Maintenance Phase - Snackwell's Cookies

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

They hit the market in 1992. Three years later, they were the best-selling cookie in America. This week, Mike and Aubrey dive into the low-fat craze of the 1990s and sample the snack that became the s...ymbol of its rise and fall.  Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPal Get Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreLinks! How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America “Eat More, They’re Healthy”Anthology of “Cookie Man” ads“What if It’s All Been A Big Fat Lie?”“Ending the War on Fat”  Support the show

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 ["The End of the World"] Uh, did we decide how we're opening the show? Of course we should. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha my opening from last time. We could also change it up. We could also skip it. I don't know. I kind of like coming up with a new tagline every week, but then that's the same as the gimmick on my other phone show. Yeah, what do you just do? I don't have it, but I'm gonna start talking and hope that something comes up. Yeah, just go. Just use nouns. Welcome to maintenance phase. I'm Aubrey, and this is Michael. Oh, yeah, sorry. And this is Michael. Oh, yes, I... And we are here to tell you all about the secret histories of dieting, weight loss, wellness,
Starting point is 00:00:51 and health that you never knew you needed to know. Ooh, the secret garden. Sure. Secret, something. Well, they're only secret if you don't like reading academic papers, because usually all this time is out in the open. There are things that most people haven't spent a ton of time thinking about. Yes, except for me who has spent the last three weeks thinking about fucking snack-well cookies. Ridiculous.
Starting point is 00:01:11 I can't wait to hear every single thing about snack-well cookies. Just as a disclaimer, this episode is about snack-well cookies ostensibly, but it's actually about the absurd low-fat craze that became America's primary ideology about food for like an entire decade. I'm super excited to talk about this in part because that decade was my like childhood and adolescence as a fat kid. So like it, I would imagine for both of us
Starting point is 00:01:41 made a big impression, right? And it was pretty formative in the way that certainly to this day that I think about food and weight and all of that kind of stuff. And snack wells were a centerpiece of that in my house. So for people that don't know, snack wells, devils food cookies were a fat-free chocolate and marshmallow cookie that was launched in 1992 by a brand named snack wells. And within three years, they were the most popular cookie in America. What? Yes, they surpassed Ritz and Oreos, which had been at the top of the charts for 80 years.
Starting point is 00:02:20 So I was thinking about this the other night night I was talking to both of my parents were snack wells, super fans. Oh yeah. And they were saying that it was sort of the first cookie that they could recall that was a sort of quote unquote diet cookie that was not set apart in a separate aisle. Yes, the box looked like Kebler cookies, right? That it was sort of like marketed alongside, it was like a cookie, but this cookie is better for you, rather than this is a diet food and this is the cookie version of that diet food. I mean, this is all wrapped up in the uniquely rock bottomage
Starting point is 00:02:56 of 1990s American food culture. But yeah, did you, did you ate snack-wells cookies? Did you remember them? Oh my God, absolutely. So we always had them in our house. Yeah. We were a dieting household through and through. And one of the things that I remember most clearly
Starting point is 00:03:11 about snack wells was that there would be many people in and around my family who would be like, I didn't eat lunch or I didn't eat all day. And now I'm going to eat some snack wells. That's my treat for not eating. People were using it in a way that was sort of incentivizing some degree of disorder eating, right? Totally, totally. Yeah. The other thing that I will say that I remember about snack wells is I distinctly remember as a fat
Starting point is 00:03:33 kid being like, okay, these are the cookies that I'm gonna have access to, which means I had better totally savor them and love them. And you know what I mean? Like really make it count with the cookie time that I have. And I remember eating them and I remember them being so dry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the other thing that I remember really distinctly about snack was. Yeah, they're like deeply unsatisfying. Yeah, did your family worship at the altar of no fat and low fat foods?
Starting point is 00:04:01 100%. Slim fast? Yes. Way watchers, yes. Carnation instant breakfast, no, because it had fat in it. Oh yeah. But we would have a box at all times of potato buds, those like instant potato flakes. So it's just like healthy. It's like astronaut food. It's so upsetting. It was this really weird approach to health in order for something to be healthy, it had to be engineered in some way.
Starting point is 00:04:31 And also this idea that what eating a low fat diet is, is eating exactly the same, but just low fat versions of everything and you'll be healthier, right? That's totally. Low fat pop tarts and low fat TV dinners and the most distinct food image of my childhood was reduced fat peanut butter.
Starting point is 00:04:54 Like it doesn't make any sense. There's not like some other species of peanut that has less fat, right? Like all you're doing is you're replacing about 40% of your peanut butter with sugar. Right. It's sort of this weird zero sum thinking. Yeah. Do you want to find out how we got to this place? I want to know every single thing about snack.
Starting point is 00:05:13 So the story begins with basically the discovery of heart attacks. Huh. Before like the 1940s and the 1950s, and this happens with most countries that go for being poor to developing relatively rapidly, the mortality rates shift from infectious diseases to non-infectious diseases. So for most of American history, people were dying of cholera and things that you could catch
Starting point is 00:05:41 from dirty water or the lack of antibiotics. People weren't thinking about cancer and heart disease things that you could catch from like dirty water or the lack of antibiotics. People weren't thinking about cancer and heart disease before the 1940s because like those were not on the radar. Right, there's sort of this idea now it feels like that like those are new ailments. Right, because we have failed in some way as a society to like quote unquote stay healthy
Starting point is 00:06:02 by which folks usually mean stay thin. Right. And that misconception feels like sort of pretty fertile territory for diet companies and for folks who are sort of inclined to for whatever reason kick up a sense of panic around public health. Oh, totally. Yeah. And so heart attacks were actually discovered or heart artery blockage was discovered in the 1800s by this guy in Berlin, who was just really fascinated by corpses, and he would just get dead bodies and cut them open. And the most amazing thing about cholesterol,
Starting point is 00:06:36 the waxy substance that blocks arteries, is that you can fucking see it. That if you take a dead person who has a bunch of heart disease, and you open up their heart, you can see like, oh, there's all this yellow shit in there. This doctor in Berlin in the 1800s was like,
Starting point is 00:06:50 huh, some people have this yellow shit in their heart tubes and some people don't have this yellow shit. But because, you know, it's 1800s, everybody's dying of fucking like pneumonia and stuff. People are not interested in heart disease. Right. But nobody really takes it up until, in the 1940s, when basically America comes out of World War II and they look around and heart disease, heart attacks are the number one killer in America.
