Maintenance Phase - The Great Protein Fiasco

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

How Nestlé executives, global health institutions and a very racist white lady seeded a series of nutritional misconceptions we're still living with today. Special thanks to John Nott for helping us out with this episode! Here's his papers on the history of protein and the British Empire.“No one may starve in the British Empire”: Kwashiorkor, Protein and the Politics of Nutrition Between Britain and Africa“How Little Progress”? A Political Economy of Postcolonial NutritionSupport us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Cicely Williams’ dissertationDariush Mozaffarian's "History of Modern Nutrition Science"The Incidence Of Protein-Calorie Malnutrition Of Early ChildhoodAn Error of Medicine? Kwashiorkor and the “Protein Gap”Childhood Malnutrition In Developing Nations: Looking Back and Looking ForwardThe Politics of ProteinThe Impact of Colonialism on Health and Health Services in TanzaniaBreast-Milk and the World Protein GapThe Influence of Colonialism on Africa’s Welfare: An Anthropometric StudyFood, Colonialism and the Quantum of HappinessRevisited: Is Subclinical Protein Deficiency A Significant Public Health Concern?Listening to the Ga: Cicely Williams’ Discovery of Kwashiorkor on the Gold Coast“Milking the Third World: Humanitarianism, Capitalism and the Moral Economy of the Nestlé Boycott”The Controversy Over Infant FormulaWar on Want’s “The Baby Killer “75 years of Kwashiorkor In AfricaThe Rise and Fall of Protein Malnutrition in Global HealthSupport the show

I'm gonna do it. Good, it's your tagline time, ladies. Oh shit, this is absolutely the first time it's occurring. I need to do a tagline. This is your first time doing the show. Okay, welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is all about gains, bro. No, does that right?

You truly have no idea, I'm so excited. I have no idea, I just know that we're talking about Pro team. There's like a weird pocket of YouTube that I found a few years ago when I was researching for the book that was like a bunch of like Jim Bro dudes focused on like building muscle mass and whatever who are also super into fat lady. Oh, and I was like, this is a really fascinating little pocket of the internet. And that's how you met your husband.

I'm straight now and I'm married surprise. I am Michael Hoffs. I'm not recording. If you would like to support the podcast, you can do that on Patreon. Fun bonus for Patreon supporters. This month, we watched Shallow Howl. It was not fun, but it was bonus. Yes. It was not fun for us, but hopefully it will be for you.

Yes. So you can get that episode on Patreon at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. You can also get shirts and tote bags and mugs and masks and all kinds of things at T public. Both of those links are linked for you in the show notes and are at maintenance phase.com. And today we're talking about protein. Yes. This is a Michael Hobbs joint. This is a lot of my weird obsessions

and my previous career. And this also, I've been keeping you in the dark because this is a story that goes back quite a ways. And I know that you love our deep hardcore history episodes. It begins in Mesopotamia. Kind of. So we're basically going to talk about the rise and fall of protein as a tool for international development.

What? Yes. Okay. So we are going to set the scene a little bit. The first thing that we need to know to understand this story is that nutrition science is surprisingly young. The first vitamin wasn't like chemically isolated

and understood until 1926. They only discovered fiber in the 1960s. Like we are new to all of this stuff. Yeah, it's like learning about old methods of contraception where you're like, oh, it was like dung and honey. Just like really wild shit. Yeah. So alongside the discovery that there

were these weird invisible nutrients in food, was this huge era of optimism around we finally understand all of these previously mysterious diseases. So when you think of something like scurvy, sailors, and a bunch of indigenous societies as well actually had known that like lemon slices or other sort of citrus-ish foods would prevent you from getting scurvy, but they didn't understand why. Sure. So all of a sudden in the 1920s and the 1930s, they start to actually understand what's going on, and all of a sudden, they start saying like, well, we can eradicate

all diseases like this. Which makes sense if you're talking about it through the lens of something like scurvy, which is so is a straight line from diet to disease, right? It does not work so well in the ways that we are sort of applying it now, which is like cancer. People are like, you just eat the right foods. And you write where you're like, no, that's real, that's real grifty. It feels like they found a pocket of disease where that has like really meaningful impacts

and then sort of extrapolated it maybe too much. Yes, exactly. I think that every major new technology ends up sparking a 20 to 30 year period of unearned optimism. And then like things get much more realistic afterwards. Yeah. And I feel like they were very much in this way. They were like, this is going to change everything. And then you're like, it did sort of. Yeah. Yeah.

Then a lot of things also got worse. So it's a time of great optimism. It's also a time of great colonialism because Britain has this like massive empire. A lot of it is in Africa, and a lot of it is among poor populations. And so for years, Britain had actually been really interested in nutrition. At the time, they justified this through like humanitarian reasons, like malnutrition in Africa. It's like such a humanitarian concern for us, but it was actually because they wanted more workers and that they could potentially be soldiers in case Britain needed them for the war effort. So this is from an article called Protein and the Politics of Nutrition

between Britain and Africa by a researcher named John Knot. He says, during a 1926 visit to the Gold Coast, which we now call Ghana, William Orn's Begour, then Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, explained that the capacity of labor is bound up with the question of food. There are a few parts of the world where the study of diatetics are more important than Africa.

Yeah, this is like the history of immigration and colonialism almost everywhere, is like, oh, free labor. Exactly. Imagine if these hundreds of thousand slash millions of people could produce capital and also conflict for us. Exactly, wow, great with that B. Incredible.

Everybody wins, except for the people who were talking about it, but still. Free money wins. Sure. So alongside this sort of this need for more labor, they were also just like really condescending. So he has this quote from a colonial administrator who's talking about like the diets of like the local populations in Ghana. He says, the ignorance and indifference to fruits is astonishing.

A cuckooff. Already fuck off. Sorry. It's already fuck off. I know. Already fuck off. There are oranges, bananas, pineapples, mango, and guava. Yet no gold-coast housewife would think of making a banana fritter. And they have never even heard of a pineapple souffle. Ah, yes, the healthiest versions of vegetables. A banana fritter and a pineapple souffle. Also, just so listen, a pineapple souffle would be a pain in the fucking ass. Because think about how much moisture is in pineapples

That would fuck your souffle right up. Also, they don't have servants who can like whip a souffle for like two and a half hours This to be like the perfect encapsulation of The sort of the attitudes toward colonial subjects at the time. It's like they're not even doing the stupid bullshit that we do They're not even frying their bananas. Come on. So that is a context for the early 1930s colonial situation. We are now going to meet our protagonist for this episode. Her name is Sicily Williams.

She is a white lady who's born to British parents in Jamaica in 1893. She is one of the first women to graduate from Oxford with a medical degree. In 1916, the only reason that she gets in is that all of the men are off fighting World War I. And they're like so desperate for doctors that they're like, I guess we'll take some women. This is the opening of one of the obituaries of her that I've read. It says, I had to go to Ghana to learn that sick babies thrive best on their mother's laps.

