1139: Fad Diets | Skeptical Sunday

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Today, millions of Americans are trying to lose weight and get their diets under control. And anecdotally, I've seen a lot more people eating healthier over the last 10 years, and that's great.
But a lot of people are also losing weight through fad diets. And what do I mean by fad diets? Basically, anything that catches a lot of traction on the back of a gimmick.
So today we're not going to be talking about things like veganism or vegetarianism here because they've been around forever. They're more like lifestyles than they are diets per se, and there's a lot more to them than just a gimmick.
But basically, if all of a sudden in a period of a couple years or even months sometimes, depending on the internet, tons of people have become convinced that there's one perfect way to lose weight and eat, and they start evangelizing it to anybody who will listen as the absolute secret to health. You're looking at a fad diet.
Here to help me digest some of this is underground seed oil dealer, Nick Pell. What's going on, Nick? It's hot.
Yeah, in Arizona. Hey, you remembered this time.
Yeah, I gotta admit the bit was not doing well with test audiences. So this is another one that you came to me with and I was instantly into it because I live in Silicon Valley, for those who don't know, in California, a lot of people are into fad diets.
Maybe not as many as they were when I lived in LA, but it's ridiculous out there. I'm always meeting people who are shilling keto, paleo, carnivore, intermittent fasting, what have you.
Carnivore's the latest one. I'm sure we'll cover that.
Yeah, not so much where I live, where people's idea of a salad is a potato salad, slathered and mayo. But I spent a lot of years in Portland and Los Angeles, and I exist in these kinds of like extremely online circles where people are always into the next big thing that's gonna have you shedding 27 pounds in three weeks.
Oh God, you'd have to cut off an arm to do that. Which of these diets do you have experience with directly? Did you ever try one of these? I did carnivore for a month actually.
So this is the one, as people might guess, this is the one where basically all you can eat is steak and eggs or is organ meat one of the main things. That's one of the main things with carnivore.
Yeah, that's about right. Steak, eggs and organ meat.
That's about it. Yeah.
Look, it sounds like that could get incredibly boring, but I could also probably get behind that as I love all of that stuff. I did eat steak and eggs every day for a month, but well, I also ate other stuff because I wanted to poop more than once a week.
Yeah, pooping more than once a week is one of those things that you don't really appreciate until it goes away. But I do love a very structured and rigid diet.
So you must have loved carnivore then because it's really easy to just buy a bunch of meat from a butcher and cook it up and eat it. Why did you come off that? I just did it as a 30-day experiment.
I do lots of different stuff that way. I just pick some random thing and do it for 30 days.
Oh, so you didn't see it as like a be-all, end-all of human health. Oh, so-and-so recommended it, so I got to do this.
That's what the Instagram shills are saying about this. No, not at all.
For one thing, carbohydrates are energy, and I just felt like such a mess when I would go to the gym. All my lifts were backsliding, which I hated.
The other thing you alluded to earlier,

it's a little gross. I know where this is going.

Yeah, so you alluded to it earlier. You poop like once every three days, tops.

Yeah, it's so gross, but I got to say, what a time saver, man. But yeah, that cannot be good

for us at all. That was always deeply concerning to me, and it was kind of like,

yeah, I think I saw in Oprah that you're supposed to go more often.

Honest truth, sometimes I would just go nuts and eat a bunch of eggs just to get things moving.

It's not like I was super backed up.

It's just weird not pooping every day.

Look, I agree.

A man needs his thinking time.

I do some of my best work on the pot.

