Maintenance Phase - Halo Top Ice Cream

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

WE’RE BACK! A new diet ice cream is taking your grocery store by storm. But what even is it? This week, Mike and Aubrey talk biohacking, dieting for straight dudes and the extremely ill-advised "Halo Top diet."Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPal Get Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreLinks!What is biohacking? The new “science” of optimizing your brain and body. (Vox) Halo Top Is Now the Most Popular Pint of Ice Cream in America (Food and Wine) What It's Like to Eat Nothing but This Magical, Healthy Ice Cream for 10 Days (GQ) Is Halo Top Good For You? The Truth About Low-Calorie, Low-Fat Ice Creams (HuffPost)Seven in 10 young people would eat whole tub of low-cal ice cream (The Grocer UK)Thanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hello and welcome to Maintenance Faze, the podcast that is low in intellectual nutrition, but only because the serving size is small. How's that? I like it! Been working on that for days! I am Michael Hobbs, I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Aubrey Gordon, I am a writer, author, and fat lady about town.

And we're so thrilled to be back! Yes! Back for good is the plan. So look for us every other Tuesday in your podcast feed! Yay! Doing it! Folks have also asked us about how they can support the show, and we are happy to announce that we have a Patreon.

Yes, we are millennials, and upon birth, everyone is given a Patreon. Yeah, it is patreon.com slash maintenance phase. And it's linked on our website at maintenancephase.com. Yes, we are finally providing a way for listeners to support us and a way for Aubrey to pay off her gambling debts. So that's what we're gonna do. Yeah, that's right.

So a bunch of folks also asked about T-shirts. I think the number one request is for methodology queen shirts. Yes, so happy to say we have methodology queen shirts. Those are all at T public. It's all linked directly again from our website, which is maintenance phase.com. We went with T public because they had the largest size range that we could find in the sort of print to order world. Many of their designs go up to Haynes 5X. If folks are aware of other places that have larger size ranges that are still print to order, let us know.

of other places that have larger size ranges that are still pre-torture, let us know. And we know that times are tough and weird, and if supporting us isn't right for you right now, or you just don't want to, all of that is totally fine. We're not gonna talk about it on the show a ton, we're not gonna make it weird. Yes, we're here if you wanna toss us some money, great.

And if you don't, totally no sweat. You know what that reminds me of? Aubrey, it reminds me of our thoughts on eating ice cream. If you want to eat it, eat it. If you don't, don't. I'm transitioning into the core content of this episode. Seamless. So what are we talking about today? So we are talking about a diet food product that is very popular right the hell now. And that is halotop ice cream. Do you know what I think is the fundamental difference

between us? What is that, Michael? I am not on Instagram. I know that Halo Top is a thing, I guess, because I hear people refer to it, but I have not been privy to any of the sort of Halo Top hype in the wild. The diet hype train goes through Instagram now.

Like that's what Instagram is. Yes. I think before we get into halotop, it's worth saying this is not a halo top ruiner episode. So people know if you like your halo top, you can keep your halo top in the parlance of the affordable care act. And if you're under 26, you can stay on your parents' halo top. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha- that you're not just gonna describe ice cream to me for an hour. Sorry. I'll come along for the sociological dissection of a transmitter encapsulated by HALOTOP. Fine. So, have you tried HALOTOP at all? No, okay.

I had never even heard of it before you said you wanted to do an episode on it. What? Yeah, I had to Google it. Oh my God. It was in 2017 not only the most popular ice cream in the US, but the most popular packaged food in the US. What? Uh-huh? No way. So here's how Halo Top describes itself. This is from their website. Halo Top is a light ice cream that actually tastes like ice cream, which sounds silly,

but when Halo Top first found its way into grocery store freezers, boasting fewer calories, less sugar, and higher protein than traditional ice cream, it became the first of its kind and created an entirely new category in ice cream. But we'll back up a second. Why did we want to make a light ice cream that tastes like ice cream? Well, it's pretty simple. We like ice cream so much that we wanted to eat it more. So we created delicious creamy light ice cream that's 280 to 380 calories per pint. So we could do just that. Oh, we're doing snack wells again. This is like the next bullet in my notes

is just like, it's the 2010s answer to snack wells. Right. I would also say they were saying that they created something totally new in a light ice cream. Light ice cream is absolutely not anything totally new. Skinny cow was a big deal in the 90s. It was sort of low fat ice cream, low fat low calorie.

