Episode Transcript
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Welcome to Nutrition For Mortals, the podcast that says life is too damn short to spend your time and attention worrying about your food choices.
So let's take a deep breath, and then join us two registered dietitians and friends as we explore the world of nutrition with a special focus on cultivating a healthy and peaceful relationship with food.
My name is Matt Priven, and I am joined as always by my co-host and the best dietitian on planet Earth, Jen Baum.
Hey, Matt.
And I will just start by saying, if you would like to support the show, we do have a Patreon, where we do an extra bonus episode every month.
As always, a portion of our Patreon goes to support The Hunger Project, which is a fabulous organization.
You can always email us show ideas at nutritionformortals@gmail.com.
And a reminder, we are real live dietitians in practice.
And so if you or anyone you know has ever thought about working with a dietitian, you can always feel free to reach out to us.
Yes, and you can find us online at oceansidenutrition.com.
So Jennifer, what are we talking about today?
So Matt, we're going to be talking about diet food and diet food trends throughout the years.
And I really wanted to talk about diet foods specifically because we've talked about a lot of various aspects of diet culture on the show so far, but we have never really dug into the long history of diet foods.
I love it.
This is a great idea for an episode.
It's nice that it's not super sciency this time.
I feel like it's nice that these episodes, we dig deep into personalized nutrition, and then we get to just talk about, I'm guessing, lean cuisine or something like that.
Stop.
Do not ruin where we are going, Matthew.
So how do you want to set this one up today?
Yeah, so I want to do this one 100% Nutrition For Mortals style with some good music, some good conversation, and maybe even a vintage ad or two.
And so we're going to do this by going 100 years back into the past, and then we're going to work our way through the decades.
And for each decade, I picked what I thought was one of the kind of biggest diet foods of that decade, and we're going to dig into it a little bit, talk about it.
My guess is that some of these are going to feel very familiar to folks listening.
And then hopefully towards the end of our conversation today, we can just kind of generally chat about how diet foods can negatively impact or harm or interfere with our relationship with food.
The only thing you asked of me was to pick music cues for the last hundred years for each decade, which was the most fun homework assignment you could possibly give me.
So I have music cues you haven't heard.
You've got diet foods I haven't heard, and we're going to swap.
That's exactly right.
So can you please start by taking us back to the 1920s?
We've got to go a hundred years in the past.
And I will say this first diet food is going to count for both the 1920s and 1930s, since it was really big in both.
But can you hit play and take us there?
Did you pull that off of a gramophone?
I took my gramophone out of the closet.
I screwed the horn in.
Yeah, got that for you.
That's amazing.
Okay, so drum roll.
The first diet food we're going to be talking about is grapefruit.
And how could we have a conversation about diet foods without talking about grapefruit?
Well, now I'm mad now.
Why?
Grapefruits are delicious.
Why?
Are we going to throw shade at grapefruits?
Tell, all right, why is grapefruits the first diet food?
Okay, because, well, okay, so we have to, we're in the 1920s.
And this is really when the grapefruit diet became huge.
I mean, in the late 1920s, early 1930s, there was a diet that came out called the 18 day diet and it was incredibly restrictive.
I mean, think 500, 600 calories a day.
And it essentially required people to eat grapefruit with every single meal.
And so this really is the time when the kind of quote unquote grapefruit diet originated.
So I've heard mention of the grapefruit diet, but I don't have much context for it.
So this is where it starts.
And it's not just eating grapefruit.
It's eating grapefruit with every meal.
That's right.
But think very little food with each meal.
So for example, breakfast would be one half of a grapefruit, Melba toast, which I was very big in the 1920s and 1930s, and coffee.
So most meals were like grapefruit and something very, very small.
Gotcha.
How did this originate?
Where does this come from?
Yeah, this is almost kind of like a diet food urban legend.
It's really hard to kind of pinpoint exactly where and how the grapefruit diet originated.
But from what I read, Ethel Barrymore, who's actually Drew Barrymore's great aunt, went into the Mayo Clinic.
She was an actress, and she kind of demanded that the doctors at the Mayo Clinic create a diet for her so that she could get, you know, quote unquote, screen ready in a short amount of time.
And allegedly, this grapefruit diet, I mean, back then, it was called the 18 day diet, was devised.
And after she requested this diet be created, it really started to spread like wildfire.
I mean, it kind of spread throughout Hollywood, actresses were using it, you know, movie stars were using it.
And again, we see iterations of this diet still.
So it really does kind of originate from Hollywood in the 1920s.
That is a crazy origin story, marching into the Mayo Clinic and demanding that a doctor prescribe a diet for quick weight loss.
That is such a strange story.
I know, I know.
And again, I mean, there's kind of question marks about how it actually went down.
But Ethyl Barrymore is often tied to the origins of the grapefruit diet.
And while it became super popular, pretty soon after it gained popularity, there started to be some pretty harsh criticism because women were passing out, they were malnourished.
And there were even doctors at the time coming out and saying, like, this is not a good idea because people were eating so little.
What year would this story have taken place?
Can you pinpoint this to a specific year?
Generally, like late 1920s was the closest I could come into identifying exactly where and how it started.
I mean, there is actually talk even before this about the kind of quote unquote magical fat burning properties of grapefruit.
I mean, again, grapefruit seems to have like had an aura of weight loss, fat burning mystique around it.
But this was the first time that grapefruit ever was kind of put into this formalized diet plan.
I was just trying to see if this coincides with the Great Depression, which is a very strange time to be actively restricting your intake when there's so many concerns about food access.
That's right.
Yeah, it seems like it's pre Great Depression that this was developed.
And again, it was really for people to try to lose weight as fast as possible.
And of course, we know that number one, grapefruit does not possess any magical fat burning enzymes or anything like that.
But this is again, this is one that kind of resurged again in a big way in the 1980s.
So in the 1980s, it kind of came back as the 10 day, 10 pounds off diet where people were eating almost exactly that same kind of formulaic half a grapefruit plus an egg and toast every day.
So I feel like grapefruits have a lot of staying power as a diet food.
Grapefruits must have been a pretty new food to have access to in the 1920s and 30s.
I mean, it's like a tropical fruit.
So at the Mayo Clinic, you know, that was like a delicacy, I would imagine.
Yeah, I think that's true.
And I will say that grapefruit sales understandably exploded.
I think the grapefruit industry was very happy at this time as a consequence of this diet gaining so much popularity.
And you know, I think again, I think this is one of those foods that continues to have a lot of mystique around it.
