Losing It: Once Upon a Diet

was really into, it was his diet. He calls eating too much that evil, and the fact that it's so common a wicked thing, and yet society at the time doesn't treat it that way. Over eating is exalted as a virtuous thing and even as a mark of distinction, while temperance, also known as moderate eating, is stigmatized and scorned as dishonorable and as befitting the miserly alone. Luigi is sort of the original diet guru. What you're hearing is the beginning of his book The Art of Living Long.

In it, he points out that overeating is gluttony, a literal sin. He's arguing that eating less is not just better, but also more moral. He says that men are abandoning the path of virtue, following one advice e roade, which leads them, though they see it not to strange and fatal chronic infirmities through which they grow pre maturely old. Before they reach the age of forty, their health has been completely worn out. Basically, Luigi is saying that people

are over eating their way into an early grave. But he actually says men because again it is the hundreds wretched and unhappy Italy. Canst thou not see that intemperance kills every year amongst the people as great a number as would perish during the time of a most dreadful pestilence, or by the sword or fire of many bloody wars. He's saying that gluteny kills as many people as plagues and wars. Clearly, Luigi Cornaro was a big fan of

eating less. But the reason that I'm taking us on a journey to Renaissance Italy is that this early diet became a really big deal, not just at the time but also over the years, and its success marks a key moment in our transformation from a culture focus on health to one that was and still is obsessed with weight. Eating less also known as dieting, has had a hold on us for a long time. But for a while, people saw eating as a way to become healthier and

for everyone in society to be generally better off. It wasn't really about losing weight the way it is today. Case in point Luigi Cornaro, who first started overhauling the way he ate to improve his health. Luigi was sick and pretty unhappy until around the age of forty. He has symptoms of gout, all kinds of stomach issues, and what he described hibs as a persistent low fever. He says he tried almost everything to feel better, but none of it worked. He says his only hope is that

death will put him out of his misery. Then his doctors have an idea. My physicians declared there was but one remedy left for my eels. That remedy was the temperate and orderly life. The prescription was to eat less. My physicians warned me, if I neglected to apply this remedy in a short time, it would be too late to derive any benefit from it. For in a few months I should certainly die. This was to be clear,

a pretty radical approach to eating at the time. To hear Luigi tell it, well off people like him were eating and drinking large amounts of whatever they enjoyed, but Luigi is desperate it, so he follows their advice. He cuts out the rich, delicious food and copious wine he had been feasting on, and he eventually settles on a diet that is simple and austere. Just twelve ounces of food a day, an egg yolk, bread, a little meat, and some soup. That's it. He also has about fourteen

ounces of wine. Hey, a man can't live on egg yolks alone. After a few days of eating less, Luigi says he's already feeling much better. Within a year, he's a new man. So long stomach pain, goodbye fever. He's in perfect health, and by his account, continues on that way for decades. By his eighties, Luigi says he feels strong, he can get onto his horse without help and easily climbs a hill on foot, and he doesn't talk about

his weight in the book, only his health. They also see how I'm ever cheerful, happy and contented, free from all perturbations of his soul, and from every vexatious thought. Instead of these, joy and peace have fixed their abode in my heart and never depart from it. At one point, his family, friends and doctors actually become worried that Luigi is not eating enough, so he adds two more ounces of food and two more ounces of wine to his incredibly strict daily meal plan. It does not go well.

He writes that he just starts feeling sick again. However, I recovered God be praised solely by returning to my former rule of life ah the power of dieting while dining on egg yokes and wine blu which he actually leads a really long life, especially for the sixteenth century. He lives to see his daughter grow up and get married. He meets his eleven grandchildren and watches them grow up too.

At the age of eighty three, he decides to share his wisdom with others so that they too may defeat the evils of intemperance and live a long and happy life. So he writes this sixteenth century dieting manifesto. I have seen many of my dearest friends and associates, men endowed with splendid gifts of intellect and noble qualities of heart

fall in the prime of life victims of this dread tyrant. Therefore, to prevent so great an evil for the future, I have decided to point out in this brief treatise what a fatal abuse is, the vice of intemperance, and easily it may be removed and replaced by the temperate habits of life. As Luigi gets even older, he says he's still in good health, and now he's cutting down his meals even further. Sometimes he's eating just one egg yoke

