WEBVTT - Episode Two: Once Upon a Diet 0:00:10.720 --> 0:00:14.280 It is in consequence of this powerful force of habit, 0:00:14.400 --> 0:00:18.320 that of late. Indeed, during my own lifetime and memory, 0:00:18.840 --> 0:00:23.880 three evil customs have gradually gained foothold in our own Italy. 0:00:24.880 --> 0:00:29.760 The first of these is adulation and ceremony, the second 0:00:30.320 --> 0:00:35.920 is hersy, and the third is the intemperance. You're listening 0:00:35.960 --> 0:00:39.280 to the words of an Italian merchant named Luigi Cornaro, 0:00:40.120 --> 0:00:44.239 voice by an actor, because Luigi himself died in fifteen 0:00:44.320 --> 0:00:48.200 sixty six, and if there was one thing that Luigi 0:00:48.360 --> 0:00:53.479 was really into, it was his diet. He calls eating 0:00:53.520 --> 0:00:57.800 too much that evil, and the fact that it's so 0:00:58.040 --> 0:01:02.600 common a wicked thing, and yet society at the time 0:01:02.800 --> 0:01:07.240 doesn't treat it that way. Over eating is exalted as 0:01:07.240 --> 0:01:10.680 a virtuous thing and even as a mark of distinction, 0:01:11.560 --> 0:01:16.679 while temperance, also known as moderate eating, is stigmatized and 0:01:16.800 --> 0:01:24.560 scorned as dishonorable and as befitting the miserly alone. Luigi 0:01:24.720 --> 0:01:28.559 is sort of the original diet guru. What you're hearing 0:01:28.640 --> 0:01:31.600 is the beginning of his book The Art of Living Long. 0:01:32.920 --> 0:01:37.080 In it, he points out that overeating is gluttony, a 0:01:37.200 --> 0:01:42.559 literal sin. He's arguing that eating less is not just better, 0:01:42.920 --> 0:01:47.840 but also more moral. He says that men are abandoning 0:01:47.920 --> 0:01:52.680 the path of virtue, following one advice e roade, which 0:01:52.800 --> 0:01:56.280 leads them, though they see it not to strange and 0:01:56.440 --> 0:02:01.120 fatal chronic infirmities through which they grow pre maturely old. 0:02:01.840 --> 0:02:04.520 Before they reach the age of forty, their health has 0:02:04.560 --> 0:02:09.720 been completely worn out. Basically, Luigi is saying that people 0:02:09.880 --> 0:02:14.480 are over eating their way into an early grave. But 0:02:14.720 --> 0:02:19.400 he actually says men because again it is the hundreds 0:02:20.160 --> 0:02:25.040 wretched and unhappy Italy. Canst thou not see that intemperance 0:02:25.200 --> 0:02:29.320 kills every year amongst the people as great a number 0:02:29.480 --> 0:02:33.920 as would perish during the time of a most dreadful pestilence, 0:02:34.440 --> 0:02:38.040 or by the sword or fire of many bloody wars. 0:02:39.760 --> 0:02:44.560 He's saying that gluteny kills as many people as plagues 0:02:44.760 --> 0:02:50.720 and wars. Clearly, Luigi Cornaro was a big fan of 0:02:50.760 --> 0:02:56.240 eating less. But the reason that I'm taking us on 0:02:56.280 --> 0:02:59.760 a journey to Renaissance Italy is that this early diet 0:03:00.240 --> 0:03:03.919 became a really big deal, not just at the time 0:03:04.240 --> 0:03:08.120 but also over the years, and its success marks a 0:03:08.240 --> 0:03:12.280 key moment in our transformation from a culture focus on 0:03:12.440 --> 0:03:17.480 health to one that was and still is obsessed with weight. 0:03:18.600 --> 0:03:22.840 Eating less also known as dieting, has had a hold 0:03:22.880 --> 0:03:26.239 on us for a long time. But for a while, 0:03:27.000 --> 0:03:30.880 people saw eating as a way to become healthier and 0:03:30.960 --> 0:03:35.320 for everyone in society to be generally better off. It 0:03:35.440 --> 0:03:39.520 wasn't really about losing weight the way it is today. 