I know a lot of folks out there can relate. Other than that, the carnivore diet, I did something called intermittent fasting.
That's where you eat for eight hours and fast for 16 hours. I don't really have any complaints about that other than that it didn't really work well with my bodybuilding schedule.
People think that intermittent fasting is some kind of miracle way to lose weight, but spoiler alert for later on in the show, it's not. Yeah, we're going to dig deeper into intermittent fasting later.
I think it's cool that you liked it more or less. For me, I was hungry in the morning, and it was driving me nuts, and my workouts were sucking.
And my trainer later told me something that I think probably going to cover later in the show, which is there's no real secret to when you eat. And so I ditched that real fast.
Yeah. So before we get any further down the fad diet road, I want to make a couple really quick disclaimers.
First of all, a bunch of these diets are super expensive. And I want to say that you absolutely do not have to spend a ton of money to lose weight, to eat healthy.
I think this is one of those kind of myths. I think it's this elitist thing that suggests that people should eat healthy and you don't need a lot of money to eat healthy.
You don't have to live off grass-fed ribeye steaks, pasture-raised eggs. Beyond that, the main issue I have with fad diets is that they present this false image that you can't eat healthy if the only supermarket in town is Walmart or Family Dollar.
Yeah, that is super fair and totally worth saying. I do see this a lot where it's, oh, it's easy for you to say you don't live in a food desert.
And I don't. So fair enough.
But you can get plenty of healthy stuff at Walmart. And I think a lot of people use it as an excuse to just eat super processed junky food.
And it's like healthy food is expensive. It costs more, but it's not necessarily out of reach for most people.
And I know I'm going to get a ton of negative email for saying that, but I think it's become a little bit of a crutch slash excuse. And I don't know, that's disempowering.
It's not good. I ate healthy when I was an unemployed single dad on EBT.
Take that for what it's worth. The other thing I want to say is that if you're concerned with the environmental impact of your diet, that's not a thing we're really going to cover.
I don't really believe individual consumer choices have that much impact on these kind of big environmental issues. But if you do, you need to do your own research because that's not really what we're talking about today.
And it's absolute mind field. It's a whole other episode.
Again, super fair. So let's dive down a bit into the whole fad diet thing.
I've always been curious about carnivore, keto, caveman, paleo, whatever diets, especially from the days when I was super into CrossFit and it seemed like absolutely everyone was into this stuff. Now I was never like a cultist when it came to it, but it worked out at a CrossFit box.
And so everybody was like, I don't know, eating raw livers or whatever before the workout and doing paleo and I don't know, pooping once a week, like we said before. So I already explained carnivore, but there are a few variations on this theme.
And it's basically just a super carbohydrate restricted diet designed to keep your body in a state of what's called ketosis. Ketosis means you don't have enough carbs to burn for your body's fuel.
So you start burning off fat instead. South Beach diet, Atkins, caveman, these are all variations on the theme of making carbs into a bogeyman.
In reality, it's just that if you eat a ton of carbs, you're constantly hungry because carbs aren't satiating, which is a fancy SAT word for they don't make you feel full. Eat a bag of chips, you want another one in 10 minutes, you don't feel full.
Protein makes you feel full. I know there's a little asterisk by this kind of because satiety is like this complex topic.
Because if you eat a giant bowl of pasta, you're going to feel full. It's just maybe that feeling won't last.
And so whenever we do nutrition topics, people always write it and they're like, you're wrong about this. And it's like, we're painting with broad strokes because we're trying to get to fad diet stuff, not because we're trying to paint a complete picture of how carbohydrates operate in the brain or whatever.
Okay. So I hope people can kind of understand that.
Okay. So with keto and these other diets, keto caveman, whatever it is, do you not eat any carbs at all? You severely restrict your carbohydrate intake.
It's like, we'll get into the numbers later. So isn't that supposed to be bad for your kidneys? Maybe other parts of you because my ex-girlfriend's father back in college, he was on Atkins and his doctor was like, yeah, you need to get off that.
You're losing weight, but your kidneys, there was some blood marker where they were like, you cannot not eat carbs. You're going to get kidney stones or worse.
I feel like it's one of those things where everyone has research to support what they think, which is true about dietary science in general. And so much of this is like people know what results they're supposed to get when they start to study.
But yes, it's bad for your kidneys. So how bad is it? It can cause kidney disease.
It can make existing kidney disease worse. And even if it doesn't cause or exacerbate kidney disease, it can cause or make worse kidney stones like you brought up.
Oh, right. So basically, yeah, the train my ex-girlfriend's dad was on.
That's a big yikes from me, man. You know, that sounds awful.
First of all, kidney stones, aren't those supposed to be brutal on you? I am so squirming in my seat even thinking about this. I heard my father pass a kidney stone in the middle of the night when I was like 12 years old, and it was horrific to listen to.
Yeah, isn't that supposed to be like the most painful thing a man can do? I think it's our version of childbirth. And every woman right now with kids is like, how dare you? But apparently it's almost as painful as childbirth.
But of course, how would I know? My wife gave birth in the bathtub with no anesthetic or no medicine. She's obviously way tougher than me.
I guess what I'm saying is I'm due for a kidney stone or two at some point, just to even the scales. Yeah.
It's more painful even than watching the scene in Top Gun where goose dies, to give you some kind of context about. Ooh, yeah.
Ouch. Of course.
Bringing a tear to my eye to even think about. So what else is out there in terms of fad diets? I know the sort of no no carb thing is always top of mind.
Caveman diet is also known as the paleo diet. And that's kind of where things get a little weird.
How is that more weird than the guaranteed kidney stone diet? So they claim that they only eat things that cavemen eat. And that's just a weird claim to me to begin with.
Yeah, I never really thought about that, but cavemen surely would have eaten bugs and grubs and worms and things like that.

And I don't remember seeing that in my mail order paleo meals that I was on a couple years

ago.

So according to these people, cavemen basically only ate meat, seafood, eggs, nuts, seeds,

some oils and vegetables that can be eaten raw like carrots, but not ones that have to be cooked like grains or beans. That's the theory.
Is that even true? First of all, they almost certainly used fire to cook meat. So why would they not cook beans? It's hard to know exactly what people ate during the Paleolithic era because they didn't have writing.
So they didn't leave written records there. Okay.
So there's not cookbooks sitting around from Grug the caveman with a recipe for cave stew, but there's got to be some kind of insight into what people ate back then. Don't we find grave sites or I was going to say archeological, but maybe if we're talking about cavemen, that's not the right word, but we find grave sites, right? There's flowers next to them.
Are there any ways that we can tell what those people ate? Sure. Yeah.
Hunter-gatherer tribes still exist today, so we can go see what do they eat. Basically, they eat not differently from what we eat.
They eat meat and they eat plants, and they studied 256 different communities in one study, and there was only one of those communities that did not eat animal flesh of some kind or another. Your ex-vegan is showing a little bit, I think.
Yeah, I'm glad we don't have to talk about veganism. I bet you are.
Mostly people eat what's around. They may have taboos against certain foods.
There may be some animals that are considered gross to eat, like you and I are not going to eat a cockroach or a rat unless we're starving. Paleo, as a concept, is based on one book from the 1960s by an anthropologist named George Murdoch.
So it's extremely limited in scope, and it's just not an accurate representation of what people ate back then. What about it is inaccurate? People on the paleo diet eat all kinds of stuff that just wasn't available to paleolithic man.
Broccoli and cauliflower are two really good examples. Cauliflower rice? Like how many paleo people eat cauliflower rice? Oh yeah, that's like a staple of that thing.
You use it for everything. Yeah, cavemen did not have cauliflower.
Most of the domesticated plants we eat as modern human beings were created through agriculture, which is post-Paleolithic era. It's over the last 4,000 years, and they bear no resemblance to the base plant that we cultivated one.
If you want to Google this, the quickest and easiest way to get a sense of it is looking at corn. Corn looks nothing like wild corn.
That's interesting. You don't think of broccoli and cauliflower as new.
They're not new if they're 4,000 years old, but I don't know. I just assumed every plant out there has been around for a million years, which I guess is not true.
Don't get me wrong. I, of course, long to live in a world where broccoli doesn't even exist, but I also like electricity and running water and basic sanitation.
So maybe not if I have to make that trade. But okay, so what if the caveman diet that people have now is not totally accurate? Does it help people to lose weight? Is it healthy-ish? Because that's the crux of the issue, not whether or not it's an accurate representation of a Stone Age person's actual diet.
That part doesn't matter, right? Oh, I completely agree.

