Speaker 1: It is in consequence of this powerful force of habit,
Speaker 1: that of late. Indeed, during my own lifetime and memory,
Speaker 1: three evil customs have gradually gained foothold in our own Italy.
Speaker 1: The first of these is adulation and ceremony, the second
Speaker 1: is hersy, and the third is the intemperance. You're listening
Speaker 1: to the words of an Italian merchant named Luigi Cornaro,
Speaker 1: voice by an actor, because Luigi himself died in fifteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, and if there was one thing that Luigi
Speaker 1: was really into, it was his diet. He calls eating
Speaker 1: too much that evil, and the fact that it's so
Speaker 1: common a wicked thing, and yet society at the time
Speaker 1: doesn't treat it that way. Over eating is exalted as
Speaker 1: a virtuous thing and even as a mark of distinction,
Speaker 1: while temperance, also known as moderate eating, is stigmatized and
Speaker 1: scorned as dishonorable and as befitting the miserly alone. Luigi
Speaker 1: is sort of the original diet guru. What you're hearing
Speaker 1: is the beginning of his book The Art of Living Long.
Speaker 1: In it, he points out that overeating is gluttony, a
Speaker 1: literal sin. He's arguing that eating less is not just better,
Speaker 1: but also more moral. He says that men are abandoning
Speaker 1: the path of virtue, following one advice e roade, which
Speaker 1: leads them, though they see it not to strange and
Speaker 1: fatal chronic infirmities through which they grow pre maturely old.
Speaker 1: Before they reach the age of forty, their health has
Speaker 1: been completely worn out. Basically, Luigi is saying that people
Speaker 1: are over eating their way into an early grave. But
Speaker 1: he actually says men because again it is the hundreds
Speaker 1: wretched and unhappy Italy. Canst thou not see that intemperance
Speaker 1: kills every year amongst the people as great a number
Speaker 1: as would perish during the time of a most dreadful pestilence,
Speaker 1: or by the sword or fire of many bloody wars.
Speaker 1: He's saying that gluteny kills as many people as plagues
Speaker 1: and wars. Clearly, Luigi Cornaro was a big fan of
Speaker 1: eating less. But the reason that I'm taking us on
Speaker 1: a journey to Renaissance Italy is that this early diet
Speaker 1: became a really big deal, not just at the time
Speaker 1: but also over the years, and its success marks a
Speaker 1: key moment in our transformation from a culture focus on
Speaker 1: health to one that was and still is obsessed with weight.
Speaker 1: Eating less also known as dieting, has had a hold
Speaker 1: on us for a long time. But for a while,
Speaker 1: people saw eating as a way to become healthier and
Speaker 1: for everyone in society to be generally better off. It
Speaker 1: wasn't really about losing weight the way it is today.
Speaker 1: Case in point Luigi Cornaro, who first started overhauling the
Speaker 1: way he ate to improve his health. Luigi was sick
Speaker 1: and pretty unhappy until around the age of forty. He
Speaker 1: has symptoms of gout, all kinds of stomach issues, and
Speaker 1: what he described hibs as a persistent low fever. He
Speaker 1: says he tried almost everything to feel better, but none
Speaker 1: of it worked. He says his only hope is that
Speaker 1: death will put him out of his misery. Then his
Speaker 1: doctors have an idea. My physicians declared there was but
Speaker 1: one remedy left for my eels. That remedy was the
Speaker 1: temperate and orderly life. The prescription was to eat less.
Speaker 1: My physicians warned me, if I neglected to apply this
Speaker 1: remedy in a short time, it would be too late
Speaker 1: to derive any benefit from it. For in a few
Speaker 1: months I should certainly die. This was to be clear,
Speaker 1: a pretty radical approach to eating at the time. To
Speaker 1: hear Luigi tell it, well off people like him were
Speaker 1: eating and drinking large amounts of whatever they enjoyed, but
Speaker 1: Luigi is desperate it, so he follows their advice. He
Speaker 1: cuts out the rich, delicious food and copious wine he
Speaker 1: had been feasting on, and he eventually settles on a
Speaker 1: diet that is simple and austere. Just twelve ounces of
Speaker 1: food a day, an egg yolk, bread, a little meat,
Speaker 1: and some soup. That's it. He also has about fourteen
Speaker 1: ounces of wine. Hey, a man can't live on egg
Speaker 1: yolks alone. After a few days of eating less, Luigi
Speaker 1: says he's already feeling much better. Within a year, he's
Speaker 1: a new man. So long stomach pain, goodbye fever. He's
Speaker 1: in perfect health, and by his account, continues on that
Speaker 1: way for decades. By his eighties, Luigi says he feels strong,
Speaker 1: he can get onto his horse without help and easily
Speaker 1: climbs a hill on foot, and he doesn't talk about
Speaker 1: his weight in the book, only his health. They also
Speaker 1: see how I'm ever cheerful, happy and contented, free from
Speaker 1: all perturbations of his soul, and from every vexatious thought.
