with his energy levels. Mm-hmm. He thought that he solved it and then he would sort of backslide and then he would try to solve it again. He was constantly tweaking. He was never quite happy with whatever solution that he found. But he also started to believe that like lack of sleep was this defining problem in the country as a whole. Yeah. And it's like, no man, you just struggle with sleep. You clearly have some form of like chronic illness that you're dealing with.

But like that doesn't mean that that's a problem for everybody. Like, other people have other things that they're dealing with. Yeah. I don't know. It just became it's like it became this like Kind of sad portrait of like where this obsession with self experimentation and with like your self. as the only test subject that matters, like can take you. Yeah. And I it's just like this the same sort of cluster of beliefs.

That I feel like a lot of those like TED talkie dudes kind of like this is a this is like a very well trodden path that a lot of those dudes went down. And I was like, oh man, if this guy like if he was still blogging today He'd be like one of these like just asking questions, transphobes. Uh- you know, like this is where it leads everybody. But then I kept fucking scrolling, and then it's like

A bunch of transphobia came out. Oh, come on. He got this is so fucked up. He got super obsessed with this idea of autogynophilia, which is this idea that like trans women are actually just like men who are turned on by dressing as women. I guess some trans woman wrote a memoir, like a moving memoir about her experience of like coming out and transitioning, and he wrote to her and was like,

Why didn't you mention like this theory? Like, why didn't you mention this like fetish thing? Jesus fucking Christ. This is where, like, why does it always lead to transphobia? It's wild to me. It's well, it's also like one of those things, right, where you're like,

Like, oh, you read a cis person's description of what they imagine trans people to be that was written in like nineteen eighty one right and just like this dude got real hooked on like it's gotta be about boners and you're like no but then okay double bittersweet then in twenty fourteen he dies What? Yeah, he had a heart attack.

while he was hiking in the hills above Berkeley, California. This then triggers a wave of like extremely ugly speculation that it was this diet that killed him, or it was the butter that killed him, It then became this thing of like, oh, the guy with the fad diet died of a heart attack. Yeah. And then his poor family had to like put out a statement with his like medical records. Jesus. At one point, I think it was his mom

had to say, like, I don't know why I have to explain the death of like a sixty year old who had a heart attack. Yeah. That's something that happens a lot. Like, don't sit around and be like, this is what really killed him. It's like Shut up. You don't know his medical history. You don't know what about his medical status he wasn't disclosing publicly. Don't use people's public personas. as a way of diagnosing them with something. And also, even if you did know all of those things.

Somebody just fucking died and a mother just buried her son. The whole thing just got like got really gross at the end. One of the reasons I think I'm like slightly easier on him than like I would be if he was still around is just because like there is this tragic ending that like makes him kind of victim and like people were weirdly shitty to him in death. But also like he did have a bunch of like crank beliefs.

And it's not clear to me that like it was all that ethical to bring him national attention and to like promote this diet when it's part of just like a much larger cluster of like Kind of just weird behaviors that this guy had. Like lots of people in America have weird behaviors. Yeah, totally. They don't need their behaviors to be turned into like best-selling books.

Yeah, nor do they need their to turn their own behaviors on other people with non best selling books. Right. Like there's this question about like, okay, when someone like that dies, who's the person you wanna be? Yeah. For me personally, the logic of like you did it to yourself or you should have thought about that before you did X, Y, and Z kind of thing is a very convenient and tidy way to dehumanize people.

that's the same kind of logic that gets leveled at people in prisons and why we don't pay attention to prison conditions. That's the same kind of logic that gets leveled at fat people. Yeah. All of that sort of like extremely unforgiving thinking is just like

truly and deeply not a thing I wanna emulate in the world. What uh what's your next one? I have kind of a twofer. Ooh, do it. Um so this is a person who wished to remain anonymous who says, Hi Aubrey and Mike, huge fan of the show over here.

