Diets Are Exactly Like Fashion:
They Recycle Every 25 Years
You may be old enough to realize that many popular fashion trends tend to recycle themselves into every generation.
So that you have to rebuy those bell-bottoms that have long since gone to Goodwill. That is, if you don’t want to be the uncool person committing the sin of wearing LAST season’s fashion fad. The fashion fad of 5 years ago is the fashion faux pas of today.
(I was pretty much the last one to give up low-waist jeans 6 or 7 years ago or so, and I was devastated, because I look good in them, and I don’t look great in high-waisted jeans. I saw Britney doing the high-waist jeans first — they aren’t a good look on her, either — and said out loud, “Nooooo! Is that where we’re going now?!” That is indeed where we went, as you have noticed. However, Laurie, my research assistant, just pointed out to me that there are signs that low-waist jeans are coming back.)
I also had a ridiculous number of blinged-out belts, which I may never be able to use again. I’m kind of mad about it. I don’t miss all the dudes in blinged-out Affliction tank tops, though.
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Diets Also Come Back Around
I’m probably not telling you anything you haven’t already observed on your own. But what people don’t seem to notice, is that the DIET INDUSTRY does the exact same thing.
You’ve probably heard of hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) injections? hCG is actually a reproductive hormone, often used clinically for fertility. But it has also been injected as a weight-loss aid.
Which is questionable at best, I might add, because it’s prescribed in conjunction with a strict diet of <500 daily calories. (Gee, who needs a pregnancy hormone to lose weight when you’re on a starvation diet?)
The FIRST time hCG flooded onto the market was in 1967, when hCG-based “fat clinics” popped up all over Europe and the U.S. It took nearly a decade for the FDA to declare hCG fraudulent in 1975, and it didn’t resurface until 2007, this time in a homeopathic form that people swooped up online in a feeding frenzy, thanks to viral internet marketing.
This second round didn’t go well, either, and in 2011, the FDA issued warning letters to hCG sellers that it should be removed from the market.
It’s a revolving door: crappy diets get run out of town when the science on how bad they are for your health finally reaches mainstream attention.
… Just long enough for people to forget the LAST time some variant of this “magic bullet” harmed a generation of true believers.
In the case of hCG, some of its adverse reactions were “mild,” like fatigue, irritability, depression, and fluid buildup (edema), but others were far more serious, such as thromboembolism (clots blocking blood vessels).
When hCG comes back next time, it’ll likely be called something else. And a younger generation will have come of age that doesn’t know why the fad was a terrible idea.
In fact, many of their parents also won’t recognize they already gave that diet fad a whirl, long ago, because it has a new name. And because the idea of magic shots causing weight loss is just so alluring.
But the same pig (with different lipstick) is still a pig.
When the bad science catches up to the fad, usually about the time everybody has also figured out it doesn’t work, the diet industry eliminates the last diet “fashion,” and brings you the same pig with a new shade of lipstick.
Keto = Atkins Resurrected
“Keto” is not new. It’s just been repackaged, with different marketing angles.
It’s essentially the Atkins diet. And my calling this diet a “pig” is not just a metaphor: the pun is intended, since the Ketogenic diet encourages you to eat bacon. So did Atkins.
The Atkins empire went bankrupt eventually, and it wasn’t pretty:
Dr. Atkins himself died in a hospital with heart disease, with some embarrassing disclosures by his doctor that wouldn’t pass HIPAA law these days.
Lots (and I do mean LOTS) of science was published showing how bad this diet was for human health.
The public’s confidence waned dramatically, as the Atkins program was so nutritionally bankrupt that the corporation hawked more than 60 supplements to cover the deficit.
Atkins’ children mismanaged the empire.
In essence, it went down in flames.
Now, all good marketers know that to revive an old cash cow, you’ve got to dress it up new and sexy. Plus they wouldn’t want to be haunted by all those studies showing how the Atkins plan caused disease … so of course they’re not going to bring it back as “the Atkins diet.”
The (evil) genius of the Atkins and Keto diets is this: they tell the American people to eat what they want to eat anyway — primarily animal flesh (meat) and secretions (dairy).