Those were the first words I heard from Sicily Williams speaking from the floor in a packed meeting in Oxford. They exemplified the open, unconventional approach that made her a packed meeting in Oxford. They exemplified the open, unconventional approach that made her a tremendous force in maternal and child health, a real pioneer of primary health care. Williams with Degonah, then the Gold Coast, in 1929, at a time when sick babies in British hospitals were separated from their mothers,

and she found African mothers generally insisted on being with their babies, and that they recovered more quickly. A cuddle is worth a lot of medicine. I love one of these open and unconventional approach or something. And it's just like, she listened to the people that she was talking to instead of just shouting at them about. I love it. But an ant of fredders and pineapple soufflays. Well, this is where we're going to come across this facility so much,

is that like, she's actually quite progressive for her time, but her time is so fucking regressive. Like the bar is like below the floor. You have to get to the bar. It's like she spoke to people. Can you imagine? What a humanitarian. And she learned the most radical thing

which is that mothers should spend time with their children. So she goes to Ghana in 1929, she gets a job as this is the actual job title, woman medical officer, which is different from medical officer because they're paid less. That's like the only actual difference in the job. She actually is like very well known

for being like a really good administrator. So she basically like restructures the entire health service in Ghana and ends up like actually making it much more receptive to patients. She also takes the local culture seriously like she learns God which is the local language and like goes to people's homes for dinners and like gets to know them and their families. So she's someone who's actually like is showing like a basic human interest in the cultures where she is residing,

which again, is pretty progressive for the time. Right, she's like not being a dick. Yes, actively and loudly all the time and people are like, oh, look at this lady. And she knows how to do a job? Forget about it. Let's write news articles. She also is one of the only people at the time

to actually talk about poverty as one of the underlying reasons for all of these medical conditions. So in her dissertation, she says, the function of a medical department conducted by any government is to raise the standard of living rather than to provide orthodox medical attention for the individual. So she's basically saying, we can't just treat people when they come in with problems. Like we have to think about the overall context that they're living in.

Yeah, totally. She's talking about prevention and she's talking about the social determinants of health both. Exactly. Before those terms existed. Yeah, that are like just now sort of taking center stage. She also, one of the reasons she's such a giant in the field is because after she does her field working on it, she ends up moving to Malaysia. She is living there at the outbreak of World War II. Holy shit.

Eventually she makes it to Singapore and the Japanese invade and she's taken as a prisoner of war for the rest of the war. So either two or three years, depending on which account you read. And this is not like Enron Martha Stewart prisoner of war camp. Like she's put in a cell with like 24 other women. She's pulled out by the Japanese equivalent of the KGB and tortured.

Oh shit. She's like deliberately starved. So this is like John McCain prisoner of war. Yes. and tortured? Oh shit. She's like deliberately starved? So this is like John McCain, prisoner of war. Yes. The gnarly shit. Yeah. Her hair goes gray. She has numbness in her toes for the rest of her life

from the vitamin deficiency. She basically gets berry berry while she's there. And when the war finally ends, she's in a hospital on death's door, basically. So if the war had kept going for another couple of months, she probably wouldn't have made it. Good Lord. She eventually becomes the head of maternal health

for the World Health Organization. Wow. And? And? She ends up leaving that job because she hates being at a desk and she wants to be like doing field work. That is incredible and it shouldn't be.

So slight pause here as we're sort of building up the figure of Sicily Williams, I also want to be crystal clear that we are not doing a like girl boss retelling of colonialism. Like, I just want to be explicit about this. So there was a biography of Sicily Williams written in 1983, which I could not get my hands on because it's out of print and the only hardback edition of it that I could find to buy was $413.13. Yeah, no thanks. But I did read a bunch of reviews of it and I read a bunch of interviews with the author and one thing the author said was like, you know, I looked through her old

papers and I looked for sort of evidence that she had the kind of negative colonial views that were characteristic of the time. And like, I didn't find anything. She's like an uncomplicated, good person. She did this great field work. So I kind of like left my Sicily Williams primary documents for like toward the end of the research. Cause I was like, okay, I need to,

like I obviously need to read her papers, but like they're just gonna be boring stuff. Like they're gonna be really technical. So I sort of waited on them, and then I finally got her dissertation from 1938, and it's one of the most racist fucking things I've ever read. I mean, she's a white woman involved

in a aggressively colonialist project. Exactly. No matter how you slice that, even if she's the best white woman involved in an aggressively colonialist project, she she still doing what she's doing, right? So, okay, so I have a long paragraph that we should read, because I think it's really important to like stare this stuff in the face. Yeah. And I was, it's, it's long, and I was going to have you read it. But then I also was like, do I want Aubrey to say the racist shit on the podcast? Like, when they come for us, do we want Aubrey on tape?

Saying like horrible colonial shit. So if you don't wanna read it, that's also totally fine. No, I'm happy to read it. Also like, the resident white lady. It's like in character, I'm doing like a dramatic reenactment. I will happily read it and I appreciate your consideration. So this is an excerpt from her dissertation written in 1938, published in The Lancet.

Quote, compared with the white races, the African seems to lack initiative and constructive ideas. Jesus Christ might know, he is almost invariably dishonest. He wishes to attain wealth without expending too much energy. He does not consider that there is any obligation to honesty beyond the members of his own family. It's bad.

This is like, song of the South shit. I also, one of my favorite sentences in this whole thing is he wishes to obtain wealth without expending too much energy. It's like, yeah, that's humans. That is, Cecilia. That's me. That's you.

That's what happens when you do a capitalism. We all want to make money and not have to do that much work. Like, it's weird. It's weird to be like, these lazy Africans want to be rich, but don't want to work. It's like, have you met rich people? Like, what do they do? Sissley, have you seen daytime TV ads in the 90s? No, you have not, but you know where I'm going with this.