And a staple of the Hobbes household. Oh, because as I mentioned, my mom was a constant dieter. So all I ever ate growing up was low fat and no fat ice cream. Totally, same in the Gordon household. It was not good. It was not really as an adult. That I was like, oh ice cream's actually like rich

and creamy and nice. So, Skinny Cow was low fat. Brires launched Carb Smart in the 2000s. Carb Smart was low carb. And Halo Top is attempting to do both. Oh, okay. It really plays into this sort of deep desire and this refrain that we hear a lot about dieting

certainly in the US and certainly in the like 90s and 2000s, which is eat whatever you want and stay thin. So what is the origin of this weird brand? So Halo Top was founded in 2012 by two attorneys actually, Justin Woolverton and Doug Boughton or Bootman, I'm not sure how you say it, Justin Woolverton, who is the guy who came up with the recipe, he was sort of miserable practicing law. He spent a lot of time sort of like looking for joy elsewhere. He tried stand-up comedy. He spent a lot of time writing like spec scripts. He wrote a spec script for the league. What?

There's just a lot of like straight-dude-ness. This is becoming like the first 25 minutes of the Joker. Where is the story going, Audrey? Hang on, I'm gonna pull up a picture of him and send it to you. Okay. Because that's where it gets out of Joker territory is when you see this actual dude and you're like, Oh no, no, no. I hope he's not hot. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha he's like in his late 30s, but then he has the haircut of like a 17-year-old. Yeah, he, one of his sort of like number one kind of hobbies is intermittent fasting,

avoiding sugar and carbs, quote, he'd regularly skip all food until 4 p.m. and then ingest two high protein entrees such as a chicken burrito bowl from Chipotle and a pork shoulder omelet. Okay. He felt this kept his mind sharp and his beach body taught. Okay, so this is what is, I think, popularly referred to as biohacking? Yes. For folks who are sort of unfamiliar

with the concept of biohacking, there are some folks who refer to it as DIY biology, which is sort of a horrifying concept to me. I just call it a fucking diet. They don't want to call it a diet because like diets are associated with women. Right, that's exactly it. Vox has a great explainer on biohacking.

They define it as quote, the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance outside the realm of traditional medicine. The idea is that you are experimenting with your own body, and you are sort of taking down the data of like, how does this thing make you feel? Oh my god. A huge portion of this sort of like quote unquote, biohacking world is around food restriction.

It's all fine. Like technically, this stuff is fine. If you like to eat Chipotle omelets, like have a Chipotle omelet, it sounds totally fine. I you like to eat Chipotle omelets, like have a Chipotle omelet, it sounds totally fine. I just, ugh, I just hate the pseudo-scientific approach of this and this sort of weird universalizing that always comes along with this. Absolutely, like there's nothing necessarily wrong or bad about this, except that I really do think

there are many cases where this is cloaking and eating disorder. Yeah, it's also wrapped up in this bullshit culture of over productivity. So much of this is about having energy so that like you can stay up late all night coding and like you can have energy to work. Absolutely. Biohacking is also what got us things like bulletproof coffee where you like stir butter into your coffee, right? And it's like eight bucks.

Yeah, and neither coffee nor butter are expensive. And yet together, they're like really expensive. And I don't know why. Vox also has this great quote about biohacking. It feels like it sort of encapsulates up a bunch of stuff. Quote, what differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it's a different genre of activity, but that the activities are undertaken

with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don't need to accept our body's shortcomings. We can engineer our way past them using a range of high and low tech solutions. And when somebody else talks about their experience of chronic illness or fatigue, I can write a very long email to them telling them, have you tried biohacking this? Because I have four pages of weird blocky text that I need you to read. Yeah, that's right.

In addition to being sort of like 2010s snack wells, this sort of biohacking stuff is sort of the straight men's equivalent of what we talked about with moon juice, which is sort of the idea that there's something amorphous that's just not right with your body. And if you just eat the right things or do them in the right order or at the right time, you can and will feel like you're in

this optimal state and a bunch of other things about your life will fall into place. It's also very Silicon Valley in that it's very apolitical. There's nothing in the biohacking rhetoric about sort of the food that we subsidize, prices, subsidies, food stamps, all of the other systems and political decisions that go into the kind of food that makes it onto our shelves. It's fundamentally creating a two-tiered food system where it's like the good stuff, quote unquote, is available to people who can afford it. 100% also. Halo Top is in no way a tech company,

but it has very techy vibes. Oh yeah, they have 75 employees, everybody works from home, they all chat on Slack, and if they need to meet, they are members of WeWork, which like of course they're members of WeWork. I know there had to be a WeWork cameo in this episode.

They also like Justinverton also talks about how, like he starts his day at 10.30 and only works in three hour blasts. Is how I subscribe to this piece. It's high-intensity interval training for working. It's intermittent fasting of work. Yeah, I also feel like WeWork is such a perfect metaphor for this because WeWork's entire business model

is literally just renting out an entire building and then subcontracting out that building in sort of little tiny units, right? You rent out one cubicle at a time. Yeah. And yet, we work sells itself as some sort of tech company or some sort of innovator when it's doing to this extremely traditional business thing.