They tell you that something unwise to eat is healthy for you. And (as plant-based MD John McDougall famously states), “people love to hear good news about their bad habits.”
(Let me say preemptively, I’m not here to get you to “go vegan.” I do often point out the clear, undeniable body of evidence, over 10K studies strong, that points to a highly plant-based diet being the healthiest, whether or not it also contains a small amount of animal products. And the whole-foods, plant-based diet is just the primary way humans ate for 2,000 years before industrial food production and the diet industry came along. In fact, Paleolithic man ate WAY more fiber [aka plants] than today’s vegans do.)
The thing that’s so alluring about every fad diet is that there’s a kernel of truth, or goodness, in them. With Keto, at least the diet bans processed sugar. Unfortunately, what comes along with that positive thing is a profoundly negative thing:
People are conditioned into “carbophobia” — they learn to avoid fruits and vegetables, and other entire classes of whole foods, which is a grave thinking error that defies logic, human history, and an obscene amount of scientific data.
A banana and a donut are both “carbs,” and one of them is very good for you, while the other is very bad for you. That very essential fact is totally lost on people who’ve been indoctrinated by the Keto or Carnivore cults.
I have no doubt that this post will yield some number of indignant comments about how someone’s biomarkers came into “healthy range,” and they lost weight, with their Keto diet.
I have three preemptive responses for these folks:
You can read my recent post here, for a couple of examples of how problematic many (if not most) of our “biomarker ranges” are, though Americans and their healthcare practitioners are absolutely addicted to them.
Both body weight and too-high cardiovascular markers come down when we ditch refined carbohydrates (sugar and flours). If any biomarkers improve, it’s not because you overate fats. (You might also end up in emergency gallbladder surgery, as one of many downsides to overeating fats for any length of time.)
If you’ve dropped a reactive comment below, you likely did not read this piece long enough to even see this paragraph (assuming my social media comments are any indication). Just spying the name of your cult triggered you into knee-jerk reactivity, unwilling to contemplate that your “fabulous results” have been achieved at grievous cost to your long-term health.
(Which is what cult members do. It’s easy to find groups of “Keto” dieters online ALSO talking about how to navigate the bad breath, foul-smelling stool, gas and bloat, energy crashes, and countless other land mines that accompany this low-fiber, meat/fat-based diet.)
These obvious signs of gastrointestinal harm are the price many are willing to pay to lose weight.
I find this very sad, since eating delicious, nutritious, whole plants gets you optimal body weight AND reduced disease risk, at the same time.
Anyway, if you haven’t thought about how diets are “recycled” just like fashion trends are, you’ll probably start noticing this now.
During the 6 years I spent on lecture tours on 450 stages, I probably said fifty times ”I predict that the next diet fad will be obsessed with fats.”
Voila! And Then There Was Keto.
And billions of dollars’ worth of “Keto-approved” food you can buy in every grocery store in America. (Notice you never see “Paleo-approved,” like you did 10 years ago. Which underscores the whole point of this editorial.)
Watch and wait: “Keto’s” days are numbered, and it will go the way of the blingy belts — only resurrect, with a different name, in a couple decades.
PS: RIP, Stephanie, my 37-yo friend back in 2017 when we were both baseball moms of 4 children each, and my youngest, Tennyson, was on a state-championship-winning team in Utah, with her oldest.
In our last conversation, I begged Stephanie to stop “doing Keto,” laying out for her its dangers, with as much care as I could. Two weeks later, she was dead of a sudden heart attack; they said her heart basically exploded. “She must have had some underlying condition,” they said, though she’d somehow been hard-working and healthy her whole life, despite carrying about 40 pounds she wanted to lose.
If you’re still reading, thanks for being here. We love hearing from you, too. We also do know that some of you have lost weight “doing Keto.” My arguments against the fad diets do not make the claim that people can’t lose weight doing them. We appreciate the 2% of our subscribers who make a $10/mo subscriber donation, which I make entirely voluntary, I know not everyone can–thank you! And, please assume that some of the links I may share, compensate my small business.
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