Maintenance Phase
Maintenance Phase
Bonus: Fad Diets
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This week's show is still in the oven so we're releasing one of our first Patreon bonus episodes. We asked our listeners for the wildest and wackiest fad diets they've ever tried and ended up doing mini-deep dives into The Rotation Diet, The Shangri-La Diet, The Special K Diet, Bethenny Frankel's "Naturally Thin" plan and the Blood Type Diet. Enjoy, and see you next week!
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Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!
Aubrey: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the bonus episode of a podcast that will teach you how to lose 10 pounds a day for three weeks straight.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: It's safe, we promise.
Michael: This is the episode where we finally launch our fad diet. This is it.
Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah.
Michael: Mask off. [laughs]
Aubrey: Wait, no, now, I want to know what your fad diet would be?
Michael: You will 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 31 sweet potatoes and eating all of them. What would yours be?
Aubrey: [laughs] Crash diet, probably for the summer only. That it's like, you can only eat what you grow.
Michael: Ooh.
Aubrey: I have seven pattypan 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.
Michael: That's the most Portland sentence you've ever said on this show.
Aubrey: I really am just a caricature.
Michael: You're actually a sketch that I've been doing. I'm doing both voices on this podcast this full time.
Aubrey: [laughs] Surprise, it's me. [laughs]
Michael: I'm Michael Hobbes.
Aubrey: I'm Aubrey Gordon. [laughs] Totally forgot that we hadn't introduced ourselves.
Michael: Well, we don't have to do this, because everybody's a Patreon supporter. I'm just trying to figure out how we transition [crosstalk] into the actual content of the show.
Aubrey: Sure. Good job, good job. You're doing it.
Michael: Thank you.
Aubrey: Today, we're talking about fad diets.
Michael: I'm so excited.
Aubrey: Me, too. We asked you all to write into us about your wildest fad diets and you all did. Last I checked, it was over 500. My guess is that now, it's closer to 600 or 700.
Michael: Thank you all. I literally thought we were going to get at most 70, you know?
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I was like, "I don't know if anybody was going to actually do this, Aubrey."
Aubrey: Totally. Well, and you were also like-- Look, I don't want you to get-- I 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're not going to get flooded. I am not worried," and then we totally fucking did.
Michael: And then we totally did.
Aubrey: Which is great.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: It's totally great.
Michael: What was your overall impression? What were the themes that emerged?
Aubrey: Well, first of all, I will say, I'm going to guess that 15% of the emails alone were about the cabbage soup diet.
Michael: Wild.
Aubrey: And everyone who wrote in thought it was just a their weird family thing. [laughs]
Michael: Oh, wow.
Aubrey: Someone wrote in was like, "I don't know if this made it outside of Germany." Someone else was like, "This was a real Australian sensation."
Michael: No way.
Aubrey: A number of people were like, "My family did this thing, where we just ate cabbage soup all the time and it was terrible."
Michael: We did an episode, because this is the platonic ideal of a fad diet, the cabbage soup thing.
Aubrey: Absolutely.
Michael: And I don't have a sense of why that one caught fire and other ones didn't, because it's not like people even like cabbage soup that much. At least on Atkins, you could just eat a bunch of bacon.
Aubrey: I think it's the same kind of thing as the Master Cleanse and a bunch of other things, where it's just like, "If it's restrictive and you hate it, it probably works the best."
Michael: It has to be good for you.
Michael: and Aubrey: Yeah.
Aubrey: It's the belief system that goes along with it. 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 10 or 20 fad diets."
Michael: Yeah, that's interesting.
Aubrey: One of them becomes a gateway drug to all the other ones. There's a little bit of a sunk investment fallacy, right? That's like, "Well, this first one didn't work. So, I got to keep at it until I find the one that does."
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: There are a lot 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, that phrase is used to describe five different approaches. One of them is straight up just you rotate through different diets a week at a time.
Michael: Oh, [laughs] at least it's honest.
Aubrey: It's just paleo for a week, keto for a week, Jenny Craig for a week, Nutrisystem for a week, whatever the-- [laughs] I think I appreciated that one because it felt at least, like you say, like honest.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Nothing's going to work. Everything's going to work a little bit. Nothing's going to work great.
Michael: And these are fundamentally all arbitrary.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: It [chuckles] doesn’t really matter, which one-- [crosstalk]
Aubrey: Just pick one. Just fucking pick one. It's fine.
Michael: It's the process of transitioning to a new diet that is probably giving you a lot of the "benefits" of a diet anyways. You might as well just switched to a new one constantly.
Aubrey: Yeah. We also got a bunch of stuff that we're not actually going to talk about today. The HCG diet, or Herbalife, or things like that that are way meatier than just a quick touch, which is what we're going to do today.
Michael: Yeah, those are episodes.
Aubrey: Those are full on episodes. We are going to get into it about Herbalife at some point. We should say, we're going to dig in on some fad diets today and we're going to include some listener emails, both fad diets themselves and the listener emails, reference specific weights, they reference calorie counts if those are things that are going to be hard for you to listen to, this might be one to skip.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: It's all of the stuff. It's all the same shit. That's always [laughs] show.
Michael: Where should we dive in? Do you want to do one of yours or do you want mine? What do we have?
Aubrey: You know what? I'll start this with The Rotation Diet. How about that?
Michael: Yeah, do it.
Aubrey: Okay. A listener named Dawn wrote into us about The Rotation Diet. Dawn says, "Picture this. 1987, I am 22 years old, and I probably weigh around 115, but felt that I was too fat to wear a bikini." Jesus fucking Christ.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: "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 works 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, 1-3 were 600 calories. days 4-7 were 900 calories. You then lived it up at 1,200 calories for one week. And the third week was a repeat of week one. I remember eating veal and maybe broccoli."
Michael: I love it like the cheat days are 1,200 calories.
Aubrey: Or, starvation level?
Michael: It's like two pieces of pizza for an entire day.
Aubrey: Yeah, 600 calories is such a fucking bummer.
Michael: Yeah, dude.
Aubrey: "Sadly, I see that the book still exists and the cover lied. I gained back all the weight plus an extra 100 pounds. I am now 56 and working through my food shit. Your podcast is brilliant and helps me find the humor as I wade through the crap." Thanks, Dawn.