But the answer is this.

And frankly, for most of this stuff,

we're going to explore.

It's going to be the same answer.

Yes, you're going to lose weight on paleo,

but not for the reasons that the proponents say.

And yes, it's healthier than the standard American diet.

But that is not saying a hell of a lot

because the standard American diet,

which is ironically also called SAD, S-A-D, is awful. Look at what the people in line at the grocery store in front of you are buying.
Unless you're doing all your shopping at Erewhon, you're going to see carts filled with nothing but frozen pizza, cheap high fat beef patties, all this very highly processed food. By the way, Arowana, it's a bougie supermarket in, what, Santa Monica or LA, where you can get wheatgrass.
You can get bomb protein shakes for 15 bucks. Yeah.
You can get those. 20 bucks now.
I remember somebody brought me like a wheatgrass shot from there, and I was like, people are drinking this on purpose. This tastes like actual, yeah, I don't even want to go into it, but that's where you can get like a $10 green smoothie.
That's the size of a shot. And if you don't go in there in yoga pants, it's like, what are you doing? I don't think it's a huge shock to anybody listening to this, that the average American doesn't have a very healthy diet.
We're kind of famous for that, even abroad. I'm friends with a lot of foreigners who come to America for the first time, especially people from like the former Eastern Bloc.
And one of the first things they say is, wow, there's a lot of flags everywhere. The roads and the cars are really big, but the people are insanely fat.
I remember my brother Florian, I call him my brother, the kid I lived with when I was an exchange student in Germany. He came to the United States.
He's probably like 17 or 18. He came to the United States and we started off in Texas.
And he was just like, we get it. You're in America because every road is lined with American flags and people have like flags on the truck and paint job with a flag on it.
And he was just like, what is going on? They do not do that in Germany because of World War II. And for other reasons, they're not nationalist.
And it made me realize it's how nationalist we are, especially in Texas and the Southern states, how patriotic everyone is. But then we went to the shopping mall and he was like, oh my God, how does that person function on a daily basis? And he saw a lot of these people riding those little scooters around and he's like, oh, why are so many people on those scooters? They get really fat when they're on those because they're not walking around.
And I'm like, no, no, it's the other way around. That person has eaten so much barbecue or whatever it is that they like can't move.
He couldn't wrap his mind around this. I apologize because it sounds like I'm fat shaming.
I'm really not. But I think we can all agree that there's a lot of people that are overweight in the United States, especially in the South and in Michigan, where I'm from.
And you just do not see that in most other countries, especially Europe. Yeah.
Anecdotally, I've lived abroad and traveled a fair bit. And it's definitely a thing that you notice in the United States and beyond.
America is factually and verifiably the 13th fattest country on earth. That's it.
We got to get those numbers up. I'm going to pump those numbers up.
Those are rookie numbers in this racket. USA.
Yes, exactly. what you find with paleo is that people lower their bad cholesterol and raise their good cholesterol.
That's good. They lower the levels of triglycerides in their body.
That's good. They eat way less trans fats and seed oils.
That's good. Trans fats and triglycerides are pretty conclusively bad for you.
Seed oils, there's some controversy about this. I'm very firmly in the camp of people who think seed oils are bad for you.
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All right. Back to Skeptical Sunday.
Okay. So this is probably a totally different Skeptical Sunday in itself, but I've heard about the seed oil thing.
And so seed oils are what stuff like sunflower oil, canola oil. I don't even know what that is because canola is not a thing, right? Vegetable oil, basically anything.
But there's a couple exceptions, olive oil and what coconut oil. So it's a whole thing, right? What's the logic? It's that in nature, you'd never get this much of that seed in one place unless you were just like OCD collecting those particular seeds and squeezing them.
It's just not a natural amount of that oil that you could get in your system. So we're not involved to deal with it.
Is that the logic there? It's not so much that, though. I think that's like not a bad place to start thinking about it.
A lot of the stuff is used in industrial processing originally, which, again, is so what? That doesn't make it bad for you. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of not a bad place to enter that.
Vice President J.D. Vance will not eat seed oils and neither will I.
My girlfriend is Jewish. She picked up a thing of vegetable oil to cook with and I told her I was as opposed to this as she would be if I brought lard into our house.
So what did she do? Did she respond well to that? She put it back and got coconut oil just to like explain to her, do not bring this home. There's a lot of stuff I think is gross, but like seed oils, like, no, do not bring seed oils into our home.
Yikes. I probably eat so much of these.
So what is the reasoning behind the seed oil thing? I had my swing and a miss at the guess that it was just you're getting too much of one thing that you normally wouldn't get. But what's the other reason? Look, that may be it.
But I'm always skeptical when the basis for something is like, it's not natural. We haven't evolved to eat this.
It's like, this is ridiculous. The problem with seed oils, as I understand it, is that there are endocrine disruptors, at least when they're heated, which means it messes up your hormonal system.
And do I think that's like the thing that makes Americans so fat? No, but I don't think it's helping at all. And I think it's probably got a lot of long-term health consequences.
I met a well-regarded cancer specialist at a party. This is years ago.
And he was like, hey, you're going to hear more about this in the next few years. Stop using vegetable oil.
I think it's one of the main causes of cancer. And he also, now that you mention it, he did say it screws up your endocrine system.
And it kind of went over my head at the time. But he told me this is the kind of thing that causes certain kinds of cancers.
And this is like a prize winning, super well-known international cancer specialist, endocrinologist type of guy. So he wasn't just on the fad diet train early.
He had his own research was a part of this. So yeah, it's freaked me out, but I guess not enough because I'm still freaking mainlining sesame oil in my Chinese food or whatever.
Yeah, I'm not on any fad diets, but I am pretty mindful about what I eat and seed oils are like a no, absolutely not. I paid $13 for a jar of mayonnaise.
I will not eat seed oils.