Starting point is 00:07:16 One thing that this draws on is because we didn't really know anything about heart attacks, but we're like, we think it's related to lifestyle. Fat in the diet had actually kind of always been somewhat demonized. You probably know this, that like, diets have been around since the 1800s. As long as there have been people larger than other people, there have been diets. And pretty shortly after the discovery of calories, they realize that fat has nine calories per gram,
Starting point is 00:07:43 and protein has four calories per gram, I think. From there, it's a very obvious leap to be like, well, fat has more calories. So losing weight requires you to eat fewer calories, therefore, eat less fat. Like, it's just like this obvious thing that's kind of like folk wisdom at the time because there's never really anything backing it up.
Starting point is 00:07:59 And so, when they start looking into heart attacks and lifestyle, the sort of the obvious thing to look at is fat. Right, I'm also just thinking about what are the stereotypes of fat people that existed before the 1900s will say. And it's all fall staff eating a turkey leg and Henry VIII. I'm pulling extremely white European examples of this. But there is just a lot about like people eating fat. Yes. And also during this period when heart attacks emerge as the number
Starting point is 00:08:31 one killer of Americans, there was also this rapid urbanization that happened in America. So I feel like Americans, probably other countries too, have always had like a weird complicated relationship with people living in cities. And so very soon after this lifestyle hypothesis emerges, you also get this stuff that is completely A historical that like, you know, we used to eat this like rich, plant-based diet and like now that we live in cities and we're shopping at grocery stores, like we've forgotten our roots.
Starting point is 00:09:00 And like people have looked into the data, it's not fucking true. People in the 1800s in America ate literally the same amount of meat as Americans in the 1950s Americans have always had a Really high fat diet and there's another way of thinking about this that is sort of like Icarus right which is sort of like oh, we flew too close to the Sun We tried to do it. Yeah, and now we have lot we have fallen right we areaced in some way, and that's now showing up in our bodies.
Starting point is 00:09:27 That feels bizarre for a conversation that is ostensibly about science. I think it's important, like, in sort of looking at the origin of the low-fat ideology of the 1990s, that it really had to win that it's back, right? That there's all these very A scientific, A historical notions kind of floating around that get picked up by researchers and institutions without realizing that like, we're just drawing on our preconceptions. So the best example of that is probably there's
Starting point is 00:09:57 these early studies that are trying to investigate like how does cholesterol affect the body, like is cholesterol good for us or bad for us? Where they take a bunch of rabbits and they feed them like all steak diet or like all butter diet to these rabbits. And like sure enough, these little rabbits start getting little rabbit heart attacks. And then they replicate these studies with like sheep and cattle and horses.
Starting point is 00:10:21 But people start pointing out, this is like decades later, people point out that like rabbits are not carnivores. Like sheep are not carnivores. So you're feeding these animals, fucking sirloin steak, who like their bodies are not set up to metabolize this. In the same way that if you fed a lion,
Starting point is 00:10:38 a diet of entirely carrots, it would probably also die. These animals are not set up for this. So they try to do, this is years later, they try to do the same study with dogs, of like feed dogs, a bunch of meat, because like they eat meat, they're meat eaters, and the dogs don't get heart attacks, the dogs are completely fine.
Starting point is 00:10:54 The thing that jumps to mind for me is I'm like, right, you could also do a study that's like, we fed dogs only chocolate for a year, and 95% of them died, you'd be like, no, that's like a dog thing. And also, if people only ate chocolate, yeah, probably we would die. Like, I don't know. Have you heard of a guy named Ansel Keys?
Starting point is 00:11:16 Yes, I have. Tell me, tell me what you know. What I know about Ansel Keys is that he was responsible or led a team of researchers who was responsible for retesting the BMI. Oh, yeah. They essentially tested in the 70s, I wanna say. The three best methods that they had
Starting point is 00:11:34 for determining someone's level of body fat and those methods were the BMI, which is like, wait, divided by height. Calipers, which are those big like sort of like tongs almost that they used to like grab fat and go, that's how much fat those big, like, sort of, like, tongs, almost that they use to, like, grab fat and go, that's how much fat you have, like, there you go. And the other one was water displacement. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:51 And so, keys did those studies and was, like, basically, like, the BMI is the best thing we have, but it's not great. And people are like, great, the BMI! Yes, he is a giant of food research in the 1950s to the 1980s. He is one of the first people who proposes what is eventually known as the Diet Heart Hypothesis that heart disease is caused by diet and cholesterol in the heart valves
Starting point is 00:12:18 is caused by saturated fat. He's like the guy that comes up with this. Fascinating. In the 1950s, he starts doing these studies on dietary fat and heart disease, but in the just like endlessly atrocious ethics of science at this time, he does a bunch of diet studies only on men, obviously.
Starting point is 00:12:36 Also, he does them in mental institutions on schizophrenics. Oh, no. So one of the main pieces of research that starts to solidify this idea that saturated fat is bad for you It's only on 66 people and it's these like schizophrenic dudes and some of them He feeds a high fat diet and some of them he feeds a low fat diet and then he tests their cholesterol and then he's like saturated fat like that's the methodology that he starts using so the other thing that's happening here is that my guess is that if you are an inpatient
Starting point is 00:13:05 psych patient and you have something as profound as schizophrenia that you are on some wild drugs in the 50s. So that's the other thing that feels like, oh buddy, there are some variables here that feel like the real cause of heart attack is saturated fat and electro shock therapy. Yeah, it just seems wild to me to be like we figured out what's happening with this group of schizophrenic Skatech and Work in like where I'm just like there are so many complicating factors here that you can't possibly Universalize that knowledge. It's extremely funny to me that like as you're criticizing the study
Starting point is 00:13:41 There's a little part of me that like wants to push back Really? It's not that bad because by the standards of the studies we're going to learn about in this episode, this is one of the better ones. Oh, no! We're going to meet so many studies that are so much worse than this. I'm like, well, at least it's a laboratory experiment. Like, at least they're taking decent data. Like, it only gets worse from here. Sure, you're like, he's a doctor. So that's a step ahead. I'm like toned down Aubrey. This is like the best one we're gonna hear about.
Starting point is 00:14:08 So on the strength of this like extremely anecdotal and like, jank ball study, Ansel Keys then departs on international comparisons. So basically Ansel Keys gets $200,000 in 1956, which was like a shitload of money to do like a real study. It's called the Seven Countries Study. It's super famous where he's basically going to go to seven countries and get like real
Starting point is 00:14:34 data. The diet, heart attack mortality, and then he's going to come back with like something definitive. The seven countries are Italy, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan. Sorry. This feels like a very selective group of countries. Yeah, it's like white, white, white, white, white, Japan. Right, right, right, right. So one of the numbers I came across was that this study has been cited one million times. What? This is like one of the foundational texts in diet and nutrition. Like you still find it cited net.
