Maintenance Phase - Bonus: Fad Diets

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

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!  Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

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. It's safe, we promise. This is the episode where we finally launch our Fad Diet. This is it. Mask off. Wait, no, now I wanna know what your Fad Diet would be. It would be biking around all day, getting really hungry,

but not eating anywhere because you're a huge food snob, and then coming home and roasting like 31 sweet potatoes and eating all of them. What would yours be? Crash diet probably for the summer only, that is like you could only eat what you grow. I have seven patty pan squash from my garden in my fridge right now,

and do I have a plan for them? No, I do not. That's too many. That's the most Portland sentence you've ever said on the show. I really am just a caricature. You're actually a sketch that I've been doing. I'm doing both voices on this podcast this full time. Hahaha.

Surprise, it's me! Hahaha. I'm Michael Hubs. I'm Bob Righord. Hahaha. I totally forgot that we hadn't introduced ourselves. Well, we don't have to do this because everybody's a Patreon supporter. I'm just trying to figure out a transition into the actual content of the show.

Sure. Good job. Good job. You're doing it. Thank you. Today we're talking about FAD diets. I'm so excited. Me too. So we asked you all to write into us about your wildest FAD diets and you all did. We got last I checked, it was over 500.

My guess is that now it's closer to six or 700. Thank you all. I literally thought we were gonna get like at most like 70. You know that. I was like, I don't know if anybody's gonna actually do this, 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 are not gonna get flooded. I am not worried. And then we totally fucking did. And then we totally did. Which is great. Yeah. It's totally great.

What was your like overall impression? Like what were the themes that emerged? Well, first of all, I will say, I'm gonna guess that like 15% of the emails alone were about the cabbage soup diet. Wow. And everyone who wrote in thought it was just a their weird family thing.

Oh, wow. Someone wrote in and was like, I don't know if this made it outside of Germany. And someone else was like, this was a real Australian sensation. No, what? And people really thought it was just like a number of people were like, my family did this thing where we just take cabbage soup all the time and it was terrible. We need an episode because this is like the platonic ideal ideal of a fad diet, the cabbage soup thing. Absolutely.

And I don't have a sense of why that one caught fire and other ones didn't because like, it's not like people even like cabbage soup that much. Like, at least on Atkins you could just like eat a bunch of bacon. I mean, I think it's the same kind of thing as the master cleanse and like a bunch of other things where it's just sort of like, if it's restrictive and you hate it, it probably works the best. It has to be good for you.

Yeah. It's sort of the belief system that goes along with it. Yeah. I think what struck me the most is that folks tend to, there were very few people who were like, I tried one fat diet once and very many people who were like, I tried 10 or 20 fat diets. Yeah. That's interesting.

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

A rotation diet is used to describe, like that phrase is used to describe, like five different approaches. One of them is straight up, just you rotate through different diets a week at a time. Oh, at least it's honest. So it's just like paleo for a week, keto for a week,

Jenny Craig for a week, neutral system for a week, like whatever the thing is. And I kind of think, like, I sort of appreciated that one because it felt like at least, like you say, like kind of like honest. Yeah. Nothing's gonna work.

Everything's gonna work a little bit. Nothing's gonna work great. And these are like fundamentally all arbitrary. Like it doesn't really matter which one you pick. Just pick one. Just fucking pick one, it's fine. It's the process of transitioning to a new diet that is probably giving you a lot of the benefits

quote unquote of a diet anyways. You might as well just switch to a new one constantly. Yeah, we also got a bunch of stuff that we're not actually gonna talk about today like the HCG diet or like Herbalife or things like that that are way meatier than just like a quick touch, which is what we're gonna do today. Yeah, those are episodes. meteor, then just like a quick touch, which is what we're going to do today. Yeah, those are episodes. Those are full on episodes. Like we are going to get into it about

herbal life at some point. Yeah. And we should say, we're going to take it on some fat diets today. And we're going to include some listener emails, both the fat diets themselves and the listener emails, reference specific weights, they reference calorie counts. If those are things that are gonna be hard for you to listen to, this might be one to skip. Yeah. It's all of the stuff. It's all the same shit that's always on our show.

You know. So where should we dive in? Do you wanna do one of yours? Sure, I do wanna mine. What do we have? You know what, I'll start with the rotation diet. How about that? Yeah, do it.

Okay. So listener named Dawn wrote into us about the rotation diet. Dawn says, picture this, 1987, I'm 22 years old, and I probably weigh around 115, but felt that I was too fat to wear a bikini. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah.

I heard about this great and new best thing called the rotation diet. This diet was the first I ever went on and was my gateway into disordered eating. That diet worked so well that I quit menstruating and was severely underweight. The premise was that you rotated a three-week eating cycle. During the first week, days 1 through 3 were 600 calories. Days 4 through 7 were 900 calories, you then lived it up at 1200 calories for one week. And the third week was a repeat of week one. I remember eating Ville and maybe broccoli.

I love it. I love it like the cheat days are like 1200 calories. Our starvation level. It's like two pieces of pizza for like an entire day. Yeah, I mean, 600 calories is such a fucking bummer. Yeah, dude. 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 Dawn also says I have a pin I like to wear my gene jacket that pictures a burger saying fuck your diet because frankly if I have one more person Tell me about their intermittent fasting keto weight watchers paleo and a multitude of other shit I will gouge my eyes out yep I'm fat all the best done Guys I like Dawn.

Dawn seems great. What if this show was a bait and switch, and then we just told Dawn to get on the paleo diet? We're like, sorry, Dawn, that one actually works. It's real. Sorry. We're bearing the lead, this entire show, almost a year. We're actually really into paleo, Dawn.

So, I'm totally surprised. The end of this podcast is us just being like, the best diet is drum roll, please. So, I looked into the rotation diet a little bit. It was developed by a psychology professor named Martin Katon, who was the head of the Vanderbilt University Weight Management program. I wanted to read to you from the official book description. So this was a number one New York Times bestseller.

The rotation diet, of course. Like so many absolute garbage diet books that promise a miracle. I got it. So here's the official book description. Lose those unwanted pounds and keep them off once and for all with an easy three-week diet. The rotation diet's unique and simple plan varies the daily calorie intake over a three-week period leading to an average weight loss of 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 Nash Villians went on the diet and weighed in weekly at supermarkets. What? The results showed, this is Michael Hobbs' catnet. What? The results showed that the city became almost a million pounds lighter. Whoa.