I guess people can remember they are like older relatives, always having, you know, half a grapefruit with breakfast because it's supposed to be, you know, really good for you or something like that.
And so, you know, I think I found it surprising that the grapefruit diet has such a long history.
Wouldn't it be funny if it really just came from a doctor being yelled at by Ethyl Barrymore and needing to provide a diet plan and just kind of looking around the room, seeing a grapefruit and going, oh, the grapefruit diet.
What if that's the story?
I mean, it's quite possible because I don't really see any science happening around this besides just creating a diet plan where people were eating so little that, of course, they were going to lose weight very quickly in the short term.
All right.
Well, that's a great one to start with.
So you said that represents the 20s and the 30s.
So should we move into the 40s?
Yeah, let's go to the 1940s.
All right.
We are in the 40s.
Things are getting smokier in here.
Very chill, very relaxing.
Yeah.
All right.
So what is the diet food of the 1940s?
It is the cayenne cocktail.
Matt, have you heard of this before?
Yeah, so is this the origin of the master cleanse?
Yes, it is.
We're going to talk about Stanley Burroughs.
Tell me all about it.
Okay.
So the cayenne cocktail was introduced by Stanley Burroughs in 1941.
And for those listening that don't know who Stanley Burroughs is, he was a kind of an alternative health practitioner, naturopath, who had some very extreme alternative ideas about health.
He was a firm believer that people needed to detox their bodies in order to be healthy.
And so in the early 1940s, he created and distributed by pamphlet.
So he was just basically handing out pamphlets to his clients or his patients instructing people on how they needed to drink a cayenne cocktail.
This was a mixture of cayenne pepper, lemon juice, maple syrup, and water, and how they should be drinking this cocktail and only this cocktail for a minimum of 10 days.
When I hear stories about people who have tried this, because this one persisted for many years, it gets dark so quickly because not only are you starving, but you're also just like on fire the whole time.
Yeah, well, and Stanley Burroughs is very big on detoxing, but very big on a concept that we've talked about before.
He really thought it was important to bring purity back into the body.
And the way that you had to do that was by essentially fasting, but also by drinking just this cocktail for, I mean, there were even, I saw examples of people drinking only this cocktail for like 20, 25 days.
So yeah, this is the sort of intersection of purity mindset with food, but then also this idea that we're trying to increase our metabolic rate through like thermogenesis of like eating really spicy cayenne pepper.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, his rationale makes no sense.
His rationale was that when the body was no longer using energy to digest food, it will begin using energy to purge toxins, a concept that makes absolutely no sense.
But that was his thinking.
And this led to him writing the book, The Master Cleanse in the 1970s, where this cayenne cocktail was really centered as, you know, quote unquote, the way to lose weight and detox your body.
Does he have any connection to Battle Creek, Michigan and the cereal moguls?
Is there a Kellogg connection we can find?
And I don't know much about this guy.
That's a great question.
I don't know the answer to that.
I just know that, quite honestly, this is probably something we have to mention.
He was not a good dude.
I mean, he is somebody that you and I would call a, you know, grade A food charlatan, because later on in his life, he faced a lot of legal challenges.
He was actually twice convicted of practicing medicine without a license.
And he was actually even charged with second degree murder following the death of a patient.
I mean, I think that was later overturned.
But he is one of those practitioners that really got into the space of almost actively doing harm because of how outlandish his ideas were.
Was it the fasting that killed that person?
Yeah, I think a little bit kind of unclear, but the combination of not having enough nutrients, potentially low electrolytes, I actually think maybe the specific patient was a cancer patient that was seeking alternative treatment.
So again, that was something that was overturned on appeal, but he was convicted multiple times for practicing medicine without being licensed.
Yeah, that's a paradigm we've seen many times with doctors who are really fuzzy on the idea of keeping their credentials up and are really liberal with what they're willing to do with restrictive diets and folks who are in really tenuous healthcare situations.
And so it makes me shudder every time, but we've talked about a number of those folks on the show already.
Yeah.
And I think the thing that bums me out so much is that even after all of this went down, I mean, again, the Master Cleanse, the book, The Master Cleanse was huge in the 1970s.
It took off in such a major way.
And then Stanley Burroughs got into all of this trouble.
But the Cayenne cocktail actually resurged in part due to Beyonce in 2006.
Did you ever hear about this?
No.
So, evidently, Beyonce admitted to using the Master Cleanse and the Cayenne cocktail to actually shape up for her role in the movie Dreamgirls.
And it turns out that in 2007, the Cayenne cocktail was the most searched recipe on Google, according to one article I read.
So this is like one of those other kind of diet foods that really refuses to die even after we've seen all the harm that it's done.
Yeah.
And it's interesting too, like you see even in not like restrictive diet plans, but just like juice bars, like cayenne is a go to ingredient and it feels like maybe this is the origin of it.
Like how did cayenne get in all these juices and smoothies?
Right?
Because I don't like it.
I don't know about you.
I've had cocktails with cayenne in them before and it's not enjoyable.
It's like too spicy for me.
I like it.
Okay, hold on.
Are you drinking the cayenne cocktail right now?
No, a kombucha with ginger cayenne.
When you're like once in a while, just kind of get the burn on, it feels kind of good.
I like it.
Well, but I think you are right that there's this kind of association that because cayenne is burning, it's spicy, that it's somehow burning fat or it's doing something to our metabolism.
And again, just to be perfectly clear, there is no evidence that cayenne or this cayenne cocktail is somehow detoxing our body or is going to lead to weight loss.
I mean, it really is just something developed by, quite honestly, somebody who had very outrageous ideas about medicine and nutrition.
Yes, good to point out.
And we kind of talked about the role of spicy foods and metabolism in our episode.
Can you hack your metabolism, right?
So we've touched on this.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
So we will leave Stanley Burroughs in the 1940s where he belongs.
And can we kick it to the 1950s?
Let's do it.
That is such a 1950s song.
This song will forever remind me of Back to the Future.
Yep, that's exactly what I was thinking.
Of course.
That's why you chose it, because you knew both of our minds would be like, back to the future.
Great movie.
Well, music's going to start getting a lot more interesting soon.
But this is yeah, this is super 50s.
So do you have any guesses about our 1950s diet food?
I like having you guess.
Okay, okay, okay.
Well, 50s, I'm thinking like Levittown, people are getting microwaves.
Is this going to be our first microwave diet food?
It is not.
You're very wrong.
It is going to be...
How far off am I about microwaves?
When did microwaves start going into homes?
When are microwaves going to come into our conversation?
Not for like another 30 years.
Wait Googling, when did microwaves get invented?