Starting point is 00:15:09 Oh, no. The silver lining of this study, the first thing that it does is that it finally proves that heart attacks affect different countries at different rates. America has more heart attacks than Japan. That was something that there was only anecdotal data for before. So in that way, it does a really good thing. But what it also produces is an extremely famous
Starting point is 00:15:28 infographic where he plots the amount of saturated fat in the diet and the rate of heart attacks. As you would expect, it's like Japan at the very lowest, right? They eat only fish there, they eat a lot of rice, it's like a super low fat diet, and they have like zero heart attacks basically. And then at the top, you've got America, which has a very high fat diet and a shitload of heart attacks. And so if you start drawing the line, like along this line, there's like all the other countries basically slot perfectly along this line. And so a lot of heart attacks and a lot of fat, a little fat, a little heart attacks. If you keep going backwards, well, zero fat, zero heart attacks. Yeah, it's inviting you to surmise. Yes, right.
Starting point is 00:16:11 And it's not actually like digging in on are there sort of phantom variables here? Are there other factors at play? And I would also say like given the cultural conversations at that time, I could imagine that this plays right the hell into sort of a personal responsibility approach to this problem. Did you come across that at all in the research?
Starting point is 00:16:32 That comes later because I mean, a real reason why this isn't a huge deal when it first comes out is because there's no obesity yet. Yeah. The panic over obesity, which both of us have grown up our whole lives with. Yep, that panic didn't really begin until the late 1980s, because obesity rates weren't climbing in the population. This is at a time culturally when you could talk about things like heart disease and hypertension and diet related disease without bringing weight into it.
Starting point is 00:16:58 Mm-hmm. But so because I know you're a methodology queen, like I am. I think we should talk about these problems with Ansel Key's methodology that people point out like 10 minutes after his study is published. Yes, tell me. The first problem with the data that he collects from these seven countries is that people cannot recall what they fucking ate.
Starting point is 00:17:17 Even if you ask people what they ate yesterday, they can't do like can you can you tell me like, how many like tablespoons of peanut butter? You had on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich yesterday like it's almost impossible people have no idea I mean the people who can for sure do that are people who are at the height of their eating disorder The people you can count on for real accurate answers to that We're away like every strawberry. Yeah, right. Honestly the only thing I remember from yesterday is that I hard boiled a bunch of eggs and that's how I found out they went bad.
Starting point is 00:17:48 Sure, but that's my only food memory of yesterday. Like aside from that, I'm like, what did I have for breakfast? I don't know. So what people point out is that he was only actually checking the diets or testing the diets of people for 1.5% of his respondents. Oh, no. Also, there were also some weird behind the scene stuff that apparently in Greece,
Starting point is 00:18:09 he was polling people on the island of Crete and the island of Kourfu, and he performed the poll in Crete during Lent. They don't eat meat, eggs, fish, cheese, butter during Lent. Right, you're polling people on like, what did you eat yesterday? And they're saying like, oh, I ate all this healthy stuff, fish, cheese, butter, during lint. Right, you're polling people on like, what did you eat yesterday? And they're saying like, oh, I ate all this healthy stuff, like, oh, I ate a salad yesterday.
Starting point is 00:18:30 And you're like, people on Crete Salads and they're super healthy. But it's like, they don't eat that typically. Listen, sure, man, do your heart disease study on Muslims during Ramadan? And you're gonna be like, they never eat, but somehow they're still alive. I know.
Starting point is 00:18:44 Well, that's also not what I'm talking about. But then, I mean, gonna be like, they never eat, but somehow they're still alive. And I know. Well, that's also not what I'm gonna say. But then, I mean, these are like the sort of background things, but then the main thing is, why did he pick those seven countries? Yeah. So one of the things that comes out immediately when this study gets published and when Ansel Keez starts talking about this research, is like, son, France. People in France eat cream, they eat a shitload of pork, they drink a shitload of wine, and they have really low rates of heart attacks.
Starting point is 00:19:08 Mm-hmm. Anselkies like admits this, he's like, oh, it's the French paradox. Oh, it's the one thing we can't explain. But then people start pointing out, like, well, wait a minute, West Germany, they eat a ton of pork, they eat like deep bread. Like, have you had a Venus Knitzel? Right. Sweden, Norway, Denmark. You can't just have seven countries that match your thesis
Starting point is 00:19:27 and then like six countries that are like, oh, they're a paradox. It's like, no, that's half. You can't just like ignore half the fucking countries in Europe and people have gone back and there's actually data on like, you know, diet studies and heart disease rates for 22 countries at the time. And if you plot the 22 countries on a graph, according to fat intake and heart disease rates for 22 countries at the time. And if you plot the 22 countries on a graph according to fat intake and heart disease, I've seen this scatter plot. It's like a polychip painting. It's just like, they're just a bunch of dots. Yeah. I came across a really interesting
Starting point is 00:19:56 1957 paper that's basically critiquing this where this researcher points out all of the other things that are correlated with heart disease. He says, the number of cars sold per capita, the number of cigarettes sold, consumption of protein, consumption of sugar. These are all associated with one common factor. Wealth, anything that accompanies a growing mid-century prosperity, including meat, sugar, car exhaust, and margarine could be causing heart disease. Right. The main thing in any of these correlational diet studies is access to resources, access to healthcare. These are things that he didn't look into at all.
Starting point is 00:20:32 He didn't do any analysis of the different healthcare systems in these countries. Interesting. There's also in 1961, the American Heart Association, which actually had like previously like looked at Ansel Kees research and had put out a statement saying like, uh, we don't really see it. It's just correlation. All they said that in 1957 like when his study came out in
Starting point is 00:20:50 1961 they put out a report saying that fat is bad and that people should start to reduce the fat in their diet. What's that disconnect about? The nutrition committee of the American Heart Association was chaired by Ansel Keys. No! Yeah. So if you look at all these different organizations, like there's eventually a surgeon general's report,
Starting point is 00:21:12 there's all these American Medical Association, blah, blah, blah. It's like the same fucking people. So it seems like all these institutions are lining up around this low-fat hypothesis, but it's like seven dudes. The same seven dudes saying the same shit is also a good alternate title for the podcast. Yes. I feel like that's going to be a recurring theme.