Because it uses avocado oil instead or something like that?

Yep.

I think we do that too, but we're bougie. We're bougie Silicon Valley dorks.
I let my wife handle

that shit.

Yeah, I'm a poor Arizona redneck who just is committed to like, I'm not eating cancer. Good.
Not going to do it. Maybe I accidentally did something right for my health.
Awesome. All right.
So back to the paleo thing. Yeah, congratulations.
Paleo is healthier than the standard American diet because it's eliminated all of the stuff that's bad about the American diet. You basically have eliminated all refined sugar, all refined carbs, all processed meat.
You cut out processed foods, added sugars, and the empty calories that come with them, you're going to lose weight. You're going to lose fat.
And losing fat is what most people actually want to do when they say they want to, quote unquote, lose weight. Are there any specific benefits to paleo then? Or is it just, here's any alternative to the standard American diet, and it's better because the standard American diet is literally the worst? It's better than low-fat diets for short-term weight loss, but so is basically everything.
It reduced all-cause mortality, resulted in lower oxidative stress. It decreased mortality from heart disease and cancer, but so did the Mediterranean diet.
And again, this is all in comparison to the standard American diet. Anytime I say it lowers something or it improves something, the bar of comparison is the standard American diet, which sucks.
So the bar is frozen pizza and fast food and cheap frozen meat five times, whatever, seven days a week. And they're sort of measuring whether or not some diet is better.
And the answer is pretty much always yes, because the bar is so low. Yeah, the bar is on the ground at this point.
Okay, so that all sounds good. What is then the downside of paleo? Because we mentioned that if you're getting rid of all carbs or something like that, which is not what you do on paleo, like you can get kidney stones, but paleo itself, it's got to have some sort of shortcoming.
You're missing out on some nutrients that are pretty readily available in legumes and beans, which they don't eat. Fiber consumption tends to be low.
I think the main issue though is that it's not a sustainable way to eat. You may know some guy who's been doing paleo for 30 years and he's ripped to shreds and he feels amazing, but he's the exception.
Most people are just not going to stick to these kinds of super restrictive diet. What about keto, which up until recently I thought was the same thing as paleo? I think keto is probably more sustainable because it's less restrictive, but yeah, it's really similar.
Can we define keto? Because I realize now I'm using terms people might not have heard of. Keto is just down to macros.
That's all keto really is. It's like a super low carb if it fits your macro diet.
Okay. Explain what macros are just briefly for our listeners who are not obsessive about weightlifting and meal prep like you are.
I, in fact, as of the last couple of years, had to learn what macros are because I wanted to lose 30 to 40 pounds of fat. And it turns out you can't do that unless you count calories in food and macros are how you do that.
Yeah. Macro is this kind of bodybuilder slang for macronutrients that's bubbled over into diet culture in general.
But basically, it's the amount of protein, carbs, and fat. These are the macronutrients you're aiming to get every day.
And it's opposed to micronutrients, which are things like vitamin C or riboflavin, which your cereal is always saying it's full of. Yeah, riboflavin sounds like a fake thing, but it turns out it's a vitamin.
That's some bad branding. So in a lot of ways, keto is just this really extreme form of low carb.
If it fits your macro type of dieting, you run your macros, you're paying super close attention to your carbs and keeping them really low. I know this is probably not right, but I'm gonna say it anyway.
Carbs are the enemy, right? That seems to be the consensus around a lot of stuff these days. We did a whole episode on fat-free foods and a lot of people are like, is this an advertisement for the paleo or keto diet? And it wasn't supposed to be, but we fell into the carbs are the enemy idea.
Why not severely restrict your carbohydrate intake? One thing that's just totally missing from our society today is the concept of moderation. So people hear stuff like, too many carbs are bad for you, and they respond with, cool, I'll just never eat carbs again.
And that's what keto is. You're supposed to stay under 50 grams of carbs a day.
Ideally, you want to get it closer to 20. A frigging banana has 27 grams of carbs in it.
Are you telling me that you think eating a banana is bad for you? A single banana each day and you're blowing out your carb allowance. Look, I'm no dietician.
My opinion's not worth anything, but I'm going to go ahead and say that you can eat a banana every day and not be in horrible shape. Yeah, right.
America is not fat because we're eating too many bananas. And keto is one of these places where you start seeing some kind of semi-serious concerns about people's health.
Like what? Because playing all coy about our bananas bad for you aside, this one has me going, are you insane? You're just not going to eat carbs ever again? I always wonder how these people make it through even one week of doing this. Beyond the nutrient deficiency issue, if you're never eating carbs in any significant amount, you're not getting any fiber, You're not eating fruit.
You're not eating vegetables. You're looking at liver problems from all the fat, kidney problems, again, because of the massive amounts of protein, can impair brain function because big shock, your brain is going to work best when you eat carbs.
To hit the other main question, for those who might have forgotten, ketosis is when your body starts to burn fat for energy instead of carbs because there's no carbs in your system. Do people lose weight on this? Because it seems like if you're not eating carbs, you have to, right? I mean, you're going to lose weight.
Yeah, they lose weight. You lose weight on keto for two reasons.
First is that, again, basically all these diets that we're talking about cut the crap from the standard American diet out. And by doing so,

they dramatically reduce caloric intake by hundreds, maybe even a thousand calories a day.

And yeah, eating fewer calories means you lose weight. This is not rocket science.