Hold everyone please.
45.
Okay, it's feasible.
Okay.
I wasn't too off the mark.
Okay, so what is the diet food of the 1950s?
It's cabbage soup, Matt.
Cabbage soup.
It's cabbage soup, because this is the decade where the cabbage soup and the cabbage soup diet started to become mainstream.
I kind of almost just like admire that like normal foods are just being spun into diet foods rather than these like super scientific diet foods I'm sure we're going to be discussing soon that need to be produced in like a lab or a factory.
It's just like cayenne pepper, cabbage, you know, like these are just normal foods that people are just like writing books about, I guess.
Well, and this is also a diet and a diet food.
I mean, nobody really knows the origins of the cabbage soup diet.
This is one that it's like almost impossible to find like, this is the individual who first formulated this diet.
But I mean, this is a diet where you're supposed to essentially cook giant pots of cabbage soup.
And that's all you're supposed to eat.
I mean, it's some variations of this, you're allowed to have one or two other foods like a fruit or a vegetable.
But mostly, you just eat cabbage soup for like 10 days or two weeks.
We know it's spread a lot.
A lot of people were doing this.
Yes.
And it's because kind of like grapefruit, there's this discourse myth around cabbage soup that cabbage possesses some kind of miracle fat burning compound, or that cabbage soup has zero calories, which of course, it doesn't.
But that's kind of the, those are the claims that are circulating about this diet.
And yeah, it was really big in the 1950s.
You had people following this cabbage soup diet to try to lose weight fast.
And it's funny because like I said, I found different iterations of this diet, but I wanted to share this one with you, which was on day four, you're actually allowed to eat three and as many as eight bananas, Matt.
And I thought to myself, is it Freelee, the banana girl who was involved in creating this cabbage soup diet?
It's Freelee's grandma, Ethel, the banana girl.
That's right, Ethel, the banana girl who was involved in creating the cabbage soup diet.
What to me honestly sounds like a very unpleasant way to eat because I actually love cabbage soup myself.
My mom makes an amazing cabbage soup.
But I would not want to eat only cabbage soup for 10 days or a few weeks.
Yes, you would stop having positive associations with cabbage soup pretty quickly.
Yeah, and this like the other diet foods we've talked about, this is another one that resurged again, the cabbage soup diet became ultra popular again in the 1980s.
And it was called so many different things.
I have no idea why, but it was referred to as the Dolly Parton Diet, or the Trans World Airlines Stewardess Diet, and the Models Diet.
It had a ton of names when it kind of gained popularity again in the 1980s.
And I'm guessing again, that's because those were the groups of individuals who this was being marketed for, and then people wanted to emulate these individuals.
But I read lots of reports from the 1980s where the cabbage soup diet was actually faxed to people.
So people were faxing this and photocopying it and just really spreading it around.
I love the idea of faxing this information to people.
I love the idea of just faxing in general and just being like, this is what we're using the fax machine for.
It occurs to me too, you're picking one from each decade, but there's probably a lot you could have chosen from, and each of them have this cyclical nature of coming back and changing how we all perceive foods and their magical properties, even if we're not actively dieting.
And so I'm really starting to think, wow, how much of our perceptions about food are just like urban legends from diet culture from the last hundred years.
That's such a great point.
And it's so true that this is really only the tip of the iceberg.
You're exactly right.
I chose one food from each decade, but each decade was filled with hundreds of different diet food trends.
And so, yeah, I think the point you make is excellent because it really speaks to how much of our thinking has been shaped by these myths, these legends, these, you know, fast detox diets.
Yeah, definitely.
Hold on.
I'm getting a fax.
Yeah, it says we should move on to the 60s here.
Should we go on?
Oh, that's a good choice.
All right, we're in the 60s.
What is the diet food of the decade?
I am actually not going to even ask you to guess on this one because I can almost guarantee you've never heard of it.
I had not heard of it until I had started researching for this episode.
But the 1960s was all about liquid diet food.
And the OG diet drink of the 1960s is something called Metracal.
Have you ever heard of it?
I have not Metracal.
Okay, so this was a 225 calorie shake that was supposed to be consumed four times a day.
So you did the math, 900 calories a day.
And it's kind of like SlimFast before there was SlimFast.
It was drink all of your calories, but keep those calories ultra low.
I'm picturing a tall but slim aluminum can or tin can, maybe ribbed on the side with like a pop top.
Is that the look?
Yes, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
And Metrecal was created by Mead Johnson, who had actually gotten the idea from seeing hospital patients who couldn't eat solid foods.
And those patients were drinking nutrition supplements, which is something that's very normal for somebody who's in the hospital and may have a low appetite or a problem eating.
And they thought, wow, this is a great idea for a diet or weight loss product.
And they created Metrecal.
All right, the intersection of hospital food and diet food.
I mean, this is just total fun fact.
The way they came up with the name Metrecal was to plug in a formula to an IBM computer.
And the computer combined meter and calories.
And so Metrecal was born.
Wait, what?
What?
I don't know, Matt.
The computer came up with it?
A computer came up with the name and don't ask me how.
I mean, these are just like bizarre facts from the 1960s.
But I just thought that was outrageous.
This reminds me of like the Wu Tang name generator from like the early 2000s.
That's right.
That's right.
And this stuff, evidently this stuff was so gross.
So I'll give you a rundown of the ingredient list.
It was a blend of skim milk, soybean flour, and vitamins and minerals.
And it tasted so bad that evidently in the 1960s, it was reported that people were often mixing alcohol in with Metrecal to make it taste better and be more palatable.
Can you still get Metrecal?
I want to make a Metrecal cocktail so bad and see what this is all about.
Well, can I read you a quote?
So this is a quote from author Susan Yager from The Hundred Year Diet.
And she said, in the 1960s, creators could replace an entire meal by opening a can of Metrecal.
It was, oh, it was huge.
I mean, restaurants would have liquid lunches, you know, Metrecal and a shot of bourbon.
Whoa, okay.
And it really was, you know, marketed as a meal replacement, a weight loss supplement.
And the advertising is so incredibly cringe, so cringe that I absolutely must play a vintage Metrecal ad.
May I?
Of course.
Here they come.
“The trim ones.
Who are they?
They're the Metrecal for lunch bunch.
At lunchtime, instead of fattening food, they have delicious Metrecal milkshake flavors to help stay slim and trim.
Fourteen different Metrecal milkshake flavors that taste just like milkshakes.
With a protein, hungry dieters need.
To help keep slim, have Metrecal for lunch.
Just lunch.
Then at night, you can enjoy dinner.