over the course of two days. What Luigi is doing may sound pretty out there, and it is half an egg yolk a day is obviously not enough food to live on. But in other ways it's actually a fairly modern dieting tactic. He is restricting his calories in a pretty extreme way by cutting out whole food groups and eating very small portions. It's something a lot of people still do today. Luigi has had lots of fans over

the years, including the inventor Thomas at us In. He also had lots of skeptics, like the well known German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that rather than leading to long life, Luigi Cornaro's diet actually shortened lives. Luigi keeps writing about his diet. The collected essays are published as a book called The Art of Living Long. The book takes off, helped along by a relatively new invention, the printing press, and like I said before, Luigi's treatise becomes

a sensation. It's been called the first best selling diet book ever. It is still sold to this day. It seems like people are still reading this book because they want to learn from Luigi's philosophy, even if they aren't going to start on the exact same diet. And Luigi did in fact live long, though there's some disagreement about whether he died at or lived to be as old

as a hundred and four. Either way, not bad. But the reason I've spent so much time telling you about a sixteenth century Italian merchant with a love for eggs is that the diet is a long, long tradition. Luigi story is a model for pretty much every blockbuster diet that's ever existed. In this episode, I'm going to take you through the history of dieting, from how the ancient Greeks thought about it to the industrial revolutions. Shaping of

modern diet culture. It turns out that the diet fads of today look a whole lot like the diet fads of yesterday. We'll also explore what led to the rise of mainstream dieting. You might assume that people were gaining a lot of weight at the time, but actually no. Society was just changing in such a way that people were afraid they might gain weight. We'll also dive into the psychology behind wacky diets and why we fall for them each and every time. I'm Bloomberg News health reporter

em Accord and from the Prognosis podcast. This is losing It. The diet goes back at least two thousand years. Like many other things, we can trace it to the days of the ancient Greeks. But the Greeks didn't look at diet and exactly the way we do today. In fact, diet comes from a Greek word die eta, as in a way of life, healthy body, healthy mind, eat moderately, sleep and exercise, well, that kind of thing. They thought of it as a responsibility you had not only to yourself,

but also your community. They had some other more out their ideas too. For example, the physician Hippocrates recommended a treatment regimen for weed that included walking around naked, sleeping on a hard bed, and vomiting after meals. The Greeks weren't into weighing out their food or counting their calories. They were concerned with good health and saw moderate eating as part of the path to getting there. But somewhere along the way we lost sight of that goal. Diets

became about fitting into a smaller pair of pants. That shift started in the fifteen hundreds with Luigi, a very unwell person who came up with a diet, wrote a book about it and sold it in that way. It comes in the beginning of the own trend of people that work along that formula. This is Louise Foxcroft, a medical historian who wrote a book called Calories and Corsets, a History of dieting over two thousand years. She's describing what Luigi Cornaro did, but also what we still see

play out to this day. A person transforms how they eat then goes on to tell the world about it, no matter how extreme, restrictive or seemingly nonsensical. The approach to understand how ideas about diet changed so dramatically we're jumping forward in time about three hundred years from Luigi to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was famously a time of economic transformation in the West. People's way of

life started looking more like it does today. There are many new physicians coming out of the medical schools, and they've all got to make a living, so they begin to diversify into different areas of medicine. And it's an industrial age, so more and more people are moving from rural settings into urban settings. The media and the print market is taking off, and it all comes together to create the perfect conditions. Really better technology helps manufacturing and

transportation expand. People are moving to cities and working in factories. Instead of mailing a letter, you could send a telegraph, allowing news and ideas to spread more quickly across the world. And diets were one of those things that began spreading like wildfire. It's during the Industrial Revolution the dieting in the truly modern sense takes off, first in Europe and then in the US. People are dieting to look good, to be healthy, to be judged favorably by other people

as well as themselves. So doctors begin to take on the idea of diets and dieting as fundamental to health, which has always been true. But they have their own particular take on it, just as you know diet gary diet doctors do today. So they all come up with their own particular diets and their own particular stories behind

their diets. They're selling points because they're trying to attract customers, obviously, and they can write about it in the press and their advertisements in the press, not only for doctors and diets, but for diet products. So quite a lot of diet drugs come onto the market during the nineteenth century as well,

which hadn't really happened before. People were taking laxatives and even pills made of lard and arsenic in an effort to lose weight ironic and dangerous remind you of anything contemporary, boosts your metabolism, smashes your appetite, and keeps cravings at

bath to help you achieve your weight loss goals. I have been taking these things for years, and a lot of people want to know how I have I lost so much weight in the past couple of months, because I really did lose a lot of weight, But I don't fully understand what is in this medicine, but it raised his body temperature to a hundred and seven degrees. He had to be put into a medically induced coma after eight pills. I think twice before you take these things.