Starting point is 00:21:34 But what's really interesting about the American Heart Association report and the institutional reports that start to come out in the 60s and 70s is that they don't recommend a low-fat diet for all Americans. They say, if you're in a high-risk group, if you have high cholesterol, if you have a history of heart disease in your family, then you should eat less saturated fat. But this is not everybody should eat less fat. Interesting. This is when Ansel Keys shows up on the cover of Time Magazine, and they call him Mr. Cholesterol, and even though the American Heart Association doesn't go this far, Ansel Keys says you should cut fat from 40% of calories
Starting point is 00:22:10 to 15%. This is, I mean, this also gets it like the beginning of the stigmatization of weight that comes, like obviously comes along with all this. One of the quotes in this time article, he says, people should know the facts. Then if they want to eat themselves to death, let them. Oh, no. It's like, oh, fuck you. Seriously. He also, I mean, I don't know how much
Starting point is 00:22:33 we're like allowed to roast him for this, but he also mentions in this time article sort of like off-hand. He's like, oh yeah, I eat a steak with my wife three times a week and like, I have eggs and bacon for breakfast. And it's like, if the guy who's entire life's work is built around reducing saturated fat, can't reduce saturated fat in his own diet, why does he feel qualified to tell everybody else to do this?
Starting point is 00:22:54 Yeah, the whole thing, I mean, it's also sort of the logic of anti-fat bias is what's happening here, right? The idea here is if you appear healthy, you can tell people who appear unhealthy to you, what to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Without scrutiny, right?
Starting point is 00:23:12 That there is sort of this idea that like, your own health is beyond reproach because look at you. But so this all gets worse in 1977 when for the first time, the US government gives dietary advice. It's called the dietary goals in the United States. They say Americans at risk again should reduce fat to 30% of calories, and saturated fat should be 10% of calories.
Starting point is 00:23:37 And they also said you should increase your carbohydrates from 55% of calories to 60% of calories. So that's like the official, super duper official advice from US government. They also mentioned, this is actually the following year, but they also mentioned that like as a tip, Americans should try to eat 13 slices of bread every day so that they can get their carbohydrates.
Starting point is 00:23:57 So that's like a lot of fucking bread, too. Sorry, Michael, I'm sorry, I can't proceed with this podcast unless I know if you've eaten your daily loaf of bread. It's almost noon. I should have had like six slices by now. Have you had your 10 a.m. piece of toast? So between this dietary goals publication and the sort of like mid to late 80s in this weird imperceptible way, the recommendation to eat less dietary fat moves from high risk groups to everybody.
Starting point is 00:24:35 No one ever says it like, oh, we're dropping this high risk recommendation. It just becomes like a cultural understanding that everybody should try to reduce fat in their diet to the extent possible. So the American Heart Association by 1981 is recommending that men limit themselves to 300 milligrams of cholesterol and women limit themselves to 225 milligrams of cholesterol, which is one egg. And the National Institutes of Health starts recommending that all Americans over two reduce their fat consumption.
Starting point is 00:25:05 Over two. Yeah, if you're under the age of two, you can eat whatever you want apparently. Under two, if it's possible, use the slim fast version of formula. Yeah. And then in the midst of this mayhem of, just like everybody trying to reduce their fat,
Starting point is 00:25:19 we get a 1984 time magazine cover story that has the headline, sorry, it's true, cholesterol really is a killer. And so all of this information is sort of telling us that we should change the way we eat, right? Clestros bad, we should eat less cholesterol, fine. This study that, you know, it's true, it's confirmed, we now know the cholesterol is bad. This is not a diet study.
Starting point is 00:25:42 It's a study on drugs. It's a study in which a bunch of people are given a statin that reduces their cholesterol and they have fewer heart attacks. It even says, like paragraph three of the article, it says, researchers decided to use a drug rather than diet to lower cholesterol because it would have been virtually impossible to control or measure the diet of so many men over so long a period. It's a great people can't eat a fucking low fat diet that long. Right, it feels like the headline here is just like, hey, we found a medication that works to lower your cholesterol. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:14 Not like, sorry, it's true. We proved this totally other thing. It's basically like this drug lowers cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart disease, so never eat eggs. There's also, on just a fundamental level, the dietary advice that everybody is sort of coalescing around is that you shouldn't eat more than 30% of your dietary consumption of fat, right?
Starting point is 00:26:37 You should reduce it to less than 30%. But there's never been a study that shows that eating less than 30% fat reduces heart disease. There's no evidence that reducing your fat to that level will reduce heart attacks because nobody has ever been able to do it for that long. There's actually a 1987 New York Times article that says, studies have shown that people who eat foods low in animal fat and cholesterol have less cholesterol in their blood. However, there is no proof that dietary changes can actually reduce heart disease.
Starting point is 00:27:06 Before we're telling people to change their diets and reduce heart disease, shouldn't there be some evidence that this works? It also feels sort of like bizarre, wishful thinking. I'm curious if anybody tried to do any, like, here's what it would look like to eat this way. So, right, guidance for folks or imagining of that because honestly, like, if you have a whatever, a bowl full of spinach, right? Like raw baby spinach with salad dressing on it, that is like 90% fat. Yeah, even though it's a tablespoon or two of salad dressing
Starting point is 00:27:39 and a big pile of spinach, that is not by anyone's definition as far as I know, an unhealthy meal. I'm hearing this advice and you're like, okay, I guess I got to eat more salads and you're like, well, no, actually salads are pretty fatty. Or fat-free cookies, for example. Oh god. But then I mean, I feel like the real thing that did it was in 1988, we get a surgeon general's report. was in 1988, we get a Surgeon General's report. Basically, it says, like, in black and white, everyone should reduce fat to the extent possible. Yeah. This is a quote from the actual Surgeon General. The report marks the first time the government
Starting point is 00:28:15 has identified reduction of fat intake as the number one dietary priority of the nation. I've read this report. It's been a minute since I read this report, the coop report. The thing that I found really fascinating about it is that it's looking at and sort of trying to make a run at these population level determinants of hell through these individual sort of mandates of like when you go to the grocery store, you should buy this.
Starting point is 00:28:39 Yeah. Rather than, what if the government subsidized these kinds of foods or stopped subsidizing these other kinds? And also, I mean, I think the central sin of this report is that they didn't think of unintended consequences. So, are you familiar with Marion Nessel? Yes, absolutely. This is a Marion Nessel stand-account. Like, I've read her books.