Also, are you familiar with exactly what you're doing right now? Right. Which is like part of a massive worldwide project to build wealth without having to do shit. Yes. Okay. Some of the intellectual qualities of the African that delay his progress, lack of initiative,

the survival acceptance of superstitions and customs, many of them fantastic and damaging, his propensity to pervericate and to defraud, may be ascribed in part to some diatetic imbalance and some to imbalance of upbringing. Although the mothers are fond of their children, they are quite incredibly careless with them. Like all primitive people, they are lacking in imagination. I have seen enough of the excellent qualities of the Africans, their good nature and cheerfulness, their astuteness, their uncomplaning fidelity, their patience in very great trials, to know that they are

worth educating. Fuck off. I know. The qualities most in need of education are observation, imagination, and judgment. There is much too that can be learned by those Europeans who are fortunate enough to spend much time with them. What do you think? In a lot of ways, it feels like a little prototype of the ways in which white women engage in colonialist projects

and then give them a kinder, gentler edge. I mean, this, to me, is why it's important to confront this as, like, an original text, because it's this expression of totally barbaric views in a way that's like, no, no, we must help them. It allows you to cast yourself as the hero somehow, because obviously these people are totally inferior to us, but it is worth educating them. Right, I mean, I think this is a sort of dynamic

that shows up in lots and lots of forms of oppression and marginalization, right? People do this kind of thing with poor people, right? That's like, hey, we got to be really nice to poor people because they don't know how terrible they are with food. They don't know what bad people they are. They don't know, you know what I mean? This kind of condescension is not only is it not interrupting those systems of oppression,

it's perpetuating them by giving them a softer edge and making them feel more welcoming to other people with privilege. She was a pioneer in mentioning sort of the effect of poverty, but she also includes, savage is happier if his condition is left unchanged. This is very possibly true, but no force on earth can prevent civilization from spreading its tendrils. The most that colonial government can do is to prevent exploitation by pruning the predatory tendrils and by encouraging the growth of those that seem beneficial. There is nothing that civilization has to offer, which is better than the welfare of those that seem beneficial. There is nothing that civilization has to offer, which is better than the welfare of children.

Uh-huh. This, to me, is why you should not look for heroes in history and look for people that are, like, palatable to you or, like, recognizable to you as good people. Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel that way about, like, don't look for heroes now, either. Also, don't find them now, yeah. Because also, you're not gonna find them.

Yeah. And because there will be a point at which you are disappointed or they're used to verge from your views or they haven't learned something yet and then they learn it and you read or see or hear something from them from before they learned that thing, right? The urge to sort of put folks up on a pedestal

historically or now is like not, and especially helpful ones. Yes. And also, frankly, I think it's a more interesting story when you admit all of this complexity. I feel like there's like a show within a show of maintenance phase that is like white people who think they're helping. Yeah, it's like a little strain of episodes that we have. And this really seems like maybe one of the best examples we've got of that.

So, do you wanna hear about what she discovers in Ghana? I don't, but I do. So, she spends seven years in Ghana doing field work. She says over that time, she sees roughly 100,000 patients. And what she notices is that there's sort of, there's this spike in mortality, like a lot of sort of very newborn babies die for various reasons. And then there's this other spike in mortality around sort of two to four years old. So she notices that a lot of kids are dying

right after their younger sibling is born. For a lot of these kids, before they die, they start to exhibit these weird symptoms. You've seen these images on posters, right? Of like a young child with like their ribs sticking out and like the big belly. Yeah, those sort of distended malnourished. Yes. Yeah, physical appearance of those things, yes.

The other symptoms that they have, a lot of them have swelling of the feet, edema. There's some sort of discoloration of the skin. A lot of them getoration of the skin. A lot of them get like reddish hair. Huh. And it's something different than malnourishment. Because she notices that the kids,

you know, she asks them about their eating, she talks to the parents, and they're getting enough food at home. And yet, they're still suffering from what appears to be a disease of malnutrition. So this is sort of like the fundamental mystery that she's trying to solve. She notices that most of these kids,

they start to get these symptoms when they stop breastfeeding and their parents switch them to sort of like this porridge that's made out of maize or cassava. She starts asking around the local women tell them that they call it quashe Orcor, which is the ga word for, it's like the disease of the deposed child, which is I think a bad translation. A better one is the sickness the older child gets

when the next baby is born. Oh, interesting. It's kind of a known enough issue that it has a local term. So she publishes this in 1933 in the archives of disease in childhood, which is a journal that's widely read and written, and she basically proposes that like this is a new thing, and very faithfully she mentions in the paper that because Kassava and Mays are relatively low in protein as

far as sort of like starchy staples go. She's like, this might be a deficiency of protein. And because she's like a woman in STEM at the time, there's all of this debate over her paper. So immediately people published these counter articles saying that actually what she's seeing is Pallagra, which is a vitamin B deficiency. And then she writes a paper in response where she's like, um, the maze that they're feeding these kids is

fermented. And when you ferment something, it has more vitamin B. So like, I know what Pallagra is. This isn't Pallagra. Yeah. Another guy. He's actually praising her. Like, he says this as a compliment. He says, Williams being a lady and a very gracious lady at that, she arrived by instinct at the correct answer. And it's like, or I saw like a hundred thousand patients. You prick. Well, I hate it.

It's so weird because it's like the extreme massage and either this lady comes up against is really a cherry on the Sunday and the Sunday is like staggering levels of global racism and colonialism. Well, that's a thing. You're reading this and you're like, Sicily, do you know anyone else who might feel irritated at people constantly condescending to them? Sicily, does anyone come to mind? Anyone at all. Sissly. Okay, Sissly. So, okay, this is the fateful paragraph. In her article, she talks about like the various forms of treatment that she's tried for the squashy orcorer thing. This is from John Nott's article.

He says, as for treatment, Williams tried varied diets without success. Combinations with butter, eggs, tomato, orange liver, marmite, yeast, B-max, iron, and arsenic all failed to reverse the symptoms. Oh, arsenic didn't do the trick? I know, weirdly. Weirdly.

Heavy metals, not the key. Interesting. The only food that seemed to work and then in only a few cases was tinned milk. Less lace, sweetened condensed milk with cod liver oil and malt seemed to be the most successful line of treatment. Man, I'll tell you what, they lost me with the cod liver oil, but then they got me back

with the malt. I would drink some malt and milk, that sounds good. She was so impressed with this Nestle milk product that she actually made a chart showing kids like recovery times and she wanted to put it up in doctor's offices. Oh, neat good. The only reason the colonial administrator wouldn't do it is because Nestle isn't a British company. They're like, yeah, yeah, seems like you're saving kids life. It's like a British way of saving kids life.

Sorry, we don't make any money off of this one. Cut it. cut it out. So basically Sicily's article and the sort of the follow-up and the debate begins this entire wave of putting protein at the center of developing world malnutrition. Like this is the main message that people take from her work is like we have to get protein

to poor people. So there's a couple other things happening at the time. After World War II, there's a lot more awareness of starvation and there's these millions of refugees moving across borders. And there's a lot more interest in what are the minimum requirements that will keep people alive nutritionally? This is actually how we get recommended daily

allowances of various nutrients. Really? Yeah, this is the period right after World War II, when there's just a lot more interest in like, okay, how many milligrams of vitamin B do people actually need? Yep, this is also a time when we're setting up a lot of institutions. So this is when we get the World Health Organization,

this is when we get the UN, this is when we get the Food and Agriculture Organization. So there's all of this sort of international action and solving malnutrition is one of the first things that these organizations set out to do. Parallel to that, we're getting all these institutions set up. This is also when we get the Bretton Woods institutions, right? This is when we get the IMF, this is when we get the World Bank. So we've got sort of on the one hand this sort of global health infrastructure that is paralleled by a global wealth infrastructure

that is designed to consolidate wealth within nations and nation states that are like already wealthy, right? We need to feed the poor, but we also need to make sure that their countries owe us a lot of money. Great. Yeah. We talk a lot on the show of a lot of scientific findings are really just people not realizing

that they're confirming their pre-existing beliefs. So around this time, as there's more panic building about protein deficiencies in the developing world. People are coming into this with a lot of preconceived notions about protein. So at the time, like the sort of upper classes of throughout Europe, but especially in Britain, we're like eating a lot of meat.