Eat sensibly, but eat the food you like.
Join the Metrecal for lunch bunch.”
That's classic.
It's so cringe.
It's so like the slim ones.
Oh, it's just so gross.
What are the visuals for that one?
Because I could only hear it and not see it.
What does the ad look like?
Yeah, so you have a group of people skiing down a ski slope, and then they're so happy, and then they all come down the ski slope, and they pop open cans of their Metrecal, and they're sipping away, and making it seem like it's so delicious.
I mean, it really was.
It really was kind of the first iteration of Slim Fast.
And so many other companies took the Metrecal product as a template and started their own form of liquid, drinkable meals.
I mean, this really was a decade where diet food moved to be liquid in a way where people started using shakes and things like that as meal replacements.
You mentioned Slim Fast earlier.
That's the big one that comes to my head.
But there's been a lot, right?
There's been a ton.
Yeah, there were lots of other brands in the 1960s.
But unsurprisingly, even though Metrecal gained popularity super, super fast, it started to be criticized pretty heavily a few years after it launched because people reported being dizzy and having digestive issues and feeling lightheaded.
You know, many of the typical side effects of being undernourished.
And then years after it was launched, 1977, the FDA actually launched an investigation into Metrecal because there were reports of so many adverse health issues with the drink.
So, it was actually banned in 1978 completely, which is why I can't give you a can so you can try it with bourbon.
So, it was banned and not because it had a specific ingredient in it that was causing health issues, but just the idea of the program it recommended, having the low-calorie diet.
There was actually some like government intervention into restrictive dieting.
Well, yes, exactly.
And it was banned specifically because Metrocal was linked to 59 deaths, which seemed to be related to the low quality of minerals and protein in the drink, resulting in individuals actually being deficient in potassium.
So, they were so undernourished that their potassium became so low, it actually caused heart problems.
So, yeah, it got pretty gnarly pretty quick.
It's still interesting to me, though, that there was some intervention here, because certainly there are a lot of companies that would love for you to eat only their product to this day that would cause the same issues.
Sure.
Should we move on to the 70s?
Let's do it.
Every time.
How many times can you hear the song and it doesn't get worse?
It just gets better.
It just gets better.
So we are solidly in the 1970s, and our diet food of the 1970s is cocaine.
No, I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding.
I was really hoping you weren't kidding.
No.
Oh, no, okay.
It's not cocaine.
Okay, our diet food of the 1970s is pineapple.
Pineapple?
We got grapefruit and pineapple.
Wow.
Okay.
Why pineapple?
That is the right question because in 1970, there was a book published called, oh my gosh, I'm getting so giggly, the sexy pineapple diet.
Oh, wow.
The sexy pineapple diet.
This is awesome.
Tell me about that.
So, once I gained my composure, the sexy pineapple diet was actually written by a man named Sten Hegler.
Hold, hold up.
Say the name again.
Sten Hegler.
Sten Hegler.
Okay.
Proceed.
Thank you.
Sten Hegler.
And his wife, Inga, they were...
Oh, now I just feel like I'm laughing at a culturally normal name from a different country.
I'm sorry.
I like the name.
I just haven't heard it before.
It's a wonderful name.
So, the Sexy Pineapple Diet was written by Sten Hegler and his wife, Inga.
Sten was a Danish psychologist and also a sexologist.
Get it, Sten.
Right?
So, as a psychologist and sexologist, Sten decided to write a diet book because why not?
And he claimed that this Sexy Pineapple Diet would help people both slim down, but also improve their sexual vitality.
So, lots of promises in this book.
And now I'm confident there's going to be a link between Sten, Doug Graham, Freely the Banana Girl.
Like, I know it's there.
I just have to research it.
Matt, this book is incredibly hard to find.
I actually wanted to try to find a copy of the Sexy Pineapple Diet so that I could read about what the specific recommendations were.
But it is really hard to find.
However, I want to show you a picture of the cover so you can see it and describe it for us, please.
All right.
So can you read the read what it says on the bottom to the Sexy Pineapple Diet, the revolutionary new method of keeping slim and erogenic, erogenic.
What does that mean?
I don't know that that's a real word.
100%.
I think he's going for, you know, erogenous, so I think what he's saying here is that you're going to gain sexual vitality or sexual capacity by following this specific diet plan.
Okay.
So the picture on the cover is a woman with, would you call it a Bob haircut?
What is this haircut?
She's eating a slice of pineapple.
Her facial expression looks like she's like a nervous squirrel who just got caught doing something.
It's, it's very strange for this book cover.
It's so bizarre.
And the diet itself essentially consists of eating nothing but pineapple for two days out of the week.
So you pick two days of the week, you eat only pineapple.
Some versions of the plan say you're allowed to eat other foods on your pineapple only days as long as you keep it under 500 total calories.
And according to an interview with Stan Hegeler, the diet wasn't based on any scientific evidence.
The author simply liked pineapple.
Okay, all right, Stan.
And pineapple continues to have this aura of superfood, weight loss, fat burn around it.
I don't know about you, Matt, but I've been asked about the health benefits of pineapple before, or if the bromelain, which are the enzymes found in pineapple, have some special magic health promoting benefits.
Of course, pineapple doesn't have anything magical about it.
There's nothing that burns fat or anything like that.
But again, I think that the appeal of pineapple as kind of like a superfood or maybe a diet food definitely persists.
It does.
It does.
It's another one we've talked about in the past and the promises of detox with pineapple and the enzymes within it.
So yeah.
Okay.
Good to know where it comes from.
Thank you.
Sexy Pineapple Diet.
I'm ready to move on from this one.
This is a little too weird.
I know.
It's getting like weirder and weirder.
Let's go to the 1980s.
One of my favorite music decades.
So I am so excited to see what you picked.
Oh, that was good, so good.
So you should know what our 1980s diet food is, because you actually mentioned it at the top of the show.
Oh, we're up to lean cuisine?
We're up to lean cuisine.
How could we talk about diet foods without talking about lean cuisine?
Absolutely, necessary.
So lean cuisine was actually first launched by Stouffer's in 1981, and it was really created as a quote unquote healthier alternative to Stouffer's frozen meals.
You know, it was supposed to be like a lower calorie, lower fat version of what were very popular frozen entrees at the time.
And lean cuisine became incredibly popular, incredibly quickly, really because of the marketing around it.
I definitely did not know this, Matt, but lean cuisine was actually named and marketed by a super famous ad exec named George Lois.
Have you ever heard of him before?
No.
Okay, he's the guy who created the I want my MTV campaign.