Michael: Dawn.
Aubrey: Dawn also says, "I have a pin I like to wear 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, weightwatchers, paleo, and a multitude of other shit, I will gouge my eyes out. Yep, I'm fat. All the best," Dawn.
[laughter]
Aubrey: Guys, I like Dawn. Dawn seems great. [laughs]
Michael: 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."
Aubrey: Mike.
Michael: We're burying the lead this entire show. Almost a year, we're actually, really into paleo, Dawn.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. Surprise. The end of this podcast as of just been the best diet is, drumroll, please. I looked into The Rotation Diet a little bit. It was developed by a psychology professor named Martin Katahn, who was the head of the Vanderbilt University Weight Management program. I wanted to read to you from the official book description. This was a number one New York Times bestseller of The Rotation Diet.
Michael: and Aubrey: Of course.
Aubrey: So many absolute garbage diet books that promise a miracle.
Michael: Yeah. My God.
Aubrey: 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 13 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 70,000 Nashvillians went on the diet and weighed in weekly at supermarkets."
Michael: What?
Aubrey: This is Michael Hobbes catnip.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: [laughs] The results showed that the city became almost a million pounds lighter.
Michael: Whoa.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Wait. Did they just say small changes and Dawn was eating 600 calories a fucking day? Small changes?
Aubrey: Yeah, small changes. Cut your caloric intake by at least a third.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: 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. 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 the reputation that the diet itself has, which is uff, uff.
Michael: Okay. As an accidental scholar in this, what do you think of this thing of rotating and changing? It's interesting to me that it's 600 calories one day, and then 1,200 the next, and then 600 the next. Why not just 800 calories every day? Why is it important that it changes constantly?
Aubrey: I think there's this whole thing around "kickstarting weight loss," which is not really a thing. But as you and I have discussed, there are lots of diets that will lead to short-term weight loss and there's some evidence that shows that our bodies seek and find stasis after a couple of weeks on a diet, which is what leads to what we call "plateauing." In some ways, it feels at least honest.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: We just be like, "Just fucking pick a diet and cycle through or just 600 calories, and then 800 calories, and I don't care." I suspect there's something about it that keeps people a little more on their toes that just like, "If you're on the same thing all the time, this is developed by a psychology professor, so, I have no doubt that there's some amount of "life hacking" of 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 extreme caloric restriction, which is like the classic. If there's a classic kind of diet, it's just like, "Stop eating. Get as close to not eating as you can."
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: This one dresses itself up, like, psychology, and the university, and it's a private university, whoo.
Michael: So maybe all of the rotation is just to trick your body into the extreme, just monotony and discomfort of eating that little every day.
Aubrey: Yeah, and I also think a core part of diet marketing is being like, "We know you've tried everything. Nothing worked until ba, ba, ta, ba." People have been saying that and using that communication formula for a good 30 or 40 years at this point, probably longer.
Michael: They're going after the people that wrote you emails and have 10 bullet points.
Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely. They're going after the repeat offenders, which historically is also me. I was a repeat offender for a long time.
Michael: Well, most people are. Most fat people have tried everything. It's not you reached 37 and you're like, "Wait, am I fat? Wait."
Aubrey: Yeah, right. We're not all Ed McMahon.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: A lot of us do in fact know that we're fat.
[laughter]
Aubrey: So, that's The Rotation Diet.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: How about you? Tell me about some of the fad diets you found?
Michael: Okay. I have a funny one and a bittersweet one and I'm going to do the bittersweet one first.
Aubrey: Oh, okay.
Michael: Okay. Have you heard of The Shangri-La Diet?
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: It sounds really boring. It sounds honestly, super padded out. My understanding is that the book is almost entirely anecdotes of people, who lost weight on the diet. It sounds really boring.
Aubrey: Oh.
Michael: Do you know what it is, though?
Aubrey: My recollection about The Shangri-La Diet is that, you're supposed to drink oil or something before-- Is that right?
Michael: Yes, yes, that is true.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: 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 20 pounds before moving on to another diet. The year 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."
Aubrey: Uff. My mom did weightwatchers off and on for a long time and in one iteration of it, in one of the phases of weightwatchers, you were supposed to eat liver every day.
Michael: Sure.
Aubrey: And my mom truly hates liver. She would cut it up into little pieces, and freeze it, and then swallow it like a pill.
Michael: Oh, my God. Wow.
Aubrey: The flax oil capsules reminded me of that. I have to imagine that the author of The Shangri-La Diet would take issue with capsules versus actually swallowing oil. There would be something about coating your throat, and stomach, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Michael: Yeah, as soon as you hear the parameters of this diet, you're like, "Oh, are there going to be a bunch of arbitrary rules put on this, so that when it fails for people, you can blame the people and not the diet?"
Aubrey: Yeah. So, what did you learn about The Shangri-La Diet?
Michael: First of all, this stuck out to me, because I did The Shangri-La Diet.
Aubrey: Oh, Mike.
Michael: I am ashamed. This is the first time this has happened on the show. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about this nudge bullshit and Freakonomics bullshit that we talked about in our Brian Wansink episode is that, I fell for it. I was into this stuff in the 2000s. I like watching TED Talks, I read both Freakonomics books, I listened to their podcast religiously for years. It was one of the first podcast I listened to. I read this infamous column in 2005 about The Shangri-La Diet and like a lot of other people, I did it for a couple days, and it actually worked really well. Really, remarkably well.
Aubrey: Oh, no, Mike.
Michael: I know.
Aubrey: This is the diet that works.
Michael: Here it comes, Aubrey. I'm about to pitch you an MLM.
[laughter]
Michael: Your three friends and we're all going to tell people about this diet.
Aubrey: Look, I got a garage full of shit that I got to move.
Michael: I was living in Copenhagen at the time, and I did this diet for three days, and it worked super well. Then, a friend of mine was living in Singapore, and I was going to visit him, and I went to Singapore, and I just obviously didn't care about the diet, because Singapore is one of the great food cities of the world. I ate a bunch of great food. Then I came back to Denmark, and then a week after I came back, I was like, "Oh, yeah, I was trying this diet before I left." Then I started again, and it just didn't work.