Yeah, that's the thing I always think when people tell me that they go on one of these diets, like,

okay, you stopped eating bread and you were eating three sandwiches every day and bread and butter when you were hungry and crackers when you were snacking. So yeah, no kidding.
You lost weight. You cut 500 calories or 700 calories out of your diet.
Of course, that's how it works. And the other reason is we talked about earlier, like satiation, protein makes you feel full for longer.
Carbs do not make you feel full for very long. So if you're living on a diet that's super high in protein, you will always feel full.
You eat even less because of that. And your options for snacking on keto are like non-existent.
Yeah, yeah. So a show fan, and I hope she's listening because she's very sweet, but a show fan made some keto snacks.
This is a few years ago. And I tried them.
And look, they weren't bad, but not something that I would normally munch on. It was essentially a cube of fat and protein in a wrapper.
So think little chunks of kind of like butter that were chocolate flavored. And again, not really my thing, but a buddy of mine is crossing Antarctica on foot, which nobody has ever done.
Some people have claimed they've done it, but I guess they're lying or something. Anyway, I pointed him towards these because he was saying one of his biggest problems is he needs to bring tens of thousands or even more calories with him, mostly protein and fat, and he has to carry it on his person.
Basically, he's basically pulling a sled like a dog. So my fat ass at a desk in Cupertino does not have that concern.
Godspeed to your friend. Crossing Antarctica on foot is about my biggest nightmare this side of going into space.
I think, honestly, those types of snacks are probably great for him. But go back to the sustainability issue.
Are you the semi-average person listening to this show? Are you really going to eat like this for the rest of your life? Like when you take the fat off that you were trying to lose, what do you plan on eating? Obviously, you're not going to eat a tub of mayonnaise or whatever every day for the rest of your life. So the issue isn't eating carbs.
I think most Americans and even the more enlightened Americans who listen to your show could probably stand to cut their carb intake or at least eat their carbs more purposefully and mindfully rather than housing an entire bag of Doritos in a single sitting. Yeah, that was dinner for you when you were vegan, eh? Doritos aren't vegan, but you're not far off.
Yeah, I've got a couple of vegan buddies who are like, oh, I'm in Alabama right now and the only vegan thing I can find at this hour, 10 p.m., whatever, is Skittles. So I had that for dinner and I'm like, I think you might be missing the point about veganism, bro.
I'm no expert, but I don't think you're supposed to do that to yourself. It's such a difficult thing to talk about, but we could do a whole episode on veganism.
In a sense, it's about ethical consumption and taking care of the environment, but also Skittles aren't vegan. I don't know, man.
I fact-checked a lot of this episode as much as I could, and I fact-checked my Skittles thing, and it turns out they stopped using the dye that was made from crushed up insects, which gross that exists. I didn't realize food dyes were made from crushed up insects.
That's really vile. And also there's some gelatin that they stopped using in like 2009.
Anyway, let's not split hairs. Apparently sometimes Skittles are vegan, but yeah, like maybe break the diet if you want to make sure that you're not just eating Skittles for dinner three nights a week when you're on your road trip.
All right. How about this? Is gluten the enemy? Because I know a ton of people who now won't eat bread because they call themselves gluten sensitive.
Is that even a real thing? I know some people have real diseases or whatever, but now it seems like every third person in LA has it. Color me skeptical.
Yeah, celiac is definitely a real thing. I knew a girl in college who had celiac and she would just get destroyed by the smallest amount of gluten.
There's something called non-celiac gluten sensitivity, but it's a new area of study and I'm a little skeptical of it. I don't want to gaslight people who have sensitivity to stuff, but I am curious why you're skeptical of it because I hate saying this because again, people have health problems.
I'm that you, listener, do not have this issue, but I think a lot of people are maybe hamming it up a little bit or being overly paranoid.

Yeah, it's this weirdly unfalsifiable thing where the only metric we have to measure it is, oh, I feel off when I eat gluten. And sure, I'm certain that out there somewhere there are people this is true of.
And I'm equally certain that 90% of the people who are talking about how they're gluten sensitive are actually suffering from some kind of eating disorder like orthorexia or hypochondriacs or have some other kind of undiagnosed OCD expression. What's orthorexia? I don't think I've heard that word before.
Orthorexia is an eating disorder where you think certain foods are clean and others are not, and you order all your eating around these concepts.

I believe it is a form of OCD.

I suspect a lot of people on these fad diets have orthorexia, at least the people who are doing them long term.