So he's huge in the marketing world.
These are his two big ones, lean cuisine and I want my MTV.
That's right.
That's what he has on his resume.
I want my MTV and lean cuisine.
It was so popular, in fact, that lean cuisine actually tripled their first year sales projections.
And demand was so high that Nestle, who actually owned Stouffer's at the time, had to ration the distribution of lean cuisine meals to grocery stores.
Because as soon as grocery stores would get deliveries, they'd sell out.
So it was that popular.
And kind of like the diet drinks, now we've got diet frozen foods, which also goes on to birth a million diet frozen foods.
This is the first big one, though.
That's right.
And they are all really low in calories.
So all of the first 10 lean cuisine meals were 300 calories or less.
They all had to meet the 10 grams of fat or less criteria because lean is in the title.
So the FDA actually considered that a nutrient content claim.
So we're talking ultra low fat, ultra low calorie, and really marketed heavily towards women.
I mean, the early lean cuisine commercials from the 1980s were targeted directly at women who wanted to slim down and lose weight.
Yes, so tell me more about that marketing.
How did they try to accomplish that?
Yeah, it was all about portraying women slimming down so that they could attract more male attention.
There was a big campaign around, you know, get more satisfaction from your meals.
You know, actually, why don't we play a 1980s lean cuisine ad so that people can get a sense of what I'm talking about?
Damn, that's a hell of a jingle.
No, Matt, you're not supposed to like it.
I love it though.
Will you describe visually so people can get a sense of what that commercial looks like too?
Yeah, so I could see this one and there's scenes of Ling Cuisine meals being presented on a table, but then it's intercut with scenes from what looks like a Baywatch style beach action movie.
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely like playing on that super 1980s Baywatch vibe for sure.
So they're pushing this idea of more satisfaction through a 300 calorie, low fat frozen dinner.
How do they just say more satisfaction when you're clearly getting less satisfaction?
That makes no sense.
It makes no sense at all.
But it was so big that people would actually go to their grocery store when they heard that the store got a delivery of lean cuisine because they were in such demand.
And so, you know, again, lean cuisine stayed big throughout the 80s.
They actually, I don't know, probably some people will remember this.
They started putting the Weight Watchers points on their meals and the exchanges on their meals so that people who were doing Weight Watchers, which was also really big at that time, would kind of buy into, oh, look, I can actually not have to count my points or exchanges.
And so I think the other thing that happened is that Lean Cuisine got really kind of tied to Weight Watchers in a big way.
And then both of those things became huge in that decade.
Yeah.
And Lean Cuisine, it's not like something that resurged, it's just still around, right?
You can still buy it in the grocery store?
You can.
And I will say that sales of Lean Cuisine over the last few decades have declined.
I think Lean Cuisine was and has been doing something that many brands are doing, which is trying to pivot away from being associated with diets.
So Lean Cuisine has definitely tried to reinvent themselves several times.
I found one quote from someone named Chris Flora, who is Lean Cuisine's brand manager, who said in 2015 that diets are dead.
And so they've really tried to kind of market Lean Cuisine as for health or for wellness or being high in protein.
Even though when I went on to the Lean Cuisine website, you can still find some of these meals that are under 200 calories.
So I'm not quite sure how diets can be dead.
And you can also be telling people that 200 calories is a meal, but that is what Lean Cuisine is doing.
So their next play is going to be, no, actually a serving size is four dinners.
So please buy four of our products for all your meals.
Right.
And the thing is, is that I think frozen foods and frozen meals can actually be a really great option.
And so I have nothing against the fact that these are frozen meals.
I just have something against the fact that it's not enough food.
It's just not a meal.
I wouldn't even consider 200 calories a snack in most cases.
All right, so are we ready to leave Lean Cuisine and head to the 1990s?
Let's do it.
That is one of my favorite songs of all time.
That is the perfect song.
I love that song.
And that one also, I can hear that song a thousand times and still love it.
Yes.
All right.
So 90s, I'm going to start definitely knowing all the foods you mentioned at this point.
So what's our food of the decade?
Well, do you want to guess?
Because yeah, now we're in 1990s, so you should be more familiar with these next few.
Is it Special K?
Oh, that would have been a good one.
No, for me, there was only one diet food that I could have chosen for the 1990s, and that is Lay's Wow Chips.
Oh my gosh.
Do you remember?
Do you remember?
Do you remember Wow Chips?
I haven't heard that in a minute.
Remind me, what was the weird ingredient in Lay's Wow Chips?
Okay.
So, wow, I feel like so many of our listeners just like inhaled because they're like, oh, I remember this.
So Wow Chips were introduced by Frito Lay in 1998.
And they were marketed as a lower fat, lower calorie potato chip.
And they were so big that they grossed $347 million the first year that they were released.
Damn, it's a lot of money.
Yeah.
And if you remember, the reason that these chips were lower fat, lower calorie is because they were made with something called olestra, which is essentially a fat substitute that's made from sucrose and vegetable oil.
But because of its molecular structure, we can't absorb olestra.
It's too large to be digested.
And so it passes through the body.
So you are not absorbing the calories from the fat or from the sucrose.
Right.
So this had some interesting digestive side effects associated with it, right?
Did you ever eat these?
Do you remember eating these?
Because I do.
I do not.
Tell me about your experience.
Well, I can just, I don't think I ate them a lot because I was, let's see, I would have been teenager at this point, but I remember trying them.
I actually remember thinking that they didn't taste horrible, but then yes, what happened pretty soon after they were released is that there started being lots of reports of very unpleasant side effects.
So people were reporting having bloating, abdominal cramping, diarrhea, nausea, and the number of complaints started to grow exponentially.
So, I am going to read you a quote from, this is from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and this has to do with the number of complaints that were launched around wow chips.
It says, quote, the FDA and Procter & Gamble were inundated with 16,700 complaints from consumers that products made with Olestra were giving them problems from flatulence to stained underwear.
A meeting of Washington's Center for Science in the Public Interest, which had criticized Procter & Gamble for hyping Olestra, featured video testimony of people afflicted by the molecule.
One claimed the cramps of snacking were comparable to the early stages of labor.
The center even shared a study commissioned by Frito-Lay, which was meant to be confidential, that demonstrated anal oil leakage was experienced by 3-9% of study subjects.
Anal leakage?
No, that's not what you want when you're eating chips.
That's not what anybody wants anytime, Matt.
Aren't you glad I didn't make you read that quote?
See, I could have.
You could have.
In our quote war, I could have made you read the sentence, anal oil leakage, but I did not.
See what a good friend I am?