Aubrey: It was neutralized by chili crab [crosstalk] in Singapore. [laughs]
Michael: I was so full of crap at that point. The crabs canceled it out.
Aubrey: Oh, my God.
Michael: Okay. Instead of me explaining how this diet works, I'm just going to read to you from this-- This column appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 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, Freakonomics, the subheading is One Professor's lifetime of self-experimentation. But in the column, the sub headline is the accidental diet.
Aubrey: Ooh.
Michael: Here's how it starts out. Seth Roberts is a 52-year-old psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. If you knew Roberts 25 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's a clear skinned, well rested, entirely affable man, who weighs about 160 pounds.
Aubrey: Fuck off.
Michael: I know. [laughs]
Aubrey: Pardon me. Fuck off.
Michael: And looks 10 years younger than his age. How did this happen? Then it describes his methodology of like, his big innovation is using himself as a guinea pig and tracking things like tracking what he eats, tracking what he weighs, tracking how he feels. This is how he solved all of his problems, basically. This is the story that they're walking us through. It took him more than 10 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. I think he's watching Good Morning America and stuff like something with lots of faces in the morning.
Aubrey: This is just somebody, who took every take home point from every TED Talk and just did all of it at once, right?
Michael: It's like a living embodiment of life hacking. I know.
Aubrey: Oh, God.
Michael: 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 Roberts TV viewing now mimics. [laughs]
Aubrey: I hate this and I want a heavy bag with a face on it that I can punch for a while.
Michael: Ever since the paleo diet, I have such a pet peeve for people invoking the Stone Age.
Aubrey: Right.
Michael: The Stone Age is a period of 2 million years of human history and different human populations in different parts of the world with very different climates.
Aubrey: Yes.
Michael: Whenever people are like, "Did you know in the Stone Age, they used to--." I'm always like, "Where? When?"
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: It's never people, who actually study the Stone Age and who know about it. It's people that have expertise in completely different fields and read on a fucking Snapple cap one time. A little fun fact that, they saw lots of faces in the morning. How would we know that about Stone Age populations?
Aubrey: Truly, and also sorry, once again. 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. Every time that shit comes up, the voice in my head is just going like, "What was the life expectancy?"
Michael: Dude, I know.
Aubrey: 19? I don't know.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: What the fuck are you talking about?
Michael: Then, the article transitions into some relatively true stuff. Because of evolutionary adaptation, we all have metabolic mechanisms that make us hold on to fat. Our bodies are set up for times of feast and times of famine. When your body goes into famine mode, i.e., dieting, it holds on to fat more tightly and that makes it really hard for you to lose weight. This is something we've said on the show. This is more or less true.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: Then, it goes into this guy, Seth Roberts, his idea that this mechanism, our bodies have this set point. He then adds this little addendum, where he says that, "What triggers your body's mechanism to hold on to fat is flavor."
Aubrey: What?
Michael: When your body tastes something that's familiar and that you like so you eat like a bowl of Lucky Charms, it switches you to fat storage mode and it's going to a bank those calories, because it could taste them. So, the key is to ingest calories without tasting them.
Aubrey: This is the most puritanical bullshit.
Michael: 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. When I was on it, I couldn't drink coffee within an hour of taking the tablespoon of oil or afterwards, because you don't want to have any flavor in your mouth at all. You want to take in these calories, but your body doesn't know you're taking in the calories.
Aubrey: What the fuck, man?
Michael: I know. The idea is that because you're taking in calories, but your body isn't banking them as calories, your body doesn't know to want more fat. You're just not hungry the rest of the day. The promise of the diet is just that you're taking in an extra, I don't know, 500 calories of oil, but then you end up eating thousand calories less of normal food.
Aubrey: This feels like, if you are a person who is predisposed to have disordered eating patterns, boy, oh boy, come on down, the water is fine. Get ready for your next eating disorder. Whoo.
Michael: I know.
Aubrey: I also think, because it's coming at you from a much more like, dude, focus set of media outlets like, Freakonomics was not anything that was like, "Come on down, ladies." I think because there's so much less discussion of men's body image, and men's eating disorders, and all of that stuff, it's a conversation about a diet that happens in a void of a broader conversation about food, and human behavior, and psychology, and all of that kind of stuff.
Michael: What frustrates me about this is that, this whole thing is so male coded and that whole world like the TED Talk world was just a lot of dudes with overconfident ideas that hadn't really been tested. This entire Freakonomics column talks about Seth Roberts doing self-experimentation as if it's some fucking revolutionary new methodology. No one has ever fucking altered their diet and monitor what their weight does before. That's dieting. That's the experience of 80% of dieters.
Aubrey: It's also fucking irresponsible, honestly 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."
Michael: If you read the comments on any of these posts or 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." Then, there's the like, "I puked immediately upon taking a tablespoon of [crosstalk] oil, people."
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Which is not a small number of people. [laughs]
Aubrey: I feel certain to my bones that I would be an immediate puke person.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: I have a pretty weak stomach. [laughs] So, it would really just-- Yeah.
Michael: I should have arranged a taste test like the Halo Top.
Aubrey: No, Michael.
Michael: I should've made you do this.
Aubrey: I'm boycotting our show.
[laughter]
Michael: I do think there is a very frustrating journalistic side to this or this was not tested. It's still not clear to me how the Freakonomics guys found this random psychology professor, who had 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. This was a huge sensation. After this column came out, it became such a big deal that Seth Roberts appeared on Good Morning America and Diane Sawyer famously ate a tablespoon of vegetable oil.
Aubrey: Whoa.
Michael: 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 scientific finding that this guy had." It's like, "This is not science. It's a thing that worked for one guy." To this day, there's never been a study of this.
Aubrey: God damn it.
Michael: It's weird for what is ostensibly a science column, and is always using the language of science, and like, "Oh, we're doing is telling you the science." It's literally a fucking anecdote.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: This guy did a thing, a weird thing that worked for him, but it's dressed up as if his "self-experimentation is real experimentation" and it's not.
Aubrey: Well, it's also one of those things, where you're like, "Oh, this is the length that the world will go to to validate things that white dudes come up with."
Michael: Exactly.
Aubrey: Well, it worked for exactly one white dude and now, it's Science like, fuck off.