And it really gets kind of the same with Halo top where they're like selling themselves as like this innovative, unprecedented thing. And it's literally just like it's a diet food, man. Yeah, totally. And I think it's worth knowing that Halo top is also like there's a ton of business journalism around Halo top because it has this sort of rags to riches story. That is this guy, Justin Wolverton came up with this recipe using a $20 ice cream maker from Amazon He came up with it in his house and When he came up with it and sort of when he started the company

He just two years before their biggest year in 2017 They were as they say sort of on the verge of collapse. They had massive debt Oh, and what ended up happening is that they fundraised from family and friends. Great, which is like, tell me. Tell me. I was just gonna say, every single business rags to riches story goes through,

I got money from my parents and my friends. Yeah. Every single one. Yeah, they raised like, I think it's like a million dollars from like family and for like they raised sort of an astronomical amount and which makes sense, right? Like they're both coming from very high end law firms. Yes.

Whenever you hear one of these, we started our business in our garage stories. Control F for parents. Intergenerational wealth is the key to understanding these stories. Yeah. What ends up happening is that Halo Top redesigns its packaging. Halo Top looks very, like its packaging is very sort of like millennially. Yes. And one of the most prominent features on that packaging is in the middle there's a giant outline of an ice cream scoop that includes the calorie count for the entire

pint. Oh, right. It is the largest print on the entire package. It's larger than the name. It's larger than the flavor. Right. Underneath the lid, it also has sort of that foil on top that's often on those sort of like premium ice cream pints, right?

There's has slogans that say things like guilt-free zone. Oh no. Or stop when you hit the bottom. Oh. That's also sort of part of the Halo Top Mystique, right? Is that there's all this stuff about, it sort of implies a loss of control around food and that celebrates that loss of control.

When the only correct thing to have on the bottom of the lid is to do it like the snap hole container and have fun facts. Oh my god, I would love it. The seahorse is the only animal where the male gets pregnant. That's right. That's what you need. Seahorse facts.

So, in addition to sort of building itself as low calorie, it is also a very low sugar ice cream. It uses two sort of sweeteners, primarily stevia, which is like a plant. Natural, it's natural. It's natural, it's plant-based, it's whatever. And it uses arithritol, which is a sugar alcohol. It's a byproduct of fermenting starches and yeast. I've never heard of this. Arithritol and xylitol and all of these different sugar alcohols show up a lot in keto diets. Oh, really?

Okay. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Because there are ways to get some level of sweetness without sugar. Oh, regular consumption of a rithritol has been linked to weight gain. Paradoxically, it can also cause headaches and diarrhea. It's also very interesting because part of the whole biohacking thing is rejecting, quote unquote, traditional medicine, western medicine,

however they're framing it. And yet, it includes all of these ingredients that are like extremely technological. There's this weird dichotomy in these sorts of diet foods where it's always presented as natural But they always include all of these unnatural like very scientific Ingredients right and it's like which one do you want man? You're not picking some arithritol off of an arithritol tree So there's also like a number of nutrition professors wait in and a number of the pieces that I read, one from NYU,

had this to say about both Arithritol and Stevia and sort of like artificial sweeteners. Since sweet taste is normally a signal to our bodies that the food product contains calories, some researchers have hypothesized that eating a sweet product that is calorie-free may result in appetite, dysregulationulation and unfavorable metabolic responses. Well, snack wells. Yeah. You eat a bunch of this diet food because you think it will satisfy you

and because you think it's little calorie and it doesn't satisfy you. It sort of messes up your appetite and may also mess up your metabolism to a degree, right? You're not necessarily any better off than when you started. Right. And it's overlooking what we actually need to be healthy, which is adaptogens. Guys, I genuinely didn't see that one coming. And it was real delayed. I was mid-sip of water. I was trying to get a little Aubrey Gigalata, you know. That was a goal-oriented behavior.

That's a goal-oriented behavior. I like it. I like it. So in addition to marketing itself around sort of calories and sugar content, Halo Top has this sort of claim to fame that is being a high protein ice cream. A lot of diet foods that are marketed toward men are marketed under the guise of being high protein. Dude, yes.

I feel like it's all based on this myth that somehow like men are not getting enough protein. When like most men are already getting twice the daily recommended amount of protein. Like there's no lack of protein in the American diet, but we've been told over and over again that we need to be eating as much protein as humanly possible.

The sort of like, example that I have, right? Like the archetypal like dude and protein thing that I'm aware of. There is an absolute nightmare of a dude who's like truly horrific on Bachelor in Paradise, which is one of the Bachelor's spin-offs. His name is genuinely Chad. Bachelor in Paradise is filmed on a beach in Mexico,

and he brought a suitcase of clothes and a whole other suitcase of protein. No way. What does it like, jars of peanut butter, whatever? It was protein powders, but it was mostly just lunch meat. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha We're on a suitcase full of like sliced turkey. That's so sad. It's so sad. He's being the opposite of a Chad. He's being like kind of a beta right now.