This new updated and revised edition of the Rotation Diet offers a scientifically proven maintenance plan that requires only small changes to establish a permanently healthier lifestyle. Wait, did they just say small changes? And Dawn was eating 600 calories a fucking day? Small changes. Yeah, small changes. Cut your caloric intake by at least a third. This is copy that's written by a marketing person who's trying to sell this book, but it also becomes

how the diet itself gets talked about, right? It's not written by a science communications person. It is reflective of like what's the most impressive sounding thing that we can do that will make people buy this book. And then it becomes sort of the reputation that the diet itself has. Right. Which is like woof, woof. What are you, okay, as an accidental scholar in this, what do you think of this thing of like rotating and changing? Like it's interesting to me that it's like 600 calories one day and then 1200 the next and then 600 the next like why not just

800 calories every day like why is it important that it changes constantly? I mean, I think there's this whole thing around like quote unquote kickstarting weight loss Which is not really a thing But as you and I have discussed like there are lots of diets that will lead to short-term weight loss And there's some evidence that shows that our bodies sort of seek and find stasis after a couple of weeks on a diet, which is what leads to what we call plateauing, quote unquote, right? In some ways it feels at least kind of honest, right? Yeah. Just be like, just fucking pick a diet and cycle through, or just like 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 than just like if you're on the same thing all the time. Really, this is developed by a psychology professor. So I have no doubt that there's some amount of sort of like quote unquote life hacking of like human psychology, blah, blah, blah, that kind of shit. But mostly this one just felt like a kind of diet that you and I have not talked about a ton,

which is just like extreme caloric restriction, which is sort of like the classic, right? If there's a classic kind of diet, it's just like, stop eating, like get as close to not eating as you can. And this one sort of dresses itself up with like psychology and a university and it's a private university. So maybe all of the rotation is just to like trick your body into like the extreme just monotony and discomfort of eating that little everyday.

Yeah. And I also think like a core part of diet marketing is being like, we know you've tried everything, but nothing worked until, but, but, and people have been saying that and using that sort of communication formula for like a good 30 or 40 years at this point, probably longer. They're going after the people that wrote you emails and have like 10 bullet points. Yeah, absolutely.

They're going after the repeat offenders, which historically is also me. I was a repeat offender for a long time Well, most people are I mean like most most fat people have tried everything It's not like you reached like 37 and you're like wait, am I fat? Wait, yeah, right. We're not all Ed McMahon A lot of us do in fact know that we're fat So that's the rotation diet, okay, How about you? Tell me about some of the uh, tell me about some of the fat diets you found. Okay. I have a funny one and a bitter sweet one, and I'm going to do the bitter sweet one first. Oh, okay. So okay. Have you heard of the Shangri-La

diet? I've heard of the Shangri-La diet through these emails, but also I have the diet book in my diet book collection, but I haven't read it. It sounds really boring. It sounds honestly 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. Oh. Do you know what it is though? My recollection about the Shangri-La diet is that it's like you're supposed to drink oil or something before, is, though? My recollection about the Shangri-La diet is that it's like, you're supposed to drink oil? Or something before, is that right? Yes, yes. That is true.

So I will let listener John explain it. He says, my most ridiculous diet was the Shangri-La diet. The method was to swallow one to two tablespoons of vegetable oil, morning and night. The boredom of flavor-free calories was supposed to suppress your appetite. I couldn't handle the sensation. Not to be indelicate, but it's like swallowing snot. BOOM!

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

And my mom truly hates liver. So she would cut it up into little pieces and freeze it and then swallow it like a pill. Oh my God. The flexible capsule sort of reminded me of that. I have to imagine that the author of the Shangri-La diet would take issue with capsule versus actually swallowing oil. There would be something about coating your throat

and stomach and blah, blah, blah, blah. 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? Yeah. So what did you learn blame the people and not the diet. Yeah. So what did you learn about the Shangri-La diet? So first of all, this took out to me

because I did the Shangri-La diet. Mike! I am ashamed. We have, this is the first time this has happened on the show, one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this nudge bullshit and freakonomics bullshit that we talked about in our Brian Wonsink episode is that like,

I fell for it, like, I was into this stuff in the 2000s. I like watched head talks, I read both Freakonomics books, I listened to their podcast religiously for years. It was like one of the first podcasts I listened to. And so I read this infamous column in 2005 about the Shengri Law Diet, and I did it. A lot of other people, I did it for a couple of days. And it actually worked really well.

Like, really well? Like, really well? Not really. I know. This is the diet that works. Here it comes, Aubrey. I'm about to pitch you an MLN. I'm still like, you're a group of three friends,

and we're all gonna tell people about this diet. Look, I got a garage full of shit that I got to move. So, I was thinking of Copenhagen at the time, and I did this diet for like three days, and it worked super well. And then I, a friend of mine was living in Singapore, and I was going to visit him, and I went to Singapore, and I just like obviously didn't care about the diet,

because like Singapore is one of the great food cities of the world and I ate a bunch of great food. And then I came back to Denmark and then like a week after I came back I was like oh yeah I was trying this diet before I left and then I started again and it just like didn't work. It was neutralized by chili crab. Doesn't think I was so in Singapore. I was so full of crab at that point.

The crab's gets tilted out. But so okay, instead of me explaining how this diet works, I'm just gonna read to you from this, this column appeared in the New York Times magazine in like one of the most popular, most credible publications in the country. Ugh. 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 subhead line is the accidental diet. 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

or 11, he weighed 200 pounds. When you encounter Seth Roberts today, he is a clear-skinned, well-rested, entirely affable man who weighs about 160 pounds, I know. Pardon me! Fuck off! And looks 10 years younger than his age. How did this happen? So then it sort of, it describes his methodology of like, his big innovation is using himself as a guinea pig. And like tracking things, like tracking what he eats, tracking what he weighs, tracking how he feels. And so this is how he solved all of his problems, basically. Like, 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. So I think he's like watching Good Morning America and stuff, like something with lots of faces in the morning. This is just somebody who took every like take-home point from every TED talk and just did all of it at once, right? He's like a living embodiment of like life hacking, I know. Oh God.