So I'm always skeptical when some sort of vague, nonspespecific, unfalsifiable new thing comes out like gluten sensitivity. Come on, man.
You have a hard time digesting bread. It's like the main staple crop of the civilized world for the last several thousand years.
Yeah, I'm skeptical of this claim. Yeah, I think that's fair, but possibly inaccurate.
Look, it confirms my bias, so I'm fine with it. But again, I want to be careful not to gaslight people who are like, no, I went on an elimination diet and turns out that gluten was the thing that made me feel like depressed all day.
Like, I suppose we're not talking about those people. I'll be super clear.
I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about, oh, I feel bloated after I went ham on the free breadsticks at Olive Garden.
Yeah, no kidding, dude. Of course you do.
Yeah, I think a lot of people's weird diets are based on something they watched on Instagram or TikTok a few days ago and also vague feelings of unease. Oh, inflammation.
So I stopped drinking milk and eating dairy because inflammation. Do you have blood work to that effect? Or you just wanted a nap after you ate 17 different types of cheese? Okay, I think I can relate to that, but I'm not sure it's inflammation.
Yeah, that's another term that I just think, what the hell do we even mean by this? Is this a medical term or is it some kind of woo that people use that means I feel a little sick after I ate an entire can of cold refried beans at three in the morning? A lot of this stuff is about people over correcting poor dietary choices with dietary choices that might come in with problems of their own, like with keto and the kidney issues that presents. Maybe don't stop eating carbs entirely, but maybe also don't eat three giant bowls of pasta and breadsticks and all this other stuff for lunch every single day after you hit Taco Bell.
Like, yeah, Americans love to do this. I feel like this is like maybe a human thing, but also kind of an American thing.
I'm going to swing the pendulum so far in the other direction. It hits the edge of the box.
Yeah. Americans in general are not real great at moderation.
So we hear that eating McDonald's seven days a week is bad for you. And then we want to switch to a diet where it's only like drinking spinach shake that eating cantaloupe or something.
There are just so few voices in America saying, how about you eat sensibly? And those voices are very quiet. Right.
It's hard for them to monetize and spend on marketing to say, here's a real sort of sensible diet. It's much better to be like, here's the one weird thing that's going viral that I invented where you only drink celery juice every day.
And that's a real one, by the way, celery juice every morning. I'm like, what are you talking about? No, I work in marketing and like this, like, whoa, the one weird trick, whatever.
That is the essence of marketing. Whether you know it or not, you're being marketed to every time you hear lose 30 pounds with this one weird trick.
Yeah, scientists hate him. He only drinks celery juice and there's no nutrition in there, so he's losing weight.
Who knew? Not to sound all Jerry Seinfeld here, but what's the deal with inflammation? Because again, I hear that word everywhere. I'm of course worried that I have it, which worry is probably causing me inflammation.
inflammationflammation is one of those terms that it's misused. Inflammation means any kind of reaction that your body has to an infection.
So when you puke or you get diarrhea when you're sick or you run a fever, that's all inflammation. It's your body trying to fight off infection.
So is this a term that's just totally unrelated to food that people are trying to make about food? There's some connection to food because if you eat things you're allergic to or straight up poison, yeah, your body's going to react to them. But for the most part, for most people, and again, please note that I'm speaking in very broad terms and don't comment about how wrong I am because you have celiac or you're lactose intolerant or whatever.
But like most people do not have issues with inflammations to specific foods, or at least there's no scientific evidence that they do. Maybe they do, but the evidence just isn't there.
So where does the idea come from in the first place? Because it seems to have crept up in the last few years. Now everything causes inflammation from forgetting to brush your teeth or floss at night to drinking a glass of milk or whatever.
I think, again, it's part of the inability to do moderation. The standard American diet is inflammatory, but that's like an entire lifestyle.
It's not just a diet. You need to stop eating all these processed foods.
You're not just going to cut out one or two things and stop the inflammation. And to be clear, the inflammation from the standard American diet does have actual effects.
This is the genesis of all of these big health problems like heart disease, liver disease. But again, none of the diets we're talking about are these magic bullets for any of these bigger issues.
It's just that replacing the standard American diet with any kind of mindful system of eating is going to be a massive improvement. Yeah, that bears repeating because the bar is so low that anything that isn't just eat whatever you want, like fast food and processed stuff, anything is going to be better than that.
What about this whole detox thing, which again, probably also another Skeptical Sunday, and I kind of get it. It's not a specific fad diet, but it seems like it falls into the same basket of stuff.
I need to detox myself. Do you have a working liver? I think so.
Maybe not after my trip to the country of Georgia for that Russian wedding a while back. I used to have a functioning liver.
Time will tell if that's still the case. Congratulations, because if your liver made it back from Tbilisi or wherever you were, you're detoxing as we speak.
But isn't there a serious issue with environmental toxins and toxins from your diet building up in your body somehow? Is that a thing? Not if you have a functioning liver and kidneys. Really? Okay.
That's a relief, I suppose. Yeah.
This is one of those things that sounds so obvious and profound and true to people who don't really understand how human biology works. You're exposed to a lot of toxins on a daily basis.
No, you don't need to go on a special diet or take some kind of special potion or supplement to get rid of them. And now for a word from our sponsors, fewer carbs than a banana.
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I think we might have touched on this in other Skeptical Sunday episodes in the past, but can you kind of explain why? Because I know if you get like mercury poisoning or some sort of severe thing, you have to take stuff to get heavy metals out of your system. But that's if you worked at Chernobyl, right? It's not like I went biking on a road and inhaled some brake dust.
So now I need to go on this thing for a week. Yeah.
Please do not write in about how you worked in a coal mine for 30 years and needed to detox. This is not what we're talking about.
You have a functioning liver and kidneys. This is literally their job is to expel toxins from your body.
And to the extent that they're unable to do their job because of, let's say, mercury in the drinking water, which I think is not a very woo-woo thing to say that there's mercury in the drinking water. The extent to which they're unable to do their job of eliminating that, dumping a bag of Dr.
Quack's special woo-ora detoxing powder into your lemon water three times a day is not going to make anything better. In a best case scenario, it's not going to do anything.
In a worst case scenario, it's going to create new problems all its own. Well, now we're never getting sponsored by Dr.
Quack's special woo-woo or a detoxing powder. Thanks a lot.
Okay, so this creates problems of its own. What are the potential problems of taking these kinds of supplements? Because I think a lot of people go, yeah, it costs money, but better safe than sorry.
What's the harm? So a lot of these supplements tend to be unregulated, which I am not a fan of regulations like at all. But with that said, one of the things about these being unregulated is that you may not even be getting what it says on the label, which if I were into taking these detox supplements, I would definitely be doing due diligence to ensure that I'm even getting what the label says that I'm getting in the amount that it says that I am, that the purity is good, that it's not put together on the floor of a mercury manufacturing plant during their shift change, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I usually make the joke that a lot of supplements have Chinese sawdust in them, and that came from a real thing. One of my buddies is a mushroom supplier, and he a lot of business with China and he has a lab test everything because he does business with China.
And he says there's a lot of stuff where they literally they will grind up mushrooms. But he's like, why are these so much cheaper than the other ones? And he's found literal samples where half of it is definitely just sawdust that's been colored with something to look like the other mushroom bits, which is pretty horrifying because, you know, you're eating those.
He's grinding them up and putting them in other supplements that people are eating. So are any of these supplements actually regulated? How does that work? The FDA doesn't regulate anything that calls itself a supplement.
So in a word, no, they're not really regulated. And yes, I know we're going to get pushed back from people here saying that's not true.
The FDA regulates supplements for adulterants and to make sure that you're actually getting what you're supposedly paying for. They don't frankly do a really good job of the latter thing.
The FDA is not here to litigate whether or not omega-3 pills are going to lower your cholesterol levels or if CLAs are going to remove adipose tissue fat from your waistline. Again, they're mostly just concerned with whether or not you're getting Chinese sawdust instead of protein powder.
Yeah, some of that Chinese sawdust is certainly tasty, but I would rather get what's on the label ideally, especially when I'm paying like $92 for some giant jug of protein. And whatever you're getting, whether it's food, supplements, whatever, like you should always be doing due diligence about what you put in your body.
You don't have to go down some crazy rabbit hole or become some nutrition autist to get like any kind of reasonable surety that you're eating healthy. But yeah, you should research everything that you eat and put in your body.
Read reviews, make sure the stuff is at least mostly made in a civilized country, I guess that you should say. I almost said the United States, not to confuse us with a civilized country or anything.
All right. So moving on, let's talk about intermittent fasting.
I know we touched on that on the top of the show. This is a big thing over here in California.
It's been recommended to me hundreds of times by various people. Tons of people I know are doing it and have been for a decade or whatever.
This is very much a thing. Yeah, it was huge in the nascent early right wing bodybuilding community on Twitter.
Oddly specific, but OK. So for those not in the know, intermittent fasting and correct me if I'm wrong here, Nick, is where you only eat between, for example, 12 p.m.
and 8 p.m. or some variation of that.
You have this like small eight-hour food window and you just don't eat outside of that. Yeah, there's some evidence that shows that intermittent fasting does improve heart health, cognitive function, physical performance, reduces your risk of type 2 diabetes, but the studies were done on animals, which doesn't mean they're worthless, but they're not perfect.
They do offer some indication that you can improve your health. I'm not necessarily talking about weight loss, but your health by eating during a feeding window and fasting the rest of the time.
A feeding window sounds like something I need to install immediately. Some of the potential benefits of IF include lowering your risk of multiple sclerosis, stroke, arthritis, asthma, Alzheimer's disease.
So there's a lot of seemingly good benefits of it. That all sounds actually pretty amazing considering that otherwise it's such a flexible diet.
How accurate is that stuff? Because that's incredible. It's as accurate as any kind of nutrition science is.
I'm pretty skeptical of nutrition science in general. You all should be.
But I don't disagree that it's great. It's flexible.
But here's the thing. Do you think that there's something magical about fasting? Do you think there's some kind of biochemical process that happens when you fast? Because that's the particular brand of woo that a lot of the IF people are pushing.
They're saying that when you fast for 16 hours a day and you only eat for eight, that you're getting some kind of special benefit that you don't get from just restricting your calories. I see.
Yes, I have heard that. And yes, that is where my mind went.
So the eight hour window is just, you're only going to get so hungry in that eight hour window. So you're only going to eat so much and therefore your calories are restricted.
Whereas yes, when people recommend it to me, they're like during that 16 hour fast, you have weak cells that could become cancer or dying off or something. And it's like fasting does increase autophagy, which means cells that essentially kill other cells, weaker cells or kill themselves when they are not fed.
So it's not just about calorie restriction. More human trials are needed.
I tried to find some good data on this. It was really hard.
This is something that somebody who's up on the latest cutting edge science might be able to talk about. But really, there's no good data on what this actually does.
A lot of people are speculating on what it does. It prevents cancer, but there's not so much data that actually backs that up.
Not yet, anyway. There's a lot of people that stop eating for like a week at a time or three days at a time for the same thing, right? Because fasting does X, Y, Z.
And I'm actually quite curious about this. So are there any kind of air quotes, magical benefits from intermittent fasting? Or is that just kind of BS? It's kind of BS.
There was a clinical study that found that intermittent fasting was as effective for weight loss as counting calories. So this is just a gimmick to get people to eat less.
And you know what, if it works for you and it helps you to cut fat, lose weight, like great, fine. I think it's fine of all the diets we discussed.
There's a cliche in bodybuilding that the best exercise is the one you'll actually do. So if you hate squats and you're always finding excuses not to do them, but you love to lay down and do the leg press, then I think it's pretty obvious that the leg press is the better exercise because that's the one you're actually going to do.
And it's the same for dieting.