0:03:40.440 --> 0:03:45.240 Case in point Luigi Cornaro, who first started overhauling the 0:03:45.280 --> 0:03:49.440 way he ate to improve his health. Luigi was sick 0:03:49.720 --> 0:03:54.760 and pretty unhappy until around the age of forty. He 0:03:54.840 --> 0:03:59.200 has symptoms of gout, all kinds of stomach issues, and 0:03:59.280 --> 0:04:03.600 what he described hibs as a persistent low fever. He 0:04:03.640 --> 0:04:08.360 says he tried almost everything to feel better, but none 0:04:08.400 --> 0:04:12.920 of it worked. He says his only hope is that 0:04:13.040 --> 0:04:17.359 death will put him out of his misery. Then his 0:04:17.520 --> 0:04:21.520 doctors have an idea. My physicians declared there was but 0:04:21.720 --> 0:04:25.560 one remedy left for my eels. That remedy was the 0:04:25.680 --> 0:04:30.080 temperate and orderly life. The prescription was to eat less. 0:04:30.560 --> 0:04:33.719 My physicians warned me, if I neglected to apply this 0:04:33.880 --> 0:04:36.800 remedy in a short time, it would be too late 0:04:36.839 --> 0:04:40.080 to derive any benefit from it. For in a few 0:04:40.120 --> 0:04:44.960 months I should certainly die. This was to be clear, 0:04:45.200 --> 0:04:48.839 a pretty radical approach to eating at the time. To 0:04:48.960 --> 0:04:52.360 hear Luigi tell it, well off people like him were 0:04:52.360 --> 0:04:57.880 eating and drinking large amounts of whatever they enjoyed, but 0:04:57.960 --> 0:05:04.440 Luigi is desperate it, so he follows their advice. He 0:05:04.480 --> 0:05:08.479 cuts out the rich, delicious food and copious wine he 0:05:08.600 --> 0:05:11.880 had been feasting on, and he eventually settles on a 0:05:11.960 --> 0:05:16.200 diet that is simple and austere. Just twelve ounces of 0:05:16.200 --> 0:05:20.479 food a day, an egg yolk, bread, a little meat, 0:05:20.800 --> 0:05:25.360 and some soup. That's it. He also has about fourteen 0:05:25.400 --> 0:05:29.520 ounces of wine. Hey, a man can't live on egg 0:05:29.560 --> 0:05:34.320 yolks alone. After a few days of eating less, Luigi 0:05:34.320 --> 0:05:39.400 says he's already feeling much better. Within a year, he's 0:05:39.440 --> 0:05:45.200 a new man. So long stomach pain, goodbye fever. He's 0:05:45.240 --> 0:05:49.240 in perfect health, and by his account, continues on that 0:05:49.320 --> 0:05:54.760 way for decades. By his eighties, Luigi says he feels strong, 0:05:55.640 --> 0:05:59.159 he can get onto his horse without help and easily 0:05:59.200 --> 0:06:03.040 climbs a hill on foot, and he doesn't talk about 0:06:03.120 --> 0:06:07.640 his weight in the book, only his health. They also 0:06:07.720 --> 0:06:12.320 see how I'm ever cheerful, happy and contented, free from 0:06:12.360 --> 0:06:16.440 all perturbations of his soul, and from every vexatious thought. 0:06:17.200 --> 0:06:20.960 Instead of these, joy and peace have fixed their abode 0:06:21.000 --> 0:06:25.320 in my heart and never depart from it. At one point, 0:06:25.520 --> 0:06:29.440 his family, friends and doctors actually become worried that Luigi 0:06:29.600 --> 0:06:33.440 is not eating enough, so he adds two more ounces 0:06:33.440 --> 0:06:36.719 of food and two more ounces of wine to his 0:06:36.839 --> 0:06:42.599 incredibly strict daily meal plan. It does not go well. 0:06:43.800 --> 0:06:47.920 He writes that he just starts feeling sick again. However, 0:06:48.240 --> 0:06:52.400 I recovered God be praised solely by returning to my 0:06:52.520 --> 0:06:59.320 former rule of life ah the power of dieting while 0:06:59.360 --> 0:07:02.520 dining on egg yokes and wine blu which he actually 0:07:02.560 --> 0:07:07.360 leads a really long life, especially for the sixteenth century. 0:07:07.960 --> 0:07:10.880 He lives to see his daughter grow up and get married. 