Starting point is 00:28:58 I've been reading her blog from one in a decade. She's one of the most pre-eminent like food and politics researchers in America. And she was actually one of the advisors on this report. And what she says later, and I think this is a huge mistake, she says, the rationale, like we knew that we wanted people to eat less saturated fat, we knew the different types of fat, we knew about like HDL and LDL cholesterol, etc. But we thought that was too complicated. So what we wanted to do was just tell people to eat less fat and then people would end
Starting point is 00:29:29 up eating less saturated fat. That's not how people work. And that's especially not how capitalism works. Yeah. I think that they just didn't think that like companies would take this advice and the media would take this advice and oversimplify it and basically exaggerate it to the point where it's gonna make everybody sicker. Totally and also like if you're reducing fat in your diet, saturated fat remains the cheapest kind of fat to get into your diet.
Starting point is 00:29:59 Yeah. What are the chances that when people are cutting out fat, that they're cutting out like French fries that they can get for 99 cents at a drive through, right? Like there's like convenience elements of this, there's cost elements of this, there's where does food show up in your sort of daily life? Where's the like where do those stimuli pop up and when do you reach for them, right? Yeah, like there's so much going on here that the idea that you could just say cut all the fat, like I get where they're coming from and also in retrospect, I'm like, no, of course that didn't work.
Starting point is 00:30:30 So in 2003, Mary Ann Nessel gives an interview to PBS where she talks about this, kind of like at the end of the low fat craze. And she says, would nobody realize, or at least I certainly never would have guessed, was that the food industry would substitute vegetable fats for animal fats in such a profound way and would also substitute sugars for fats and keep the calorie content of their products exactly the same. The best example is the snack wealth phenomenon. Snack wealth cookies were advertised as no-fat cookies, but they had almost the same amount of calories.
Starting point is 00:30:59 In fact, if you go to the store today and look at Oreos, they have a reduced fat Oreo cookie that has, I think, six calories less than the regular Oreo cookie. It's lower in fat, but it's higher in carbohydrates. And so I think all of this dovetails with really the expansion of the obesity epidemic and the construction of the obesity and the Americans were getting fatter,
Starting point is 00:31:20 stigma against fat people is severe. People were desperate to lose weight and the diet industry was becoming a thing at this point. And the food, like mechanics, reduced fat this and, you know, fortified with fat was also becoming a thing and was playing on people's desperation to lose weight. And I think that the authors of this report thought that they were putting it into a country where people were just like, eh guess I should you know eat like this to reduce heart disease But people were not interested in reducing heart disease at this point. They were interested in being thin
Starting point is 00:31:52 Yeah, God that's so tricky because you're like, oh, this is such you're coming from such a pure place No, it's like all Marion you did It's like, all Marion, you did it all this sweetie. Totally the good. Okay, I'm just gonna put out these recommendations that are gonna help people reduce heart disease. It's gonna be really precise. It's really scientific and here we go. Like, and we've really considered all the options
Starting point is 00:32:15 when you put it out into the world. People are like, it'll make you thin. You're like, no, that's not the, okay. You immediately after this report comes out, this is when we get the flood of low fat products onto the market. We also get like a lot of magazines and newspapers took this up like prevention magazine, which is not like as much of a deal now, but was huge, like a really, really influential women's magazine in the 80s and 90s.
Starting point is 00:32:38 Basically, they had like diets where they would say like, how to switch from low fat to no fat. Absolutely my recollection from again, like 90s diet foods was I remember being in middle school very distinctly and being very excited to eat some fat-free yo-play yogurt out of curiosity at the time that I was sort of like you know continuing to hone my lens on like what are calorie counts what are you know what's the sugar content, all that kind of stuff. And I remember being completely shocked at how much sugar. Dude, yeah. Was in fat-free yogurt.
Starting point is 00:33:10 So it's also just like this really tricky thing where it's sort of like, oh my god, all of these like very sweet, well-intentioned people really thought they were going to stick it to corporations and get people to get here. And actually the corporations were like, somehow this only makes us stronger. It's like, yeah. Like, no. So, I gave you a homework assignment for this episode. Should we do that?
Starting point is 00:33:31 Yes. Oh my god, let's do it. I'm so excited. Okay. So in preparation for this episode, I went to my local grocery store and bought a box of snack wells, devils, food, cookies. And we should say, like, as a disclaimer, that the And we should say, like as a disclaimer, that the fat-free version, like the one that we're going to talk about
Starting point is 00:33:48 that was introduced in 1992 no longer exists for reasons that we will get into. So what we have in front of us is a box of, it just says on the box 40% less fat, but it's not clear like what it's 40% less fat than. Okay, okay, well are we gonna do this? I got 12 in front of me. I'm cutting into my bag.
Starting point is 00:34:08 I realize I probably should've done away with cellophane before this. God, these look really disappointing. We should also say that the company's Neckwills is no longer owned by Nabisco. It's like one of these corporate whatever, it's passed hands a couple times and they've changed the recipe.
Starting point is 00:34:24 And when we looked at these online, the reviews are universally negative. Like, if you go on Amazon, it's like all one star reviews. Like people fucking hate these cookies. So I got my own Amazon because I couldn't find them in any grocery stores, which feels like a pretty good indicator. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:34:40 I have where Sennak Wells is at today, but when I found them online, the average review was one and a half stars. I think it's just like, it's a chocolate cookie. Like how much do you have to screw it up to get one and a half stars? Right. So chocolate cookie, uh oh.
Starting point is 00:34:58 All right, so here we go. All right, let's do it. You got one for you. Yeah, got it. All right. Oh. It's really chewy. Mm-hmm.
Starting point is 00:35:06 There's like a layer of chocolate cake cookie kind of vibe. Yeah. And then a layer of extremely springy marshmallow on top of that. Yeah, like gummy bear chewy. Mm-hmm. And then the whole thing is dipped in some kind of chocolate flavored coating.
Starting point is 00:35:20 Oh, it's not that bad. I thought it would be worse actually. The cake layer tastes like it's like just barely being kept together. I don't know if yours are sort of falling apart. Yeah, yeah. Like the baker in me is like, maybe you did more egg. But that is fat.
Starting point is 00:35:31 That has as much fat as the leading brand, Aubrey. So. Yeah, sorry, whoops. Well, but it has a grating, I mean, I guess that's the sugar in the marshmallow, but there's like, you can taste like grains. There's like grains of something in it. Mm-hmm. Like that bottom layer, the cake layer,
Starting point is 00:35:45 it's not quite sawdust texture. But it's also not far off. You know? Not sawdust. Yeah. Yeah. I know, honestly, I've had worse store-bought cookies. Sure. Yes. You know? But if the question is like, would I get these of my own accord?