Okay, so two ridiculous fad diets I tried are the Special K Diet and Bethany Frankel's Naturally Thin. That's so cursed. I have no idea who Bethany Frankel is. You don't know who Bethany Frankel is? No, but it's like the name of a female, I guess, influencer. And then something with like thin in it, I'm already just like the hairs on the back of my neck just stood up. I'm gonna do you one worse, Mike. It's not an influencer. Oh. Bethany Frankel is a real housewife.

Holy shit, wait which which jurisdiction? New York, Rony. Rony oh she's one of the Ronies, okay. This person goes on to say the special K diet was ridiculous. and I need to know its origins. But basically I think all you ate was special K in any of its varieties all day long, other than I think one meal. I was all cap starving, like shaking. And I'm pretty sure I gained a couple of pounds.

It was clearly just a ploy to get people to buy their cereal. I was just desperate. They just like told you that their food was a diet food and to like eat a bunch of their food and called it a diet?

Like that's all that it was? Yes, it was called the Special K Diet or the Special K Challenge. Um, there were a bunch of TV ads about it, and they featured uh among other things, like someone like pulling on jeans and then sort of like pulling on one of the belt loops to be like, look how loose my jeans are and they would say you can lose a dress size in two weeks or lose a jean size in two weeks. The diet was this

Replace two meals each day with a bowl of special care. And then over time, at some point, it sort of segued into like. eat any special K product, including their like cereal bars which were kind of like Rice Krispy Treat kind of vibes. This is demented The Oreo diet, eat nothing but Oreos. Like that's not a diet, and it's coming from the Oreo people. Well, also, like, listen.

Special K has a larger serving size than many cereals. The serving size is one cup, but one cup of breakfast cereal for two meals a day is not going to leave you feeling like full, happy, and ready to take on the day, right? Like All of the stuff has disappeared from the Kellogg's website and from Special K website. Um, it was up there for uh I'm gonna guess a good ten years. WebMD wrote uh did a write-up on the special K diet, quote

There's nothing special about special K products. In fact, most are not whole grain and they tend to be low in fullness promoting fiber and protein. It's cereal. Yeah. It's cereal. It's not gonna like hold you. You're not gonna feel like you ate an omelet. You're gonna feel like you ate some cereal. Yes. They also get a little science-y for a minute, which I was like, there's a little parenthetical in here and I wanna see if you can sniff it out.

Quote, Results of a 2002 study done at Purdue University, funded by Kellogg, showed that replacing regular meals with calorie and portion controlled cereal meals could result in weight loss. Study participants took in an average of one thousand five hundred and ninety calories per day and cut their fat intake in half. Quote, substituting cereal for higher calorie meals can help people trim calories and fat.

in the study, we found those reductions were doable and resulted in about a four point four pound weight loss over a two week period, says study author Rick Mattis PhD. Ridiculous.

They're basically saying that like people lost weight because they ate less. Like it has nothing to do with the cereal. No, it has absolutely fucking nothing to do with the cereal and also Here's the thing, they advertise this as lose ten pounds in two weeks, and then their own fucking study that they fucking paid for was like, you probably gonna lose four and a half pounds.

And I think the wild thing about the special K Challenge slash diet, whatever you want to call it, is that it really is the most transparent advertising campaign that has ever happened, which is like

Buy twice as much of our product and you'll get thin by eating our food. Like what? The biggest scam that the cereal industry has ever perpetuated on the American people is remember ads when we were growing up, how they would say like part of a nutritious breakfast or like part of a complete breakfast?

And then they would have like seven other foods. They would have like a whole other breakfast with a bowl of cereal and they're like, Now it's good for you I was like in my thirties when I realized that it's basically just like if you eat this with some healthy stuff It's a healthy breakfast. Like it's literally everything is part of a healthy breakfast if you pair it with other things that are healthy. Like How were they allowed to do this? It's the most nonsense.

Phrase. Well, and from its inception, cereal was designed as a quote unquote health food, right? Yes. But in a lot of ways, like this is just the same shit that Kellogg's has been doing since it was Kellogg's, right? All of the cereal brands do the same thing, which is like, this is a health food. Don't look at the nutrition facts. Bye. Yeah. Right? Give me the uh give me the influencer lady. Perfect.