Speaker 1: Instead of these, joy and peace have fixed their abode
Speaker 1: in my heart and never depart from it. At one point,
Speaker 1: his family, friends and doctors actually become worried that Luigi
Speaker 1: is not eating enough, so he adds two more ounces
Speaker 1: of food and two more ounces of wine to his
Speaker 1: incredibly strict daily meal plan. It does not go well.
Speaker 1: He writes that he just starts feeling sick again. However,
Speaker 1: I recovered God be praised solely by returning to my
Speaker 1: former rule of life ah the power of dieting while
Speaker 1: dining on egg yokes and wine blu which he actually
Speaker 1: leads a really long life, especially for the sixteenth century.
Speaker 1: He lives to see his daughter grow up and get married.
Speaker 1: He meets his eleven grandchildren and watches them grow up too.
Speaker 1: At the age of eighty three, he decides to share
Speaker 1: his wisdom with others so that they too may defeat
Speaker 1: the evils of intemperance and live a long and happy life.
Speaker 1: So he writes this sixteenth century dieting manifesto. I have
Speaker 1: seen many of my dearest friends and associates, men endowed
Speaker 1: with splendid gifts of intellect and noble qualities of heart
Speaker 1: fall in the prime of life victims of this dread tyrant. Therefore,
Speaker 1: to prevent so great an evil for the future, I
Speaker 1: have decided to point out in this brief treatise what
Speaker 1: a fatal abuse is, the vice of intemperance, and easily
Speaker 1: it may be removed and replaced by the temperate habits
Speaker 1: of life. As Luigi gets even older, he says he's
Speaker 1: still in good health, and now he's cutting down his
Speaker 1: meals even further. Sometimes he's eating just one egg yoke
Speaker 1: over the course of two days. What Luigi is doing
Speaker 1: may sound pretty out there, and it is half an
Speaker 1: egg yolk a day is obviously not enough food to
Speaker 1: live on. But in other ways it's actually a fairly
Speaker 1: modern dieting tactic. He is restricting his calories in a
Speaker 1: pretty extreme way by cutting out whole food groups and
Speaker 1: eating very small portions. It's something a lot of people
Speaker 1: still do today. Luigi has had lots of fans over
Speaker 1: the years, including the inventor Thomas at us In. He
Speaker 1: also had lots of skeptics, like the well known German
Speaker 1: philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that rather than leading to
Speaker 1: long life, Luigi Cornaro's diet actually shortened lives. Luigi keeps
Speaker 1: writing about his diet. The collected essays are published as
Speaker 1: a book called The Art of Living Long. The book
Speaker 1: takes off, helped along by a relatively new invention, the
Speaker 1: printing press, and like I said before, Luigi's treatise becomes
Speaker 1: a sensation. It's been called the first best selling diet
Speaker 1: book ever. It is still sold to this day. It
Speaker 1: seems like people are still reading this book because they
Speaker 1: want to learn from Luigi's philosophy, even if they aren't
Speaker 1: going to start on the exact same diet. And Luigi
Speaker 1: did in fact live long, though there's some disagreement about
Speaker 1: whether he died at or lived to be as old
Speaker 1: as a hundred and four. Either way, not bad. But
Speaker 1: the reason I've spent so much time telling you about
Speaker 1: a sixteenth century Italian merchant with a love for eggs
Speaker 1: is that the diet is a long, long tradition. Luigi
Speaker 1: story is a model for pretty much every blockbuster diet
Speaker 1: that's ever existed. In this episode, I'm going to take
Speaker 1: you through the history of dieting, from how the ancient
Speaker 1: Greeks thought about it to the industrial revolutions. Shaping of
Speaker 1: modern diet culture. It turns out that the diet fads
Speaker 1: of today look a whole lot like the diet fads
Speaker 1: of yesterday. We'll also explore what led to the rise
Speaker 1: of mainstream dieting. You might assume that people were gaining
Speaker 1: a lot of weight at the time, but actually no.
Speaker 1: Society was just changing in such a way that people
Speaker 1: were afraid they might gain weight. We'll also dive into
Speaker 1: the psychology behind wacky diets and why we fall for
Speaker 1: them each and every time. I'm Bloomberg News health reporter
Speaker 1: em Accord and from the Prognosis podcast. This is losing It.
Speaker 1: The diet goes back at least two thousand years. Like
Speaker 1: many other things, we can trace it to the days
Speaker 1: of the ancient Greeks. But the Greeks didn't look at
Speaker 1: diet and exactly the way we do today. In fact,
Speaker 1: diet comes from a Greek word die eta, as in
Speaker 1: a way of life, healthy body, healthy mind, eat moderately,
Speaker 1: sleep and exercise, well, that kind of thing. They thought
Speaker 1: of it as a responsibility you had not only to yourself,
Speaker 1: but also your community. They had some other more out
Speaker 1: their ideas too. For example, the physician Hippocrates recommended a
Speaker 1: treatment regimen for weed that included walking around naked, sleeping
Speaker 1: on a hard bed, and vomiting after meals. The Greeks
Speaker 1: weren't into weighing out their food or counting their calories.