0:07:11.760 --> 0:07:15.480 He meets his eleven grandchildren and watches them grow up too. 0:07:16.800 --> 0:07:19.640 At the age of eighty three, he decides to share 0:07:19.760 --> 0:07:23.200 his wisdom with others so that they too may defeat 0:07:23.240 --> 0:07:27.400 the evils of intemperance and live a long and happy life. 0:07:28.520 --> 0:07:33.160 So he writes this sixteenth century dieting manifesto. I have 0:07:33.320 --> 0:07:37.480 seen many of my dearest friends and associates, men endowed 0:07:37.480 --> 0:07:41.440 with splendid gifts of intellect and noble qualities of heart 0:07:41.960 --> 0:07:48.200 fall in the prime of life victims of this dread tyrant. Therefore, 0:07:48.800 --> 0:07:52.120 to prevent so great an evil for the future, I 0:07:52.200 --> 0:07:55.960 have decided to point out in this brief treatise what 0:07:56.120 --> 0:08:00.680 a fatal abuse is, the vice of intemperance, and easily 0:08:00.840 --> 0:08:04.800 it may be removed and replaced by the temperate habits 0:08:04.840 --> 0:08:09.760 of life. As Luigi gets even older, he says he's 0:08:09.800 --> 0:08:13.320 still in good health, and now he's cutting down his 0:08:13.440 --> 0:08:18.400 meals even further. Sometimes he's eating just one egg yoke 0:08:18.560 --> 0:08:23.480 over the course of two days. What Luigi is doing 0:08:23.880 --> 0:08:29.880 may sound pretty out there, and it is half an 0:08:29.880 --> 0:08:33.600 egg yolk a day is obviously not enough food to 0:08:33.679 --> 0:08:39.320 live on. But in other ways it's actually a fairly 0:08:39.400 --> 0:08:43.680 modern dieting tactic. He is restricting his calories in a 0:08:43.760 --> 0:08:47.559 pretty extreme way by cutting out whole food groups and 0:08:47.600 --> 0:08:51.560 eating very small portions. It's something a lot of people 0:08:51.840 --> 0:08:57.200 still do today. Luigi has had lots of fans over 0:08:57.240 --> 0:09:01.320 the years, including the inventor Thomas at us In. He 0:09:01.480 --> 0:09:05.640 also had lots of skeptics, like the well known German 0:09:05.679 --> 0:09:10.000 philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that rather than leading to 0:09:10.200 --> 0:09:17.400 long life, Luigi Cornaro's diet actually shortened lives. Luigi keeps 0:09:17.440 --> 0:09:21.520 writing about his diet. The collected essays are published as 0:09:21.520 --> 0:09:25.480 a book called The Art of Living Long. The book 0:09:25.840 --> 0:09:30.440 takes off, helped along by a relatively new invention, the 0:09:30.480 --> 0:09:37.439 printing press, and like I said before, Luigi's treatise becomes 0:09:37.480 --> 0:09:41.880 a sensation. It's been called the first best selling diet 0:09:41.880 --> 0:09:46.840 book ever. It is still sold to this day. It 0:09:46.880 --> 0:09:49.920 seems like people are still reading this book because they 0:09:49.960 --> 0:09:54.040 want to learn from Luigi's philosophy, even if they aren't 0:09:54.040 --> 0:09:58.200 going to start on the exact same diet. And Luigi 0:09:58.240 --> 0:10:03.360 did in fact live long, though there's some disagreement about 0:10:03.360 --> 0:10:06.920 whether he died at or lived to be as old 0:10:06.960 --> 0:10:13.200 as a hundred and four. Either way, not bad. But 0:10:13.240 --> 0:10:16.000 the reason I've spent so much time telling you about 0:10:16.000 --> 0:10:19.520 a sixteenth century Italian merchant with a love for eggs 0:10:20.080 --> 0:10:24.640 is that the diet is a long, long tradition. Luigi 0:10:24.840 --> 0:10:28.480 story is a model for pretty much every blockbuster diet 0:10:28.600 --> 0:10:32.760 that's ever existed. In this episode, I'm going to take 0:10:32.840 --> 0:10:36.200 you through the history of dieting, from how the ancient 0:10:36.240 --> 0:10:39.840 Greeks thought about it to the industrial revolutions. Shaping of 0:10:39.880 --> 0:10:43.840 modern diet culture. It turns out that the diet fads 0:10:43.840 --> 0:10:47.559 of today look a whole lot like the diet fads 0:10:47.600 --> 0:10:52.920 of yesterday. We'll also explore