Diet pills are coming on the scene during the Industrial Revolution, and because people are living and working more in crowded, densely populated areas, everybody can compare themselves to everybody else because there you are. You even had the emergence of nineteenth century diet influencers. One of them was the poet Lord Byron. Back then, Lord Byron was also famous for

his yo yo dieting. The five ft eight inch tall writer weighed himself in public on the London Stores Coffee Skills, losing a whopping fifty four pounds between two a nds. Lord Byron's weight loss strategies included wearing lots of clothing so he would sweat more, and diets that were then in vogue, like eating flat vinegary potatoes. Vinegar, by the way, is still being used for weight loss today. So Janette says that after taking apple side of vinegar, she felt

less bloated. Was it before and after on her then? Michelle says she saw a major improvement in her energy throughout the day, and Demor says she dropped more than the dress side. Anyway, back to Lord Byron, he was very influential, and doctors in the eighteen sixties are worried about Byron's influence on the young lung after Byron's disappeared from the place. It wasn't just Lord Byron, many many fad diets emerged during this time, you know, as newspapers

and magazines and drugs and adverts. It's just a massive market and it starts increasing throughout the nineteenth century. Of course, that business would keep getting bigger and bigger. Today, the industry brings in about seventy billion dollars a year in the US alone. Around the time that Lord Byron was guzzling vinegar, a minister named Sylvester Graham was preaching a

different kind of diet. M Sylvester rejected the changes happening in society at the time, like more processed foods, and like any true minister, he was also very concerned about sin, specifically the sin of gluttony. Sylvester told his followers to cut out meat, even though being vegetarian was pretty radical back then. He also wanted them to cut out alcohol, coffee, and spices. If Sylvester seems like an old timey figure, consider that you've probably eaten a snack. He invented a

whole week cracker known as the Graham Cracker. Can you imagine how horrified he'd be about s'mores. Other trends popularized during these years include the low carved diet, also a modern favorite, and chewing your food as much as possible, which was known as Fletcherizing after the colorful American businessman who touted its weight loss benefits. Charlotte took seven hundred cheese, by which time nicocial meal would be freezing cold. Say

you probably wouldn't continue eating anyway. The writer's frowns. Kafka and Henry James started Fletcherizing, so did the businessman John Rockefeller, And though it might sound silly, plenty of people recommend chewing for weight loss to this day. I want to work out that flattens your bell fast. Forget about working your muscles, try working your jaw instead chewing. New tools for measuring both food and bodies also come on the

scene during this time. They include the calorie, which you may remember from episode one to recap Researchers in Europe began using calories to measure the energy and food. The American scientist wilverolan Atwater brought those ideas to the US, where calories would become the basis for you guessed it, new diets. The point I am making with this tour through diet history is that we've essentially been recycling the

same tired diet premises for hundreds of years. Another modern measurement that will be familiar to any dieter also begins in this era, eventually leading to body mass index or b m I. The formula was first invented by a Belgian mathematician in the eighteen thirties. Life insurance companies subsequently began using metrics like weight and height when deciding whether to grant people life insurance or not. You can see why they might want a tool like this. If someone died,

life insurers would have to pay up. B m I has since become incredibly widely used as a way of assessing people's health, but there are a lot of researchers, activists, and even doctors who say that it isn't very useful for that One of the issues is that b m I tables were initially based on white men, and yet the measure is uniformly applied to everyone these days, including

women and people of color. The dangers do health resulting from overweight have been shown convincingly by light insurance records. Life expectancy decreases as the amount of overweight increases. Excessive calorie intake is the cause of overweight. By this point,

you're probably getting the picture. This time period was the start of many of our modern ideas about dieting, the calorie body mass index, scammy weight loss pills, foods designed specifically for dieting, chewing more to eat less, low carb diets. Even that's what keto is. The Keto diet is simply a shift in how you eat. They claim to turn

your body into a fat burning machine. Luigia Cornaro was way ahead of his time, and as the Industrial Revolution and years following it show, much of dieting comes as a result of the conditions of modern life. Diet as we know it starts here, and very little about it changes from then until now. So okay, let's recap for a second. In the nineteenth century, technology was advancing to allow us to produce more stuff and communicate more efficiently.