Once he stumbled upon the solution, Roberts, like many scientists, looked back to the Stone Age for explication. Anthropological research suggests that early humans had lots of face-to-face contact every morning, but precious little after dark, a pattern that Roberts TV viewing now mimicked. I hate this, and I want like a heavy bag with like a face on it that I can punch for a while.

I actually have like ever since the Paleo diet, I have such a pet peeve for people like invoking the Stone Age. Right, the Stone Age is a period of like two million years of human history and like different human populations in different parts of the world with like very different climates Yes, so never people are like did you know in the Stone Age that used to I'm always like where when yeah It's never people who actually study the Stone Age and who know about it It's people that have like expertise in completely different fields and like read on a fucking snap-al-cap one time Like a little fun fact, they're like, there's a lot of faces in the morning. Like how would we know that about Stone Age populations?

Truly and also like, sorry. Once again, like there's all this shit that's like, we have to go back in time to find the optimal diet or way of being or whatever. And every time that shit comes up, the voice in my head is just going like, what was the life expectancy? Dude, I know.

19? I don't know. What the fuck are you talking about? So then the article transitions into some relatively true stuff. It talks about how like, because of evolutionary adaptation, we all have metabolic mechanisms that make us hold onto fat, right?

Like, where our bodies are set up for like times of feast and times of famine. And so when your body goes into like famine mode, i.e. dieting, it holds onto fat more tightly. And that makes it really hard for you to lose weight. And like, this is something we've said on the show, this is more or less true. Then, it goes into this guy Seth Roberts, his like 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 onto fat is flavor. What? When your body tastes something that's familiar and that you like, so you eat a bowl of lucky charms,

it switches you to like fat storage mode, and it's gonna like bank those calories because it could taste them. So the key is to ingest calories without tasting them. This is the most puritanical bullshit. So you have to drink flavorless oil, twice a day like a tablespoon, two-dabel tablespoons, he says that you should like whatever experiment. And you should plug your nose so you can't taste it. And when I was on it, I couldn't drink coffee within an hour of taking the tablespoon of oil or like afterwards because you don't want to have

any flavor in your mouth at all. You want to like take in these calories, but your body like doesn't know you're taking in the calories. What the fuck, man? I know. And so the idea is that because you're taking in calories, but your body isn't like banking them as calories, your body doesn't know to want more fat. So you're just not hungry the rest of the day. So the sort of the promise of the diet is just that like you're taking in an extra, I don't know, 500 calories of oil,

but then you end up eating like a thousand calories less of normal food. This feels like if you are a person who is predisposed to have a disorder eating patterns, boy, boy, come on down, the water's fine, get ready for your next eating disorder, woo! And I also think because it's sort of coming at you from a much more like, dude focused sort of set

of media outlets, right? Like, freakingomics was not anything that was like, come on down, ladies. So I think because there's so much less discussion of men's body image and men's eating disorders and all of that kind of stuff, it's a conversation about a diet that happens in kind of a void of a broader conversation about food and human behavior and psychology and all of that kind of stuff.

And also, what frustrates me about this is that it is, like, this whole thing is so male-coded. And, like, that whole kind of world, like, the TED Talk world was just like a lot of dudes with, like, overconfident ideasident ideas that like hadn't really been tested. Like this entire Freakonomics column talks about Seth Roberts doing self experimentation as if it's some sort of fucking revolutionary new methodology. Like no one has ever fucking altered their diet

and like monitored what their weight does before. That's dieting, that's the experience of like 80% of dieters. 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. or like illnesses or people who have different body types. It just works for me, therefore everybody, drink vegetable oil and stop watching TV at night. If you read the comments on any of these posts or like the New York Times article, there's the like, it worked for me people.

There's the like, I tried it and it didn't work for me people. And then there's the like, I puke immediately about taking a tape with you in the oil people, which is like not a small number of people. I feel certain to my bones that I would be an immediate puke person. Yeah, I have like a pretty weak stomach. So it would really just, yeah.

I should have arranged a taste test. Like the head of the talk. No, my question. I mean, you do this. I'm boycotting our show. But I mean, I do think there is a very frustrating journalistic side to this, or like, this was not tested. It's still not clear to me how the Freakonomics guys found this random psychology professor

who had like found a weight loss technique that works for him. They also let him be a guest blogger on their website. They promoted his book when it came out. Like, this was a huge sensation. Like, after this column came out, like, it became such a big deal that Seth Roberts appeared on Good Morning America and Diane Sawyer famously ate a tablespoon of vegetable oil. Whoa. This was a big deal and the Frekenomics 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. And it's like, this is not science. It's a thing that worked for one guy. It's never to this day. There's never been a study of this. God damn it. So it's weird for like what is ostensibly a science column

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

oh, this is the lengths that the world will go to to validate things that white dudes come up with. Exactly. We worked for exactly one white dude and now it's capital S science. Yes. Like, fuck off. There's a good column by a guy named John Ford, who's a medical professor at UCLA, who

writes a whole column, basically just like calling out the Freakonomics guys for shining a spotlight on something that hasn't not only has it not been tested, but like Seth Roberts never even attempted to test it. And so John Ford says in this column, he says, presenting a highly speculative idea as proven science to an audience unlikely to appreciate the difference is misleading at best and disingenuous at worst. This is a massively popular platform that millions of people read. If you put it a column that says, like, this guy found this miracle new weight loss technique? You don't think that's promoting the diet?

Right, totally. We live in a country where like, what, two thirds of the population is desperate to lose weight? Like, you're just gonna throw this fucking fish in the middle of like all these like hungry seals and just be like, well, it's not our fault that they ate it. Like, come on. I actually think the Onus is even greater on people marketing or promoting diets to add more disclaimers to add more sort of parameters around what they're talking about because of the sort of like ravenousness with which people will sort of descend on a new diet. Diet marketers have a greater onus on them

to be like 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. Yeah, and none of them can like... I so much of it lies with editors too, of editors being like, sorry man, you so much of it lies with editors too of editors being like, sorry man, you got one anecdote of one guy with one diet, like come back to us in three years when it's been tested.