Uh, Bethany Frankel is one of the real housewives of New York. This is what our anonymous emailer has to say about that. Quote. The second diet I followed, which was packaged as a quote unquote mindset and lifestyle, the anti diet, is from Bethany Frankel's book Naturally Thin. She claims that all quote unquote naturally thin people

do all of these things without thinking about them. Famously scooping their bagels, taking three bites of an unhealthy food but not finishing it, telling yourself you can have it all, just not all at once, I guess it seemed sensible at the time that But I always look back on it as disordered eating light. I'd love for you guys to read the book because it's probably severely unhinged LMAO. So I'm glad that you don't know who Bethany Frankel is.

a little background on her. She um started on the Real Housewives of New York in two thousand eight. So she's been around for a minute. She had spent the early two thousands kind of trying to make it in Hollywood. She'd been a production assistant. She hosted one season of a daytime talk show called Bethany in twenty thirteen. And she had sort of made a name for herself on

the Apprentices Martha Stewart season. Okay. She has also since built a business out of her Skinny Girl brand of low calorie foods, like They'll have like skinny girl margarita mix and that sort of thing. That's just like a lower calorie and relatively joyless cocktail to have, right?

This thing about scooping bagels, is that a thing that you've heard before? I was gonna ask you about this. What what is that? It's where you genuinely like usually take like a spoon and you scoop out the bread out of the middle of a bagel, so you're just eating the outside Of the bagel? I've never seen somebody do that. It's just a thing that people do commonly. It's part of the like

d you know, joylessness of eating in this way, right? Which is just like, what if I had a bagel but made it sad? What if I took a delicious food and made it a bummer? A bagel trench. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I am of the opinion that it's like sort of aligned with our emailer, which is sort of like it is sort of eating disorder light stuff. So the book is sort of organized around ten rules for living naturally thin. the the concept here is that there are naturally thin people and they just sort of know how to eat and that's how they're naturally thin. Right. And they do things like scoop out their bagels and they do things like

They don't restrict and that sort of thing. The interesting thing to me about the list of ten rules is that they echo a lot of intuitive eating principles. But they like take a wild fucking turn. Like the first half, you're like, Oh, you're on the right track and then it takes a gnarly turn and you're like, No, no, no, no, no, no, wrong.

Um, so for example, one of the rules is that you shouldn't diet or restrict because dieting leads to binging and binging makes you fat and you're like, Well phone You're so close. You were so close. She says eat more real foods and real meals um and less sort of quote unquote processed stuff. Sure. Which I'm like, well that's just foods that poor people can afford and people who don't have time can eat.

That sort of discourse around processed foods and clean eating is just another way of stigmatizing foods that low income people can afford and can eat, right? She also says eat whatever you want, but do it in moderation, which if you ask folks who are sort of like in deep on intuitive eating, they're like Yeah, yeah, yeah. Moderation is a way to make restrictions sound sort of sensible, right?

Right. Like if you are again, like if you are a person who tends toward disordered eating, moderation becomes a a little like baby step back into restriction for you. Right. I actually have a little clip of her talking about her uh book. This is a little promotional video from Simon and Schuster, her publisher. I thought it was gonna be a clip of her on Real Housewives throwing her wine at somebody. I mean

I didn't look up that clip, but I bet you it would take us fifteen seconds to find if you want to. Dude, I've never watched Real Housewives, but on like eight different occasions I've been really bored and I'll go on YouTube and I'll type in Real Housewives Best Fights. That's like and there's compilations? And some of them were like forty minutes long, and I'll watch the whole thing. It's really fascinating because I was like, look, when I was sort of prepping for this one, I was like, okay.

There's like an eighty percent chance or an eighty-five percent chance that Mike has no idea who this is, and then there's a fifteen percent chance that he is a dedicated viewer of Real Housewives. I'm like really into it. I have no idea and interestingly you s you seem to have managed to check both boxes. Right? Just like I only watch The wildest parts. Um, are you ready to hear Bethany Frankel talk about her book? All right, let's do it.