Michael: Yes. 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 calling out the Freakonomics guys for shining a spotlight on something that not only has it not been tested, but Seth Roberts never even attempted to test it. 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 worst."
Michael: Mm-hmm.
Michael: 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?
Michael: Right. Totally.
Michael: We live in a country, we're like, "What two thirds of the population is desperate to lose weight?" You're just going to throw this fucking fish in the middle of all these hungry seals and just be like, "Well, it's not our fault that they ate it." Come on.
Aubrey: I actually think the onus is even greater on people marketing or promoting diets to add more disclaimers, to add more parameters around what they're talking about, because of the ravenousness with which people will descend on a new diet.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: Diet marketers have a greater onus on them to be very clear, very specific, and very 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. [laughs]
Michael: Yeah. None of them-- [crosstalk] So much lies with editors, too. Editors being like, "Sorry, man, you got one anecdote of one guy with one diet. Come back to us in three years when it's been tested."
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right.
Michael: This is where it gets bittersweet.
Aubrey: Okay.
Michael: This was 2005, when this comes out, there's this massive wave of publicity. Then, Seth Roberts becomes a pretty prominent blogger, actually. This was peak blog times, like pre-social media. I started reading a lot of posts on his blog. He just got weirder and weirder over time.
Aubrey: Oh.
Michael: He was really obsessed with this idea of self-experimentation as a methodology. He had a chip on his shoulder like, "Why isn't self-experimentation taken more seriously?' He started doing this thing, where he became convinced that eating half a stick of butter a day just with a knife and fork, it seems, would improve his brain function.
Aubrey: [laughs] I'm real mad because 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.
Michael: That's why you're so smart. You just get all the sticks of butter.
Aubrey: I'm so fucking smart.
Michael: Aubrey, you're a little slow this episode. Did you not have your butter, today?
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I noticed you are a little sluggish. [laughs]
Aubrey: Classic brainfood, sticks of butter.
Michael: There's also some anti-Vax adjacent stuff. He gets really obsessed with omega-3s and there's all these posts like crank posts about how omega-3s cure ADHD. He has this long thing about, I guess, pregnant women are more likely to have gingivitis, that thing where you floss your teeth and it bleeds. He was convinced that, because pregnant women aren't getting omega-3s. He kept saying depression doesn't exist and what people think is depression is that, they just need to get more sleep. He was obsessed with sleep as the key to everything and like that is what ails Americans is it like we're not getting enough sleep. He had all this stuff about how fermented foods cure acne. It was just a bunch of pretty standard crank contrarian stuff. All dressed up as science of the like, I'm just asking questions or cherry picking. It was very COVID denier.
Aubrey: Uh-huh.
Michael: It's like, that thing, where you're like, "A study out of Prague found that people who wear masks always die." Then you look and like, "That's not what the study found at all and it's some weird journal that you've never heard of, and the people who wrote it aren't epidemiologists." You're like, "Ah." This looks like science, if you don't actually look at it.
Aubrey: That's what happens when you try to universalize based on a sample size of one.
Michael: This is a thing. Yes.
Aubrey: That's what happens when you're like, "What's true for me is true for everyone," which is also how we get so much anti-fat bias 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, "Our bodies are the same and you just fucked yours up. So, let me help you fix it." It's really easy to get down a super weird rabbit hole of being like my experience is everyone's experience.
Michael: I know. One of the reasons it's so bittersweet to me is that, on some level, I get it in that he struggled with sleep his entire life. It seems he always had struggles with his energy levels. He thought that he solved it, and then he was 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 lack of sleep was this defining problem in the country as a whole.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: And it's like, "No, man, you just struggle with sleep. You clearly have some form of chronic illness that you're dealing with." But that doesn't mean that that's a problem for everybody. Other people have other things that they're dealing with.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: I don't know. It became this sad portrait of like, "Where this obsession with self-experimentation and with yourself as the only test subject that matters can take you."
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: The same cluster of beliefs that I feel a lot of those TED talkie dude's like, "This is a very well-trodden path," that a lot of those dudes went down, and I was like, "Oh, man, if this guy, if he was still blogging today, he'd be one of these just asking questions transphobes." This is where it leads everybody, but then I kept fucking scrolling, and then it's a bunch of transphobia [laughs] came out.
Aubrey: Oh, come on.
Michael: This is so fucked up. He got super obsessive this idea of autogynephilia, which is this idea that transwomen are actually just like men, who are turned on by dressing as women. I guess, some trans woman wrote a memoir, a moving memoir about her experience of coming out and transitioning. He wrote to her and was like, "Why didn't you mention this theory? Why didn't you mention this fetish thing?"
Aubrey: Jesus fucking Christ.
Michael: This is where like, "Why does it always lead to transphobia?" It's wild to me.
Aubrey: Well, it's also one of those things, where you're like, "Oh, you read a cis person's description of what they imagined trans people to be that was written in 1981," which is like, "This dude got real hooked on." It's got to be about boners and you're like, "No."
Michael: But then, okay, double bittersweet. Then, in 2014, he dies.
Aubrey: What?
Michael: Yeah, he had a heart attack while he was hiking in the hills above Berkeley, California. This then triggers a wave of 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."
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: And then, his poor family had to put out a statement with his medical records.
Aubrey: Jesus.
Michael: 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 a 60-year-old, who had a heart attack."
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: That's something that happens a lot. 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 about his medical status he wasn't disclosing publicly. Don't use people's public personas as a way of diagnosing them with something.
Aubrey: And also, even if you did know all of those things, somebody just fucking died and a mother just buried her son.
Michael: The whole thing just got really gross at the end.
Aubrey: Oh.
Michael: One of the reasons I think I'm slightly easier on him than like I would be if he was still around is just because there is this tragic ending that makes him victim and people were really shitty to him in death. But also, he did have a bunch of crank beliefs and it's not clear to me that it was all that ethical to bring him national attention and to promote this diet when it's part of a much larger cluster of just weird behaviors that this guy had. Lots of people in America have weird behaviors.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally.
Michael: They don't need their behaviors to be turned into bestselling books.