They're sort of like, well, obviously a high protein diet is the best for you. And like protein builds muscle, like a lot of the preconceptions that we have about protein now, this is really like when they were forming was from basically a bunch of rich people who were already eating a lot of meat and they had like convinced themselves that like that was the best way to eat. This is totally moon juice and a funny way all over again which is just like, well I eat like this, it must be the best way to eat. Exactly.

And where you're like, well, hang on a second. There's also a couple of, again, themes in our show, rat studies that come out in the 1920s. I guess these people are able to reproduce a version of Quashiorcourt in rats by giving them like enough calories, but like super low protein calories, the rats come down with the same sorts of symptoms.

So, in 1949, the UN assigns two dudes, of course, to do a bunch of field work in Africa, finding out what is the deal with this Quasher Yorkor thing. Are those dudes white dudes? I mean, obviously, Aubrey. Yeah, okay, just check it. Just make the implicit explicit over here. So they spend two years doing this survey.

Their paper is published in 1952. In the conclusion, it says, Whoa! Bold claims! is the most serious and widespread nutritional disorder known to medical and nutrition science. Whoa! Bold claims! So I am going to send you an excerpt from this paper. Do I get to read more racist shit? I mean, so it's about that. This is like almost 30 years later and it's still less racist than Sicily. Okay.

It's still pretty bad. It's still pretty bad. While much Quascioar core is due to poverty, much is also due to ignorance. With the best intentions, African mothers commit many grave faults in the feeding of their children. But though young mothers naturally tend to follow traditional routines, they are not unready to learn. It's not a great quote.

It's real rough that you're like, oh, much of it's due to poverty, but, oh, wait, what is this? Ignorance, also ignorance. It's not rough that you're like, oh, much of it's due to poverty, but oh, wait, what is this? Ignorance, also ignorance. It's not just that you're poor, it's also that you don't know anything. This is a very important component of this panic. Is it like, we can educate them out of this.

Like, this becomes the guiding fix for this problem. It's one of those moments where you can see actively the exact dynamic of like racism making conditions materially worse for black and brown people and also making white people feel better about ourselves where we're like, ooh, we know. And we're talking about like dozens of people in rooms, like not aware that this is the dynamic at all.

Gah. This is the other recommendation that they make from the report. Here in the Senate, you know, the quote. The header here says immediate action, quote, in most hospitals, outpatient departments, medical centers, etc., Schimm milk powder is not at present available to the medical staff for purposes of treatment. Although the provision of Schimm milk is the most valuable form of treatment at present known for established cases of quashiorcor.

So that's the other fix. We need to educate people and we need to give them these products that will cure this protein deficiency. So you mentioned a fetish for protein and it feels to me like just in the last whatever 30 years of my conscious memory and engagement with diets and that kind of thing, of the three macronutrients, fat, carbohydrates, and protein. Protein is the one that hasn't been blamed for people getting fat. I know, right? It seems like this sort of safe zone

where people would be like, I just need to eat more protein. I'll just, protein's only good for you. It'll only build muscle, it'll only do all these things. And I'm like, man, this is what happens right before something gets canceled. For my canceled protein, aren't we? So basically, this report comes out in 1952, and this is like proof, right? Like we have it.

Protein malnutrition is the issue throughout the developing world. And for the next 20 years, there's just an explosion of interest in this problem. So I'm not going to go over it because it's really boring, but there's like conferences and symposiums, and there's just more and more institutional momentum around this understanding of the problem. This is actually one of the reasons why UNICEF won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. It wasn't the boxes of pennies. It wasn't the cardboard boxes of pocket chains that we gathered trick-or-treating as kids. That didn't do it.

There's also an explosion in research and funding. So there's something called the Protein Advisory Group that is set up at the UN, and that sort of directs all of this research toward solving this. There's tons of laboratory research going on trying to get higher protein versions of these staple crops. So this is an excerpt from an article called The History of Modern Nutrition Science by Deruch Motsafari and who does a lot of work related to sort of food and history. And I've interviewed him for various things over the years. He says that this is the beginning of what we've talked

about in other episodes, nutritionism. This idea that sort of what nutrition is and what food is is just the delivery of individual vitamins that deal with individual health conditions. He says, a nutritional model developed to address deficiency diseases. Identify and isolate the single relevant nutrient, assess its isolated physiological effect, and quantify its optimal intake level to prevent disease. Like this was becoming the paradigm of nutrition.

So two things, one, it feels like since then that has been not debunked, but like tempered, which is sort of like, hey man, you can take a bunch of vitamins, your body may or may not absorb them. And we've also spun it out into a whole industry that is rooted in this idea of like optimization. And this is where you get like, hew all and soy lips. It's like, we got everything you need into this one cup. All you have to do is drink this sludge, and then you'll have your nutrition, right?

It's like, thank God we're finally gonna have food without all of the culture. Yeah. Oh, man. Let's get rid of all that pesky flavor and enjoyment. How do I pleasure in this? Yeah. One thing that bugged me actually about Mott's Safari and's article is he sort of ends it by saying,

you know, who knows what the future holds. We're still looking for the ideal balance of like macro and micronutrients. Right. Why would we want that? Right. We're going to find out that whatever 17% protein and like 22% starch is ideal. Like, how would anyone even fucking do that? We're gonna find out that whatever 17% protein and like 22% starch is ideal. Like, how would anyone even fucking do that?

There's still this strange obsession with quantification even in a field where like people should absolutely know better. I don't know, I just think it's really weird. Yeah, it's an obsession with quantification that then gets turned into mandates for individual behavior, which then get turned into the opportunity to sell stuff to people, which is like, we got your thing that's 22% protein and 17% blah blah blah, and you know what I mean, like the whole bit. I feel very cynical about

that cycle at this point. Yeah. And also, one of the things I came across researching this is that, you know, human requirements for protein are actually a bell curve. Oh, interesting. So it's kind of silly to say that you need X number of grams of protein because you might need more than me and I might need more than somebody else. And there aren't great ways to measure that right now. It's usually just like how does it make you feel?