what led to the rise 0:10:53.040 --> 0:10:58.120 of mainstream dieting. You might assume that people were gaining 0:10:58.200 --> 0:11:02.280 a lot of weight at the time, but actually no. 0:11:03.640 --> 0:11:07.680 Society was just changing in such a way that people 0:11:07.760 --> 0:11:13.040 were afraid they might gain weight. We'll also dive into 0:11:13.040 --> 0:11:17.240 the psychology behind wacky diets and why we fall for 0:11:17.320 --> 0:11:21.840 them each and every time. I'm Bloomberg News health reporter 0:11:22.000 --> 0:11:27.079 em Accord and from the Prognosis podcast. This is losing It. 0:11:32.000 --> 0:11:36.160 The diet goes back at least two thousand years. Like 0:11:36.240 --> 0:11:38.720 many other things, we can trace it to the days 0:11:38.880 --> 0:11:41.719 of the ancient Greeks. But the Greeks didn't look at 0:11:41.760 --> 0:11:45.560 diet and exactly the way we do today. In fact, 0:11:45.880 --> 0:11:50.200 diet comes from a Greek word die eta, as in 0:11:50.600 --> 0:11:56.000 a way of life, healthy body, healthy mind, eat moderately, 0:11:56.480 --> 0:12:00.560 sleep and exercise, well, that kind of thing. They thought 0:12:00.559 --> 0:12:04.199 of it as a responsibility you had not only to yourself, 0:12:04.360 --> 0:12:08.720 but also your community. They had some other more out 0:12:08.760 --> 0:12:13.800 their ideas too. For example, the physician Hippocrates recommended a 0:12:13.840 --> 0:12:18.640 treatment regimen for weed that included walking around naked, sleeping 0:12:18.720 --> 0:12:24.840 on a hard bed, and vomiting after meals. The Greeks 0:12:24.880 --> 0:12:28.400 weren't into weighing out their food or counting their calories. 0:12:28.960 --> 0:12:32.880 They were concerned with good health and saw moderate eating 0:12:33.040 --> 0:12:36.640 as part of the path to getting there. But somewhere 0:12:36.720 --> 0:12:41.400 along the way we lost sight of that goal. Diets 0:12:41.440 --> 0:12:46.040 became about fitting into a smaller pair of pants. That 0:12:46.160 --> 0:12:50.600 shift started in the fifteen hundreds with Luigi, a very 0:12:50.679 --> 0:12:53.959 unwell person who came up with a diet, wrote a 0:12:54.000 --> 0:12:57.559 book about it and sold it in that way. It 0:12:57.720 --> 0:13:01.080 comes in the beginning of the own trend of people 0:13:01.440 --> 0:13:05.520 that work along that formula. This is Louise Foxcroft, a 0:13:05.600 --> 0:13:09.560 medical historian who wrote a book called Calories and Corsets, 0:13:10.080 --> 0:13:14.720 a History of dieting over two thousand years. She's describing 0:13:14.760 --> 0:13:18.920 what Luigi Cornaro did, but also what we still see 0:13:19.120 --> 0:13:23.959 play out to this day. A person transforms how they 0:13:23.960 --> 0:13:28.360 eat then goes on to tell the world about it, 0:13:28.440 --> 0:13:34.120 no matter how extreme, restrictive or seemingly nonsensical. The approach 0:13:34.960 --> 0:13:39.640 to understand how ideas about diet changed so dramatically we're 0:13:39.720 --> 0:13:43.960 jumping forward in time about three hundred years from Luigi 0:13:44.040 --> 0:13:51.040 to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was famously a 0:13:51.080 --> 0:13:55.680 time of economic transformation in the West. People's way of 0:13:55.720 --> 0:13:59.480 life started looking more like it does today. There are 0:13:59.600 --> 0:14:03.240 many new physicians coming out of the medical schools, and 0:14:03.280 --> 0:14:05.040 they've all got to make a living, so they begin 0:14:05.080 --> 0:14:09.199 to diversify into different areas of medicine. And it's an 0:14:09.240 --> 0:14:13.120 industrial age, so more and more people are moving from 0:14:13.240 --> 0:14:17.360 rural settings into urban settings. The media and the print 0:14:17.920 --> 0:14:21.760 market is taking off, and it all comes together to 0:14:22.000 --> 0:14:26.840 create the perfect conditions. Really better technology helps manufacturing and 0:14:26.920 --> 0:14:32.560 transportation expand. People are moving to cities and working in factories. 