Hi, I'm Bethany Frankel. I'm a natural food chef and my book is called Naturally Thin, Unleash Your Skinny Girl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting, which is exactly what the book is. It's basically a book that is the be all end all never diet again.

I want to eat great food and I was going to Italy on a trip. A friend had recommended a bunch of restaurants through Mario Bitali and I said I'm done. I'm going to Italy. I'm going to eat everything. I'm going to go to all these restaurants and I am not coming back with my jeans one inch.

I sort of just figured out to not be afraid of food, to be able to eat what you want in smaller quantities and to be able to use the ten rules I talk about in Naturally Thin in different situations to get you through that moment. and to be able to really never have to worry about it.

A naturally then isn't necessarily for the person to to lose 150 pounds. I'm sure that they could, but it's for the person that wants to lose twenty, thirty, five, ten pounds, the person that wants to maintain their weight. A person like me who all through high school and college would struggle with their weight. obsessed, count what they ate, work out

and just every woman that I know. Any nutritionist can tell you to eat a half a grapefruit and a quarter cup of cottage cheese for breakfast and tell seven hundred people to eat the exact same thing. But those seven hundred people had different childhoods, different parents, different environments, different money, so this book is for everyone. A single wine was thrown. I'm livid.

I was counting on a table flip in this promotional video. You took me to YouTube under false pretenses. So talk to me about your reactions to that to that video. I mean I wanna know what you think, but I mean I'm of two minds. She seems to be like aware of fad diets. She seems to be aware of like the one cup of cottage cheese thing is total bullshit. I mean, it's better than the cabbage soup garbage we got for decades, I guess.

On the other hand, she is straightforwardly selling a diet and explicitly calling it not a diet. Like it's right on the cover of her book. It's like learn how to be a skinny girl and like leave all the dieting behind. It's like you're literally telling people how to become skinny without being on a diet. It's like that's what diets do. So like It's an improvement on where we were, but it's still not.

Good. Leave dieting behind with these tricks that I learned from eating disorders is really is what it feels like to me. Where it's like it's not a capital E, capital D eating disorder, right? Like that's not actually what she's selling here. But it is sort of like Okay, but Be weird about food in public and only have three bites of something that you like. Yeah. It feels like it's sort of talking out of both sides of its mouth at all times, right?

that there is sort of this like, don't dye it but do become thin. Don't restrict, but absolutely restrict. Right, like all of this sort of stuff is kind of straddling a line. The one thing that I will say that I really appreciated about her approach was she was like, This isn't for people who need to lose a hundred pounds. She did say she did say everyone I know And it's like, we know Bethany, you don't know anything We know you don't know fat people. We know you don't know fat people.

And we know that even if you do, you're going to pretend like you don't. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like there's like a cousin that you don't talk about or whatever. Yeah. It just felt like this little window into sort of this world of like a way of thinking about food that kind of masquerades as like healthy and neutral and like psychologically healing, but is still like the same shit. You are like America's greatest

Chronicler of like this shift in diet discourse. So like I I'm incapable of saying anything that I haven't learned from you on But there is like this weird sort of almost gaslighty thing. They'll be like, this isn't a diet, and then they'll just explain what is obviously a diet. Or like, this isn't about losing weight, but then they'll tell you how to lose weight. And you're like Do you hear yourself?

It is part of this thing that we're going through now, which is just like a cultural changing of the clothes that diets wear. Yeah. Without actually getting underneath and like dealing with the actual sort of diets themselves or dissuading people from dieting itself. We're essentially at this point just dissuading people from calling what they do a die. I know. Again, is it an improvement on like the bullshit that we had to deal with in the eighties and nineties? Sure. But it's not.

It's not like a great leap forward. No, and I think I think it likes to bill itself as like a radical reorganization of how we live our lives and it's a fucking search and replace. It is a command F for diets and replace with lifestyle change or detox or cleanse. Or health trend or like what the fuck ever, right?