Starting point is 00:35:58 Absolutely not. Yes, totally. I have like a weird aftertaste now. It's like super duper chocolatey. So I wonder, hang on, I'm gonna look at the ingredients on the, oh, dude, I know, I wrote them down. There's, what is it, 17 ingredients? This feels like the science words label.
Starting point is 00:36:12 Yeah, oh totally. Here's what I have for my ingredients in order. Wheat flour, corn syrup, invert sugar, which I choose to believe just means gay sugar. Yes. Hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is coconut and or palm oil, then coconut powder, then glycerin, and then just leavening. Yeah, that's what I have to do.
Starting point is 00:36:31 An action more than an ingredient, but okay. But so now we know. Now we know. So, apparently at Nabisco, first of all, they launched the snack well brand specifically to capitalize on this. When they were designing the cookies, they called it Project Zero, because they wanted zero fat. Like they set out to make a zero fat cookie. Another thing I found in old marketing,
Starting point is 00:36:52 digested of like how the snack was cookies were marketed, and they talked about how diet food at the time was fucking terrible. It was like, you know, these weight watchers things and like slim-fash shakes, and most of the low fat stuff at the time was like fruit-based. And this was the first time that it was like a chocolate low fat product, like a low fat product that looked like a normal product. Like that hadn't been seen before.
Starting point is 00:37:15 There's like so much wishful thinking that goes into the creation of diet foods, right? Which is sort of like the idea that you could lose a bunch of weight and eat foods that are as decadent, if not more so. Yeah, you could lose weight, you could have a healthier heart and you could eat these chocolate marshmallow-sommest cookies. It's also, I mean, I think it's also like we've totally forgotten about this now, but snack-wells cookies were one of the first snack products that were marketed to adults. Mm.
Starting point is 00:37:41 The like snacks, where you know, seems like gummy bears and stuff, like things that kids would eat. And this is really the beginning of like the snack industry. The idea of like, you know, 3 p.m. you're at work, you wanna have like a little nibble. That as like a marketing category didn't really exist yet. And so another reason why the snack was cookies
Starting point is 00:38:00 went so far is because they had like a year of lead time of like telling people that like it was okay to snack on something if you're an adult. Totally fascinating. Well, and also like now there are like whole, like as you're talking about this, I'm like, oh right, there are whole ad campaigns now around adult snacking, right?
Starting point is 00:38:19 That's like grab this 100 calorie pack of almonds instead of the donut in the break room at work, or the hungry Grab a Snickers ad campaign, right? Where you're like, well, that's not Snickers isn't for hunger, everybody. I mean, let's put it in the mention that because they deliberately made the package of snack well cookies smaller,
Starting point is 00:38:39 so that first of all, it would be under two bucks, which they really wanted it to be cheap. And secondly, they didn't want it to be seen as like a family package of stuff. Like they talk about how like you buy Oreos and there's like 48 of them. And it's very clear that it's like supposed to be in the cupboard. It's like a family thing that you bring out
Starting point is 00:38:55 after the family is eaten dinner or something. But these were supposed to be like individual. You were supposed to get them yourself and take them to work with you. And so part of this thing of like eating the whole box It's not clear that like they intended for that to be the outcome But like the box was much smaller 12 cookies in a box was kind of an innovation That's what they're counting on is like some level of binge eating whether or not that's the language that they have for to the framework or whatever
Starting point is 00:39:20 Right like they're designing something to be eaten in a single sitting or a couple of sittings by one person. This is also the beginning of what researchers call nutritionism, which I think has like taken over the US food supply. This idea that the healthiness or unhealthiness of a product is related to whether or not it has a specific thing. The idea that like, well, it's low in fats, what's healthy for me, are like it's low in fats, so it's healthy for me, or like, it's high in omega-3s. This is something that is deliberately pushed by food companies,
Starting point is 00:39:52 so that they can put a like a nice label on their product. Like, the really infamous one was that there used to be a little nutrition label on the front of the Lucky Charms box that said, Lucky Charms boosts immunity. I don't know how the fuck they came up. I think it was 45, it was like, vitamin A or some shit, like something. But Americans are not getting like, rickets at like large rates,
Starting point is 00:40:14 but it was like a way of being like, oh, well, it boosts immunity. So like, of course, I can have a bowl of Lucky Charms for breakfast. It's this idea of like this very binary understanding of health that is completely like, it benefits nobody other than food companies.
Starting point is 00:40:28 Right, it's a little bit like the sort of like freak out about gluten that happened maybe 10 years ago, right? It's sort of like everyone's got to get gluten out of their diets that there was grain, grain, and wheat, belly and all of those sort of diet. Oh, totally. Our brains are gonna hang onto one thing. We're all freaked out about both our mortality and our appearance.
Starting point is 00:40:46 And here's one element, omega-3s, or gluten, or sugar, or carbs, or fat, or whatever it is, that you can then just hang on to that alays all of those fears. I think the grossest example of this is the complete corruption of the American Heart Association that they start allowing brands to pay them to put hurt healthy stickers on the front of their packages. Do you remember these? It's like a little heart logo with a white check mark. Those were paid. I mean, you still have to match,
Starting point is 00:41:17 like you still have to meet some like basic criteria. Like it's not, they're not putting it on literally anything. But like they started putting it on any product that was low fat. So in the 90s, you could get a heart healthy sticker on frosted flakes, marshmallow, crispy's, and fucking pop tarts. Right, it was on like every cereal.
Starting point is 00:41:34 That's what I remember. Yeah, oh yeah me too. Yeah, yeah. But like that's a completely absurd understanding of health. Oh yeah, you know, honey nut Cheerios are low in fats. They're good for you. And they're just like pure refined grains, like try to make cereal in a kitchen.
Starting point is 00:41:47 Like cereal is not a food, it's like you can only make it on an industrial scale. I love reading these old accounts. I found like all these like industry trade publications where this is bananas. By 1995, there were 1,914 new low fat products hitting the market. That's almost 2,000 new products that are marketed as low fat on the market in 1995.
Starting point is 00:42:10 Wow! And this is from a times op-ed like after all this is over. It says, by the mid-90s, a flood of low fat products entered the food supply. Nonfat salad dressing, baked potato chips, low fat sweetened milk and yogurt, and low fat processed turkey and baloney. Low fat baloney is like its own ring of hell. Gross, what's even funny? It's just, ugh.
Starting point is 00:42:31 I like almost hope that it's like sawdust, because then it can't be like absorbed. Like salty. What else do you put it in? It just ground up newspapers. Yeah. There's also, do you remember? This is like deep cut, dude.