0:14:33.280 --> 0:14:36.200 Instead of mailing a letter, you could send a telegraph, 0:14:36.720 --> 0:14:40.960 allowing news and ideas to spread more quickly across the world. 0:14:41.800 --> 0:14:44.960 And diets were one of those things that began spreading 0:14:45.160 --> 0:14:50.560 like wildfire. It's during the Industrial Revolution the dieting in 0:14:50.600 --> 0:14:54.760 the truly modern sense takes off, first in Europe and 0:14:54.800 --> 0:14:58.320 then in the US. People are dieting to look good, 0:14:59.040 --> 0:15:03.040 to be healthy, to be judged favorably by other people 0:15:03.440 --> 0:15:07.040 as well as themselves. So doctors begin to take on 0:15:07.800 --> 0:15:10.480 the idea of diets and dieting as fundamental to health, 0:15:10.560 --> 0:15:12.720 which has always been true. But they have their own 0:15:12.760 --> 0:15:15.520 particular take on it, just as you know diet gary 0:15:15.880 --> 0:15:18.120 diet doctors do today. So they all come up with 0:15:18.160 --> 0:15:22.600 their own particular diets and their own particular stories behind 0:15:22.680 --> 0:15:28.400 their diets. They're selling points because they're trying to attract customers, obviously, 0:15:28.840 --> 0:15:31.080 and they can write about it in the press and 0:15:31.120 --> 0:15:34.320 their advertisements in the press, not only for doctors and diets, 0:15:34.360 --> 0:15:38.800 but for diet products. So quite a lot of diet 0:15:38.880 --> 0:15:42.160 drugs come onto the market during the nineteenth century as well, 0:15:42.160 --> 0:15:49.960 which hadn't really happened before. People were taking laxatives and 0:15:50.160 --> 0:15:54.080 even pills made of lard and arsenic in an effort 0:15:54.120 --> 0:16:00.880 to lose weight ironic and dangerous remind you of anything contemporary, 0:16:01.200 --> 0:16:04.360 boosts your metabolism, smashes your appetite, and keeps cravings at 0:16:04.360 --> 0:16:06.440 bath to help you achieve your weight loss goals. I 0:16:06.480 --> 0:16:09.680 have been taking these things for years, and a lot 0:16:09.680 --> 0:16:11.120 of people want to know how I have I lost 0:16:11.200 --> 0:16:13.960 so much weight in the past couple of months, because 0:16:14.000 --> 0:16:16.000 I really did lose a lot of weight, But I 0:16:16.000 --> 0:16:19.000 don't fully understand what is in this medicine, but it 0:16:19.080 --> 0:16:21.640 raised his body temperature to a hundred and seven degrees. 0:16:22.440 --> 0:16:24.320 He had to be put into a medically induced coma 0:16:24.360 --> 0:16:27.600 after eight pills. I think twice before you take these things. 0:16:28.000 --> 0:16:32.239 Diet pills are coming on the scene during the Industrial Revolution, 0:16:33.040 --> 0:16:37.120 and because people are living and working more in crowded, 0:16:37.480 --> 0:16:41.920 densely populated areas, everybody can compare themselves to everybody else 0:16:41.960 --> 0:16:46.000 because there you are. You even had the emergence of 0:16:46.280 --> 0:16:50.840 nineteenth century diet influencers. One of them was the poet 0:16:50.920 --> 0:16:55.560 Lord Byron. Back then, Lord Byron was also famous for 0:16:55.640 --> 0:16:59.560 his yo yo dieting. The five ft eight inch tall 0:16:59.640 --> 0:17:04.680 writer weighed himself in public on the London Stores Coffee Skills, 0:17:05.400 --> 0:17:09.400 losing a whopping fifty four pounds between two a nds. 0:17:10.720 --> 0:17:14.920 Lord Byron's weight loss strategies included wearing lots of clothing 0:17:15.119 --> 0:17:18.520 so he would sweat more, and diets that were then 0:17:18.520 --> 