If you're not going to live off organ meat and cave nuts, then paleo is not going to

work for you.

On the other hand, if you're not a huge fan of breakfast and you just start skipping it

all together and you cut out after dinner snacks, go ahead, do that.

Call it intermittent fasting, call it whatever you want.

But no, your body does not transform into some kind of magic fat burning machine because you skipped breakfast is that kind of how all these diets work it really seems like it always just comes down to calorie restriction which is what i learned when i was dieting myself it's super difficult to tease it out because all of these diets involve massive caloric restrictions. So it's hard to say

because they're all already doing that. You cut all the carbs out of your diet in keto, you're probably not going to replace that by eating a bowl full of mayonnaise and butter.
And you can't drink milk because milk's loaded with carbs. That's another thing where you can easily get tons of calories from.
You just cut hundreds or in extreme cases, thousands of calories out of your diet, simply because you decided that you're going to keep your carb intake somewhere absurdly low. So that does seem to be a common theme with a lot of these fad diets, but if it works, then so what? Are we on the same page with that? Yeah, more or less.
But I think the so what is that most of the stuff just isn't sustainable. It's such an extreme reaction to the standard American diet.
Like rather than just eat sensibly, count your calories, count your macros, get a food scale. People want to go to these like extreme measures.
And another reason is that when people say, I want to lose weight,

that's not really what they mean. What do you mean by that? I think that's pretty much exactly

what people want to do when they go on a diet. No, they don't want to lose weight.
They want

to be less fat. No one is trying to lose weight to be a skinny fat blob just to say that they