Aubrey: Yeah, nor, do they need to turn their own behaviors on other people with non-bestselling books.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: There's this question about like, "Okay, when someone that dies, who's the person you want to be?"
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: F0r 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 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 the same kind of logic that gets leveled at fat people.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: All of that extremely unforgiving thinking is just truly and deeply not a thing I want to emulate in the world.
Michael: What's your next one?
Aubrey: I have a twofer.
Michael: Ooh, do it.
Aubrey: This is a person, who wished to remain anonymous, who says, "Hi, Aubrey and Mike. Huge fan of the show over here. Okay, so, teo ridiculous fad diets I tried are the Special K Diet and Bethenny Frankel's Naturally Thin.
Michael: [laughs] That's so cursed. I have no idea who Bethenny Frankel is.
Aubrey: You don't know who Bethenny Frankel is?
Michael: No. But it's the name of a female, I guess, influencer and then something with thin in it, already just the hairs on the back of my neck just stood up.
Aubrey: I'm going to do you one worse, Mike. It's not an influencer.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: Bethenny Frankel is a real housewife.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Holy shit. Wait, which jurisdiction?
Aubrey: New York, RHONY.
Michael: She's one of the RHONYs. Okay.
Aubrey: This person goes on to say, "The Special K Diet was ridiculous and I need to know its origin. 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 kept starving, shaking, and I'm pretty sure I gave a couple pounds. It was clearly just a ploy to get people to buy their series. I was just desperate."
Michael: They just told you that their food was a diet food, and to eat a bunch of their food, and called it a diet. That's all that it was.
Aubrey: Yes, it was called the Special K Diet or the Special K challenge. There were a bunch of TV ads about it, and they featured among other things like someone like pulling on jeans, and then pulling on one of the belt loops to be like, "Look how loose my jeans are?" They would say you can lose a dress size in two weeks or use a jean size in two weeks. The diet was this. Replace two meals each day with a bowl of Special K.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: And then, over time at some point it segued into eat any Special K product including their cereal bars, which were rice crispy treats kind of vibes.
Michael: [laughs] This is demented.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: It's just like the Oreo diet. Eat nothing but Oreos. It's not a diet and it's coming from the Oreo people.
Aubrey: Well, also, 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 full, happy, and ready to take on the day.
Michael: I know.
Aubrey: All of the stuff has disappeared from the Kellogg's website and from Special K website. It was up there for, I'm going to guess, a good 10 years. WebMD did a write up on the Special K Diet,
"There's nothing special about Special K products. In fact, most are not whole green and they tend to be low in fullness promoting fiber and protein."
Michael: It's cereal. Yeah.
Aubrey: It's cereal.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: It's not going to hold you. You're not going to feel you ate an omelet. You're going to feel you ate some cereal.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: They also get a little sciency for a minute, which I was like, "There's a little parenthetical in here and I want to see if you can sniff it out." "Results of a 2002 study done at Purdue University funded by Kellogg shows replacing regular meals with calorie and portion controlled serial meals could result in weight loss. Study participants took in an average of 1,590 calories per day and cut their fat intake in half." "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 4.4-pound weight loss over a two-week period," says study author, Rick Mattes, PhD.
Michael: Ridiculous. They're basically saying that people lost weight because they ate less. It has nothing to do with the cereal.
Aubrey: No, it has absolutely fucking nothing to do with the cereal. And also, here's the thing. They advertise this as lose 10 pounds in two weeks, and then their own fucking study that they fucking paid for was like, "You probably going to lose four and a half pounds." [laughs] I think the wild thing about the Special K Challenge/Diet, whatever you want to call it is that, it 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." What?
Michael: 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 are part of a complete breakfast."
Aubrey: And then, they would have seven other foods. They would have a whole other breakfast with a bowl of cereal and they're like, "Now, it's good for you."
Michael: I was in my 30s when I realize that it's basically just like, "If you eat this with some healthy stuff, it's healthy breakfast. [crosstalk]
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: It's literally everything is part of a healthy breakfast. If you pair it with other things that are healthy, how were they allowed to do this? It's the most nonsense phrase.
Aubrey: Well, and from its inception, cereal was designed as a "health food."
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: But in a lot of ways, this is just the same shit that Kellogg's has been doing since it was Kellogg's. All of the cereal brands do the same thing, which is like, "This is a health food. Don't look at the nutrition facts. Buy."
Michael: Yeah.
[laughter]
Michael: Give me the influencer lady.
Aubrey: Perfect. Bethenny Frankel is one of The Real Housewives of New York. This is what our anonymous emailer has to say about that. "The second diet I followed, which was packaged as a "mindset and lifestyle" the anti-diet is from Bethenny Frankel's book Naturally Thin." She claims that all "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 seems sensible at the time, 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.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: I'm glad that you don't know who Bethenny Frankel is. A little background on her. She started on The Real Housewives of New York in 2008. She's been around for a minute. She had spent the early 2000s trying to make it in Hollywood. She'd been a production assistant, she hosted one season of a daytime talk show called Bethenny in 2013, and she had made a name for herself on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart season.
Michael: Oh, okay.
Aubrey: She has also since built a business out of her skinny girl brand of low-calorie foods. They'll have like skinny girl margarita mix and that sort of thing.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: That's just a lower calorie and relatively joyless cocktail to have. This thing about scooping bagels is that a thing that you've heard before?
Michael: I was going to ask you about this. What is that?
Aubrey: It's where you genuinely, usually take 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?
Michael: I've never seen somebody do that.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Is it the thing that people do commonly?
Aubrey: Do you know joylessness of eating in this way, which is just like, "What if I had a bagel, but made it sad? What if I took a delicious food and made it above it?"
Michael: A bagel trench, yeah.
Aubrey: Yeah. I am of the opinion that is aligned with our emailer, which is like, it is eating disorder light stuff. The book is organized around 10 rules for living naturally thin. The concept here is that, there are naturally thin people, and they just know how to eat, and that's how they're naturally thin, and they do things like scoop out their bagels, and they do things like they don't restrict and that thing. The interesting thing to me about the list of 10 rules is that, they echo a lot of intuitive eating principles. But they take a wild fucking turn. The first half, you're like, "Oh, you're on the right track." Then, it takes a gnarly turn and you're like, "No, no, no, no. Wrong."