It's just using different words to do exactly the same fucking thing. Atkins was called a diet, keto is now referred to as a lifestyle. Right. They're the same fucking thing at their core. Dude, you know what it is? Hmm. It is Kentucky fried chicken changing its name to KFC when the word fried became like kind of stigmatized, like a lot of people weren't eating fried foods because they wanted to lose weight.

And so KFC saw the writing on the wall and changed its name to like this acronym that like people don't even know what it stands for and kept selling the same chicken. Yeah, totally. So like It's all the same shit. It's just like It's what these capitalist enterprises have done to survive a culture change. Yeah. So you said you had a funny one. Yes. I can use a funny fad diet. Are you familiar with the blood type diet?

Uh yes, we got a lot of emails about the blood type diet. This was one of the ones that we got like a big wave of emails about. It's fascinating to me. It's eat right and then the number four your blood type. Yes. What's the number four? I love that it's the number four. It's the too fast, too furious. style of naming things, yeah. I know absolutely nothing. I have never read the Eat Right for Your Blood type stuff. I never did it. I don't know anybody who did it.

So I am coming in 100% fresh. So this is this is an email from a listener who also wanted to remain anonymous. It says The Fad diet that I put myself on when I was twelve. was Dr. Peter Dodamo's Blood Type Diet Eat Right for Your Blood Type. I would be so interested to hear your views on this diet and whether or not there's any scientific credibility to it. Knowing what I know now, I am so embarrassed that I ever believed any of this.

This diet prescribes what you can and cannot eat based on your blood type. The food lists are so detailed and also seem so random. For example, my blood type is O, so I could eat apples, but oranges were forbidden. I was on this diet for eight years, and it is hard to know exactly what the impact was.

I don't think it was physically harmful as I was not cutting out any major food groups as a whole, but I did become obsessed with the food list and felt guilty if I ever ate, for example, a mushroom which was on the forbidden food list. Hm. As you will probably not be too surprised to hear, as an indirect maybe, consequence of this diet, I did develop anorexia, which lasted many years.

This diet did also encourage me to substitute carob for chocolate, which you could argue is totally unforgivable. So, like, listen, before we get into this one Uh, I just wanna name I know this is not an uncommon experience. It was also my experience to start dieting when you're like before you even hit your teenage years. But I also want to name like

That's fucking horrible and really, really heartbreaking. And the phrase, I put myself on this fucking blood type diet is like just sucking the joy out of life. That's what happens. uh and introducing like really, really harmful forces into fee people's lives. So like before we dig like we're gonna dig in, I'm sure we're gonna have a great time with it. And also I just wanted to name like

That fucking sucks, and I'm so sorry that this listener went through that. Yeah, it's also just so important to forgive yourself. For falling for this kind of stuff. Yeah. We could do a whole episode on all of the scams that I have fallen for in my life. And not like sophisticated scams, like super caveman lizard brain level scams, and you know, the people selling these diets Whether they know it or not or not. They are reaching back to a long tradition of making customers forget that.

the last time they went through this hope and disappointment cycle. They are playing on deep set anxieties. There's nothing shameful about falling for this stuff. It happens. Right. The villains are not the people who fell for these scams. The villains are the grifters who are selling them. Absolutely. And the blood type diet is like one of the griftier ones. So

It's developed by this guy, Peter Dodamo. He actually got the idea from his dad. There is a very good takedown of this diet on Refinery 29 by Kelsey Miller called Why the Blood Type Diet is a Dangerous Myth. It's excellent. He was the son of another famous naturopath, James Didamo, who first posited the idea that a diet based on blood type might have health benefits. The senior Didamo prescribed a low-fat vegetarian diet to all of his patients.

Noting that some seemed to exhibit improved health, others remained the same, and some got worse. Could blood type be the cause? God damn it. Could being a horse girl be the cause? Could Star Trek Phandom be the cause? All of those I'm just asking questions. I don't know. I just got real grump real fast with that one. I just love

Th like the whole genesis of this is this doctor who just gives the same fucking thing to everyone and is then like, oh, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I wonder if the problem is like the blood type.