You mean you're just an unworthy competitor.
Now I know I have the upper hand in this battle.
That's all it means.
That's right.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
So as you can imagine, this was not good for sales.
People will probably remember that wow chips were then required to have a product warning that read, olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools.
Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients.
Vitamins A, D, E, K have been added because that's actually something I didn't know is that olestra actually causes you to lose fat soluble vitamins because the vitamins are binding to the olestra and then being excreted.
So not only were these chips causing massive digestive issues, but they were also causing you to lose important nutrients.
So they just bound more fat soluble vitamins to the chips that you could also poop out.
Just get rid of the chips, people.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Which did finally happen.
So WOW chips obviously never recovered.
They were renamed light products in 2004, I am sure, to try to pivot away from the WOW label that so many of us had negative associations with.
And then they were finally discontinued in 2010.
But I think many of us who grew up in the 90s will remember these chips very, very well.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's a good one.
Good choice.
More fun to talk about than Special K.
All right.
You ready to head to the 2000s?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm back in college, baby.
Yeah, we are.
Well, I'm older than you.
Not by a bunch.
All right, we're in the 2000s.
I still want you to guess.
I like having you guess.
This is also one that to me is like, I couldn't not talk about this in this episode, but I'll be interested to see what you guess for the 2000s.
I have nothing that's like coming right to my head.
Like, oh, it's obviously that.
You want me to say it?
All right, say it.
Okay, it's 100 calorie packs.
Oh, okay, yeah, good choice.
Wow, that's just a novel invention in the last 20 years, is putting 100 calories of nuts in a little pack.
That's right.
Well, it's actually, it started in 2004, when Kraft introduced their 100 calorie packs of Oreo thin crisps.
And this is another one.
Did you ever eat these?
I remember eating 10 packs at a time of those things.
Absolutely.
Yeah, well, me too.
I remember being like, I think I'll have three of these.
That sounds great.
Seems appropriate, yeah.
And this is another product that got so big, so fast.
I read one estimate that Kraft sold around $75 million worth of 100 calorie packs in the first year.
And then this was another product that got so big so quickly that so many other companies started imitating it.
So I have a vivid memory of the 2000s of walking down the snack aisle, and you could get anything in 100 calorie pack, right?
General Mills products, Kellogg's products.
I mean, Doritos, Sun Chips, anything and everything was coming in 100 calorie packs.
So much more packaging.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I mean, so wasteful on that kind of front, but so big.
And I mean, again, this is something I remember.
And I just remember thinking about how gross the Oreos were because they weren't even real Oreos.
It wasn't like you were having like a really good double stuff Oreo.
It was this kind of like dry dehydrated Oreo like crisp wafer.
So the other vivid memory I have is just being like, why am I eating this not great Oreo version?
Especially because classic Oreos are so good, because it's really one of the best inventions of modern food science.
I mean, it's kind of a perfect cookie that stands on its own.
I remember watching like a Bon Appetit test kitchen about Claire trying to like reproduce an Oreo cookie, and she had the hardest time doing it because they've just like perfected the actual way the cookie breaks, and how it interacts with milk, and the flavor, the like deep cocoa flavor of it.
It's so freaking good.
Yeah, oh, for sure.
Do you have a favorite Oreo?
Because I do.
Classic.
Don't give me a vanilla golden Oreo, please.
Classic.
No, I would never give you a vanilla golden Oreo, but I will say that the thin mint Oreos are so bomb.
I freaking love them.
That's a good choice.
I respect you for that.
Thank you.
I like how if I had chosen a vanilla golden Oreo, you're just going to end the show.
It was not going to be okay with you.
What's your technique for interacting with an Oreo?
Do you just eat it?
I just eat it.
I don't dip it in milk.
No, I don't take it apart.
I don't dip it in milk.
I don't like liquid, like with cookies and stuff like that.
So no, I just grab myself a stack.
Thin mint.
I actually do love double stuff as well.
Yeah, and I just eat them straight out.
Are you like a tear the top off person?
I'm kind of like a push the sides together, so it kind of separates a little bit, just so I can dunk it in the milk, and more milk can get in there.
And yeah, I've got a whole thing.
We all have a whole thing.
I have a whole Oreo process that I never knew about.
Yeah.
Okay, so back to 100 Calorie Packs.
This is another product where the advertising...
I'm actually not going to play any of the ads from the time, but one of the things that I remember about this product is that the advertising, again, was really targeted at women in a pretty demeaning way.
I mean, these advertisements would show women screaming in excitement and running after trucks carrying 100 Calorie Packs of different snacks, as if this is what women get very excited about.
I mean, it's really kind of diet culture at its most abhorrent, in my opinion, making it seem like just women are so focused and excited just to get 100 Calorie Pack of shitty Oreos.
But it was really also tied to the guilt-free snacking movement of the early 2000s.
This is the time where I really feel like guilt, and that word particularly, was kind of intertwined with snacking in a really big way as well.
Another thing that persists to this day, there's companies whose whole branding is reduced guilt products.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
We've mentioned this on the show before is that you see guilt-free or guiltless.
These terms I think were very, very much typical of the early aughts when it came to food choices and marketing and snacking.
And the truth is that while you and I are joking around about our favorite Oreos, these types of 100-calorie packs, they can be really harmful.
I came across a blog post from 2019 where the writer described their experience of interacting with 100-calorie packs as a young teenager.
And so I'll go ahead and read you a quote from that blog, Matt.
It says, quote, I don't remember calories being part of my life before 100-calorie packs were introduced, but as soon as they came onto my radar, calorie counting became my obsession.
It wasn't a healthy habit for a 15-year-old to be learning.
I was already questioning the attractiveness of my own body, and the new snacks taught me to feel guilty for consuming any snack that clocked in over 100 calories.
Yeah, that's a paradigm we've heard so many times in practice working with clients.
It's sort of the perception of what the right amount of food to eat is.
Sometimes these companies really force that on people, especially young kids and teens who not like anybody needs to be thinking about this, but certainly, it's a rude way to enter the world being told that there's a right amount of crackers or nuts or whatever it might be to eat, especially when we talked about serving sizes and how those are developed and the sort of fuzzy research efforts that go into figuring out what a serving size is, but then kind of ignoring it and being like, well, we're just going to stuff 100 calories in here.
And if you open a second pack, you might feel like you're doing something wrong, but it has nothing to do with any recommendations or nutrition ideas.
That's exactly right.
And I think the 100 calorie pack was so clever from a diet food, diet culture perspective, because I think our brains do like nice round numbers.