Yeah, that's right. So this is where it gets better sweet. Okay, so this was like, you know, 2005 when this comes out, there's this massive wave of publicity, and then Seth Roberts becomes like a pretty prominent blogger actually. Like this was, this was peak blog times, like pre-social media. And so I started reading like a lot of posts on his blog and like he, he just got like weirder and weirder over time.

Oh. He was really obsessed with this idea of self experimentation as a methodology. He sort of had like a chip on his shoulder of like why isn't self-experimentation taken more seriously? He started doing this thing where like he became convinced that eating half a stick of butter a day, just like with a knife and fork it seems, would improve his brain infection. So 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. That's why you're so smart. You're just like, it's all the sticks of butter. I'm so fucking smart. Aubrey, you're a little slow this episode. Did you not have your butter today?

I noticed you're a little slow this episode. Did you not have your butter today? I noticed you're a little sluggish. The brain, the classic brain food sticks a butter. There's also some like anti-vaxx adjacent stuff. He gets really obsessed with Omega threes. And there's all these posts, like crank posts, about how Omega 3's cure ADHD, he has this long thing about, I guess pregnant women are more likely to have ginger vitus and that thing where you floss your teeth and it bleeds.

And he was convinced that it's like, cause pregnant women aren't getting Omega 3's, he kept saying like depression doesn't exist. And what people think is depression is that they just need to get more sleep. Like he was obsessed with sleep as the key to everything. And like, that is what Ails Americans, is it like, we're not getting enough sleep. He had all this stuff about how fermented foods cure acne.

Like, it was just a bunch of like pretty standard crank, contrarian stuff. And like, all like, dressed up as science, right? a bunch of pretty standard crank contrarian stuff and all dressed up as science of the, I'm just asking questions or cherry picking. It was very COVID denier. Uh huh. It's that sort of thing where you're a study out of Prague found that people who wear masks always die.

And then you look and 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 and you're like no this like looks like science if you don't actually look at it. That's what happens when you try to universalize based on a sample size of one. This is a thing. Yes. That's what happens when you're like what's true for me is true for everyone which is also kind of how we get so much anti-fat bias, right? Is that thin people absolutely believe

that they have done a series of right things to become thin and that fat people are not doing those same right thing. Just because their belief is fundamentally that like, our bodies are the same and you just fuck tears up, so let me help you fix it. And it's really easy to get down a super weird rabbit hole. A very rabbit hole.

Experiences everyone's experience. I know. One of the reasons it's so bittersweet to me is that on some level I get it in that like he struggled with sleep his entire life. It seems like he always had struggles with his energy levels. He thought that he solved it

and then he was sort of backslide and then he would try to solve it again. He was constantly tweaking. He was never quite happy with whatever solution that he found. But he also started to believe that lack of sleep was this defining problem in the country as a whole. 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. Like other people have other things

that they're dealing with. Yeah. I don't know. It just became, it became this like kind of sad portrait of like where this obsession with self experimentation and with like yourself as the only test subject that matters like can take you. Yeah.

And it's just like the same sort of cluster of beliefs that I feel like a lot of those like Ted Talkie dudes, kind of like this is like a very well-trodden path. That a lot of those dudes went down and I was like, oh man, if this guy, like if he was still blogging today, he'd be like one of these like just asking questions, transphobes.

You know, like this is where it leads everybody. But then I kept fucking scrolling. And then it's like a bunch of transphobes. You know, like this is where it leads everybody, but then I kept fucking scrolling and then it's like a bunch of transphobia. Oh, come on. He got, this is so fucked up. He got super obsessed with this idea of auto-guinephilia, which is this idea that like trans women are actually just like men who are turned on by dressing as women. I guess some trans woman wrote a memoir,

like a moving memoir about her experience of like coming out and transitioning, and he wrote to her and was like, why didn't you mention like this theory? Like why didn't you mention this like fetish thing? Jesus fucking Christ. This is where like why does it always lead to transphobia? It's wild to me. It's also like one of those things right where you're like, oh you read a cis person's description

of what they imagine trans people to be that was written in like 1981. Right? I just like, this dude got real hooked on like, it's gotta be about boners. And you're like, no. But then, okay, double bittersweet. Then in 2014, he dies.

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

At one point, I think it was his mom had to say like, I don't know why I have to explain the death of like a 60 year old who had a heart attack. Yeah. That's something that happens a lot. Like, don't sit around and be like, this is what really killed him. It's like, shut up. You don't know his medical history. You don't know what about his medical status. He wasn't disclosing publicly.

Don't use people's public personas as a way of diagnosing them with something. And also, even if you did know all of those things, somebody just fucking died and a mother just buried her son. The whole thing just got really gross at the end. One of the reasons I think I'm slightly easier on him than I would be if he was still around is just because there is this tragic ending

that makes him kind of victim and people were really shitty to him in death. But also, he did have a bunch of like crank beliefs, and it's not clear to me that like it was all that ethical to bring him national attention and to like promote this diet when it's part of just like a much larger cluster of like kind of just weird behaviors that this guy had, like lots of people in America

have weird behaviors. Yeah, totally. They don't need their behaviors to be turned into like bestselling books. Yeah, in order to they need their to turn their own behaviors on other people with non-bestselling books. Right. Like, there's this question about like, okay, when someone like that dies, who's the person you want to be? Yeah. For me, personally, the logic of like, you did it to yourself or you should have thought about that before you did X, Y, and z kind of thing, is a very convenient and tidy way to dehumanize people. That's the same kind of logic that gets

leveled at people in prisons and why we don't pay attention to prison conditions. That's the same kind of logic that gets leveled at fat people. All of that sort of like extremely unforgiving thinking is just like truly and deeply not a thing I want to emulate in the world. What's your next one? I have kind of a two-fer. Who do it? So this is a person who wished to remain anonymous

who says, hi, Aubrey and Mike, huge fan of the show over here. Okay, so two ridiculous fan diets I tried are the special K diet and Bethany Frankl's naturally thin. Oh, that's so cursed. I have no idea who Bethany Frankl is. You don't know who Bethany Frankl is? No, but it's like the name of a female, I guess, influencer.

And then something with like thin in it, I'm already just like the hairs on the back of my neck just to help. I'm gonna do you one worse, Mike. It's not an influencer. Bethany Frankel is a real housewife. Oh man. Oh shit, which jurisdiction?