Starting point is 00:42:44 There was something called the McLean Deluxe. Like McDonald's had a low fat hamburger. I don't remember this. I remember getting it. How was it? I don't know. I think I liked it just because I like McDonald's stuff as a kid.
Starting point is 00:42:56 I wasn't like a discerning customer at like 12 years old. They were also Taco Bell, had tacos called border lights. Oh, I definitely remember border lights. Kentucky fried chicken had skinless chicken. Uh-huh. It was everywhere. That was also like the point at which in my house,
Starting point is 00:43:14 all of those products shifted over to the low fat version of whatever it was. Oh yeah, me too. Low fat, reduced fat cheese. Oh, remember that stuff? What a bummer. It's like toothpaste. Oh, yeah that stuff? What a bummer. It's like toothpaste. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:43:26 It's really fascinating and retrospect given how sort of our conversation about nutrition has progressed in the meantime. The idea was you should still be buying stuff from the middle of the store, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should still be buying shelf stable stuff in boxes. It should still come from General Mills or Nabisco
Starting point is 00:43:44 or whatever, but you have to get the reduced fat version of that thing. It was also a time when like people were like don't eat nuts, don't eat cheese, don't eat avocados. Oh my god, don't eat avocados, right? Yeah. So it's also fascinating to see how much of this is like, how far the pendulum swings. By 1995, snack wells, if it had been a standalone company, it would have been the third largest food company in America. And this is a really fascinating moment where like my kid brain is catching up to my adult understanding of things.
Starting point is 00:44:15 Right, where I'm like, I for sure was just like, oh, my family just really liked this brand. Oh yeah, that's how I thought before I started researching this too. Totally, I did not think like, no, this was like a really concerned, sort of marketing effort. It was sort of the perfect storm of like
Starting point is 00:44:30 public health recommendations and then corporations and like sort of the food industry and diet industry seizing on those. All of this stuff, like of course, it's all of those things and it isn't just like, might add really like marshmallows. So we got marshmallows. I think that's not what it was.
Starting point is 00:44:45 Do you remember the ads? Do you remember the Cookie Man ads? I don't remember anything about the advertising from Stakwells. I think we don't remember it because we were too young and the marketing was aimed at adults. So I found a compilation on YouTube of the ads that they ran for Stakwells. The central premise is that they're in such high demand that stores
Starting point is 00:45:06 are running low. And that's actually fucking true. Stores would run out and there's like apocryphal stories of people who would follow the delivery trucks to the store. Like if they were out driving and they saw delivery truck, they would follow it to the grocery store so that they could get it because you could not get these cookies anywhere. This is like the beetles of snack foods. It's ridiculous. Just like people like screaming and following them or maybe a better comparison, the Furby of Snack Foods.
Starting point is 00:45:33 Like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, I find it a lot. So what was, was there like a peak of snack wells popularity? Do we know? It's actually fascinating. It's like 92, it introduces 95, it peaks. By 1998, it basically doesn't exist anymore. Interesting. And I don't know like how much this contributed to it, but during this time, these studies
Starting point is 00:45:54 start to come out about what is now known as the snack wells effect. So they do these studies where they bring people into a room and there's like a bowl of M&Ms. And they're like, oh yeah, have as many as you want. We're waiting. We'll call you in later. And there's a scale under the bowl so they can a bowl of M&Ms. And they're like, oh yeah, have as many as you want, we're waiting, we'll call you in later. And there's a scale under the bowl so they can see how many M&Ms you eat. And for one group, they say, oh, have some M&Ms. And for the other group, they say, oh, they're low fat M&Ms,
Starting point is 00:46:14 they're new, have as many as you want. And the people that get the low fat M&Ms, which don't exist, by the way, they eat 30% more than the people who have the regular M&Ms. Uh-huh. The logic or the theory of this is that there's, there's so much shame around food. These don't produce the same amount of shame.
Starting point is 00:46:33 Yeah. You feel like, oh, I ate the whole box of cookies, but like, it's no fat, so it's okay to eat the box of cookies. And so, it's not really something that people like reckon with in the literature, the way that foods affect emotions, but it seems like that's a big part of the snack world's effect.
Starting point is 00:46:48 Totally and like from a corporate perspective, right, from a profit motive perspective, if people are eating 30% more of your product, they are giving you 30% more money. Yes, like that at some point or another, they will continue to buy your product at a higher rate if they are eating more of it. Right. And there's also... There's studies of this too. What's weird is despite all this,
Starting point is 00:47:12 the sheer scale of this low fat craze, Americans didn't eat that much less fat, they just ate more. Like if you look at daily calorie consumption, it increased by something like 400 calories per person during this period. Really? Yeah, and that was almost all carbohydrates.
Starting point is 00:47:29 As a percentage, we ate less fat. But like we ate the same raw amount of fat. I mean, my theory on this is that it's just satiety. Yeah. That like you eat a box of fucking snack while cookies and you are not full. You're just gonna eat more like an hour later as if you haven't eaten anything
Starting point is 00:47:44 because this food is like specifically designed to go straight through you. Like there's no fiber in it. There's nothing in it that would like trigger all of the hormones that are like telling you like I'm done eating now. It triggers all the hormones that say, I'm not full. Well, and there's also the whole sort of like
Starting point is 00:48:01 world of food science, right? Around snack foods and sort of packaged foods like these. Yeah. There is a whole little industry of people whose job it is to make these irresistible. Yes. Yeah. Every product wants you to buy the most of it. Right.
Starting point is 00:48:17 And so, you know, by 1995 it peaks by 98. It's basically cratered. And there's this hella shady New York Times article in 1998 with the headline, Nabisco gives in as consumers shun snack wells demanding taste. And it's about how in 1998, snack wells started adding fat to the cookies
Starting point is 00:48:37 because they tasted like shit and nobody wanted to eat them. And less they were desperate to lose weight. There's not as much fat as there would be in like an Oreo, I guess, but there's some fat because fat carries flavor. Yeah, totally. 2002, 2003 is when the low fat craze really ends.