And I think this idea of 100 calories was very appealing, in part because it was low, but in part because it was very controlled and this nice, easy number to remember.
Yeah, no, that's a really good point.
It's getting me thinking too about how now in the modern era, there's this shift, the diet culture conversation is super anti-processed foods and ultra-processed foods.
But corporations fueled by diet motives have been pushing really super-processed packaged foods on us for a really long time.
And now they're going, don't eat any of those things anymore.
It's just like, you've been taking us for a whirlwind tour of food culture here.
We find ourselves in such a strange place now, and so much of our problem has just been informed by the same actors that are trying to sell us shit.
I could not agree with you more.
And so, let us leave 100 calorie packs, which I will say sales did decline.
They are not as big as they used to be, thank goodness.
But let us leave them in the in the aughts, and let us head to the 2010s.
Never say you can't have it.
You.
All right, here we are in the 2010s.
2010s, some good music, some good music.
And so my pick for the 2010s is cauliflower rice.
Yeah, that's a good one.
That's a good one.
I know, I had to, I mean, I had to.
And can I tell you the most interesting fact that I learned about cauliflower rice in my research?
Of course.
Cauliflower rice was invented by Harrison Ford's son.
Really, Ethel Ford?
That's the stupidest thing I've said.
The Ethel Ford.
All right, why, what?
Indiana Jones' kid invented cauliflower rice?
What's going on here?
Okay, so let me tell you about this.
So Harrison Ford's son, Ben Ford, is a chef, something else I had no idea about.
And in 1998, Ben Ford was a chef in California.
He was evidently just conceptualizing a dish the way that chefs do.
And he created a component of a dish that he called cauliflower couscous.
So he didn't call it cauliflower rice.
But this is essentially the kind of first appearance of cauliflower rice or cauliflower couscous that we see in the last 25, 30 years.
Is he like a fancy chef where this was like a cool new interpretation playing with ingredients or was this a diet food?
No, no, it's so funny because they evidently interviewed.
There's been a lot of interviews with him about this particular food component.
People have asked him, you know, did you know that this was going to take off?
Did you create this to be eaten as a carbohydrate substitute?
And he was just like, no, I was just trying to make a good lamb dish.
That was literally his reply.
I love that, because cauliflower is awesome, and it's fun to experiment with food, but it sounds like his motives were not to replace rice with something new and spawn pizza crusts and all sorts of inventions over the years.
No, I mean, really, the other reason, I mean, the real reason I think that cauliflower rice gained such popularity is because of the rise of the paleo diet.
So in 2002, the book, The Paleo Diet was published by Lauren Cordain, and paleo started to get super big in the early aughts and then became super big in the 2010s.
And so you had all of these paleo, you know, recipes and blogs and books coming out that recommended eating cauliflower rice instead of regular rice because, as I'm sure you're aware, most people are on the paleo diet, you're not supposed to eat anything grain containing.
And so this was the kind of classic paleo substitution for regular rice.
Yeah, and the popularity couldn't have happened without Dr.
Atkins and the low carb craze.
And so this was really a carb replacement.
And if you were a paleo adherent, it was a grain replacement.
But I think the larger context is it's a low carb version of something to put on your plate in place of rice.
That's exactly right.
I think to say that cauliflower rice is anything but huge would be an understatement because you can find it everywhere now.
I see it in every supermarket.
But I will say that I didn't actually know that cauliflower rice has been pretty controversial.
I don't know if you've ever heard of the like controversy between the cauliflower industry and the rice industry, Matt.
What?
No.
I think that cauliflower rice really cut into the market share of the rice industry.
And that makes a lot of sense.
And so there was a statement issued in 2017 that essentially called for cauliflower rice to be called something different.
This is a quote from Betsy Ward, who was the president and CEO of USA Rice.
I mean, who knew that was a thing, but that's who she is.
And she said, quote, only rice is rice, vegetables are vegetables, and they shouldn't try to pretend they are anything else.
I read that in my snarkiest voice.
Do you like that?
I was so angry.
Cauliflower.
Okay, so we've got a beef.
That's what this is called, right?
This is a beef.
This was a beef.
Yes, this was a beef.
And now, actually, you will probably notice that it's often labeled riced cauliflower instead of cauliflower rice, because many states do not allow cauliflower rice to call itself rice because of how upset the rice industry was at cauliflower.
I feel like the cool move from the rice industry would just be to issue a two-word statement that's like, nice try.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just like throw down, like mic drop it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just kind of leave it there.
Okay.
So cauliflower rice is our official diet food of the 2010s.
It's still with us, as most people are aware, but I think the craze is kind of leveled off at this point.
And there's, I think, more of an appreciation for rice rice.
Well, and I think that as the paleo diet has become a little less popular, I mean, I think paleo is still pretty big, but I don't think we're at peak paleo anymore.
And so I think as paleo interest has declined some, so has cauliflower rice.
And it's one of those things where people like it, go for it.
But I also think regular rice is great, too.
I think cauliflower rice is not great.
I agree with you.
I don't...
Taste preference wise.
Yeah.
I have really only tried it once, and I actually love cauliflower, but I just thought to myself, if I'm going to eat cauliflower, I want to eat roasted cauliflower with olive oil and salt on it.
And if I want rice, I want rice.
That was my feelings about it.
You know, when you try to conceptualize it as the grain on your plate, it's too wet.
It's not right.
It's not appropriate.
It's too mushy, yeah.
And it doesn't absorb sauce well.
That's my big problem.
Okay.
So we're done with the 2010s, which means we're up to the current era here.
That's right.
And I didn't pick a diet food for the 2020s, because it's not this decade isn't over yet.
But I don't know.
I wanted to ask you if you had to choose a diet food of the 2020s so far, what would you choose?
Like what stands out to you as a very recent diet food trend?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
And I thought you wanted me to pick a music cue from the 2020s, and I did.
And I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what is the music of today when we look back in 20 years.
And I'm having the same conundrum trying to think about what is the food we're going to look back on and think is the diet food of today.
But can I play my music selection for you?
Of course you can.
Okay, I like it, I like it.
Yeah, okay, Cezza, it was the only right answer for me because it sounds modern, it sounds like it's happening now, and so much of music these days sounds like the past decades.
But what is the diet food that feels so modern?
Okay, so my pick for the 2020s is, I'm just gonna guess that in two years, all this shit comes back around and it's grapefruit again.
Okay, okay, no, I actually thought about that too.
I thought it is very likely that we could just move into an old school iteration of the cabbage soup diet or the grapefruit diet reinvented.