Anyway, as it turns out, Halo Top has the same amount of protein as any other ice cream. Milk has a sort of standard amount of protein. You can't increase or decrease that. And other ice creams aren't marketing themselves as sources of protein. They're marketing themselves as ice creams. That's like the yogurt that advert has itself as gluten-free.

That's right. The co-founders of halotop are aware that they have the same sort of protein profile as other ice creams, and Doug Bootin said, quote, nobody's going to eat 1200 calories of Ben and Jerry's for the 20 grams of protein. The other thing that they do add to Halo Top is fiber. They add prebiotic fiber is how they sort of bill it on the ingredients list. What the fuck does that mean, Aubrey? It's truly a thing. I mean, I'm not sure if I'm gonna have to do it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have to do it.

I'm not sure if I'm gonna have to do it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have to do it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have to do it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have to do it. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have to do it. is fiber. Oh, they add prebiotic fiber, is how they sort of bill it on the ingredients list. What the fuck does that mean, Aubrey? It's, it truly is a kind of fiber. Prebiotic. Prebiotic, so they're probiotics, right? Which are the actual bacteria that folks

are trying to add to their gut. Right. Prebiotics are fruits and vegetables and whole grains. What? They're the things that feed good bacteria in your gut. Oh, it just means it's bacteria food. Yeah. There's like making up a scientific sounding term

for just like every banana you've ever eaten. It is found in Chikare route, which is where many of these sort of low-carb foods actually get theirs. So a lot of low-carb foods are a little bit lower in carbs, but they pump in a bunch of fiber, which is a little bit lower in carbs, but they pump in a bunch of fiber, which is a carbohydrate, but in diets, people subtract the fiber from the overall carb count.

Oh. So they talk about net carbs, and net carbs means total carbohydrates minus the number of grams of fiber. Oh my God. So it's sort of like, it doesn't really count, even though it's totally a carbohydrate. This is also very Silicon Valley, in that there's this dry-tour quantification,

but then food manufacturers also know about the quantification rubrics that you're using, and so they can very easily game that system. You can pump in a bunch of fiber, and they know that that's going to be subtracted from the carb count. Right. So it's going to make it seem as if this is sort of carb-friendly, when it seems like they're just sort of like j-ing the stats a little bit. A little bit. The other like real secret ingredient in Halo Top is air. Oh. What's it they're whipping the cream? Yeah, so all ice cream gets churned and get some air churned into it.

It's part of the reason that it's sort of light and fluffy and you get that kind of ice cream scoop texture. Yeah. Each pint of halo top, two cups of ice cream, right, is three quarters of a cup of air. Nice. Yeah. So, if you let halo top melt, you will have like, you know, a little more than half a pint. I mean, the pint that I bought is light. I didn't notice that when I was putting it in my backpack. This feels like it has a stuffed animal under, something.

It doesn't feel like it has a stuffed animal under something It doesn't feel like it's full of liquid. Absolutely. So the average Halo top pint weighs 256 grams Uh-huh, and the average Ben and Jerry's pint weighs 428 oh wow, so almost double. Yes, it's really a significant difference. I mean, I'm not gonna talk shit on foods that are mostly air because that's a significant difference. I mean, I'm not going to talk shit on foods that are mostly air because that's meringue erasure. Yes, soufflé.

Oh, yeah, I'm prosuflé. So a number of dieticians were quoted in a lot of the stories that I read about Halo Top. Basically, their whole thing was like, it's only healthier if you eat a regular serving size. So it's only comparable to other ice creams on volume terms. Right. That's exactly right.

The nutrition facts and the calorie count and fat and all of that kind of stuff for a whole pint of halotop really is comparable to a single serving of existing ice creams. So even if you are counting calories and fat and carbs and all of that kind of stuff, you really could just have a scoop of ice cream. But that's not biohacking, Arbery, that's just like eating food. And we'll say Halo Top is actually like a more accessible option for people who are diabetic.

Like if you can't eat sugar, having a low sugar ice cream is like probably your shot at having more than one spoonful of ice cream. Right. So there are uses for it like almost any diet food, right? It ends up creating more accessible foods for people with chronic illnesses. When we should probably actually just be creating foods

for people with chronic illnesses without being like, and it'll make you thin, and you can eat a whole pint and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, these are not bad products in and of themselves, necessarily, but they're contributing to really weird cultural attitudes. Right. Okay, so before we get into the next part, let's actually just taste some halotop. Thank you. You got some halotop, yeah?