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: 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, fuck. You're so close, you're so close."
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: She says, "Eat more real foods, and real meals and less "processed stuff."'
Michael: Sure.
Aubrey: Which I'm like, "Well, that's just foods that poor people can afford and people who don't have time can eat." That discourse around processed foods and clean eating is just another way of stigmatizing foods that low-income people can afford and can eat." She also says, "Eat whatever you want, but do it in moderation," which if you ask folks who are like in deep on intuitive eating. They're like, "Yeah, moderation is a way to make restriction sound sensible.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: Again, if you are a person who tends toward disordered eating, moderation becomes a little baby step back into restriction for you. I actually have a little clip of her talking about her book. This is a promotional video from Simon and Schuster, her publisher.
Michael: I thought it was going to be a clip of her on Real Housewives throwing her wine at somebody.
Aubrey: I mean, I didn't look up that clip, I bet you it would take us 15 seconds to find that if you want to. [laughs]
Michael: I've never watched Real Housewives, but on eight different occasions, I've been really bored, and I'll go on YouTube, and I'll type in Real Housewives best fights.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: And there's compilations and some of them are 40 minutes long and I'll watch the whole thing.
Aubrey: It's really fascinating because look, when I was prepping for this one, I was like, "Okay, there's an 80% chance or an 85% chance that Mike has no idea who this is. Then there's a 15% chance that he is a dedicated viewer of Real Housewife."
Michael: Really into it.
Aubrey: I've no idea and interestingly, you seem to have managed to check both boxes.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: It was like, "I only watch the wildest parts." Are you ready to hear Bethenny Frankel talk about her book?
Michael: All right, let's do it.
Bethenny: I am Bethenny Frankel. I'm a natural food chef and my book is called Naturally Thin: Unleash Your SkinnyGirl 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. But I am a chef, 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 Batali. 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'm not coming back with my jeans one inch tighter." I just figured out to not be afraid of foods, to be able to eat what you want in smaller quantities, and to be able to use the 10 rules I talked 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.
Naturally Thin isn't necessarily for the person to lose 150 pounds. I'm sure that they could, but it's for the person that wants to lose 20, 30, 5, 10 pounds, a 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 eat, workout nonstop, 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 700 people do the eat the exact same thing. But those 700 people had different childhoods, different parents, different environments, different money. So, this book is for everyone.
Michael: Not a single wine was thrown. I'm livid.
Aubrey: [laughs] I was counting on a table flip in this promotional video.
Michael: You took me to YouTube under false pretenses.
Michael: So, talk to me about your reactions to that video.
Michael: I want to know what you think, but I'm of two minds. On some level, she seems to be aware of fad diets, she seems to be aware of the one cup of cottage cheese thing is total bullshit. 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. It's right on the cover of her book. It's like, "Learn how to be a skinny girl and leave all the dieting behind." It's like, you're literally telling people how to become skinny without being on a diet. That's what diets do. So, it's an improvement on where we were, but it's still not good. [laughs]
Aubrey: Leave dieting behind with these tricks that I learned from eating disorders is really what it feels like to me, where it's like, it's not Eating Disorder. That's not actually what she's selling here, but it is like, "Okay, but be weird about food in public and only have three bites of something that you like." It feels it's talking out of both sides of its mouth at all times that there is this like, "Don't diet, but do become thin. Don't restrict but absolutely restrict." All of this stuff is straddling the 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 the hundred pounds."
Michael: She did say, "Everyone I know," and it's like, "We know, Bethenny. You don't know any fat people."
Aubrey: We know, you don't know fat people, Bethenny.
Michael: We know, you don't know fat people.
Aubrey: [laughs] We know that even if you do, you're going to pretend like you don't.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: [laughs] You know what I mean? There's a cousin that you don't talk about, whatever. Yeah, it just felt like this little window into this world of a way of thinking about food that masquerades as healthy, and neutral, and psychologically healing, but it's still like the same shit.
Michael: You are America's greatest chronicler of this shift in diet discourse.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I am incapable of saying anything that I haven't learned from you on this. But there is this weird almost gas lady thing. They'll be like, "This isn't a diet," and 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?"
Aubrey: It is part of this thing that we're going through now, which is just a cultural changing of the clothes that diets wear without actually getting underneath and dealing with the actual diets themselves or dissuading people from dieting itself. We're essentially at this point, just dissuading people from calling what they do a diet.
Michael: I know. Again, is it an improvement on the bullshit that we had to deal with in the 80s and 90s? Sure. But it's not a great leap forward.
Aubrey: No and I think it likes to bill itself as a radical reorganization of how we live our lives and it's a fucking search and replace.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: It's a command F for diets and replace with lifestyle change, or detox, or cleanse, or health trend, or what the fuck ever. It's just using different words to do exactly the same fucking thing.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Atkins was called a diet, keto is now referred to as a lifestyle. They're the same fucking thing at their core.
Michael: Dude, you know what it is?
Aubrey: Hmm.
Michael: It is Kentucky Fried Chicken changing its name to KFC, when the word fried became stigmatized. A lot of people weren't eating fried foods, because they wanted to lose weight. So, KFC saw the writing on the wall and changed its name to this acronym that people don't even know what it stands for, and kept selling the same chicken.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. It's all the same shit. It's what these capitalist enterprises have done to survive a culture change.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: So, you said you had a funny one.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: I can use a funny fad diet.
Michael: Are you familiar with The Blood Type Diet?
Aubrey: Yes. We got a lot of emails about The Blood Type Diet. This was one of the ones that we got a big wave of emails about.
Michael: It's fascinating to me.
Aubrey: It's eat right and then the number four, your blood type. Yeah.
Michael: Yes, it's number four. I love that it's the number four.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: It's the 2 Fast 2 Furious style of naming things. Yeah.
Aubrey: I know absolutely nothing. I have never read the Eat right 4 Your Blood Type stuff, I never did it, I don't know anybody who did it. So, I'm coming in 100% fresh.
Michael: This is an email from a listener, who also wanted to remain anonymous. It says, "The fat diet that I put myself on when I was 12 was Dr Peter D'Adamo blood type diet: Eat right 4 Your Blood. 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 seems so random. For example, my blood type is O. 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. 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."