It's like maybe don't prescribe the same thing to everybody. This is actually the person that Bethany Frankel was talking about in that video. Like any doctor can give it tell everyone to eat the same thing. So I guess he comes up with this absurd typology and then his son Peter Didamo sort of runs with it. So Kelsey also mentions in her piece that

The the sort of the main, like the official headshot of him on his website is like of him in a lab coat, standing in a sort of quasi clinical environment. But like he's not a doctor, he's like a naturopath. With a degree from like a naturopathic university outside of Seattle? She says. He is a naturopathic practitioner and, as he describes himself on his website, a research educator, Amateur horologist.

Budding software developer and air cooled enthusiast. I had to Google like half of these. I was gonna say I know what like two of those terms are. He was a haberdasher. The basics of the diet are like exactly what it sounds. It's basically that like your blood type determines the kind of diet you eat, the way that your body is able to break down foods.

He has this typology of like the different blood types, and each one of them has like a little narrative with it, because his idea is that like the blood types emerged. at different times in like human history. What? I exactly. So I'm gonna go through these. So type O he calls the hunter. And this is like what our blood type was when we were like hunter gatherers.

So the idea is that you should be eating a ton of like meat and fish and sort of like old fruits and vegetables, but not like new fruits and vegetables, and you shouldn't be eating grains Because this is supposed to be like pre agriculture. Old like they've been around for a long time or old like they've been sitting in your fridge for a couple of weeks. Like old like they've

Like they're ancient or whatever. So you're not having pomelos, you're not getting pluats. You gotta eat the old shit. Yeah, exactly. Enjoy your quints. So In Kelsey's piece, she says, My veins were filled with type O, therefore I was instructed to renounce my vegetarianism and embrace a meat and fat heavy lifestyle. Among other rules, my fancy nutritionist ordered me to eat plenty of beef, venison, and pineapple juice. While avoiding things like strawberries, later

Lentils and almost all dairy, though butter was okay. Yeah, you know how cavemen were always eating butter? Like all the time? That's why they were so smart. Good lord. He also apparently in his book has a bunch of like personality type bullshit. That goes along with the blood type? This is from a Harvard Medical Something Something article about this.

As this blood type is descended from hunters, the fight or flight reflex is strong and can translate to anger issues or manic episodes. What the fuck is anything? What are you talking about? personality types go with blood types? Like no. Like absolutely not. And also like as you're reading through all of this, I'm thinking about I have multiple diet books that are this kind of eat right for your type thing, but rather than being organized around blood type are organized around no fucking joke.

astrological signs. Dude, y yeah, I was w the whole time I was reading this, I was like, somebody absolutely did the Zodiac Diet, didn't they? Multiple people did the Zodiac Diet and I have three of those books. Yes. But this feels like If that diet put on a lab coat. Yeah, yeah. So next we have type A, which he calls the agrarian or cultivator. This is from the Harvard article. This blood type emerged with the rise of community living when, thanks to the dwindling supply of game to hunt,

Human digestion was forced to adapt to carbohydrate consumption. Forced to adapt. Type A's, therefore, should eat mostly vegetables and soy proteins, being mindful of their highly sensitive immune systems. and increased risk of life threatening disease, as well as naturally higher stress levels. They should avoid crowds and corn and practice tai chi. Then there's type B, which he calls nomads.

Because these are like there's like subtle societies and there's also like nomad like nomadic hordes like roaming the steps or whatever. So he says that everybody with type B blood is descended from like Mongolians? Like he clearly read like one article in National Geographic about Genghis Khan and he's like, Yes, like the the nomads. So but then he translates this into like you can eat plants And me though. But like not chicken or pork and you can have like some dairy

But you should never have wheat, corn, lentils, or tomatoes. Which like I tomatoes, I don't know why that would have anything to do with Mongolia, but like Fine. Sure. And then there's also type A B blood. This is like a mixture of like settled societies and nomadic societies. I think he ran out of like societies that he's familiar with and he's like, uh this one was like part nomadic, part settled, or whatever.