Yes. Okay. I was specifically instructed by my co-host to get the peanut chunk something, something flavor, but then my local Walgreens did not have that and only had salted caramel. Oh, great. So that is what I have in front of me. Got the fucking ingredients list. It's like the paragraph of a Jonathan Frans novel. It's massive. Here are the ingredients in vanilla halo top. You ready? Give it to me. Skim milk, eggs, erythritol, prebiotic fiber, milk protein concentrate, cream, organic cane sugar, vegetable glycerin, organic carob gum, carob, our old nemesis, organic

war gum, and organic stevia leaf extract. Okay. Meanwhile, vanilla hoggendoss is cream, skim milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, vanilla. Ice cream stuff. Yeah, ice cream stuff. So I got peanut butter cup because it is the most popular flavor in the US.

The good news is you got salted caramel, which I believe is the most popular flavor in the UK. I feel deep solidarity with our British listeners right now. All right. All right, you ready? All right, here we go. Let's go. Goddamn it, it's pretty good.

I am a livid. I mean, I think it's fine. It's pretty convincingly salted caramel flavor. Yeah, although it does sort of have the texture of like a sorbet. Like it doesn't have the sort of dense rich creaminess of a real ice cream. Totally. So I will say as someone who makes ice cream at home from time to time, you are a white woman in your 30s in Portland. One of the hardest things about making ice cream is making sure that it doesn't crystallize.

Oh yeah. They seem to have done a pretty good job of waiting crystallizing. Yeah. I would not say that if I were in the mood for ice cream, I wouldn't be like, ooh, somebody give me some halo top. Yeah, me either. But I wouldn't necessarily turn it down. I'm eating more because I can't stop and I have to get to the bottom of the thingy. Yeah, you're following instructions.

I think if I was like at a party at somebody's house or something and somebody gave me just like a bowl with a spoon and this ice cream, I think I would eat it, but I would also think that there was like at a party at somebody's house or something in somebody's game, you just like a bowl with a spoon and this ice cream, I think I would eat it, but I would also think that there was like something off about it. Yeah, it doesn't taste like to a little ice cream or Ben and Jerry's or whatever. Right, but it doesn't taste bad.

I think what we're deciding now is that the rest of this episode is just gonna be us finishing the pint and it's just gonna be ASMR, just quiet mouth sounds and us not speaking. Wait, what is your underneath the linsei? Mine says, you had me at Halo. Oh, that's actually pretty good. Goddamn it.

Yeah, it's cute. Mine says, I love to love you, baby, or something. But I threw it away already, but it was something along those lines. But it definitely wasn't like a pro binge eating, like come see my bottom message. Come see my bottom. That was actually pretty good.

I should be pitching this to the Halo Top people. You genuinely should. You know, it really needs, it needs some fucking nuts. Like, it needs something to balance out the trickle-y oversweetness of it, because it's basically just like air and sugar. Yeah. But then you can't add nuts to it,

because that adds a ton of fat and a ton of calories. And fiber that is not necessarily prebiotic. God dammit. necessarily prebiotic. Goddamn it. This postbiotic fiber, fucking bullshit ass fiber. Okay, so here's where it gets fun. Are you ready? Give me fun.

The reason that Halo Top got as popular as it did is that there was an immensely popular piece in GQ magazine in January of 2016. Okay. It was written by a guy named Shane Snow, who's another dude who seems very focused on this kind of biohacking stuff, like he takes his measurements every day

and weighs himself every day and calculates his own body fat. He was talking to his super ripped trainer in LA who started telling him about Halo Top, this ice cream that he'd been eating that was like healthy ice cream. This writer Shane Snow starts sort of doing the math in his head and says, oh my God, I could actually get to my protein goals per day if I only ate Halo Top. Wait, only ate Halo Top like ice cream or like only ate Halo Top like three meals a day?

More than three meals a day as we will get into. What? So he creates what he calls the Halo Top diet. What? He subsists exclusively on Halo Top for 10 days. Shut up, Aubrey, no. I told you this is where it gets fun. Uh.

So he says in his piece for GQ, he says, quote, for 10 days I would do what's surely a number of homo sapiens, primarily world of warcraft addicts had done before, but never in the name of research, and certainly never with the hopes of getting skinnier. I'd be eating nothing but ice cream. Uh, okay. Which also like, I don't know what people who play world of warcraft ever did to this dude.

Yeah, let's leave the world of warcraft. They're not fucking with anybody. Those people are nice. I know what people who play World of Warcraft ever did to this dude. Yeah, let's leave the World of Warcraft They're not fucking with anybody those people are nice. I know those people so Perhaps unsurprisingly within a few days he starts to experience some pretty profound side effects because he's only eating fucking ice cream He has these lingering headaches sort of constantly their ice cream headaches. Are we sure that ice cream headaches. Are we sure they're ice cream headaches? No, they're not ice cream headaches. They're like, you haven't been eating real food headaches. He also gets a really big canker sore that keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Oh my God. He talks about being constantly shivering. He lives in Los Angeles, constantly shivering. Well, Donnie cold stuff all the time. He figures out that he needs to eat a pint of ice cream every two to three hours to keep her having a headache. Why do people do this? It's like those videos on YouTube where people just set these absurd challenges for themselves.