lost weight. To be less fat, you want to eat high protein, moderate sensible amounts of fat and carbs, all three of which in proper amounts are necessary for the maintenance of your muscle.
And if you lose as much muscle as you do fat, you are not going to be happy with how you look. Maybe you don't care.
Maybe it's entirely for health reasons, but you want to talk about skeptical? I'm skeptical that you only want to lose weight for health reasons. I think that there are lots of people, even people who their come to Jesus moment on it's time to lose weight was you just got type two diabetes.
You're going to have heart disease in three months if you don't change your diet super fast. I also think a ton of them love the idea of looking better.
And that's maybe what's going to keep them going. The health stuff, sure, it's the kick in the ass they need to get going.
But do they look in the mirror after they've dropped 100 pounds and like what they look? Yes. I suppose that makes sense.
So at the end of the day, are you saying that people shouldn't do any of these fat diets? It doesn't seem like you're really coming down on it like that. No, what I'm saying is people should do whatever works for them to help them lose weight slash be less fat, whatever.
Out there right now, I'm sure there's some guy who just, he doesn't have a sweet tooth. He's not a fan of carbs.
And you tell him, buddy, I got a diet where you can lose all kinds of weight and you can eat as much steak and eggs as you want, which is pretty much true of carnivore because like how much steak and eggs are you going to eat? But like you can eat as much steak and eggs as you want. And he's going to go, oh, great.
But you can't eat candy or bread. I don't care.
I get to go ham on steak and eggs every day. Cool, dude.
Go talk to your doctor. Go talk to a dietician and do carnivore until you get the body of a Greek god.
I don't think most people are going to want to do that. The best diet is the one that you stick with.
The key to losing weight is eating less and moving more. That's it.
You make it sound so simple. By the way, I love the suggestion of not only talking to your doctor but talking to to a dietician, because what I've noticed is that dieticians know way more about this than a lot of doctors do.
And I feel like I've even fact checked health episodes on this show with doctors and then found out that, ooh, I really should have fact checked this with an actual dietician. So get both if you're thinking about doing something like this.
So again, you make it sound so simple, but if it's so simple, why does America have this obesity epidemic

that seems to be getting worse?

Like all the big problems in America,

it's complicated.

There's no quick and easy answer for this.

There's a lot of reasons.

One is there's more heavily processed foods around.

They're cheaper.

They're more calorie dense.

They're nutrient poor.

They're not as good for you as whole foods, but they have a ton of calories. So there's not some magic to whole foods.
It's just hot pockets have tons of sodium, way more calories, way less vitamins than hamburger you make at home or a beef Wellington, like a fancy hot pocket. People like the convenience of the processed food and they like that it's cheap at the point of sale, but that convenience and cheapness comes with a cost on your health.
And people want that marketing solution. People want, here's the one crazy trick that 28 pounds in seven days, kind of like people want that.
They don't want to sacrifice. They don't want to expend the effort.
And it's like, it doesn't work that way. Losing weight sucks.
It's hard. You have to not eat when you want to.
You have to relearn your associations with food to figure out if you're hungry or you're bored or you're depressed. There's all kinds of reasons people go to the kitchen, pick up a sleeve of Ritz crackers and stuff their face with them.
It doesn't always have to do with hunger. And you have to learn how to recognize that.
It's hard. It's hard to lose weight.
Yes, I can certainly relate to that. When I was doing my sort of dieting, losing fat thing, I really had to look at food more as fuel and not just like you said, oh, I'm bored and I'm watching a movie.
So I want to eat this giant bag of whatever. That just doesn't work.
And once you change that programming in your brain, which is, of course, easier said than done, but massively life-changing, you don't really want to go back. Like, I don't find myself craving an entire bag of Fritos unless, you know, something is going wrong with my week, right? It's not actually hunger.
And I think that's an important realization. Thanks, Nick, for joining us today and feeding us everything we need to know about the latest and greatest fad diets on the market today.
I think the real important point here is no matter which fad diet sort of crops up after this that we didn't cover on the show, it's almost certainly going to be also about calorie restriction, but with extra steps, right? That's just kind of the takeaway today is that it's always, always, always about calorie restriction. It's just that stuff is hidden under some kind of gimmick.
So be on the lookout for that. Thanks, everyone, for listening.
Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Show notes on the website, of course.
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My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own.
And I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer, and I'm certainly not a dietician, as you probably have gleaned from other episodes of this show. So do your own research before implementing anything that you hear on this show, ideally with somebody who knows what they are actually talking about.
Also, we may get a few things wrong here and there,

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The deepest parts of our oceans remain a mystery, with 75% still unexplored. You're about to hear a preview with Victor Vescovo, the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans, built and piloted a submarine that defied crushing pressures, revealing a world few have ever seen.
71% of the Earth is ocean, and of that, 75% is completely unexplored. It's extraordinary.
Deep ocean in the middle of the Pacific is completely unknown. We just don't go there, and it's hard to go there.
And many of the places in the ocean are really rough. And because it's so harsh, that's why it's really hard and really expensive to explore the ocean.
I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity, which I'm probably most known for is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans. If I'm going to spend money, I'm not going to spend it on a $10 million birthday party.
I'm going to spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology. It was kind of like Ocean's Eleven, where I basically got to go around the world and say, who is the best person for expedition management? Who would be the best ship captain? And because this was such an ambitious undertaking, they wanted to do it.
That, I think, is the way to spend wealth. I enjoy exploration.
I enjoy pushing technological boundaries. But I like putting myself on the pointy end of the spear, and I don't leave it to other people.
I want to be at the control. When I went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together.
Mine was designed and tested to a crush depth of 15,000 meters. That thing was a tank.
And things did go wrong, eventually. You can operate in a very dangerous world.
You just need to be aware, and you need to mitigate those risks. What did Victor find in the darkness where even light cannot reach? To find out, listen to episode 1089 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.
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