Starting point is 00:48:54 And when you read the academic articles, they have this sense of wonder and mystery. They're like, well, I don't know why. It really took us these extra years to really drop the low fat craze. And it's like, atkins. Yeah. It's not like Americans are reading their copy
Starting point is 00:49:11 of the Journal of the American Medical Association and being like, I believe I shall change my diet. Like, no, it was another fucking fat diet, you guys. It's not hard. Another fat diet promising essentially the same thing. Yes. If you eat this way, if you do this thing, we will make you thin. It's not hard. Another fat diet promising essentially the same thing. Yes. If you eat this way, if you do this thing,
Starting point is 00:49:27 we will make you thin, you will be healthier by every measure, slash no measure. Yeah. Right? Like the way that these conversations about health happen around diet are super duper, duper imprecise, right? People aren't like, we started out talking about this
Starting point is 00:49:43 as like an issue of like heart disease, which is a very specific conversation and the bigger these conversations get and the further they veer into diet land, the further they veer away from like useful data, useful practices, right? Like precise information, all of that. It just becomes every idea about health and beauty and desirability and size size and every, like, they all get sort of collapsed into one another. You know, we've clearly moved on from the low fat ideology, but the meta ideology of this stuff, I don't know if we've grown that much.
Starting point is 00:50:16 Like, it's really difficult to do research on this because a lot of the books about the rise of the low fat craze are written by people who are pitching their own diet. Gary Towell to wrote the infamous What If Fat Doesn't Make You Fat article that basically launched the Atkins diet in the New York Times in 2002. He has now become this weird like, eat nothing but bacon guy. I read his book, but like you have to sort of like cut out the parts that are like, and that's why sausages are the best.
Starting point is 00:50:45 And you're like, I don't know Gary. And then there's other, I read another book, finding a tycolds, it's all about how fat is good for you and we should all be eating a super high fat diet. And there's actually some interesting data behind that, whatever. It's just, it's difficult to get historical information about this stuff from, when every single source is trying to tell you that like, no, like no no no the new thing is like
Starting point is 00:51:05 fat is good right like it's simplistic to say fat is bad but like actually fat is good and it's like that actually sounds just as simplistic to me and the fears that we are trying to a lay or the the the solutions that we're trying to find as individuals are also pretty simplistic right yeah you're afraid of dying you're afraid of not having good health you're afraid of you know whatever the things are what you're doing in that moment, you're afraid of not having good health, you're afraid of, you know, whatever the things are. What you're doing in that moment, what you're looking for Arguably when you reach for a box of snack wells or for any of these sorts of things is a way of allaying your own anxiety That may or may not have any relationship to what it actually does to your body or to your health, right?
Starting point is 00:51:42 That has infinitely more to do with your feelings about your own body and your emotional state than it does to do with anything related to the science behind these products, the nutritional value of them, right? It's much more individual, like this quest for like, this food is good and this food is bad and this diet is good and this diet is bad.
Starting point is 00:52:02 It negates how much individual variation there is. Like, I know people that are on low fat diets, and they love their low fat diet and it gives them energy and it makes them happy. And like, I'm not interested in taking that away from them. Like, if you're on a low fat diet, then like, have a blast. Like, if it's healthy for you, then it's healthy for you.
Starting point is 00:52:17 I don't see any reason to say that, like, oh, it's bad for everybody. In the same way, I don't see any reason to say, it's good for everybody. And I know people that are on like super duper low carb like the people that have managed to keep atkins for like a decade. Like I know those people and they're happy with their diets. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:34 Like if it works for you, it works for you. And you should have access to accurate information. Right. As you're making the decision of like what kind of food you want to eat, what kind of like if you want to subscribe to a model of a diet that someone else created, I think that's part of what makes this also tricky, is that folks are looking for very direct, very clear cut and very tested solutions. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:56 That for the most part don't actually exist in the universeatory thing at the end of this episode, where you read through all the literature reviews that have tested the low fat diet compared to other diets. I can read you excerpts, there's been, we always wanted to do this one, there was one in 2005, there's one in 2015, where it's like they test, like the South Beach diet and a low fat diet and atkins and whatever.
Starting point is 00:53:20 And most of these studies find no real difference. You look at the actual data on each one of the diets, and like every diet study finds the same thing. Some people gain weight on the diet, some people have nothing, and some people lose weight on the diet. Yeah. There's no real evidence that like a low fat diet in general, like on a population level does anything.
Starting point is 00:53:40 Yeah. And let me end with like this extremely long, but extremely good quote from Ann LeBurg, who's a professor who's written about the history of the low fat diet craze. She says, low fat recommendations competed with the reality of grocery stores and restaurants filled with fattening foods of all sorts and decreasing cost and increasing availability of food of all sorts. Food became widely available 24-7. Americans ate more processed food. The changing social structure, for example, the two-worker family or the single-parent family meant the family's eight-out more often. Low fat made living and
Starting point is 00:54:12 eating difficult, requiring both healthcare practitioners and patients to be counter-culture. For some Americans, eating low fat meant denying local or ethnic heritages. Following a low fat diet was also expensive, inconvenient, and in fact elitist. One had to avoid most restaurants and most foods sold in grocery stores. The result was two cultures, fat and low fat. This is the problem with every single fat diet, is that it competes with the reality of people's fucking lives.
Starting point is 00:54:37 I had this old yoga teacher who would say that everyone should be upside down for like one hour a day, like doing a headstand or a handstand. I think about it all the time because like, she might have been right, but also like, I can't fucking do that. I can't do that in the office. I can't do that at home. It's not gonna happen.
Starting point is 00:54:55 So it's kind of irrelevant whether she's right or not because it's not gonna work for anybody. We clearly need to come up with something that will actually work for everybody. And the fact that this doesn't work, that you're hungry and like pissed off and like binging, and tired, and emotional all the time, that actually is like pretty relevant. Don't whether or not we should recommend this to people. That's not some like footnote. So much of the sort of like dietary information that gets tossed out is sort of like assuming that humans are some kind of like processing plant.
Starting point is 00:55:26 Yeah. And they put something in at the beginning. And the same product comes out every time rather than like, no, there are workers who work in the plant and sometimes they get sick and sometimes the machinery malfunctions. And also it's a person. It's not a fucking processing plan. And so yeah, if you like your low fat diet, you can keep it. If you like snack well fat diet, you can keep it. If you like snack-well cookies, eat them. If you don't like them, don't eat them.
Starting point is 00:55:50 Just like eat what's right for you. Yeah, eat the things that you like. If you eat a whole box of snack-wells cookies, you're not a terrible person. Right, totally. Don't shit on other people's diets, especially don't give unwarranted diet advice. Did people you do not know that well?
Starting point is 00:56:02 Because their bodies are different from yours. 100%. And if you see a snack-wells delivery truck, follow it to the store. Did diet advice, did people you do not know that well because their bodies are different from yours? 100% and And if you see a snack well is delivery truck follow it to the store. Yeah, it might be your only chance It's the last one in America [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC

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