New York, Roni. Roni, she's one of the Ronis, okay. This person goes on to say, the special K diet was ridiculous, and I need to know its origins. But basically, I think all you ate was special K in any of its varieties all day long. Other than I think what meal? I was all-capped starving, like shaking, and I'm pretty sure I gave a couple pounds.

It was clearly just a play to get people to buy their cereal. I was just desperate. They just told you that their food was a diet food and to like eat a bunch of their food and called it a diet? Like that's all that it was? Yes, it was called the special K diet or the special K challenge.

There were a bunch of TV ads about it and they featured among other things like someone like pulling on jeans and then sort of like pulling on one of the belt loops to be like, look how loose my jeans are. And they would say you can lose a dress size in two weeks or there's a gene size in two weeks. The diet was this, replace two meals each day with a bowl of special care.

And then over time at some point, it sort of segwayed into, like, eat any special K product, including their like cereal bars, which were kind of like race, crispy treat, kind of vibes. This is demented. It's just like the Oreo diet, eat nothing but Oreos. Like, that's not a diet,

and it's coming from the Oreo people. Well, also, like, listen, special K has a larger serving size than many cereals. The serving size is one cup, but one cup of breakfast cereal for two meals a day is not going to leave you feeling like full happy and ready to take on the day, right? Like all of the stuff has disappeared

from the Kellogg's website and from special K website. It was up there for, I'm gonna guess a good 10 years. WebMD wrote, did a write up on the Special K diet. Quote, there's nothing special about Special K products. In fact, most are not whole grain and they tend to be low in fullness promoting fiber and protein. It's cereal, yeah. It's cereal.

It's not gonna like hold you. You're not gonna feel like you ate an omelette. You're gonna feel like you ate some cerealelette. You're gonna feel like you ate some cereal. Yes. They also get a little sciencey 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. Quote, results of a 2002 study done at Purdue University, funded by Kellogg, showed replacing regular meals with calorie and portion controlled cereal 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. Quote, substituting cereal for higher calorie meals can help people trim calories and fat. In the study, we found those reductions were doable and resulted in about a 4.4 pound weight loss over a two week period, says study author Rick Mattis, PhD. Ridiculous. They're basically saying that people lost weight because they ate less. Like it has nothing to do with the cereal.

No, it has absolutely fucking nothing to do with the cereal. And also, here's the thing. They advertise this as lose 10 pounds in two weeks, and then their own fucking study that they fucking paid for was like, you're probably going to lose 4 and a half pounds. And I think the wild thing about the special K challenge, slash diet, whatever you wanna call it, is that it really, it is the most transparent advertising campaign that has ever happened, which is like, by twice as much of our product, and you'll get thin by eating our food.

Like, what? The biggest scam that the cereal industry has ever perpetuated on the American people is, remember ads when we were growing up, how they would say like part of a nutritious breakfast or like part of a complete breakfast? And then they would have like seven other foods. They would have like a whole other breakfast with a bowl of cereal and they're like, now it's good for you.

I was like in my 30s when I realized that it's basically just like if you eat this with some healthy stuff it's a healthy breakfast. It's literally everything is part of a healthy breakfast. If you pair it with other things that are healthy like how are they allowed to do this? It's the most nonsense phrase. Well and from its inception cereal was designed as a quote unquote, health food, right? Yes. But in a lot of ways, like, this is just the same shit that Kellogg's has been doing since it was Kellogg's, right?

All of the cereal brands do the same thing, which is like, this is a health food. Don't look at the nutrition facts. Bye. Yeah, really? Oh, yeah. Give me the influencer lady. Perfect.

Bethany Frankel is one of the real housewives of New York. This is what our anonymous emailer has to say about that. Quote, the second diet I followed, which was packaged as a quote unquote mindset and lifestyle. The anti-diet is from Bethany Frankel's book, Naturally Thin. She claims that all quote unquote, Naturally Thin people do all of these things without thinking about them, famously scooping their bagels, taking three bites of an unhealthy food, but not finishing it, telling yourself you can have it all just not all at once. I guess it seemed sensible

at the time, but I always look back on it as disordered eating light. I'd love for you guys to read the book because it's probably severely unhinged LMAO. So I'm glad that you don't know who Bethany Frankel is. A little background on her. She started on the Real Housewives of New York in 2008, so she's been around for a minute. She had spent the early 2000s kind of trying to make it in Hollywood.

She'd been a production assistant. She hosted one season of a daytime talk show called Bethany in 2013. And she had sort of made a name for herself on the apprentice's Martha Stewart season. Okay. She has also since built a business out of her skinny girl brand of low calorie foods. Like, they'll have like skinny girl margarita mix and that sort of thing. That's just like a lower calorie and relatively joyless cocktail to have, right? This thing about scooping bagels, is that a thing that you've heard before? I was going to ask you about this.

What is that? It's where you genuinely like usually take like a thing that you've heard before? I was gonna ask you about this. What is that? It's where you genuinely, like, usually take like a spoon and you scoop out the bread out of the middle of a bagel so you're just eating the outside of the bagel. I've never seen somebody do that. Is this a thing that people do commonly? It's part of the, like, joylessness of eating in this way, right? Which is just like, what if I had a bagel but made it sad?

What if I took a delicious food and made it a bum? A bagel twinch, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I am of the opinion that is aligned with our emailer, which is sort of like, it is sort of eating this sort of light stuff. So the book is sort of organized around 10 rules for living naturally thin. The concept here is that for living naturally thin. The concept here is that there are naturally thin people and they just sort of know how to eat and

that's how they're naturally thin. And they do things like scoop out their bagels and they do things like they don't restrict and that sort of thing. The interesting thing to me about the list of 10 rules is that they echo a lot of intuitive eating principles, but they like take a wild fucking turn. Like the first half, you're like, oh, you're on the right track. And then it takes a gnarly turn and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, wrong. So for example, one of the rules is that you shouldn't diet or restrict because dieting

leads to binging and binging makes you fat. And you're like, well, fuck, You're so close. You are so close. She says eat more real foods and real meals and less sort of quote unquote processed stuff, which I'm like, well, that's just foods that poor people can afford and people who don't have time can eat. That sort of discourse around processed foods and cleaning is just another way of stigmatizing foods that low income people can afford and can eat, right? She also says eat whatever you want, but do it in moderation, which if you ask folks

who are sort of like in deep on intuitive eating, they're like, yeah, yeah, moderation is a way to make restrictions sound sort of sensible, right? Like if you are, again, like if you are a person who tends toward disordered eating, moderation becomes a little like baby step back into restriction for you, right? I actually have a little clip of her talking about her book. This is a little promotional video from Simon and Schuster, her publisher.