0:17:24.560 in vogue, like eating flat vinegary potatoes. Vinegar, by the way, 0:17:24.840 --> 0:17:28.240 is still being used for weight loss today. So Janette 0:17:28.280 --> 0:17:31.000 says that after taking apple side of vinegar, she felt 0:17:31.040 --> 0:17:33.400 less bloated. Was it before and after on her then? 0:17:33.400 --> 0:17:36.520 Michelle says she saw a major improvement in her energy 0:17:36.640 --> 0:17:39.879 throughout the day, and Demor says she dropped more than 0:17:39.920 --> 0:17:43.359 the dress side. Anyway, back to Lord Byron, he was 0:17:43.560 --> 0:17:47.560 very influential, and doctors in the eighteen sixties are worried 0:17:47.600 --> 0:17:52.320 about Byron's influence on the young lung after Byron's disappeared 0:17:52.320 --> 0:17:57.399 from the place. It wasn't just Lord Byron, many many 0:17:57.560 --> 0:18:01.679 fad diets emerged during this time, you know, as newspapers 0:18:01.680 --> 0:18:05.200 and magazines and drugs and adverts. It's just a massive 0:18:05.280 --> 0:18:09.639 market and it starts increasing throughout the nineteenth century. Of course, 0:18:09.760 --> 0:18:13.639 that business would keep getting bigger and bigger. Today, the 0:18:13.720 --> 0:18:17.800 industry brings in about seventy billion dollars a year in 0:18:17.840 --> 0:18:21.919 the US alone. Around the time that Lord Byron was 0:18:22.040 --> 0:18:26.679 guzzling vinegar, a minister named Sylvester Graham was preaching a 0:18:27.080 --> 0:18:33.720 different kind of diet. M Sylvester rejected the changes happening 0:18:33.760 --> 0:18:38.159 in society at the time, like more processed foods, and 0:18:38.280 --> 0:18:43.400 like any true minister, he was also very concerned about sin, 0:18:44.240 --> 0:18:49.320 specifically the sin of gluttony. Sylvester told his followers to 0:18:49.359 --> 0:18:53.399 cut out meat, even though being vegetarian was pretty radical 0:18:53.480 --> 0:18:58.000 back then. He also wanted them to cut out alcohol, coffee, 0:18:58.240 --> 0:19:03.440 and spices. If Sylvester seems like an old timey figure, 0:19:04.119 --> 0:19:08.639 consider that you've probably eaten a snack. He invented a 0:19:08.720 --> 0:19:13.840 whole week cracker known as the Graham Cracker. Can you 0:19:13.920 --> 0:19:19.480 imagine how horrified he'd be about s'mores. Other trends popularized 0:19:19.520 --> 0:19:23.560 during these years include the low carved diet, also a 0:19:23.600 --> 0:19:27.440 modern favorite, and chewing your food as much as possible, 0:19:27.880 --> 0:19:32.359 which was known as Fletcherizing after the colorful American businessman 0:19:32.480 --> 0:19:37.080 who touted its weight loss benefits. Charlotte took seven hundred cheese, 0:19:37.119 --> 0:19:39.920 by which time nicocial meal would be freezing cold. Say 0:19:40.080 --> 0:19:44.560 you probably wouldn't continue eating anyway. The writer's frowns. Kafka 0:19:44.720 --> 0:19:49.879 and Henry James started Fletcherizing, so did the businessman John Rockefeller, 0:19:50.720 --> 0:19:54.840 And though it might sound silly, plenty of people recommend 0:19:54.920 --> 0:19:58.080 chewing for weight loss to this day. I want to 0:19:58.119 --> 0:20:02.080 work out that flattens your bell fast. Forget about working 0:20:02.080 --> 0:20:08.400 your muscles, try working your jaw instead chewing. New tools 0:20:08.480 --> 0:20:11.919 for measuring both food and bodies also come on the 0:20:11.960 --> 0:20:16.280 scene during this time. They include the calorie, which you 0:20:16.320 --> 0:20:21.320 may remember from episode one to recap Researchers in Europe 0:20:21.440 --> 0:20:26.119 began using calories to measure the energy and food. The 0:20:26.160 --> 0:20:31.080 American scientist wilverolan Atwater brought those ideas to the US, 0:20:31.680 --> 0:20:35.399 where calories would become