Which is generally a pretty good measure anyway. And so even if we do come up with some sort of quote unquote ideal mix, it's not gonna be ideal for everyone, it's gonna be an average ideal. So we're all gonna have to eat the food that makes us feel good anyway. So like we should all just do that. Yeah, unless and until we know a shit ton more

than we do right now. Yeah. Just see what you want, eat with, you know, use your best instincts, all that kind of stuff, right? Yes. So there's this massive explosion in research. Most of the work that's actually being done at this time is like weird franken foods. This is from John Nott's article about the history of this entire thing. He says, in this environment, and in the shadow of the impending protein crisis, international agencies

in Western governments concentrated on the high-tech production of protein foods. British petroleum, for instance, created single-cell proteins grown on oil. What? I know. Others created leaf protein concentrate, grain jelly-like substances that were produced by putting inedible leaves through a centrifuge. Fish protein concentrate, oful leftover from fileting, or the whole of a junk fish proved fairly popular. Chlorilla, a single cell form of algae that was grown on sewage, was less so. Nonetheless, as food grown entirely on waste, it did represent the crowning achievement of modernist nutrition and is still available

marketed as a health food. They're really working over time to make that sound as gross as is humanely possible. We grew it on oil. We grew it on garbage. The minute he said that, I heard like an audible click in my head, where I'm like, Gwyneth is going to be hacking like the poop protein in like a week.

You're like, you know, it's grown on poop. It has to be good for you. Hmm. So the first way that the world is solving this problem is with like the Franken poop foods. The second way is by spreading baby formula around the world. So this is a long history that had kind of been running for a while. So as part of this whole nutritionism wave in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the understandings,

especially among the British upper classes, was this idea that breast milk isn't optimized. And the store bought baby formula is actually better for kids than breast milk. Whoa! In their defense, the colonialists were telling everybody not to breastfeed, not just poor women. I will say I have a number of friends who have given birth in the last five years. And the uniform experience that all of them have had has been going to see lactation counselors and feeling massively ashamed and massively shamed about not being able to like produce breast milk in the right way at the right times, in the right volumes, all that kind of stuff, that the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction now,

that it feels kind of wild to think about. Anyway, there was a time when no one was supposed to be breastfeeding because it is such an emphasis now. And I was so aware doing the research on this, that there's such a culture of morality around, especially mothering in a way that they're conspicuously isn't with fathering, but also super duper around breastfeeding.

And there's actually a huge, you're wrong about story of this entire field that we're gonna get to, but there's plenty of people who can't breastfeed for whatever reason. And like, their kids are fine. Like, I think like, there's lots of science saying that like, at the aggregate level, breastfeeding is good for kids. And the kids have advantages. Like, there's weird enzymes and breast milk that help with immunity and all kinds of other things that we don't know how to synthesize. But also, people seem to have taken that science as like if your kid breast feeds,

he's gonna go to Harvard and if he doesn't breast feed, he's gonna die. And it's like these are very overlapping circles. Right, this is the thing that is like a particular B in my bonnet lately. This sort of like use of research that seems to indicate a population level trend gets turned into. Research definitely found this rule for people.

And then that turns into an individual mandate for personal behavior in your life. All of that kind of stuff, just like feeds into this bizzaro machine that just produces anxious people. This was one of my revelations reading this article too, that I had always seen the shift away from breastfeeding that happened in poor countries, it happened in rich countries, kind of over 50 years, people were breastfeeding much less than they had been before. And I had blamed the marketing of the corporations. Like this has always been sold to me as a corporate greed story where companies like Nestle had marketed these products to women basically by lying to them. And that is true,

but it is not the full story. So a lot of women around this time, and the reason why this happened so quickly around 1900, was industrialization. A lot of women had to work, and you can't breastfeed when you're at work, and if you're working long hours, oftentimes you leave your kid with like your sister or your mom, who oftentimes can't breastfeed. So it's also really frustrating that there's this like moralizing around breastfeeding at a time when like the world was making it harder for women to breastfeed.

It's like a double capitalism. Yes, exactly. It was capitalism all along in that companies like Nestle were doing this sort of like predatory shitty advertising. And. It was capitalism all along in that. Companies like Nestle were doing this sort of like predatory shitty advertising. And also it was capitalism all along in that. People had to fucking be at work. Yeah. And what are you going to do? I found a really interesting 1981 New York Times article about this entire controversy and it has this paragraph with two sentences that perfectly encapsulate the dichotomy of the different explanations. It says, infant formula is popular with some low income women because they see it as a

kind of status symbol, says Judith Gordon, formerly a researcher at the city's Bureau of Maternity Services. But doctors believe that a more significant contributing factor is the need for many of these women to return to work soon after giving birth, which makes formula the simplest feeding method. Yeah, I wonder which one of those really carried the day? Was it the idea of a status symbol

or was it I have to be at fucking work and I have a baby that needs to eat? Right. There is some classism baked into that narrative as well. Yeah. Which is just like, we're smart and we would never fall for that. That's why we drink moon juice. Like okay.

Yeah. The reason women buy sex dust is because they think it's a high status item. So I think it's important to stress that the existence of formula is not the problem. The issue is when this happens in poor countries where women cannot afford enough formula. One of the things they mention in Ghana is that baby formula tends to cost roughly half a day's labor for like the average worker.

Good God. In Seattle, the minimum wage is $15 an hour. so that would be 60 bucks for one bottle of baby formula, which lasts one day. Jesus Christ. So like, in that context, what do people do? They buy one can of baby formula and they stretch it out. So like, there's a study in Indonesia that finds that only a quarter of people are diluting

the baby formula with water, which you have to do anyway. Only a quarter of people are diluting it at like the recommended amounts. Everybody else is stretching one day of formula to like two, three, four, five days. There's also this sort of the ethical question of selling a product where it's basically impossible to administer it safely. So one of the things that says on all of the packaging for the baby formula is like after you open it,

after you put it in the bottle, refrigerated after that. Well, a lot of people in West Africa don't have refrigerators. So they're leaving it out, which is like a completely predictable outcome, and then they're getting bacteria on it, and then they give it to their kids, and their kids get infections. The fundamental problem isn't even just refrigeration.

It's just like, people need to make more money or this thing needs to cost less. That's the central tension here. Exactly. Just in case anybody thinks that I'm letting Nestle off the hook, there's a congressional hearing in 1978 where they interrogate the, I believe, CEO of Nestlé, who is like a fucking weasel personified.

The only reason we are watching this clip is just because the dude is like so gross. You know, I love to judge a CEO, this sounds great. Exactly. Just like, I don't mean like his physical appearance, I just mean like his entire demeanor is just like slime. All right, I'm all queued up and ready to hit play when you are. BEEP.

Would you agree with me that your product should not be used where there is impure water? Yes or no? We give all these structures just answer. What would you, what would you, what would you, say? I was not, but we cannot talk with that. Well, as I understand what you say is where there's impure water it should not be used. Yes.