I thought it was going to be a clip of her on real housewives throwing her wine at somebody. I mean, I didn't look up that clip, but you it would take us 15 seconds to find if you want to. Dude, I've never watched real housewives but on like eight different occasions, I've been really bored and I'll go on YouTube and I'll type in real housewives best fights. And there's compilations. And some of them were like 40 minutes long and I'll watch the whole thing. It's really fascinating because I was like, look, when I was sort of prepping for this one,

I was like, okay, there's like an 80% chance or an 85% chance that Mike has no idea who this is. And then there's a 15% chance that he is a dedicated viewer of Real Housewives. What? What are you doing? No idea. And interestingly, you seem to have managed to check both boxes.

Right? It's like I only watch the wildest parts. Are you ready to hear Bethany Frankel talk about her book? All right, let's do it. Hi, I'm Bethany Frankel. I'm a natural food chef. And my book is called Naturally Thin, I'm Least Your Skinny Girl, and for yourself, I'm a lifetime food chef and my book is called Naturally Thin, I'm Least Your Skinny Girl and for yourself I'm a lifetime of dieting, which is exactly what the book is.

It's basically a book that is to be all-end all, never diet again book. 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 Batale and I said, I'm done. I'm going to Italy, I'm going to eat everything, I'm going to go to all these restaurants and I'm not coming back with my jeans one inch tighter. And I sort of just figured out to not be afraid of foods, to be able to eat what you want in smaller quantities, to be able to use the 10 rules I talk about in naturally thin, in different situations, to get you through that moment and to be able to really never have to worry about it.

And naturally thin is it 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, the person that wants to maintain their weight. A person like me who all through high school and college would struggle with their way, obsess, count what they ate, work out, non-stop, and just every woman that I know. Any nutritionist can tell you to eat a half a break through it and a quarter cup of cottage cheese for breakfast, and tell 700 people to eat the exact same thing. But those 700 people had different childhoods, different parents, different environments,

different money, so this book is for everyone. different money, so this book is for everyone. Not a single wine was thrown. I'm libid. I was counting on a table flip in this promotional video. You took me to YouTube under false pretenses. So, it talks me about your reactions to that video. I mean, I want to know what you think,. I mean, I wanna know what you think, but I mean, I'm of two minds. On some level, she seems to be like aware of Fad diets.

She seems to be aware of like the one cup of cottage, she's thing is total bullshit. I mean, it's better than the cabbage soup garbage we got for decades, I guess. On the other hand, she is straightforwardly selling a diet and explicitly calling it not a diet. Like, it's right on the cover of her book. It's like, learn how to be a skinny girl

and like, leave all the dieting behind. It's like, you're literally telling people how to become skinny without being on a diet. It's like, that's what diets do. So like, it's an improvement on where we were, but it's still not good. Leave dieting behind with these tricks that I learned from eating disorders.

It really is what it feels like to me, where it's like, it's not a capital E capital D eating disorder, right? That's not actually what she's selling here, but it is sort of like, okay, but be weird about food in public and only have three bites of something that you like. Yeah. It feels like it's sort of talking out of both sides of its mouth at all times, right? That there is sort of this like, don't die it, but do become thin. Right. Don't restrict, but absolutely restrict.

Right, like all of this sort of stuff is kind of straddling in 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 100 pounds. She did say, she did say, everyone I know. And it's like, we know Bethany.

You don't know any fat people. We know you don't know fat people. We know you don't know fat people. And we know that even if you do, you're going to pretend like you don't know fat people. We know you don't know fat people. And we know that even if you do, you're going to pretend like you don't. Yeah. You know what I mean? There's like a cousin that you don't talk about.

Yeah, whatever. Yeah. It just felt like this little window into sort of this world of like a way of thinking about food that kind of masquerades as healthy and neutral and psychologically healing, but it's still the same shift. You are America's greatest chronicler of this shift in diet discourse.

I'm incapable of saying anything that I haven't learned from you, almost. But there is this weird, almost gas lady thing. So it'll be like, this isn't a diet. And then they'll just explain what is obviously a diet. Or like, this isn't about losing weight. But then they'll tell you how to lose weight. And you're like, do you hear yourself?

It is part of this thing that we're going through now, which is just like a cultural changing of the clothes that diets wear without actually getting underneath. And like dealing with the actual sort of diets themselves or dissuading people from dieting itself. We're essentially at this point just dissuading people from calling what they do a diet. I know. Again, is it an improvement on like the bullshit that we had to deal with in the 80s and

90s? Sure. But it's not, it's not like a great leap forward. No, and I think it likes to bill itself as like a radical reorganization of how we live our lives and it's a fucking search and replace. Yes, a command F for diets and replace with lifestyle change or detox or cleanse or health trend or what the fuck ever, right? It's just using different words

to do exactly the same fucking thing. Atkins was called a diet, Keto is now referred to as a lifestyle, right? They're the same fucking thing at their core. Dude, you know what it is? It is Kentucky Fried Chicken, changing its name to KFC. When the word fried became like kind of stigmatized. Like a lot of people weren't eating fried foods because they wanted to lose weight.

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

I could use a funny, fat diet. Are you familiar with the blood type diet? Yes, we got a lot of emails about the blood type diet. This was one of the ones that we got like a big wave of emails about. It's fascinating to me. It's eat right, and then the number four, your blood type. It's the number four. I love that it then the number four, you're blood type. It's the number four.

I love that it's the number four. It's the too fast, too furious style of naming things. Yeah. I know absolutely nothing. I have never read the eat right for your blood type stuff. I never did it. I don't know anybody who did it. So I am coming in 100% fresh.