Speaker 1: They were concerned with good health and saw moderate eating
Speaker 1: as part of the path to getting there. But somewhere
Speaker 1: along the way we lost sight of that goal. Diets
Speaker 1: became about fitting into a smaller pair of pants. That
Speaker 1: shift started in the fifteen hundreds with Luigi, a very
Speaker 1: unwell person who came up with a diet, wrote a
Speaker 1: book about it and sold it in that way. It
Speaker 1: comes in the beginning of the own trend of people
Speaker 1: that work along that formula. This is Louise Foxcroft, a
Speaker 1: medical historian who wrote a book called Calories and Corsets,
Speaker 1: a History of dieting over two thousand years. She's describing
Speaker 1: what Luigi Cornaro did, but also what we still see
Speaker 1: play out to this day. A person transforms how they
Speaker 1: eat then goes on to tell the world about it,
Speaker 1: no matter how extreme, restrictive or seemingly nonsensical. The approach
Speaker 1: to understand how ideas about diet changed so dramatically we're
Speaker 1: jumping forward in time about three hundred years from Luigi
Speaker 1: to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was famously a
Speaker 1: time of economic transformation in the West. People's way of
Speaker 1: life started looking more like it does today. There are
Speaker 1: many new physicians coming out of the medical schools, and
Speaker 1: they've all got to make a living, so they begin
Speaker 1: to diversify into different areas of medicine. And it's an
Speaker 1: industrial age, so more and more people are moving from
Speaker 1: rural settings into urban settings. The media and the print
Speaker 1: market is taking off, and it all comes together to
Speaker 1: create the perfect conditions. Really better technology helps manufacturing and
Speaker 1: transportation expand. People are moving to cities and working in factories.
Speaker 1: Instead of mailing a letter, you could send a telegraph,
Speaker 1: allowing news and ideas to spread more quickly across the world.
Speaker 1: And diets were one of those things that began spreading
Speaker 1: like wildfire. It's during the Industrial Revolution the dieting in
Speaker 1: the truly modern sense takes off, first in Europe and
Speaker 1: then in the US. People are dieting to look good,
Speaker 1: to be healthy, to be judged favorably by other people
Speaker 1: as well as themselves. So doctors begin to take on
Speaker 1: the idea of diets and dieting as fundamental to health,
Speaker 1: which has always been true. But they have their own
Speaker 1: particular take on it, just as you know diet gary
Speaker 1: diet doctors do today. So they all come up with
Speaker 1: their own particular diets and their own particular stories behind
Speaker 1: their diets. They're selling points because they're trying to attract customers, obviously,
Speaker 1: and they can write about it in the press and
Speaker 1: their advertisements in the press, not only for doctors and diets,
Speaker 1: but for diet products. So quite a lot of diet
Speaker 1: drugs come onto the market during the nineteenth century as well,
Speaker 1: which hadn't really happened before. People were taking laxatives and
Speaker 1: even pills made of lard and arsenic in an effort
Speaker 1: to lose weight ironic and dangerous remind you of anything contemporary,
Speaker 1: boosts your metabolism, smashes your appetite, and keeps cravings at
Speaker 1: bath to help you achieve your weight loss goals. I
Speaker 1: have been taking these things for years, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people want to know how I have I lost
Speaker 1: so much weight in the past couple of months, because
Speaker 1: I really did lose a lot of weight, But I
Speaker 1: don't fully understand what is in this medicine, but it
Speaker 1: raised his body temperature to a hundred and seven degrees.
Speaker 1: He had to be put into a medically induced coma
Speaker 1: after eight pills. I think twice before you take these things.
Speaker 1: Diet pills are coming on the scene during the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: and because people are living and working more in crowded,
Speaker 1: densely populated areas, everybody can compare themselves to everybody else
Speaker 1: because there you are. You even had the emergence of
Speaker 1: nineteenth century diet influencers. One of them was the poet
Speaker 1: Lord Byron. Back then, Lord Byron was also famous for
Speaker 1: his yo yo dieting. The five ft eight inch tall
Speaker 1: writer weighed himself in public on the London Stores Coffee Skills,
Speaker 1: losing a whopping fifty four pounds between two a nds.
Speaker 1: Lord Byron's weight loss strategies included wearing lots of clothing
Speaker 1: so he would sweat more, and diets that were then
Speaker 1: in vogue, like eating flat vinegary potatoes. Vinegar, by the way,
Speaker 1: is still being used for weight loss today. So Janette
Speaker 1: says that after taking apple side of vinegar, she felt
Speaker 1: less bloated. Was it before and after on her then?