Aubrey: Listen, before we get into this one, I just want to name. I know this is not an uncommon experience. It was also my experience to start dieting when you're before you even hit your teenage years.
Michael: Yes, it's bad, it's really really bad.
Aubrey: But I also want to name like, "That's fucking horrible and really, really heartbreaking." The phrase "I put myself on this fucking blood type diet" is like just sucking the joy out of life. This is what happens and introducing really, really harmful forces into people's lives. Before we do, we're going to dig in, I'm sure we're going to have a great time with it. And also, I just wanted to name that fucking sucks and I'm so sorry that this listener went through that.
Michael: Yeah, it's also just so important to forgive yourself for falling for this kind of stuff.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: We could do a whole episode on all of the scams that I have fallen for in my life and not sophisticated scams, like, super caveman, lizard brain level scams. The people selling these diets, whether they know it or not, they're reaching back to a long tradition of making customers forget 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.
Aubrey: Right.
Michael: The villains are not the people who fell for these scams. The villains are the grifters who are selling them.
Aubrey: Absolutely.
Michael: And The Blood Type Diet is one of the griftier ones. It's developed by this guy, Peter D'Adamo. He actually got the idea from his dad. There is a very good takedown of this diet on Refinery29 by Kelsey Miller called why The Blood Type Diet is a dangerous myth. It's excellent. She says, "He was the son of another famous naturopath, James D'Adamo, who first posited the idea that a diet based on blood type might have health benefits. The Senior D'Adamo prescribed a low-fat vegetarian diet to all of his patients noting that some seem to exhibit improved health, others remained the same, and some got worse. Could blood type be the cause? [laughs]
Aubrey: God damn it. Could being a horse girl be the cause?
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: Could Star Trek fandom be the cause? All of those, I'm just asking questions. I don't know. It's just got real grump real [laughs] that one.
Michael: I just love 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 types." I was like, "Maybe, don't prescribe the same thing to everybody.'
Aubrey: This is actually the person that Bethenny Frankel was talking about in that video like, "Any doctor can tell everyone to eat the same thing." [laughs]
Michael: I guess, he comes up with this absurd typology and then his son, Peter D'Adamo runs with it. Kelsey also mentions in her piece that the main like the official headshot of him on his website is of him in a lab coat standing in a sort of quasi clinical environment, but he's not a doctor. He's a naturopath with a degree from a Naturopathic University outside of Seattle. She says, "He is a Naturopathic Practitioner and as he describes himself in his website, a research educator, Ivesian, amateur horologist, budding software developer, and air-cooled enthusiast."
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I had to google half of these.
Aubrey: I was going to say, "I know what two of those terms are."
Michael: [laughs] I know.
Aubrey: He was a haberdasher--
[laughter]
Michael: The basics of the diet are exactly what it sounds. It's basically that your blood type determines the kind of diet you eat, the way that your body is able to breakdown foods. He has this typology of the different blood types and each one of them has a little narrative with it, because his idea is that, the blood types emerged at different times in human history. [crosstalk] Exactly. I'm going to go through these. Type O, he calls the hunter and this is like, "What our blood type was when we were hunter-gatherers?" The idea is that you should be eating a ton of meat, and fish, and old fruits and vegetables, but not new fruits and vegetables and you shouldn't be eating grains, because this is supposed to be pre-agriculture.
Aubrey: 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?
Michael: Old like they're ancient or whatever.
Aubrey: So, you're not having pomelos. You're not getting pluots. [laughs] You got to eat the old shit.
Michael: Yeah, exactly.
Aubrey: Enjoy your quince.
Michael: In Kelsey's piece, she says, "My veins were filled with type O. Therefore, I was instructed to renounce my vegetarianism and embrace a [crosstalk] 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 strawberries, lentils, and almost all dairy, though butter was okay."
Aubrey: Yeah, you know how cavemen were always eating butter like all the time?
Michael: That's why they were so smart.
Aubrey: Good Lord.
Michael: He also apparently in his book has a bunch of personality type bullshit that goes along with the blood types? 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." [laughs]
Aubrey: What the fuck is anything?
Michael: What are you talking about? Personality types go with blood types? No.
Aubrey: Absolutely not and also, 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 or organized around no fucking joke astrological signs.
Michael: Dude. Yeah, the whole time I was reading this, I was like, "Somebody absolutely did the zodiac diet, didn't they?"
Aubrey: Multiple people to the zodiac diet and I have three of those books.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: But this feels like, if that diet put on a lab coat.
Michael: Yeah.
[laughter]
Michael: 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."
Aubrey: Forced to adapt.
Michael: "Type As, 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."
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Then there's type B, which he calls nomads because there's settled societies and there's also nomads, nomadic hordes like roaming the steps or whatever. He says that everybody with type B blood is descended from Mongolians. He clearly read one article on National Geographic about Genghis Khan and he's like, "Yes, the nomads. They are Mongolian thing."
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: But then, he translates this into like, "You can eat plants and meats, but not chicken or pork, and you can have some dairy, but you should never have wheat, corn, lentils, or tomatoes," which like tomatoes, I don't know why that would have anything to do with Mongolia but fine.
Aubrey: Sure.
Michael: And then, there's also type AB blood. This is a mixture of settled societies and nomadic societies. I think he ran out of societies that he's familiar with. He's like, "Ah, this one is part nomadic part settled or whatever." This is from the Refinery29 article. It says, "The rarest and newest of the blood types is what D'Adamo calls the chameleon. It is the only one that emerged not from environmental factors, but from intermingling. It is somehow more mystical than the others. Lamb, dairy, tofu, and grains are all good for ABs, well, buckwheat and smoked meats can be problematic.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: They are charismatic [crosstalk] have low stomach acid and should practice visualization techniques.
Aubrey: Classic combination of lamb and tofu.
Michael: As you would expect, this is all of this science behind this diet is just completely fucking wrong.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: It's not true that the emergence like the evolutionary emergence of blood types has anything to do with agrarian societies. Apes have exactly the same blood types as humans, which indicates that blood types probably evolved 20 million years ago. It's not even the case necessarily that type O evolved first, and then the rest. First off, 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. That's completely ludicrous.