People were living in cities, Medicine was becoming professionalized, and with that you had the rise of doctors trying all kinds of creative ways to make money off of people's health. These are all things that helped make diets more widespread and embraced by everyday people. But what was it about this particular moment in time that made people suddenly so concerned about their waistline? Sure there was all this technological innovation, but what else had changed? It was no longer fashionable.

This is Peter Stearns. He's a history professor at George Mason University an author of a book called fat History. The classic story is that until the late nineteenth century, if you were a little bit plump, it was probably a sign a that you were healthy because you had enough to eat, and be you were successful because you had enough to eat. And that just that just begins to drop off, and the fashion begins to emphasize slenderness.

What Peter is getting at is that along with changing technology, this time also brought some pretty drastic changes to Western beauty ideals. At a time when people struggled to get enough to eat, being thin was just proof of that. It was also more common having curves being heavier. That meant you were wealthy and successful, and compared to thinness,

it was unusual. As industrialization brought more prosperity and with it less physical activity and more process foods, the tables turned think back to Renaissance paintings hundreds of years earlier, in the time of our favorite early diet guru Luigi Cornaro. Artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Tysian famously painted curvy women, often naked. In Rubens paintings, you see flesh, rippling, fat roles,

even sally light. His subjects might be called Rubenesque today. Really, Luigi was ahead of his time because back then then was not the standard. You can see beauty ideals begin shifting in art at the time, like the influential drawings of women done by the artist Charles Dana Gibson in the nineties. The women in his work were known as Gibson girls. Gibson girls had thick, glossy hair piled on top of their heads and impossibly tiny waists. They wore

impeccable gowns and often glamorous furs. They became the new beauty ideal for American women. They're featured in magazines like Life and scrib Neers. Remember this was before TV, so magazines were an even bigger deal. They were the subject of songs and even wallpaper designs. The Gibson girls are curvy, but in a very different way than the Renaissance women painted by Rubens and Titian. They have pronounced hourglass figures. Women wanted to look like them in the same way

women want to look like Kardashians Now. Fashion would transform even further in the coming decades. A small waists and the corsets that made them possible fell out of style in favor of the nine twenties flapper look. We're also familiar with. Hips were out and then was in. The Flapper look comes into style at a time that a lot is changing for American women. Many of them started working during World War Two, with men away fighting the war,

and women soon gained the right to vote. Flappers were rebelling against the way women had lived their lives before, including through what was fashionable. The shift to thinner bodies being valued and prized happened really quickly. It's kind of funny to think about that today when it can feel like being skinny has always been desirable. There was a famous French stage star named Sarah Bernard who came to the United States I believe in the eighteen eighties, and

she was ridiculed because she was so thin. People did not find her attractive. She came back in the nineties and she was a wow, this is exactly the way people are supposed to look. There's also a medical side to the shift. Remember this is the era of the calorie and more sedentary lifestyles. Scientists are becoming concerned about people eating too much. Now they're getting evidence that seems to say pretty clearly that weighing too much is bad

for you. The reality is actually more complicated, though that's something we'll get into later in this series. There is at this point there's well established scientific evidence that we definitely relates to health, definitely relates to mortality. Chances concerned about issues like heart attacks and blood pressure go up markedly. I mean, the old causes of death are beginning to recede in favor of some of the causes we worry about today, and wait in body shape clearly enter into

those causes. People aren't dying as much from infectious disease a k A. The old causes of death. Because of better treatments and public health measures, the new public health concern now is weight, and specifically the health risks of carrying around extra pounds. Consumption of calories in excess of body needs is the single most extensive nutritional problem affecting public health in this country. People should be informed that

overweight is preventable. Before this, when people weighed themselves, they might have used agricultural scales in public places Lord Byron style. Now scales start getting used much more widely. Hospitals start buying them in the late eighteen hundreds. By the twenties, skills make their debut in people's bathrooms, and doctor's offices are regularly weighing people when they come in for an exam. You have to be a really old fashioned doctor by

not to know that weight could be an issue. In other words, that dreaded way in at your annual physical became a routine medical practice hundred years ago. Think about that for a second. Doctors didn't constantly check how much you weighed. Before then, they didn't always needed to evaluate your health because in those days, we was not equivalent to health The Industrial revolution was also changing the fashion industry. Before handmade clothing was the norm, a seamstress might make