Where the people are so poor that they're not going to realistically be able to continue to purchase that, and which is going to mean that they're going to dilute it to a point, which is going to endanger the health that it should not be used. Yes. Right now then my final question is, what do you do or what do you feel is your corporate responsibility to find out the extent of the use of your product in those circumstances in the developing part of the world? Do you feel that you have any responsibility?

We can't have that responsibility. May I make have any responsibility? We can't have that responsibility. So may I make a reference to, you can't have that responsibility? No. No, no. What do you think? Two things before we get into the actual content of this. One, Ted Kennedy is a young buck of,

I don't know. I know. I think so. I guess? Two, this clip is made so clearly in 1978, not because of anything but the glasses frames. Although you can barely make them out past all the sideburns. He's hard to see the glasses behind the bushes.

Yeah. Yeah, no. He seems this guy, the Nestle CEO. What's his name, do we know? I have no idea. Oh, that doesn't make sense. I don't care. This guy, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't care either.

Fuck that guy. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. He just seems so equivocating, so like, well, just let me get a word in, let me do, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, you know, like that sort of like,

trying to sort of brush everything off, like, we can't do that, we can't do this. Yeah. Just give an answer. Just give an answer. And like, this is their entire strategy for this whole thing is just like, well, we, baby formulas, good. Like, we had no idea that people wouldn't have refrigerators.

Like, it's just, it's the typical sort of like, how could we, a giant multinational corporation, possibly understand the market that we're operating in? It's a strategy that seems likely or two have been advised by risk-averse attorneys that it has to be advised by like optics-aware communications people. I know. And also they were like blanketing these products across Africa. So there's a study in 1960 that showed one in eight radio advertisements in Kenya was for Nestle Lactogen, which is their baby formula. And in Brazil, it's the third most advertised product after cigarettes and soap.

It's not great. Wow. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha they had what were called milk nurses, who were women who were dressed like nurses, who would hang out in hospitals and give mother's free samples of baby formula. Whoa! So it's like, you gotta hook them on this, like you give them a sample, and they'll stay with our brand. And oftentimes telling them that formula is healthier

than breast milk. It reminds me of the Fen Fen episode when they put a bunch of their like pharmaceutical sales reps in lab coats. Yeah, exactly. The power of like a white uniform. Yes, totally. Like I'm gonna make myself look like I'm part

of a power structure. It's like a medical stolen valor or something. Yeah, yeah. Like this is so aggressively shitty to be like, I'm gonna cause play as a healthcare provider and then actually just be selling you shit. And then be like, I never said I was a healthcare provider. Yeah, I was just in a nurse's uniform in a hospital.

Hey man, that's on you. If you drew that conclusion, that's on you. Okay. This is from the infamous report that comes out about this later in the 1970s that's like the big expose that kind of makes this an international issue. It says, in many third world hospitals, the staff routinely separates the mother and baby at birth and feeds formula to the baby during its entire stay in the pediatric's ward. On discharge, the mother receives a free tin of formula and a feeding bottle.

By the time the mother has finished her free tin of formula, she may be a confirmed bottle feeder and her baby, accustomed to the easy sucking on an artificial nipple, may rebel at the more demanding task of drawing milk from a breast. Or, if it's Dr. Carl Taylor, chairman of the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins, the mother's milk can dry up and then the baby is hoped on formula. So like, part of this is women who can't breastfeed, but there's also, they're preventing women from being able to breastfeed. Like, come on. Totally indefensible. Yeah, and again, this is one of those things where it's like, maybe they didn't mean to, maybe they did mean to, and ultimately that doesn't matter. Yes, you did the thing. You did the thing and you made this a whole lot harder for a whole lot of people who

are in an extremely vulnerable period of their lives, which is right after giving birth to a tiny person. The other thing that I think has been underplayed in this entire Nest Lae versus Africa story is the fact that there are women who could not breastfeed throughout human history. And there are other fixes for this. Baby formula is just cow's milk with a lot of the fat removed and then they put in some sugar and some vitamins. But it's not actually super technologically advanced

as a substance, like you can make versions of it relatively easily. So this is an excerpt from the New York Times article from 1981. In 1971, a team of international health workers began distributing supplies of powdered milk and corn, soy milk, mixtures to mothers of undernourished children in Nepal. But because many mothers prepared it under unsanitary conditions, the food caused diarrhea. Medical workers then discovered that even the poorest homes had an ample supply of grains. The nutritionists concocted a flower from local corn, wheat, and soybean supplies, and then taught Nepalese women how to prepare it.

Malnourished children were usually well on the way to recovery within five weeks of starting on the mixture. Well, so at the same time that all of these institutions are pouring millions of dollars into like poop-grown proteins. A lot of indigenous cultures had ways of dealing with this problem and like those projects were not getting funded. Seems like our white lady public health official

was listening, but not listening hard enough. But not listening hard enough. Part of what sort of feeds into this is this concept from folks in the West That there couldn't possibly be any knowledge amongst any indigenous culture They need me to find the solution because they can't possibly know a friend of mine has a metaphor that I use a lot of that He's I went wonder bread that sort of to make wonder bread you do all of this processing to remove the fiber from the wheat, you bleach it, you take out all of these vitamins,

like you take away everything sort of makes it food. And then once you make it, then you like re-fortify it with all the stuff you took out. Yeah, you enrich it. Yeah. And I feel like it's a little bit the process of colonialism. It's like you're sort of trying to wipe the slate clean and sort of like take away,

discard all of these indigenous customs. Like you should probably breastfeed if you're able to do that, right? You're like sweeping all of that away. And then you're like, no, no, no, no, we're gonna give you something that's like better than breastfeeding, right? Like we're gonna optimize all of this.

Like you're putting back in all of this knowledge, but in this way that is like completely inefficient and like a lot of the knowledge that you're putting back in all of this knowledge, but in this way that is like completely inefficient and like a lot of the knowledge that you're putting back in is garbage. And I also think, I don't want to say that Sicily Williams and the sort of the protein deficiency is like the only reason for this because there's a lot of other historical trends happening at the same time. But this idea of baby formula instead of breastfeeding is intimately wrapped up with this protein deficiency. Because the entire idea is that people are getting enough calories, but they're not getting enough protein.

Like that is essential to the reason why these formulas are being pushed on mothers, because otherwise they would just be eating the local food. This entire understanding of protein is like, well, if you eat the local food, your kid is going to get quashier core. So it's really important that you buy this Nestle stuff instead of the food that you already have access to and like doesn't cost 60 bucks. Uh-huh.

So the sort of, okay, this is where we're getting into like the slightly better news part of the episode. Oh, okay. There's a huge backlash to this that starts forming and do you want to guess who began the backlash to bottle feeding? Oh, who began the backlash to bottle feeding? Sicily Williams.