So this is 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'Damos blood type diet colon eat right for your blood type. I would be so interested to hear your views on this diet and whether or not there's any scientific credibility to it. Knowing what I know now, I am so embarrassed that I ever believed any of this. This diet prescribes what you can and cannot eat based on your blood type.

The food lists are so detailed and also seem so random. For example, my blood type is O, so I could eat apples but oranges were forbidden. I was on this diet for eight years, and it is hard to know exactly what the impact was. I don't think it was physically harmful as I was not cutting out any major food groups as a whole, but I did become obsessed with the food list and felt guilty if I ever ate, for example, a mushroom, which was on the forbidden food list. 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 caribou for chocolate,

which you could argue is totally unforgivable. So like, listen, before I 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 like before you even hit your teenage years. Yes, it's bad. But I also want to name like, that's fucking horrible and really, really heartbreaking. And the phrase I put myself on this fucking blood type diet is like, just sucking the joy out of life.

So that's what happens. And introducing like really, really harmful forces into people's lives. So like before we did,, we're gonna dig in, I'm sure we're gonna 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. Yeah, it's also just so important to forgive yourself

for falling for this kind of stuff. Yeah. We could do a whole episode on all of the scams that I have fallen for in my life and not like sophisticated scams like super caveman lizard brain level scams and you know the people selling these diets Whether they know it or not. They are 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. Right. The villains are not the people who fell for these scams. The villains are the grifters who are selling them. Absolutely. And the blood type diet is like one of the griftier ones. So it's developed by this guy, Peter D'Ammo. 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 natural path, James Didomo, who first posited the idea that a diet based on blood type might have health benefits. The senior Didomo prescribed a low-fat vegetarian diet to all of his patients, noting that some seem to exhibit improved health, others remain the same, and some got worse.

Could blood type be the cause? I think God damn it. Could being a horse girl be the cause? Could Star Trek fandom be the cause? All of those, I'm just asking questions. I don't know. I just got real grump, real fast with that one. I just love 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 It's like maybe don't prescribe the same thing to every this is actually the person that Bethany Frankl was talking about in that video Like any doctor can give it tell everyone to eat the same thing So I guess he comes up with this absurd Doctor can give it, tell everyone to eat the same thing. So I guess he comes up with this absurd typology, and then his son Peter Didomo sort of runs with it. So Kelsey also mentions in her piece

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

a research educator, Ivesian, amateur, orologist, budding software developer, and air-cooled enthusiast. I had to google I have of these. I was gonna say I know what like two of those terms are. No. He was a Haberdassure. The basics of the diet are like exactly what it sounds. It's basically that like your blood type determines the kind of diet you eat the way that your body is able to break down foods. He has this typology of like the different blood types

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

So the idea is that you should be eating a ton of like meat and fish and sort of like old fruits and vegetables, but not like new fruits and vegetables, and you shouldn't be eating grains, because this is supposed to be like pre-agriculture. Old? Like they've been around for a long time or old like they've been sending your fridge for a couple of weeks. Like old like they've like they're ancient or whatever. So you're not having pommelose. You're not getting plewats. You gotta eat the whole shit. Yeah exactly. Enjoy your quince. So, in Kelsey's piece, she says,

my veins were filled with type O, therefore I was instructed to renounce my vegetarianism and embrace a meat and fat heavy lifestyle. Among other rules, my fancy nutritionist ordered me to eat plenty of beef, venison, and pineapple juice, while avoiding things like strawberries, lentils, and almost all dairy, though butter was okay. Yeah, you know how cavemen were always eating butter?

Like, like, all the time? That's why they were so smart. Good lord. He also apparently in his book has a bunch of like personality type bullshit that goes along with the blood 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

What the fuck is anything? What are you talking about like personality types go with blood types like no? Like absolutely not and also like as you're reading through all of this, I'm thinking about, I have multiple diet books that are this kind of eat right for your type thing, but rather than being organized around blood type, our organized around no fucking joke, astrological signs. Dude, yeah, at the whole time I was reading this, I was like, somebody absolutely did the zodiac diet, didn't they?

Multiple people did the zodiac diet, and I have three of those bucks. Yes. But this feels like if that diet put on a lab coat. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. So next we have type A, which he calls the agrarian,

or cultivator. This is from the Harvard article. This blood type emerged with the rise of community living when, thanks to the dwindling supply of game to hunt, human digestion was forced to adapt to carbohydrate consumption. Force to adapt! Type A's therefore should eat mostly vegetables and soy proteins, being mindful of their highly sensitive immune systems, and increased risk of life-threatening disease, as well as naturally higher stress levels.

They should avoid crowds and corn and practice Tai Chi. Then there's Type B, which he calls nomads. Because there's like subtle societies and there's also nomad, nomadic hordes, roaming the steps or whatever, so he says that everybody with tight bee blood is descended from like Mongolians. Like he clearly read like one article and National Geographic about Genghis Khan. And he's like, yes, like the nomads.

That's a really Mongolian thing. So then he trains like this into like you can eat plants and meats, but like not chicken or pork, and you can have like some dairy, but you should never have wheat corn lentils or tomatoes. Which is like, I don't know why that would have anything to do with Mongolia, but like fine. Sure. And then there's also type AB blood. This is like a mixture of like settled societies and nomadic societies. I think he ran out of like societies

that he's familiar with. And he's like, oh, this one, there's like part nomadic, part settled or whatever. This is from the Refinery29 article. It says, the rarest and newest of the blood types is what Didamo calls the chameleon. It is the only one that emerged not from environmental factors but from intermingling,

and it is somehow more mystical than the others. Lamb, dairy, tofu, and grains are all good for A-Bs. Well, buckwheat and smoked meats can be problematic. They are a cosmetic, have low stomach acid, and should practice visualization techniques. Classic combination of lamb and tofu. So as you'd expect, this is like all of the sort of science behind this diet is just completely fucking wrong. Yeah.

It's not true that the emergence, like the evolutionary emergence of blood types has anything to do with like agrarian societies. So apes have exactly the same blood types as humans, which indicates that blood types probably evolved like 20 million years ago. It's not even the case necessarily that type O evolved first and the rest burst off. Like apparently there's some theories to 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 adaptation that happened this fast like that's completely ludicrous The only way in which this works and the only reason that this would work is if you sort of believe that there is some like unlocking the mystery of the past and the evolution and of blah blah blah, right? where you're like, no, it's just fucking food. It's actually- It's actually-

Let it be food. And there's- it's called A, B, O grouping. That's the name of the typology of blood that we have. There's actually like 30 other ways of classifying people's blood. The only reason why this is the most prominent one and that like is popularly known is that that's what you need to know for transplants. Oh, it's dangerous to give O blood to an A person. We should all know this because we need that for transfusions.