They're like, can I beat Super Mario Brothers with my feet? And it's like, why would you want to do that? Right, totally. Why would you want to do that? Yes. And the problem here isn't that it's ice cream. The problem is that he's only eating one food. Yeah, even if you were eating something quote unquote healthy, if you were only eating kale for 10 days,

you'd also have weird side effects. Because that's not how humans are supposed to live. Yes. Here's actually a quote that I was like, oh, Lord, he keeps a food diary of this whole 10 days, right? Of course. At 9.30 p.m., I headed over to a lady friend's house, reluctantly carrying the ice cream cooler pack with quote unquote, breakfast.

I remember a story a friend told me about a guy she went out with. He was training for a bodybuilding contest and busted out a can of tuna fish every two hours. Nice. At least I wasn't the tuna fish guy. Well, what's the difference, bro? You're the ice cream guy. Yeah bro. It's such a good metaphor for the reasons why

fad diets don't work is because any fad diet that requires you to bring a fucking cooler over to the person's house when you're gonna go get laid is not a sustainable plan. You can't just expect to have a cooler with you at all times for the rest of your life. So part way through the Halo Top Diet, this guy consults two nutritionists. They say that his canker sore that keeps getting bigger is probably due to a vitamin C deficiency because you're not getting vitamin C. So he's getting scurvy. Yeah, they want to know whether or not he's caught a cold yet because cutting calories

this significantly often weakens your immune system. They did say that they were pleasantly surprised that he wasn't experiencing more sort of gastrointestinal distress, particularly that he hadn't had diarrhea, because of the volume of arrhythmia. So, on the underside of the lid on halotop, it should say, surprisingly little diaria. There is something, okay, this is unfair, but there's something so fucking male about this idea of finding out

about something that you didn't know about before. And this thing is healthy, and it's good, and you're excited about it. And then eating only that thing. It's not enough to just be like, well, sometimes I like ice cream. So next time I buy ice cream, I'm gonna try this Halo Top stuff. No, no, no, no, it's like, this is good for me.

Therefore, it must be good for me if I only eat this thing. I mean, it's just deranged thinking. Right, there's also something sort of childlike about it. Yes, so at the end of the Halo Top diet, here is how he sort of closes it out. Quote, after 50 straight pints of ice cream, I clocked in at 143.5 pounds, down 9.9 pounds, and 12% body fat, down 3%. Oh my god.

I'd lost some water weight, but no discernible muscle mass. I'd added 1.5 inch of muscle to my chest and slimmed my waist. My kanker sore was still massive, and I had a cold. He also talks throughout this where he's like, a friend of mine ate a hot dog, and I thought about murder. Oh my God.

It's like, he does a good job of being like, this is not a good experience. But I'm like, then why are you writing about it though, my guy? Yeah, exactly. Then why should we publish this? And you know that people are going to take the message from this, hey, look at this miracle-ass ice cream. Yes. The trick with all of this stuff and with all of these sort of fad diets is that folks will then go out and evangelize the diet that they're on, right? This is part of the sort of cycle of dieting, right?

Yeah. If you lose weight quickly on a pretty drastic diet, you go out and start recommending it to people. They also don't necessarily do the math. I'm like, it took me 10 days to lose nine pounds and I felt like shit the whole time. Right. So they're also just recommending like, you too can shiver and be mean to people.

I have a giant kinkersore and a headache all the time. And keep a fucking cooler with you at all times, which I'm sure is very easy to incorporate into your busy life. It's super sustainable. They also, does he say anything about what happens to him? Once he goes back to a normal ass diet, he probably just gains all the way back.

He does not say, I think this is a short-term project, but he does say as soon as he's off the diet, he's like, I just wanted to eat eggs and spinach, and I was like, I get that. This is the thing with Fad diets. It's Fad diets work as long as you are on them. Yeah. And then once you go off of them, guess what?

You're on a new diet now and then you have a new body to go with it. Totally. And also, I think like, look, man, if you're trying to lose more than five to ten pounds, even if you match the pace of a diet like this, someone like me would have to eat nothing but ice cream and be like a mean kanker sore monster for like nine to 10 months. Screech.

Right? I would have to have, it would be like my year of eating ice cream. Yeah. Think of how much weight you would lose when they have to cut off your gangrenous foot from having scurvy for seven months. I remember after Super Size Me came out,

which is a movie that we have to do an episode on, some nutrition professor went on the like, Twinkies and Doritos diet. We literally just ate like the worst imaginable processed food for 30 days and he lost weight because he just, he restricted his calories. So he would only eat like 1500 calories a day but it was all just shit food

and he ended up losing weight. And it's like, yes, any diet where you're just restricting the number of calories you're taking in per day, you're going to lose weight on it. So he could have done this with anything. Yeah, totally. This entire experiment says nothing about Halo top. So here's where it gets a little dark again. The canker sore eventually ate him alive.