What? So she gets kicked out of Ghana after seven years because she has a big fight with her boss because Sicily is trying to admit an infant to the hospital with a form of tuberculosis that's in your tummy, and so it's not contagious. And her boss is like, we don't allow patients

with tuberculosis because it's so contagious. And Sicily's like, right, but this kid isn't contagious, we should admit him. And they get into like a huge fight over this, Sicily either leaves or she's fired or whatever, but she like storms out of Ghana in a huff. She ends up going to Malaysia. And in Malaysia, she kind of looks around

and she's seeing all of these infant problems, like infections, bacteria, like kids having all kinds of malnutrition problems. And she notices that it's mostly in mothers who are using bottle feeding. She starts asking around and she finds out that a lot of these women have been visited by these nurse people who were selling them sweetened condensed milk to use as baby formula. Oh, whoa.

And telling them that it's better than breastfeeding. Oh, whoa. And so Sicily, again, not trying to do some girlboss shit, but like, she is incensed by this. Like, even, even Sicily can be like, that's fucked up. Yeah, totally. You should not be telling these moms this. I would say being a healthcare provider for a child and not wanting that child to die is not a moral triumph.

That is a moral baseline. Yeah, baby's dying, bad. Yeah. So in 1939, she gives a speech in Singapore where she says, if your lives were as embittered as mine by seeing day after day this massacre of the innocence by unsuitable feeding, then I believe you would feel as I do

that misguided propaganda on infant feeding should be punished as the most criminal form of sedition and that those deaths should be regarded as murder. Whoa! And the talk is called milk and murder. Holy shit! Bold choices.

She's like, fuck Nestle. Fuck the Texas. Like, don't give this shit the kids. And again, like, nobody was saying this at the time. This was still like this like scientific paradigm. And like people weren't even really questioning that like formula is better than breast milk yet. Yeah.

And so this backlash gets taken up. You will not believe this by conservative Christians. What? So in the 1960s and the 1970s, there's these massive campaigns against Nestlates. It's one of the longest consumer boycotts in history, and it's led by people who want to have conservative families and they want to bring back breastfeeding. Whoa.

Isn't that weird? Because we are so used to the Christian movement being totally aligned with the political right. But this was not the case then. the Christian movement being totally aligned with the political right, but this was not the case then. The only actions against corporations that I've only seen Christians do in my lifetime is like when Disney has a gay pride parade or something. But taking action on behalf of African kids

against a giant corporation way to go Christians. Totally also kind of make sense in terms of sort of like the history of missionary work amongst like white Western Christians. Yeah. Once you find out that this is the position that they took, you can sort of get there in your brain to like, oh right, here's how they would have gotten there.

But it is so different than our current like faith-based anti-breast feeding, like don't breastfeed in public, don't breastfeed at work. Let's just fascinating. What a strange turn. So Sicily is pushing back against bottle feeding. There's kind of this movement against Nestlé and the other companies that are selling these products in the developing world.

Meanwhile, nobody is questioning this protein stuff. Everything is just moving under its own momentum around like protein deficiency as the most important issue in global hunger. But then, it's actually kind of amazing to me how quickly this all comes crashing down. So in 1974, a guy named Donald McLaren, who's also a field worker, he's doing work

around Beirut in Lebanon. He publishes an article called The Great Protein Fiasco. And he basically tears down this entire field, like he just sets the whole thing on fire. And it's like one of the best debunking articles I've ever read, because the whole thing just has this air of bafflement of like hang on. What is the evidence that protein deficiency is a problem? He goes over all of the available evidence. He's like, okay, Sicily Williams, 1933. She didn't even

say that it was protein deficiency. All she said was that kids have these symptoms and they get better when we give them this Nestlé milk. Literally, the wording from her article is, we cannot rule out protein deficiency as an explanation. He also says, there's all these studies from all over the world that like people with Quashiorcourt don't get better when you give them higher protein diets. There's like a really comprehensive study in India where they find like there's certain populations there with like very low protein diets and certain populations with like normal protein diets. They have exactly the same incidence

of Quashiorcourt. Whoa. So, this research is like, they didn't even pour the foundation, but they started building the house anyway. This is the thing. And then what's amazing is I went back, and I read the 1952 paper, that was like the final nail in the coffin, like it's protein,

and like it doesn't even say that in the paper. Like, in the actual text of their article, they don't actually really find a pattern. And they're just like, yeah, it's in some places and it's not, but then in the paper, like in the actual text of their article, they don't actually really find a pattern. And they're just like, yeah, it's in some places and it's not, but then in the conclusion, it's like, this is the biggest issue facing world nutrition. You're like, what? This was the thing that came up a bunch

in the obesity epidemic stuff too, that like the data around rising body weights is way more complicated and goes up in some demographics and goes down in others and like not saying it's not a thing, but there's way more complexity to it than that. And I'm so fascinated by these sort of moments and it seems like they're coming up more and more on the topics that we talk about here,

where even the researchers themselves are developing these sort of narratives that may or may not actually fit the data that's in front of them. I think a huge part of it is just bias, like confirmation bias and other forms of bias. Sure. Because this, I mean, not only are they finding it in some places and not others in Africa, but they're also applying this to the entire world. They're saying like, this is a global problem. Yeah.

It's like, well, all you've surveyed is Africa and you didn't even find it that much in Africa. Mm-hmm. The other major thing that, again, they had found in 1952, but like didn't do anything with, was that what Sicily Williams described in 1933 was extremely specific. These people are eating enough,

but they are still showing signs of a malnutrition disorder. What the investigators find in 1952 is that people are not eating enough. So in the paper, they say, the diets of Africans, and especially African children, are never deficient in only one nutrient.

In addition to the very marked efficiency in animal protein, there's a deficiency in vegetable proteins, in minerals, in vitamins. So it's like people need food. That's the thing. It's like they don't have enough food. So like, you can't talk about a deficiency of protein if people are not eating enough of anything. Jesus Christ. And again, this is in the paper in 1952 and all Donald McLaren in his like super big old fiasco debunking is like, excuse me, like this is all right in front of us. I'm not sure why we're all talking about protein all the time.

Right, unless we're also saying it's protein and calories and fat and carbohydrates and B vitamins and- Yes. If you're gonna start listing things, just list everything or just be clear. Like, hey man, it turns out the problem here is hunger and food access. So like, this article causes a firestorm.

Within one year, there's an article called the protein gap in nature, like super prestigious. It says, the concept of a worldwide protein gap is no longer tenable. The problem is mainly one of quantity rather than quality. And like, that's it. So within two more years, the protein advisory group doesn't exist anymore. Whoa!