Aubrey: The only way in which this works and the only reason that this would work is if you believe that there is some unlocking the mystery of the past, and of evolution, and of blah, blah, blah, where you're like, "No, it's just fucking food. Just let it be food."
Michael: Exactly. It's called ABO grouping that the name of the typology of blood that we have. There's actually 30 other ways of classifying people's blood. The only reason why this is the most prominent one and that is popularly known is that that's what you need to know for transplants.
Aubrey: Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Michael: It's dangerous to give O blood to an A person. We should all know this, because we need that for transfusions. But blood has thousands of characteristics and there's all weird antigens. Some people are positive for this and negative for that. There's this really rare thing of people with like, it's called an Rh antigen and it's 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 that has nothing to do with AB blood types. It's just a completely different typology of blood. So, it's really facile to be like, "This is the only thing about blood that matters." It matters for transplants, but blood is complicated, my guy.
Aubrey: Yeah. And also, it does feel it ties right in with the Brian Wansink episode, which is just like, "There's just such a great degree of certainty around what is fundamentally either just made up or wishful thinking."
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: Even the things we think we know for sure we don't even really fucking know.
Michael: Totally. There's also some Wansink stuff in-- It does appear that blood types are correlated with certain disease outcomes. There are actually some links between diseases snd blood types. But it's tiny gradations. Apparently, people of B type blood are at slightly higher risk for type 2 diabetes, but people read that and they're like, "Well, if you have B blood, you're going to get diabetes. If you don't have B blood, you're safe." But we're talking about risks of 4.1% versus 4.3% risk.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally.
Michael: It's not all that meaningful on an individual level to tie these broad characteristics to your disease risk. It's going to come down to many other much more obvious factors than your fucking blood type. It's interesting at a population level and understand the mechanisms behind it, but this idea that we can take these tiny differences in risk and be like, "This is the best way to eat for you." That's not how these kinds of characteristics work.
Aubrey: Well and if you follow these rules to a T, you will go from definitely you're going to get diabetes to definitely you're not going to get diabetes.
Michael: Exactly.
Aubrey: No, diabetes is an extremely prevalent chronic illness in the US that we know shockingly little about. People can give you the sense of certainty, but ultimately, what they're offering you is a security blanket that may or may not actually do anything for you.
Michael: What's really fascinating to me about the diets, too, is that, it actually goes back to his father's recommendation, that his dad was like, "Go on a vegetarian low-fat diet, blah, blah, blah." Well, a lot of people point out is that, all of the diets that they're recommending for all four blood types, they're all just like normal ass diets. They're like, "Eat lean fish, eat a lot low-fat dairy, try not to eat processed foods." There's been two systematic studies of this diet. One of them is based on food frequency questionnaires and we've already talked about how trash they are, massive grain of salt with this, but they basically found that the kind of people who eat the diet for 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.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I think the study is trash and methodology is bad. But the idea is that, anyone can pick any of those four diets at random and you will probably lose weight, because you're restricting a huge amount of food. If you randomly restrict half of the foods and you say like, "I can't eat that," you're going to lose weight.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: What drives me nuts about this and this is not really a problem with science, but it's a problem with the griftiness of the sector, It's very clear that this guy just fucking made all of this up.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: He made up all the science, he made up the thing about like you can't eat dairy, but you can eat butter. He fucking made it up, and he made it up in the 1990s, and it's not until 2013 that a decent study comes out, where they actually compare this to other diets.
Aubrey: Good Lord.
Michael: In the intervening 20 years, of course, I think the book is translated into 70 languages. It's sold 4 million copies, New York Times bestseller, blah, blah, blah. But 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 basing this plan on anything." Then, all these other wheels have to turn for people to actually apply a scientific method to it.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: It feels very much like that and is part of this thing about why folks who are promoting diets. I genuinely think ought to have a higher-- A, ought to have any standards of evidence that they present, which is not currently the case. But B, that they also should have higher standards, because what's going to happen is, you release a new diet into the world, a bunch of people are going to glom on to 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 develop this allegiance with a diet, and then it'll take three, or five, or 10 years for clinical research to catch up. By that point, however many thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people will have done that diet.
Michael: Exactly.
Aubrey: It's just shitty on so many levels.
Michael: Right. I forget why, but I was looking at celebrity diets this week, too and apparently, Christina Aguilera was on some weird color diet. For lunch, all of her foods had to be yellow and then for dinner, all of her foods had to be green.
Aubrey: 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 yellow foods, and so on and so forth.
Michael: But at least that one is upfront about the fact that there's fucking making it up.
Aubrey: Dude, we're just picking colors.
Michael: It's completely arbitrary. This one is also just completely arbitrary. It's just like, "Pick any arbitrary food rule like only eat foods that begin with the vowels."
Aubrey: Yeah, totally.
Michael: You will lose weight, because you're restricting most of the foods.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right.
Michael: To me, I don't know that you even have to do a systematic analysis of these things, where it's a dumb thing that some random person made up.
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right.
Michael: It's not real on its face.
Aubrey: Right. We have this like very ass backwards approach to diets, which is like, "If you're against it, it's on you to prove why it doesn't work."
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: That's where we're at with keto right now is a bunch of keto people are like, "It worked for me. So, prove why it's bad."
Michael: I know. I saw those emails. I know.
Aubrey: Oh, buddy.
Michael: I know.
Aubrey: Yeah. But that's 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. If you're going to evangelize a bunch of diet changes, you really should have some kind of evidence to back that up.
Michael: And everyone else should probably just ignore you. The media should just fucking ignore you until you have that evidence.
Aubrey: Yes. You should not be platformed.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: And even when there is evidence, as we have discussed, that evidence is very thin. It's very unreliable, and its methodologies don't hold up to much scrutiny very often at all.
Michael: So, yeah, that's the lesson.
Aubrey: [laughs] Everything's garbage. Eat what you want.
Michael: Everything's garbage. Eat what you want. This is how we end every episode. Do It. Don't listen to charlatans, [unintelligible [01:10:56] weirdos, and if you really want some exercise throw a glass of fucking wine on somebody.
Aubrey: If you really want some exercise, avoid crowds, do some Tai Chi.
Michael: Do some Tai Chi.
[laughter]