Speaker 1: Michelle says she saw a major improvement in her energy
Speaker 1: throughout the day, and Demor says she dropped more than
Speaker 1: the dress side. Anyway, back to Lord Byron, he was
Speaker 1: very influential, and doctors in the eighteen sixties are worried
Speaker 1: about Byron's influence on the young lung after Byron's disappeared
Speaker 1: from the place. It wasn't just Lord Byron, many many
Speaker 1: fad diets emerged during this time, you know, as newspapers
Speaker 1: and magazines and drugs and adverts. It's just a massive
Speaker 1: market and it starts increasing throughout the nineteenth century. Of course,
Speaker 1: that business would keep getting bigger and bigger. Today, the
Speaker 1: industry brings in about seventy billion dollars a year in
Speaker 1: the US alone. Around the time that Lord Byron was
Speaker 1: guzzling vinegar, a minister named Sylvester Graham was preaching a
Speaker 1: different kind of diet. M Sylvester rejected the changes happening
Speaker 1: in society at the time, like more processed foods, and
Speaker 1: like any true minister, he was also very concerned about sin,
Speaker 1: specifically the sin of gluttony. Sylvester told his followers to
Speaker 1: cut out meat, even though being vegetarian was pretty radical
Speaker 1: back then. He also wanted them to cut out alcohol, coffee,
Speaker 1: and spices. If Sylvester seems like an old timey figure,
Speaker 1: consider that you've probably eaten a snack. He invented a
Speaker 1: whole week cracker known as the Graham Cracker. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine how horrified he'd be about s'mores. Other trends popularized
Speaker 1: during these years include the low carved diet, also a
Speaker 1: modern favorite, and chewing your food as much as possible,
Speaker 1: which was known as Fletcherizing after the colorful American businessman
Speaker 1: who touted its weight loss benefits. Charlotte took seven hundred cheese,
Speaker 1: by which time nicocial meal would be freezing cold. Say
Speaker 1: you probably wouldn't continue eating anyway. The writer's frowns. Kafka
Speaker 1: and Henry James started Fletcherizing, so did the businessman John Rockefeller,
Speaker 1: And though it might sound silly, plenty of people recommend
Speaker 1: chewing for weight loss to this day. I want to
Speaker 1: work out that flattens your bell fast. Forget about working
Speaker 1: your muscles, try working your jaw instead chewing. New tools
Speaker 1: for measuring both food and bodies also come on the
Speaker 1: scene during this time. They include the calorie, which you
Speaker 1: may remember from episode one to recap Researchers in Europe
Speaker 1: began using calories to measure the energy and food. The
Speaker 1: American scientist wilverolan Atwater brought those ideas to the US,
Speaker 1: where calories would become the basis for you guessed it,
Speaker 1: new diets. The point I am making with this tour
Speaker 1: through diet history is that we've essentially been recycling the
Speaker 1: same tired diet premises for hundreds of years. Another modern
Speaker 1: measurement that will be familiar to any dieter also begins
Speaker 1: in this era, eventually leading to body mass index or
Speaker 1: b m I. The formula was first invented by a
Speaker 1: Belgian mathematician in the eighteen thirties. Life insurance companies subsequently
Speaker 1: began using metrics like weight and height when deciding whether
Speaker 1: to grant people life insurance or not. You can see
Speaker 1: why they might want a tool like this. If someone died,
Speaker 1: life insurers would have to pay up. B m I
Speaker 1: has since become incredibly widely used as a way of
Speaker 1: assessing people's health, but there are a lot of researchers, activists,
Speaker 1: and even doctors who say that it isn't very useful
Speaker 1: for that One of the issues is that b m
Speaker 1: I tables were initially based on white men, and yet
Speaker 1: the measure is uniformly applied to everyone these days, including
Speaker 1: women and people of color. The dangers do health resulting
Speaker 1: from overweight have been shown convincingly by light insurance records.
Speaker 1: Life expectancy decreases as the amount of overweight increases. Excessive
Speaker 1: calorie intake is the cause of overweight. By this point,
Speaker 1: you're probably getting the picture. This time period was the
Speaker 1: start of many of our modern ideas about dieting, the
Speaker 1: calorie body mass index, scammy weight loss pills, foods designed
Speaker 1: specifically for dieting, chewing more to eat less, low carb diets.
Speaker 1: Even that's what keto is. The Keto diet is simply
Speaker 1: a shift in how you eat. They claim to turn
Speaker 1: your body into a fat burning machine. Luigia Cornaro was
Speaker 1: way ahead of his time, and as the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: and years following it show, much of dieting comes as
Speaker 1: a result of the conditions of modern life. Diet as
Speaker 1: we know it starts here, and very little about it
Speaker 1: changes from then until now. So okay, let's recap for
Speaker 1: a second. In the nineteenth century, technology was advancing to
Speaker 1: allow us to produce more stuff and communicate more efficiently.