This is from the Refinery twenty nine article. It says The rarest and newest of the blood types is what Didamo calls the chameleon. It is the only one that emerged not from environmental factors, but from intermingling, and it is somehow more mystical than the others. Lamb, dairy, tofu, and grains are all good for ABs, while buckwheat and smoked meats can be problematic. They are charismatic, have low stomach acid, and should practice visualization techniques.

Classic combination of lamb and tofu. So as you would expect, this is like all of the sort of science behind this diet is just completely fucking wrong. Yeah. It's not true that the emergence, like the evolutionary emergence of blood types has anything to do with like agrarian societies? So apes.

have exactly the same blood types as humans, which indicates that blood types probably evolved like twenty million years ago. It's not even the case necessarily that type O evolved first and then the rest Burst off. Like, apparently, there's some theories that say that, but there's others that say that it was type A that evolved first. We're still figuring it out, but the idea that We started to evolve to have different types of blood like 10,000 years ago when we started cultivating crops.

You don't get evolutionary adaptations that happen this fast. Like that's completely ludicrous. The only way in which this works and the only reason that this would work is if you sort of believe that there is some like unlocking the mystery of the past and of evolution and of blah blah blah. Right? Where you're like, no, it's just fucking food. Exactly. Just let it be food. And there's

It's it's called ABO grouping. That's the name of the typology of blood that we have. There's actually like thirty other ways of classifying people's blood. The only reason why this is the most prominent one and that like is popularly known is that that's what you need to know for transplants. Oh it's dangerous to give O blood to an A person. We should all know this because we need that for transfusions.

But there's blood has like thousands of characteristics. And there's all kinds of like weird antigens. Like some people are like positive for this and negative for that. And there's this really rare thing of people with like it's called an RH antigen and if like a woman who's positive for the RH antigen has birth to a baby that's negative for the RH antigen, the baby can die. But like that that has nothing to do with like AB blood type?

It's just like a completely different typology of blood. Yeah. And so it's really facile to be like, This is the only thing about blood that matters. It's like It matters for transplants, but like blood is complicated, my guy. Yeah, and also I mean it it does feel like it ties right in with the Brian Wantsing. episode which is just like there's just such a great degree of certainty I know around what is fundamentally either just made up or wishful thinking.

Even the things we think we know for sure we don't even really fucking know. Totally. There's also some on sing stuff. in it does appear that like blood types are correlated with like certain disease outcomes. Like there are actually some links between diseases and blood types, but it's like it's tiny gradations. People apparently people with B type blood are like at slightly higher risk for type two diabetes.

But like people read that and they're like, well if you have B blood, you're gonna get diabetes, and if you don't have B blood, you're safe. But it's like we're talking about risks of like four point one versus four point three percent risk. Yeah, totally. It's not all that meaningful on an individual level.

to tie these kind of broad characteristics to your disease risk. Like it's gonna come down to many other, like much more obvious factors than your fucking blood type. Like it's interesting at a population level and understanding the mechanisms behind it. But this idea that we can take these like tiny differences in risk. and be like, This is the best way to eat for you It's just like that's not how these kinds of characteristics work. Well and if you follow these rules to a T

you will go from definitely you're gonna get diabetes to definitely you're not gonna get diabetes. No. Diabetes is like an extremely prevalent Chronic illness in the US that we know shockingly little about.

People can give you this sort of sense of certainty, but ultimately what they're offering you is a security blanket that may or may not actually do anything for you. What's really fascinating to me about the diets too is that it actually goes back to like his father's Recommendation, right? That his dad was like, go on a vegetarian, low-fat diet, blah, blah, blah. What a lot of people point out is that all of the diets that they're recommending for all four blood types are like.

They're all just like normal ass diets, right? They're like eat, you know, lean fish. Eat a lot of like I don't know, low fat dairy, try not to eat processed foods. There's there's been two systematic studies of this diet. And one of them is based on like food frequency questionnaires. And like we've already talked about how trash they are. Yeah. So like massive grain of salt with this. But like they basically found that the kind of people who eat the diet for like type A

had lower weights than people who didn't eat the type A diet, but it didn't matter what their blood type was. I I think the study is kind of trash and the methodology is bad. But the idea is that like anyone can pick any of those four diets at random and like you will probably lose weight.