So I could see that happening too.
There is like the cyclical nature to it.
Do you think that we're in a different place now though?
Like, I think there's this idea that, you know, times are changing and people are waking up to the problems of diet culture and restrictive eating, or, you know, imbuing food with too much magical property.
What do you think?
Are we in a new place or are we just damned to keep repeating this history?
That's a hard question for me to answer because I would like to think that we're moving away from, you know, centering diet foods in a major way.
And I think that we have evidence, you know, for example, the fact that things like 100 calorie packs don't sell as well anymore, or that lean cuisine has had to reinvent itself over and over to try to stay relevant.
I mean, these are all indications to me that perhaps we're moving in a direction away from, you know, kind of like peak diet culture.
But I don't know, because then I see things like cloud bread or I see things like cauliflower waffles, and then I don't know.
So I think that I'm hopeful but unsure.
Yeah, that's how I feel too.
Hopeful but unsure.
Yeah, I think there's maybe a larger mission to what we're trying to do here today, which is really reflect on all these iterations of diet foods for a reason.
And like, what do they do to us as a society when we have to see these in the grocery store day in and day out?
So how are you feeling about diet foods now, having done all this searching?
Well, I think what's so interesting, and yes, I mean, you're exactly right.
I think the reason we wanted to structure this episode the way that we did is so that we could have a conversation about diet foods.
And what I found was so interesting is that when you hold up and talk about diet foods next to each other, one right after the other, and you talk about how terrible they can make people feel, right?
Because either people are eating so little or their food ingredients that they're eating is making them feel digestively horrible.
It just really speaks to how unappealing diet foods can be, how unappetizing they can be, how they can result in us feeling both physically and mentally kind of terrible.
I think that there's the felt experience of eating these foods.
And I think a lot about the symbolism of it.
If you're choosing products that are outwardly diet focused, or making big claims on the packaging about how few carbohydrates are in there, it's just repeatedly sending this message, this sort of symbolism of, you are eating in service of the goal of weight loss, or you're eating in service of feeling a sense of control over your body shape and size.
Do you know what I mean?
I would agree with that 100%.
And the other thing that it makes me think about is how diet foods can really change how we behave and interact with foods.
And what I mean by that, Matt, is that I think the first thing that I often notice is that people are eating a lot of diet foods, low-cal foods.
They can become, I mean, not everyone, but you can become definitely more food seeking.
Because if you're constantly eating foods that you don't like as much or that aren't as appealing, you're essentially not satiated.
You're not enjoying food as much.
And the consequence of that for many people is that they're thinking about food more because they're just generally more dissatisfied with their food choices.
Yeah, and there's been a lot of research about deprivation and how it relates to food seeking behaviors over the years.
We can feel pretty confident that when people are intentionally depriving themselves, that's going to lead to fixation on eating a certain way, could lead to over consumption of certain foods, past the point of comfortable fullness or binge eating behaviors.
And so this is something we see play out both like anecdotally in our experience working with clients, but also in the literature.
No, that's an excellent point, because I think this idea of increased cravings and thinking about food more, because either number one, you could be hungry because you haven't eaten enough, think like 200 calorie lean cuisine meal, or because you've constantly chosen a less appealing option, or you've specifically avoided a certain food.
This really does play out in the literature.
And so I think what I'll have you do, Matt, is actually read a quote.
This is from a 2020 article titled The Psychology of Food Cravings, The Role of Food Deprivation.
Quote, one group of studies investigated a selective food deprivation during which participants were instructed to refrain from eating certain types of foods.
This type of experimental manipulation is sometimes also called a hedonic deprivation, as only specific foods are avoided.
While consumption of all other foods are unrestricted, and thus total energy consumption is assumed to be unaffected.
Some studies included a deprivation of chocolate-containing foods, but single studies on other types of foods are also available.
The deprivation periods range from one day to 14 days, and all studies investigated university students.
Almost all studies found that the deprivation increased cravings for the avoided food.
Yes, exactly.
So the deprivation can sort of create the state of craving, but it leaves people feeling so confused.
I think it's a great point, Matt, and I think the science of all this is very complex.
I mean, now we're in to the psychology of food cravings.
All of this is not simple, but I do think it's really interesting to think about the role of deprivation, the role of being undernourished, in how we're thinking about or relating to food.
I think there's a lot of value to digging into that.
The other thing I guess I want to say too is that diet culture doesn't get to own these foods.
And what I mean by that is, you know, you started out at the top of the show saying, you know, how much you love grapefruit.
And I do too, like grapefruit is freaking delicious.
And I always want to put out there that people should be eating foods that they like and enjoy.
And just because a food falls into like a quote unquote diet category or has been part of a diet, like cabbage soup, for example, doesn't mean we can't eat intuitively and still love the heck out of those foods.
And so I put that out there too, because I think there I mean, I've been asked the question before, you know, is it OK that I like Halo top ice cream?
And I always am like, yeah, if you really like it and you enjoy it, go for it.
And if you want to have half a grapefruit with breakfast because you're like, this is delicious, that's an awesome thing.
That's very, very different than utilizing low calorie or imitation foods or unappealing foods in replacement of something you would want more.
Yeah, definitely.
All right.
Well, I don't have anything else to add.
What about you, Matt?
No, I think that this has been really fun.
This has been a blast.
And yeah.
All right.
So I came across in my research of 100 years of diet food.
I came across a very funny and what I think is very appropriate clip from a very funny comedian named Kevin James Thorton.
And so I say we go out on that.
What do you think?
Remember, like Subway convinced all of us that if you wanted to eat healthy in the 90s, eat as many foot long Subway sandwiches as you possibly can and pair it with Olestra chips.
Do you remember those?
There was a chip in the 90s that they chemically made like an oil that had no fat in it.
So they were chips that were like fat free, but they were still fried somehow.
And on the bag, it said, may cause anal leakage.
Why did half the room just chant that with me?
Like that was a memory from the 90s.
It was like may cause anal leakage.
Peek-a-boo.
That was a weird thing for us to all come together around us.
But also kind of beautiful.
So thank you.
Nutrition For Mortals is a production of Oceanside Nutrition, a real life nutrition counseling practice in beautiful Newburyport, Massachusetts, where we provide individual nutrition counseling, both in person and online via telehealth.
Feel free to learn more about our practice at oceansidenutrition.com.
If you want to send in a show idea, you can email us at nutritionformortals@gmail.com.
We're on Instagram at Nutrition For Mortals.
If you're digging the show, tell a friend.
Maybe give us a nice review on Apple Podcasts if you can.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you next time.