Speaker 1: People were living in cities, Medicine was becoming professionalized, and
Speaker 1: with that you had the rise of doctors trying all
Speaker 1: kinds of creative ways to make money off of people's health.
Speaker 1: These are all things that helped make diets more widespread
Speaker 1: and embraced by everyday people. But what was it about
Speaker 1: this particular moment in time that made people suddenly so
Speaker 1: concerned about their waistline? Sure there was all this technological innovation,
Speaker 1: but what else had changed? It was no longer fashionable.
Speaker 1: This is Peter Stearns. He's a history professor at George
Speaker 1: Mason University an author of a book called fat History.
Speaker 1: The classic story is that until the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: if you were a little bit plump, it was probably
Speaker 1: a sign a that you were healthy because you had
Speaker 1: enough to eat, and be you were successful because you
Speaker 1: had enough to eat. And that just that just begins
Speaker 1: to drop off, and the fashion begins to emphasize slenderness.
Speaker 1: What Peter is getting at is that along with changing technology,
Speaker 1: this time also brought some pretty drastic changes to Western
Speaker 1: beauty ideals. At a time when people struggled to get
Speaker 1: enough to eat, being thin was just proof of that.
Speaker 1: It was also more common having curves being heavier. That
Speaker 1: meant you were wealthy and successful, and compared to thinness,
Speaker 1: it was unusual. As industrialization brought more prosperity and with
Speaker 1: it less physical activity and more process foods, the tables
Speaker 1: turned think back to Renaissance paintings hundreds of years earlier,
Speaker 1: in the time of our favorite early diet guru Luigi Cornaro.
Speaker 1: Artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Tysian famously painted curvy women,
Speaker 1: often naked. In Rubens paintings, you see flesh, rippling, fat roles,
Speaker 1: even sally light. His subjects might be called Rubenesque today. Really,
Speaker 1: Luigi was ahead of his time because back then then
Speaker 1: was not the standard. You can see beauty ideals begin
Speaker 1: shifting in art at the time, like the influential drawings
Speaker 1: of women done by the artist Charles Dana Gibson in
Speaker 1: the nineties. The women in his work were known as
Speaker 1: Gibson girls. Gibson girls had thick, glossy hair piled on
Speaker 1: top of their heads and impossibly tiny waists. They wore
Speaker 1: impeccable gowns and often glamorous furs. They became the new
Speaker 1: beauty ideal for American women. They're featured in magazines like
Speaker 1: Life and scrib Neers. Remember this was before TV, so
Speaker 1: magazines were an even bigger deal. They were the subject
Speaker 1: of songs and even wallpaper designs. The Gibson girls are curvy,
Speaker 1: but in a very different way than the Renaissance women
Speaker 1: painted by Rubens and Titian. They have pronounced hourglass figures.
Speaker 1: Women wanted to look like them in the same way
Speaker 1: women want to look like Kardashians Now. Fashion would transform
Speaker 1: even further in the coming decades. A small waists and
Speaker 1: the corsets that made them possible fell out of style
Speaker 1: in favor of the nine twenties flapper look. We're also
Speaker 1: familiar with. Hips were out and then was in. The
Speaker 1: Flapper look comes into style at a time that a
Speaker 1: lot is changing for American women. Many of them started
Speaker 1: working during World War Two, with men away fighting the war,
Speaker 1: and women soon gained the right to vote. Flappers were
Speaker 1: rebelling against the way women had lived their lives before,
Speaker 1: including through what was fashionable. The shift to thinner bodies
Speaker 1: being valued and prized happened really quickly. It's kind of
Speaker 1: funny to think about that today when it can feel
Speaker 1: like being skinny has always been desirable. There was a
Speaker 1: famous French stage star named Sarah Bernard who came to
Speaker 1: the United States I believe in the eighteen eighties, and
Speaker 1: she was ridiculed because she was so thin. People did
Speaker 1: not find her attractive. She came back in the nineties
Speaker 1: and she was a wow, this is exactly the way
Speaker 1: people are supposed to look. There's also a medical side
Speaker 1: to the shift. Remember this is the era of the
Speaker 1: calorie and more sedentary lifestyles. Scientists are becoming concerned about
Speaker 1: people eating too much. Now they're getting evidence that seems
Speaker 1: to say pretty clearly that weighing too much is bad
Speaker 1: for you. The reality is actually more complicated, though that's
Speaker 1: something we'll get into later in this series. There is
Speaker 1: at this point there's well established scientific evidence that we
Speaker 1: definitely relates to health, definitely relates to mortality. Chances concerned
Speaker 1: about issues like heart attacks and blood pressure go up markedly.