Because like you're restricting a huge amount of food. Right. If you like randomly restrict like half of the foods and you say like I can't eat that, you're gonna lose weight. Yep. What drives me nuts about this, and this is this is not really a problem with science. But it's like a problem with like the griftiness of this sector. Is it like

It's very clear that this guy just fucking made all of this up. Yeah. He made up all the science. He made up the thing about like you you can eat dairy, but you can't eat butter. He fucking made it up, right? And he made it up in the 1990s. And it's not until 2013 that like a decent study comes out where they actually compare this to other diets.

Good lord. In the intervening twenty years, of course, this you know, I think the book is translated into like seventy languages. It sold like four million copies, like, you know, New York Times bestseller, blah blah blah. But it's like it takes a really long time. to actually investigate these things and like we shouldn't have to. The guy made it up. There's no basis. He's not he's not basing this plan on anything. And then it's like all these other wheels have to turn.

for people to like actually apply a scientific method to it. What is is it Mark Twain who said the thing about like a lie can make it around the world before the truth gets its shoes on or whatever that

saying is. Like it feels very much like that and is part of this sort of thing about why uh folks who are sort of promoting diets, I genuinely think ought to have a higher like A ought to have any standards of evidence that they present, which is not currently the case, but B that they also should have kind of higher standards because what's gonna happen is you release a new diet into the world. A bunch of people are gonna glom onto it because they feel shitty about their bodies and they want

a sense of hope that they aren't stuck with the body that they have. And they'll sort of develop this allegiance with a diet and then it'll take you know, three or five or ten years for clinical research to catch up. And by that point, You know, however many thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people will have done that diet. Exactly. It's just shitty ones

So many levels. Right. And like I was I I forget why, but I was looking at celebrity diets this week too. And apparently Christina Aguilera was on some like weird like color diet. We're like for lunch. All of her foods had to be yellow, And then for dinner all of her foods had to be green. Oh, we got an email about this, the rainbow diet, which is like Mondays you eat red foods, Tuesdays you eat orange foods, Wednesdays you eat yellow foods, and so on and so forth. But like

At least that one is like kind of upfront about the fact that they're just fucking making it up. It's completely arbitrary. And like this one is also just completely arbitrary. It's just like pick any arbitrary food rule, like only eat foods that begin with vowels. Yeah, totally. And like you will lose weight because like you're restricting most of the food. Yeah, that's right. To me it's like I I don't know that you even have to do a systematic

analysis of these things where it's like it's a dumb thing that some random person made up. Yeah. It's not real on its face. Right, right, right, right. The we sort of have this like very ass backwards approach to diets, which is like It's on if you're against it, it's on you to prove why it doesn't work. Right. Yes. That's sort of where we're at with keto right now. Yeah. Is like a bunch of keto people are like, it worked for me, so prove why it's bad. I know. I saw those emails.

Nobody. Yeah. But like that's sort of the place that we get in. And actually I think the burden of proof should be on people promoting radical changes to your diet that are completely unproven. That's who is responsible here. Yeah. If you're going to evangelize a bunch of diet changes. You really should have some kind of evidence to back that up. And everyone else should probably just ignore you.

Like the media should just fucking ignore you until you have that evidence. You should you should not be platformed. Yeah. And even when there is evidence, as we have discussed, that evidence is very sort of thin, it's very unreliable, and its uh methodologies don't hold up to much scrutiny very often at all. So uh yeah, that's the lesson. Everything's garbage, eat what you want. Everything's garbage, eat what you want. That's how we end every episode.

Uh do it. Don't listen to charlatans. Don't platform weirdos. And uh if you really want some exercise, throw a glass of fucking wine on somebody. If you really want some exercise, avoid crowds, do some tai chi. Do some tai chi