No, the darkness is that a bunch of media outlets replicate this. Wait, what? Yeah, so Yahoo News does the Halo Top Diet, uh, Spoon University, which is sort of like a food website for college kids. Wait, what instead of pointing out how trash this entire endeavor was, they decided to do it themselves. Mmm. Even for online journalism, that's shocking.

So each of these pieces talks quite a bit about the side effects, but the closing of all of these pieces is like, but I lost a lot of weight. Oh my god. They're all like pretty amazing how much weight I lost. It's, this is, uh, this is 99% the fault of the fucking editors as usual. Writer's pitch pieces, it's fine. People do odd experiments with their bodies, it's fine.

But the fact that somebody working at these like pretty major nationwide publications can't see a pitch like this and just be like, oh, it's a fat diet. We publish a million articles like this. We've gone through a million fat diet cycles by now. We're not gonna publish this because it's not very responsible and The headlines for these are all like there's a new diet. I tried this new diet and I lost this amount of weight right like They're all sort of like enticing you into this is a good idea as all of this press around the halo top diet

Quote unquote ramps up so do the sales of Halo Top. I'm sure, yeah. It becomes a big enough deal that their chief operating officer, Doug, who's one of the co-founders, makes a statement about it and is just like, hey, don't do this. Okay, that's like a vague, that's vaguely responsible. But at the same time, so like Doug is saying, don't do this, we don't recommend it. Justin on the other side is saying, actually we have this really fun GQ article come out.

Oh no. And it sort of was really key to the brand's success. It's sort of how he talks about it. Oh. Both of them talk about eating ice cream for breakfast most days. What? Yes. So they're talking about this not as a dessert substitute, but they're just like, sometimes you can just eat it for a meal. I don't know. I don't necessarily object to these dudes. I don't necessarily object to the existence of this product. I do strenuously object to promoting it as a diet or as a diet food.

And I think the biggest thing is, and this is where they've gotten sort of knocked publicly the most, is that advertising ice cream as you're going to eat the whole pint of this, is really hard to think of that as doing anything other than normalizing or promoting or reaching out to specifically marketing to people with issues with binge eating. When they have been sort of called out on this binge eating disorder thing, Justin Wilverton sort of issued a response in one of the pieces that I read,

and here's what he had to say, quote, everybody has their own definition of healthy. For us, it means foods that are as unprocessed as they can be. Halo top is something where people can eat the whole pint more a lot more than a quarter of a cup of ice cream. Wait, listen to this motherfucker that just said, unprocessed.

Right. Read the fucking ingredients again. Carabgum, guargum. Yeah. Yeah. What definition of unprocessed allows for all these ingredients that I've never fucking heard of, and I'm a weirdo that like reads about this shit all the time? Yeah, totally.

It just doesn't hold any water at all. Yeah, because holding water requires processing, Aubrey. If you're processing, it's the whole water. According to the co-founders, they estimate within Halo Top that their customers are eating between five and 10 pints of Halo Top per week. Their success isn't necessarily

that everybody under the sun loves Halo Top. Their success is the people who love Halo Top by way the fuck more Halo Top than any other brand of ice cream that they would get. I mean, it reminds me a lot of the alcohol industry where we all see beer ads everywhere and this is idea of sort of having a beer with friends, but 60% of alcohol is consumed by 10% of the customers. Fast food, I believe, has the same structure where there's what are called heavy users,

people that are eating a lot of fast food, and it's actually the majority of the market. I mean, I don't want to shame anybody that eats a pint of ice cream, because sometimes you need to eat a pint of ice cream, but also it seems like the company is taking on the same structure as these other industries. Yeah, this doesn't get from me a full-throated, like this is fucked up and these guys need to be stopped.

Do you know what I mean? I don't feel that way about it. But it does not sit well with me. Mm-hmm. Slate ran a piece about halotop. And this quote, I thought really sort of encapsulated the ways in which the line gets blurred between dieting and disorder eating. Hmm. All any dieting person really wants, and I am extrapolating from personal experience here, is to eat a whole container of something. Preferably that thing will taste good, or at least not bad, but what's crucial in the end is getting to eat all of it. What Halo Top does so brilliantly, is tap into Americans' love of Benjing.

This writer goes on to say that she doesn't blame the creators of Halo Top for that love of Benjing, and I'm like, no, of course, you can't pin it all in these two guys, but it doesn't seem frankly very ethical to me. The last piece that I want to talk about in terms of Halo Top's marketing is its most recent ad campaign from last year. The title of that ad campaign is Stop Shooting Yourself. Oh no. SH-O-U-L-D.