Speaker 1: I mean, the old causes of death are beginning to
Speaker 1: recede in favor of some of the causes we worry
Speaker 1: about today, and wait in body shape clearly enter into
Speaker 1: those causes. People aren't dying as much from infectious disease
Speaker 1: a k A. The old causes of death. Because of
Speaker 1: better treatments and public health measures, the new public health
Speaker 1: concern now is weight, and specifically the health risks of
Speaker 1: carrying around extra pounds. Consumption of calories in excess of
Speaker 1: body needs is the single most extensive nutritional problem affecting
Speaker 1: public health in this country. People should be informed that
Speaker 1: overweight is preventable. Before this, when people weighed themselves, they
Speaker 1: might have used agricultural scales in public places Lord Byron style.
Speaker 1: Now scales start getting used much more widely. Hospitals start
Speaker 1: buying them in the late eighteen hundreds. By the twenties,
Speaker 1: skills make their debut in people's bathrooms, and doctor's offices
Speaker 1: are regularly weighing people when they come in for an exam.
Speaker 1: You have to be a really old fashioned doctor by
Speaker 1: not to know that weight could be an issue. In
Speaker 1: other words, that dreaded way in at your annual physical
Speaker 1: became a routine medical practice hundred years ago. Think about
Speaker 1: that for a second. Doctors didn't constantly check how much
Speaker 1: you weighed. Before then, they didn't always needed to evaluate
Speaker 1: your health because in those days, we was not equivalent
Speaker 1: to health The Industrial revolution was also changing the fashion industry.
Speaker 1: Before handmade clothing was the norm, a seamstress might make
Speaker 1: a gown for you. More mass produced clothing brought clothing
Speaker 1: sizes out into the open and made it a lot
Speaker 1: easier to compare your body to other people's bodies. Think
Speaker 1: about how obsessed people get these days with their pants size.
Speaker 1: That kind of panic dates back here. But this is
Speaker 1: what I find most interesting about everything that is going
Speaker 1: on during this time. There is no real reason to
Speaker 1: believe people were actually gaining more weight at this point
Speaker 1: in history. Instead, the way society was changing, there was
Speaker 1: this potential for weight gain. That is what people were
Speaker 1: concerned about. So on the one side, there's more food,
Speaker 1: more readily available, and at the same time from an
Speaker 1: increasing number of people, physical exertion goes down. More and
Speaker 1: more people are in white collar jobs, the role of agriculture,
Speaker 1: and even blue collar jobs begins graduated decline. So just
Speaker 1: in the normal course of things, people are expanding fewer
Speaker 1: calories during their day. People aren't moving around as much,
Speaker 1: and they're sitting more at desks. Unwanted pounds creep on
Speaker 1: so easily in this motorized and mechanized age with its
Speaker 1: labor saving devices. But it wasn't just this fear of
Speaker 1: becoming unhealthy because you're no longer laboring on a farm
Speaker 1: all day or walking five miles to school. It was
Speaker 1: also new beauty ideals and skills becoming more widely available.
Speaker 1: You have more opportunities to check your weight, therefore more
Speaker 1: opportunities to begin to worry about your weight. If you
Speaker 1: worry about your weight, you are more interested now in
Speaker 1: checking it. So these trans reinforce themselves, no question, there
Speaker 1: are also some new different ways of thinking about the
Speaker 1: evolution of beauty standards. I spoke with Sabrina Strings about that.
Speaker 1: She's an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine,
Speaker 1: and she actually traces the rise of the thin ideal
Speaker 1: to the eighteenth century, a little earlier than the period
Speaker 1: we've been talking about. The Transatlantic slave trade has been
Speaker 1: going on for hundreds of years at this point, and
Speaker 1: criticisms are gaining steam, and Sabrina says it's no coincidence
Speaker 1: that attitudes about bigger bodies were changing at this time too.
Speaker 1: Sabrina's research has found that racist language starts getting used
Speaker 1: to describe bigger people and justify idealizing thin bodies. People
Speaker 1: were saying that African slaves were fundamentally different from Europeans,
Speaker 1: and one of the ways they did that was by
Speaker 1: making the claim that African slaves couldn't control themselves around food.
Speaker 1: Sabrina says these racist arguments helped justify the institution of slavery,
Speaker 1: and one of the ways in which race science evolved
Speaker 1: to prove European superiority was the suggestion that they knew
Speaker 1: how to control themselves when it came to food. They said,
Speaker 1: black people overeat. You know, they're hyper oral, and this
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons why black people are fat.