a gown for you. More mass produced clothing brought clothing sizes out into the open and made it a lot easier to compare your body to other people's bodies. Think about how obsessed people get these days with their pants size. That kind of panic dates back here. But this is what I find most interesting about everything that is going on during this time. There is no real reason to believe people were actually gaining more weight at this point

in history. Instead, the way society was changing, there was this potential for weight gain. That is what people were concerned about. So on the one side, there's more food, more readily available, and at the same time from an increasing number of people, physical exertion goes down. More and more people are in white collar jobs, the role of agriculture, and even blue collar jobs begins graduated decline. So just in the normal course of things, people are expanding fewer

calories during their day. People aren't moving around as much, and they're sitting more at desks. Unwanted pounds creep on so easily in this motorized and mechanized age with its labor saving devices. But it wasn't just this fear of becoming unhealthy because you're no longer laboring on a farm all day or walking five miles to school. It was also new beauty ideals and skills becoming more widely available. You have more opportunities to check your weight, therefore more

opportunities to begin to worry about your weight. If you worry about your weight, you are more interested now in checking it. So these trans reinforce themselves, no question, there are also some new different ways of thinking about the evolution of beauty standards. I spoke with Sabrina Strings about that.

She's an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and she actually traces the rise of the thin ideal to the eighteenth century, a little earlier than the period we've been talking about. The Transatlantic slave trade has been going on for hundreds of years at this point, and criticisms are gaining steam, and Sabrina says it's no coincidence that attitudes about bigger bodies were changing at this time too.

Sabrina's research has found that racist language starts getting used to describe bigger people and justify idealizing thin bodies. People were saying that African slaves were fundamentally different from Europeans, and one of the ways they did that was by making the claim that African slaves couldn't control themselves around food.

Sabrina says these racist arguments helped justify the institution of slavery, and one of the ways in which race science evolved to prove European superiority was the suggestion that they knew how to control themselves when it came to food. They said, black people overeat. You know, they're hyper oral, and this is one of the reasons why black people are fat. But we as Europeans, we are rational who we are controlled, and we can do better than that. Having a bigger

body became proof of racial inferiority. In other words, maybe you've heard diets and the culture around them being described as oppressive. It's usually used to say specifically that diets oppressed women, a reference to the way women are particularly judged for not meeting beauty standards. Most dieters are women, by the way. That's why Sabrina's work feels like such an important part of history around why and how we got to where we are today. It shows another oppressive

dimension of diets, one that's much less talked about. How diets have historical roots slavery and racism. Some people are able to benefit magnificently from dieting. They build their whole empires on telling people how to lose weight. But then there are the other people who are those individuals being told to lose weight who are being oppressed by that information. So to summarize, during the Industrial Revolution era, society was

changing rapidly. People started living in cities and leading more sedentary lives. At the same time, bigger bodies were falling out of fashion in the Western world, and doctors became more concerned about people's weight. Things like scales and new clothing sizes made it easier for people to notice the size of their bodies and worry about it. These all help explain why dieting became so incredibly popular at this point in history. But there's still a lingering gap here

that we need to resolve. Because people didn't just fall for dangerous, difficult diet schemes hundreds of years ago. They fall for them to this very day. Why do we do this to ourselves? Time after time. There's just something about the promise of dieting that we can't shake. Humans have been attracted to these outlandish schemes again and again throughout history. We love a ridiculous premise, like the grapefruit diet. Yes,

that was a real diet. Weird al Jankovic even wrote a song parodying every big of Me Gonna be an aery view now details me one diet throw out. We want to believe we truly can lose ten hounds in a week if someone tells us they have the secret, nobody else has. Sure, why not? Sounds great? I just talked about how dieting takes off during and after the Industrial Revolution, a time of tremendous economic and societal change.

People wanted to be thinner because that's what they were being told to look like, and because their doctors were increasingly concerned about the health risks of extra weight. But we're not just obsessed with getting smaller. We're obsessed with getting smaller fast. Lots of people have fallen for a fad diet that claimed some insane amount of weight loss in a ridiculously short amount of time. We've talked a lot about the history of diets in this episode. But

now I want to shift gears. We're going to talk about something slightly different, the psychology of diets. Why do we keep falling for these things? The short answer has to do with a familiar concept, delayed gratification. Delaying gratification is something we don't like to do because when things are far away, we don't value them as much. The technical term for this is delayed discounting. We usually think about this idea in terms of good things and pleasure,

which is why it's known as delayed gratification. But Michael Lowe, a professor of clinical psychology at Drexel who has previously worked as a Weight Watchers consultant, offered me a different perspective. He told me that the same concept applies to unhappiness and discomfort. By the time your pre pandemic genes no longer fit, you're desperate to change that and soon we act quickly to get pleasure as soon as we can.