I like know where this is going. It's so dark. Tell me where you think it's going. It's going to be pretending to free you from diet talk when it's actually just another form of diet talk. I mean, you just nailed it. Damn it. I'm spoiling your episode.

I'm sorry. You were gonna lead me there by the hand and I ran in front of you. You don't know, it's perfect because you really can kind of see it coming a mile away. Yeah. This is their quote from their stop shooting yourself website. I don't know.

So the ad is essentially, it's 30-second spot. It is a plus-sized woman dancing in her bra and panties. I'm with you so far. And while she's dancing around there, these slogans that pop up on screen that say, I should work out more. I should eat more salads and I should skip dessert. And she is eating halotop. Oh man. At the end of the ad, she sees that one of her neighbors is looking in through her apartment window. And she is eating halotop. Oh man. At the end of the ad, she sees that one of her neighbors is looking in through her apartment window. And she's just like, whatever, I'm gonna keep dancing, right? It's just sort of like, I'm gonna be free and easy

and I'm gonna live my life. Here we go. Yeah. So the idea here that this ad seems to be sort of like playing into is what a lot, a lot, a lot of diet companies and diet food companies are doing, which is sort of like, it's okay to be fat so buy this ice cream that will make you thin.

Yeah, it's so gross to be using this stuff to sell people fucking ice cream. It's so gross. Because essentially, like if you look at the sort of track of what's happening here, like fat activists and eating disorder advocates have done a shit ton of work to make sure that people understand that dieting is not a sustainable way of being that it doesn't actually lead people to lose weight,

that it fucks up your physical and mental health. And essentially what is happening right now, culturally, is that all of that stuff, like dieting is just getting a search and replace. For like, it's not about dieting, it's about wellness, and it's not about restriction, it's about empowerment so that you can restrict. If you choose to restrict, right? What is the purpose of eating halotop if not to lose weight? Right, total.

It's not like calories and carbs taste bad and you wanna avoid them for that reason. So it's like, you're telling this woman to lose weight while you're being like, you're fine as you are. It's so fucking cynical. And this is also a place where people are like, look, the culture around food is changing. The culture around fatness is changing. And again, what they're talking about isn't concrete experiences of fat people or people

with eating disorders or people who experience a lot of food policing for any number of reasons. What they're talking about is ad campaigns. Right. That feels like there's more acceptance. And I would argue, that means that there's more explicit policing of fat people, not that there is more acceptance of fatness of fat people. Right. If only she had halo top, she wouldn't be so fat.

Totally. Right. I mean, that's the message people are going to get. And she is eating halo top. So she's on her way. She's doing the right thing. She's becoming thin. You know what it reminds me of? Hmm. The ridiculous cynicism of those, what was it, Winston ads that were like, you've come a long way, baby. Totally.

It was like, we're feminists and like, look at how great we are with women's rights. Hey, here's a stick that's gonna kill you. You think this? It's like just immediately sucking up feminism into the fucking tractor beam of capitalism. Using this like genuine advancement of women to do it. And it's exactly the same here.

It's like body positivity is great. Look how happy you are with yourself. Take this thing that's gonna make you different. Totally. Also, fuck them. The whole thing came out of this biohacking, intermittent fasting. I'm gonna tweak my body thing. Like, halotop is another should.

I should be eating halotop instead of this normal hogging does. Yeah, absolutely. I just saw that ad and I was like, I feel gross and I hate it and I don't know why. And I saw this, like, when I was not PMS-ing. So that was a genuine neutral response. I think by doing all this marketing, they're shooting themselves in the foot.

How was that? I'm sorry. I have to say, I'm like very delighted that you stumbled upon that, and I'm also very delighted that we're almost at the end of this episode, because there are so many fewer opportunities for more shooting jokes. I know, could you save this for last? Otherwise, the whole the whole show would be full of these. Yeah, totally. So, I feel like the thing that I want to say to close this out is just like totally eat what you want, but please don't conflate marketing with nutritional education. Yes. This is one of those cases where like a brand is saying we're good for you for all of these reasons, so our brains go, oh these things are good.

It's good to have- Right. Or things are good. It's good to have- Right. ...or Rithritthal. It's good to have stevia. Please, please, please know that the people who are telling you that are trying to sell you or Rithritthal and stevia. Yes. The purpose of companies is to sell you as much of their product as possible.

Right. Anyone who's telling you like this is the best, probiotic, antibiotic fiber, whatever, they have no incentive to tell you the truth. Right. As you say, Halo Top's job is to make money, and they are doing a bang-up job of making money. They are not your source of nutritional education. Nor is a fucking GQ story about eating ice cream for 10 days. Yes, please, please, please, play! However, if you're really interested in getting a canker sore, now you know where to go. Thank you.