Speaker 1: But we as Europeans, we are rational who we are controlled,
Speaker 1: and we can do better than that. Having a bigger
Speaker 1: body became proof of racial inferiority. In other words, maybe
Speaker 1: you've heard diets and the culture around them being described
Speaker 1: as oppressive. It's usually used to say specifically that diets
Speaker 1: oppressed women, a reference to the way women are particularly
Speaker 1: judged for not meeting beauty standards. Most dieters are women,
Speaker 1: by the way. That's why Sabrina's work feels like such
Speaker 1: an important part of history around why and how we
Speaker 1: got to where we are today. It shows another oppressive
Speaker 1: dimension of diets, one that's much less talked about. How
Speaker 1: diets have historical roots slavery and racism. Some people are
Speaker 1: able to benefit magnificently from dieting. They build their whole
Speaker 1: empires on telling people how to lose weight. But then
Speaker 1: there are the other people who are those individuals being
Speaker 1: told to lose weight who are being oppressed by that information.
Speaker 1: So to summarize, during the Industrial Revolution era, society was
Speaker 1: changing rapidly. People started living in cities and leading more
Speaker 1: sedentary lives. At the same time, bigger bodies were falling
Speaker 1: out of fashion in the Western world, and doctors became
Speaker 1: more concerned about people's weight. Things like scales and new
Speaker 1: clothing sizes made it easier for people to notice the
Speaker 1: size of their bodies and worry about it. These all
Speaker 1: help explain why dieting became so incredibly popular at this
Speaker 1: point in history. But there's still a lingering gap here
Speaker 1: that we need to resolve. Because people didn't just fall
Speaker 1: for dangerous, difficult diet schemes hundreds of years ago. They
Speaker 1: fall for them to this very day. Why do we
Speaker 1: do this to ourselves? Time after time. There's just something
Speaker 1: about the promise of dieting that we can't shake. Humans
Speaker 1: have been attracted to these outlandish schemes again and again
Speaker 1: throughout history. We love a ridiculous premise, like the grapefruit diet. Yes,
Speaker 1: that was a real diet. Weird al Jankovic even wrote
Speaker 1: a song parodying every big of Me Gonna be an
Speaker 1: aery view now details me one diet throw out. We
Speaker 1: want to believe we truly can lose ten hounds in
Speaker 1: a week if someone tells us they have the secret,
Speaker 1: nobody else has. Sure, why not? Sounds great? I just
Speaker 1: talked about how dieting takes off during and after the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, a time of tremendous economic and societal change.
Speaker 1: People wanted to be thinner because that's what they were
Speaker 1: being told to look like, and because their doctors were
Speaker 1: increasingly concerned about the health risks of extra weight. But
Speaker 1: we're not just obsessed with getting smaller. We're obsessed with
Speaker 1: getting smaller fast. Lots of people have fallen for a
Speaker 1: fad diet that claimed some insane amount of weight loss
Speaker 1: in a ridiculously short amount of time. We've talked a
Speaker 1: lot about the history of diets in this episode. But
Speaker 1: now I want to shift gears. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: about something slightly different, the psychology of diets. Why do
Speaker 1: we keep falling for these things? The short answer has
Speaker 1: to do with a familiar concept, delayed gratification. Delaying gratification
Speaker 1: is something we don't like to do because when things
Speaker 1: are far away, we don't value them as much. The
Speaker 1: technical term for this is delayed discounting. We usually think
Speaker 1: about this idea in terms of good things and pleasure,
Speaker 1: which is why it's known as delayed gratification. But Michael Lowe,
Speaker 1: a professor of clinical psychology at Drexel who has previously
Speaker 1: worked as a Weight Watchers consultant, offered me a different perspective.
Speaker 1: He told me that the same concept applies to unhappiness
Speaker 1: and discomfort. By the time your pre pandemic genes no
Speaker 1: longer fit, you're desperate to change that and soon we
Speaker 1: act quickly to get pleasure as soon as we can.
Speaker 1: But we all I want to act quickly to get
Speaker 1: rid of stress and distress and unhappiness as quickly as
Speaker 1: we can, And therefore the more radical to diet, the
Speaker 1: quicker the pounds come off. In the short term. Michael
Speaker 1: is saying here that really out their diets don't scare
Speaker 1: us off, they actually attract us. Because we think that
Speaker 1: diet sounds so crazy it just might work. Michael says
Speaker 1: that means we are also part of the problem because
Speaker 1: we don't really want to make small, reasonable changes to
Speaker 1: how we eat, exercise and live in the long term.
Speaker 1: What we really want is to lose weight quickly. Fad diet,
Speaker 1: crash diet. It's why we think of diets as short
Speaker 1: term solutions because we're primed to think that way about
Speaker 1: weight loss, a diet that will get you ready for
Speaker 1: swimsuit season or your cousin's upcoming wedding. We treat lots
Speaker 1: of other things that way too. How things will pan
Speaker 1: out longer term isn't even really on our minds. What's
Speaker 1: being offered is something that we want, and generally it's
Speaker 1: being offered in a package that says this is going
Speaker 1: to be quick and relatively easy. This is Janet Paul
Speaker 1: v a psychologist who is now retired but for a
Speaker 1: long time studied diets at the University of Toronto. Much
Speaker 1: quicker and easier than really changing your behavior over the
Speaker 1: long term, and so that's attractive to most of us.