But we all I want to act quickly to get rid of stress and distress and unhappiness as quickly as we can, And therefore the more radical to diet, the quicker the pounds come off. In the short term. Michael is saying here that really out their diets don't scare us off, they actually attract us. Because we think that

diet sounds so crazy it just might work. Michael says that means we are also part of the problem because we don't really want to make small, reasonable changes to how we eat, exercise and live in the long term. What we really want is to lose weight quickly. Fad diet, crash diet. It's why we think of diets as short term solutions because we're primed to think that way about weight loss, a diet that will get you ready for swimsuit season or your cousin's upcoming wedding. We treat lots

of other things that way too. How things will pan out longer term isn't even really on our minds. What's being offered is something that we want, and generally it's being offered in a package that says this is going to be quick and relatively easy. This is Janet Paul v a psychologist who is now retired but for a long time studied diets at the University of Toronto. Much quicker and easier than really changing your behavior over the long term, and so that's attractive to most of us.

I mean, we'd all rather you know, if I could rub a cream on my face and have all my wriggles disappeared, well, that would be great. Or if I could rub a cream on my body and have weight disappear, that would be better. She says. There's another reason we all fall for diets. She calls it false hope syndrome. People think, well, if I only could lose this weight, everything in my life would be better. I would get a boyfriend, I would get that promotion I've always wanted.

It's just this weight that's holding me back. But that's not realistic either. People think weight loss will change not just their bodies, but also everything, all the aspects of their lives that weren't totally perfect before. And if you think about it, these kinds of transformation stories are baked deep into popular culture. It's a basis of fairy tales like Cinderella and many a makeover montage and teen movies. Remember, Janet calls it false hope syndrome, the idea that weight

loss will transform your life. That's the hope part, but it's actually false hope. Janet has worked as a therapist for patients who laws weight. Some I even lost a lot of weight. And when they lost weight, sure they got compliments, but they also were almost disappointed. I heard over and over I actually lost the weight back, you know, whenever, and nothing changed. My friends didn't treat me better, my work didn't treat me better. Nothing changed. I went through

all of this. These psychological draws help us understand why people have turned to diets over and over and over again, over hundreds, if not thousands of years. They're popular and controversial because they're about who we are at the end of the day, what our bodies look like, but also how we live our lives. Something I keep coming back to, though, is how often diet history repeats itself. Name a modern diet and it's probably been done before the century had vegetarians.

Diet breads are the new Graham crackers. Your ancestors did locarb diets before your mom tried Atkins, and before Dr Oz was telling you about the weight loss benefits of vinegar, Lord Byron was drinking it. These ideas seem new, they are not. We just keep falling into the same traps and following the same bad information. Here's Louise Foxcraft again when I write the book. Actually, I thought, I see exactly how to write a good diet book. Now I could do that. She was talking about her book on

the history of dieting. I could call it the History Diet, so I could take all the best elements out of this and write my own diet book. I'd pick out all the best bits, all the bits that appeared to work, or all the bits not only I mean, if I was completely unscrupulous, not only the bits that appeared to work, but the bits that people appeared, um two be susceptible to.

It's not difficult to do. It's a formula to it all. Obviously, to be clear, Louise never created the History Diet, though you could totally see that working right, And she makes a great point about diets they always follow a formula. We're going to explore that. In the next episode. We'll head to neighborhood in Miami, Florida, known for its iconic beaches, sunny weather, and beautiful people. It's a groundbreaking phenomenon with

a global following, the South Beach Diet. We'll tell the story behind the iconic early two thousands die it and what it teaches us about the formula for a hit diet. This off actually began with its founder's own effort to lose weight, and of course we'll meet that founder, the cardiologist Arthur Agatston. The follow starts laughing at me and I said, what are you laughing at? He said, look at your belly, and I really I had one losing

It is written and reported by me Ema Court. Kristin V. Brown is our editor, Magnus Hendrickson is our senior producer, Stacy Wong our associate producer, and Blake Maples is our audio engineer. Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown. Our voice actor for this episode was Sonny de Knocker. Thanks to Francesco Levi and Tim Annette. Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already, and if you like our show, please leave us a review that helps

others find out about it. Thanks for listening, See you next time. H