But there's blood has thousands of characteristics. And there's all kinds of weird antigens. Like some people are positive for this and negative for that. And there's this really rare thing of people with like, it's called an RH antigen. And if like a woman who's positive for the RH antigen has birth to a baby that's negative for the RH antigen, the baby can die.

But that has nothing to do with AB blood types. It's just a completely different typology of blood. Yeah. And so it's really fast-ciled to be like, this is the only thing about blood that matters. It's like, it matters for transplants, but blood is complicated, my guy. Yeah, and also, I mean, it does feel like it ties right in

with the Brian Wonsink 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. Yes. Even the things we think we know for sure, we don't even really fucking know. Totally.

There's also some onesang stuff in, it does appear that like, blood types are correlated with like, certain disease outcomes. Like, there are actually some links between diseases and blood types, but it's like, it's tiny gradations. People, apparently people with B type blood

are like at slightly higher risk for type two diabetes, but like, people read that and they're like, well, if you have B blood, you're gonna get diabetes. And if you don't have B blood, you're safe. But it's like, we're talking about risks of like 4.1 versus 4.3% risk. Yeah, totally. It's not all that meaningful on an individual level

to tie these kind of broad characteristics to your disease risk. Like it's gonna come down to many other, like, much more obvious factors than your fucking blood type. Like it's interesting to population level and understanding the mechanisms behind it, but this idea that we can take these like tiny differences in risk and be like,

this is the best way to eat for you. It's just like, that's not how these kinds of characteristics work. Well, and if you follow these rules to a T, you will go from definitely, you're going to get diabetes to definitely, you're not going to get diabetes. No, diabetes is like an extremely prevalent chronic illness in the US that we know shockingly little about. People can give you this sort of sense of certainty,

but ultimately what they're offering you is a security blanket that may or may not actually do anything for you. What's really fascinating to me about the diets too, is that it actually goes back to like his father's recommendation, right? That his dad was like, go on a vegetarian, low fat diet, blah, blah, blah.

What a lot of people point out is that all of the diets that they're recommending for all four blood types are like, they're all just like normal-ass diets, right? They're like, eat, you know, lean fish, eat a lot of like, I don't know, low fat dairy, try not to eat processed foods. There's been two systematic studies of this diet. And one of them is based on like food frequency questionnaires

and like we've already talked about how trash they are. So 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. I think the study is kind of trash and the 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, I can't eat that, you're going to lose weight. What drives me nuts about this? This is not really a problem with science, but it's like a problem with like the griftiness of this sector, is that like, it's very clear

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

compare this to other diets. Good lord. In the intervening 20 years, of course, this, you know, I think the book is translated into like 70 languages. It's sold like four million copies, like, you know, New York Times bestseller blah blah blah. But it's like, it takes a really long time to actually investigate these things. And like, we shouldn't have to. The guy made it up. There's no basis. He's not basing this plan on anything. And then it's like, all these other wheels have to turn for people to actually apply a scientific method to it.

What is it, Mark Twain, who said the thing about a like, a like, can make it around the world before the truth gets its shoes on? Or whatever that's saying is? It feels very much like that and is part of this sort of thing about why folks who are sort of promoting diets I genuinely think ought to have a higher,

like a ought to have any standards of evidence that they present, which is not currently the case, but b that they also should have kind of higher standards. Because what's gonna happen is you release a new diet into the world, a bunch of people are going to glom onto it because they feel shitty about their bodies and they want a sense of hope that they aren't stuck with the body that they have. And they'll sort of develop this allegiance with a diet and then it'll take, you know, three or five or ten years for clinical research to catch up. And by that point, you know, three or five or 10 years for clinical research to catch up.

And by that point, you know, however many thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people will have done that diet. Exactly. It's just shitty on so many levels. Right. And like, I was, I forget why, but I was looking at celebrity diets this week too.

And apparently, Christina Aguilera was on some like weird, like color diet. We're like, for lunch, allera 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. Oh, we got an email about this The Rainbow Diet, which is like, Monday's, you eat red foods. Tuesday's, you eat orange foods. Wednesday's, you eat yellow foods, and so on and so forth.

But at least that one is like, kind of upfront about the fact that there's fucking making it up. Dude, we're just picking colors. It's completely arbitrary. And like, this one is also just completely arbitrary. It's just like, pick any arbitrary food rule. Like, only eat foods that begin with vowels.

Yeah, not totally. And like, you will lose weight because like, you're restricting most of the foods. Yeah, that's right. To me, it's like, I don't know that you even have to do a systematic analysis of these things where it's like, it's a dumb thing that some random person made up. Yeah, that's right. It's not real on its face.

Right, right. We sort of have this like very ass backwards approach to diets, which is like it's on if you're against it It's on you to prove why it doesn't work. Yeah, right. Yes That's sort of where we're at with keto right now. Yeah is like a bunch of keto people are like it worked for me So prove why it's bad. I know I saw those emails Yeah, but like that's sort of the place that we get in. And actually, I think the burden of proof should be on people promoting radical changes to your diet that are completely unproven.

That's who is responsible here. If you're going to evangelize a bunch of diet changes, you really should have some kind of evidence to back that up. And everyone else should probably just ignore you. Like the media should just fucking ignore you evidence to back that up. And everyone else should probably just ignore you. Like the media should just fucking ignore you until you have that evidence. You should not be platformed. Yeah.

And even when there is evidence, as we have discussed, that evidence is very sort of thin. It's very unreliable, and it's methodologies don't hold up to much scrutiny very often at all. So, yeah, that's the lesson Everything's garbage you will you want everything's garbage you want so we get every episode Doing it don't listen to charlatans don't clap from weirdos and If you really want some exercise throw a glass of fucking wine on somebody. If you really want some exercise, avoid crowds.

Do some Tai Chi. Do some Tai Chi. Thank you.