Speaker 1: I mean, we'd all rather you know, if I could
Speaker 1: rub a cream on my face and have all my
Speaker 1: wriggles disappeared, well, that would be great. Or if I
Speaker 1: could rub a cream on my body and have weight disappear,
Speaker 1: that would be better. She says. There's another reason we
Speaker 1: all fall for diets. She calls it false hope syndrome.
Speaker 1: People think, well, if I only could lose this weight,
Speaker 1: everything in my life would be better. I would get
Speaker 1: a boyfriend, I would get that promotion I've always wanted.
Speaker 1: It's just this weight that's holding me back. But that's
Speaker 1: not realistic either. People think weight loss will change not
Speaker 1: just their bodies, but also everything, all the aspects of
Speaker 1: their lives that weren't totally perfect before. And if you
Speaker 1: think about it, these kinds of transformation stories are baked
Speaker 1: deep into popular culture. It's a basis of fairy tales
Speaker 1: like Cinderella and many a makeover montage and teen movies. Remember,
Speaker 1: Janet calls it false hope syndrome, the idea that weight
Speaker 1: loss will transform your life. That's the hope part, but
Speaker 1: it's actually false hope. Janet has worked as a therapist
Speaker 1: for patients who laws weight. Some I even lost a
Speaker 1: lot of weight. And when they lost weight, sure they
Speaker 1: got compliments, but they also were almost disappointed. I heard
Speaker 1: over and over I actually lost the weight back, you know, whenever,
Speaker 1: and nothing changed. My friends didn't treat me better, my
Speaker 1: work didn't treat me better. Nothing changed. I went through
Speaker 1: all of this. These psychological draws help us understand why
Speaker 1: people have turned to diets over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: over hundreds, if not thousands of years. They're popular and
Speaker 1: controversial because they're about who we are at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, what our bodies look like, but also
Speaker 1: how we live our lives. Something I keep coming back to, though,
Speaker 1: is how often diet history repeats itself. Name a modern
Speaker 1: diet and it's probably been done before the century had vegetarians.
Speaker 1: Diet breads are the new Graham crackers. Your ancestors did
Speaker 1: locarb diets before your mom tried Atkins, and before Dr
Speaker 1: Oz was telling you about the weight loss benefits of vinegar,
Speaker 1: Lord Byron was drinking it. These ideas seem new, they
Speaker 1: are not. We just keep falling into the same traps
Speaker 1: and following the same bad information. Here's Louise Foxcraft again
Speaker 1: when I write the book. Actually, I thought, I see
Speaker 1: exactly how to write a good diet book. Now I
Speaker 1: could do that. She was talking about her book on
Speaker 1: the history of dieting. I could call it the History Diet,
Speaker 1: so I could take all the best elements out of
Speaker 1: this and write my own diet book. I'd pick out
Speaker 1: all the best bits, all the bits that appeared to work,
Speaker 1: or all the bits not only I mean, if I
Speaker 1: was completely unscrupulous, not only the bits that appeared to work,
Speaker 1: but the bits that people appeared, um two be susceptible to.
Speaker 1: It's not difficult to do. It's a formula to it all. Obviously,
Speaker 1: to be clear, Louise never created the History Diet, though
Speaker 1: you could totally see that working right, And she makes
Speaker 1: a great point about diets they always follow a formula.
Speaker 1: We're going to explore that. In the next episode. We'll
Speaker 1: head to neighborhood in Miami, Florida, known for its iconic beaches,
Speaker 1: sunny weather, and beautiful people. It's a groundbreaking phenomenon with
Speaker 1: a global following, the South Beach Diet. We'll tell the
Speaker 1: story behind the iconic early two thousands die it and
Speaker 1: what it teaches us about the formula for a hit diet.
Speaker 1: This off actually began with its founder's own effort to
Speaker 1: lose weight, and of course we'll meet that founder, the
Speaker 1: cardiologist Arthur Agatston. The follow starts laughing at me and
Speaker 1: I said, what are you laughing at? He said, look
Speaker 1: at your belly, and I really I had one losing
Speaker 1: It is written and reported by me Ema Court. Kristin V.
Speaker 1: Brown is our editor, Magnus Hendrickson is our senior producer,
Speaker 1: Stacy Wong our associate producer, and Blake Maples is our
Speaker 1: audio engineer. Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown.
Speaker 1: Our voice actor for this episode was Sonny de Knocker.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Francesco Levi and Tim Annette. Be sure to
Speaker 1: subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already, and if you
Speaker 1: like our show, please leave us a review that helps
Speaker 1: others find out about it. Thanks for listening, See you
Speaker 1: next time. H