Apparently there's some big food summit, something, something, and they're just not invited. I guess there's like, uh, I think we don't exist anymore, you guys. Like, it's gone. Snubs and flubs, the protein advisory group. My God. The last nail in the coffin in this is in 1975, Sicily Williams writes a paper where she's like, this is on you. I never said it was protein, punk, like all I did

was describe my medical interactions with some patients. You did all of this, like don't put this on me. She says nutritional disorders cannot simply be met by supplying the missing food stuff. For although primary nutrition is due to a deficiency in the food, we must always find out why this deficiency exists. And like, I interviewed John Knot,

the guy that wrote these two really good papers about the impact of colonialism on this whole protein panic rise and fall. And he said that like going back through all of the literature on this, it's actually really striking how much the sort of field work, people on the ground, people who know these populations

and who see see patients clinically, were actually getting it right the entire time. Oh, interesting. Like Sicily Williams was actually right. The area of Southern Ghana where she was working was like actually relatively affluent at the time. And people really did have enough food. And they were showing these symptoms

of this potentially protein deficiency. It's actually, we don't totally understand what causes this condition, but like some sort of deficiency in a context of not starvation, but like that's a very specific context. Applying that to the rest of Africa is absurd, and the rest of the world is like double absurd.

So like most of the people who are doing this kind of work were actually fine. It's just when this work got translated into international institutions and into guidelines and recommendations that the break happened. It's so tricky, right? Because ostensibly at this point,

the purpose of nutrition research is to come up with guidelines and recommendations. Yeah. And also, it feels like the more that you and I get into this stuff, the more it's like, of nutrition research is to come up with guidelines and recommendations. Yeah. And also it feels like the more that you and I get into this stuff, the more it's like, anyway, the place it really fell apart was the guidelines and the recommendations. Like putting this car together was going great until the car was put together and then it was a bad car.

Yeah. Right. It just, it feels so challenging and frustrating and understandable and human how all of this happened. We're looking for making sense out of a big scary thing which is both our health and our mortality. Yeah. And we're not very good at it, as it turns out.

And also, this is what John Nott's articles emphasize. The main reason why it got taken up by these institutions, right? The original 1952 report is like 200 and something pages long. They could have taken all kinds of things from that report. They could have emphasized all kinds of things. The reason why colonial administrators and the international institutions emphasized protein was because it doesn't implicate poverty. He quotes somebody as saying like, no one is starving in implicate poverty. Oh, no. He quotes somebody as saying, like,

no one is starving in the British Empire. Oh, no! If people are starving, you have to look at the way that your policies contributed to that starvation or like, you're not fixing that starvation. Like, there's an implication of you. Whereas if you're saying, oh, these people are eating enough, it's just they don't know

that they're eating this cassava that happens to be low in protein. Like, that completely lets you off the hook. And I don't think anyone was doing this consciously, but it's like they're reading through these reports. Like, you know, there were all kinds of other academic articles that they could have made a big deal out of, but they plucked Sicily Williams' work out of relative obscurity and called that the center of nutrition problems

in the world because it was like, ah, here's one that doesn't make us look like the bad guys. Yeah. Well, and again, if it's all research that's being produced by and interpreted by white people, it's also going to be being produced by an interpreted by white people, it's also gonna be like, I don't wanna lean into this stuff that makes me feel bad about myself as a white person as well.

Right, like, I don't wanna feel like I'm part of this machine that has created all of these health disparities and deaths of children, right, like that's horrible. You don't wanna feel like you're part of that. So of course, of course, of course, people gravitate toward the narratives that provide them with comfort, whether or not that's a thing that they feel like they're doing or are intending to do.

Exactly. And also, it makes sense that state entities would also lift up the research that makes them look altruistic in some ways. Exactly. It's also important of like, I think some of this was operating at a subconscious level, but some of this was also operating

at a like cartoon evil level. So John Not mentions in his history of this episode that people were actually telling the colonial administrators that like, it's poverty, and they were being actively censored. He says, over the course of the year, representative preliminary reports were depoliticized by the colonial office to remove any suggestion

that low wages, inadequate returns from cash crops, and declines in food production were complicit in the pervasive pattern of malnutrition. Whoa! It's so gross and so in retrospect so predictable, right? That's what power does is preserve itself. And also this whole thing of education does the same thing. Because if you have to educate these populations

of like, oh, apparently the cassava is too low in protein, it allows you to save these populations by like fortifying the cassava that they eat. Like this kind of research continues now of crops like basic rice, basic yams, whatever, that are higher in vitamin A, higher in beta-carotene, kind of like supercharged staple foods. And what John not point out to me when we spoke was it's like, people who have more money generally feed themselves a more varied diet. Like, in that in 1952 report where they did this

big survey, they found that like beans and fish and a wide array of vegetables were like pretty widely available in the places where people were starving. If they had money, they would just be eating beans and fish. Like they don't need Franken Cassava that has like a two gram higher protein count. Like if they just had money, they would feed themselves a more varied diet because like if there's one thing that's like, I think probably universal to 100% of humans,

it's like people don't like to eat the same thing all the time. Yes. One of the first things that happens as people start to move up the income ladder is they eat more varied diets and especially more protein. So like we don't need, like we are like fish scale concentrate instead of it's like just give people money and they'll buy fish. Yeah, they don't need some like magical new engineered thing and they certainly don't need it to be like Nestle branded. I know. Talk about learning the words, but not the music.

Yeah, exactly. You've missed the biggest part, which is no one has any money, which means no one has any food, and also we as nations are the ones withholding the money and therefore the food. So what if we stop doing that? And I think also, I mean, just like as I'm obsessed with Elon Musk in a way that is deeply unhealthy,

there's also a parable here about like using technology to solve political problems. People not having enough to eat is about as political a problem as it gets. A Martisn won a Nobel Prize for showing that a famine has never taken place in a functioning democracy. The idea that sort of people were not getting enough protein, and we were gonna solve that with like poop algae, where like BP was gonna do some like crude oil peanut butter. Like that's not how we solve problems typically. I feel like you're making up a new fad diet right now. Don't tell Gwyneth.

Pupalji crude oil peanut butter. Like what? What? No. So I just wanna end with a quote from John Noth's paper. Pupalji, crude oil, peanut butter. Oh my God. My God. So I just want to end with a quote from John Nott's paper. I think this is the opening sentence of the paper, actually. He says, eating has always been political. And diatetics, the implementation of a certain dietary regime, has always

reflected the ideals of a given political economy. Yep. Anytime we're talking about the food of populations that we don't know that much about, anytime we're giving food recommendations, we're making political statements and we're making value statements, and we're not always aware that that's what we're doing.

Yeah, we're acting on implicit bias. Yes. If we don't check those implicit biases and if we don't acknowledge them and if we don't structure research and policy decisions around the idea that that exists and is something we need to account for, then we're just going to keep replicating. And this is like just a cartoonish example of a lot of that. You know what I mean?

Like it's so. I know. Whoa. So intense. So over the top. This episode had everything. We had some poop poop we had some boobs If only there were a real racist white lady who could like call bullshit on it

Yeah, the only racist white lady I know is Aubrey Gordon who I have for months. Thanks for watching!