the basis for you guessed it, 0:20:36.080 --> 0:20:43.399 new diets. The point I am making with this tour 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:48.199 through diet history is that we've essentially been recycling the 0:20:48.320 --> 0:20:55.240 same tired diet premises for hundreds of years. Another modern 0:20:55.240 --> 0:20:59.160 measurement that will be familiar to any dieter also begins 0:20:59.240 --> 0:21:03.439 in this era, eventually leading to body mass index or 0:21:03.760 --> 0:21:07.520 b m I. The formula was first invented by a 0:21:07.560 --> 0:21:13.400 Belgian mathematician in the eighteen thirties. Life insurance companies subsequently 0:21:13.480 --> 0:21:17.520 began using metrics like weight and height when deciding whether 0:21:17.600 --> 0:21:22.040 to grant people life insurance or not. You can see 0:21:22.040 --> 0:21:25.760 why they might want a tool like this. If someone died, 0:21:26.359 --> 0:21:30.040 life insurers would have to pay up. B m I 0:21:30.200 --> 0:21:33.680 has since become incredibly widely used as a way of 0:21:33.720 --> 0:21:38.920 assessing people's health, but there are a lot of researchers, activists, 0:21:38.960 --> 0:21:42.480 and even doctors who say that it isn't very useful 0:21:42.600 --> 0:21:45.920 for that One of the issues is that b m 0:21:45.920 --> 0:21:49.880 I tables were initially based on white men, and yet 0:21:49.920 --> 0:21:54.640 the measure is uniformly applied to everyone these days, including 0:21:54.680 --> 0:21:58.879 women and people of color. The dangers do health resulting 0:21:58.960 --> 0:22:03.280 from overweight have been shown convincingly by light insurance records. 0:22:04.440 --> 0:22:10.359 Life expectancy decreases as the amount of overweight increases. Excessive 0:22:10.400 --> 0:22:14.520 calorie intake is the cause of overweight. By this point, 0:22:14.520 --> 0:22:18.159 you're probably getting the picture. This time period was the 0:22:18.200 --> 0:22:22.399 start of many of our modern ideas about dieting, the 0:22:22.520 --> 0:22:28.840 calorie body mass index, scammy weight loss pills, foods designed 0:22:28.960 --> 0:22:35.080 specifically for dieting, chewing more to eat less, low carb diets. 0:22:35.119 --> 0:22:39.320 Even that's what keto is. The Keto diet is simply 0:22:39.359 --> 0:22:42.040 a shift in how you eat. They claim to turn 0:22:42.080 --> 0:22:47.119 your body into a fat burning machine. Luigia Cornaro was 0:22:47.480 --> 0:22:51.359 way ahead of his time, and as the Industrial Revolution 0:22:51.640 --> 0:22:55.879 and years following it show, much of dieting comes as 0:22:55.920 --> 0:23:00.400 a result of the conditions of modern life. Diet as 0:23:00.400 --> 0:23:04.080 we know it starts here, and very little about it 0:23:04.160 --> 0:23:14.520 changes from then until now. So okay, let's recap for 0:23:14.560 --> 0:23:18.720 a second. In the nineteenth century, technology was advancing to 0:23:18.760 --> 0:23:22.360 allow us to produce more stuff and communicate more efficiently. 0:23:23.040 --> 0:23:27.679 People were living in cities, Medicine was becoming professionalized, and 0:23:27.760 --> 0:23:30.880 with that you had the rise of doctors trying all 0:23:31.040 --> 0:23:34.640 kinds of creative ways to make money off of people's health. 0:23:36.040 --> 0:23:39.280 These are all things that helped make diets more widespread 0:23:39.400 --> 0:23:43.119 and embraced by everyday people. But what was it about 0:23:43.160 --> 0:23:46.439 this particular moment in time that made people suddenly so 0:23:46.520 --> 0:23:51.560 concerned about their waistline? Sure there was all this technological innovation, 0:23:52.320 --> 0:23:56.760 but what else had changed? It was no longer fashionable. 0:23:56.880 --> 0:23:59.960 This is Peter Stearns. He's a history professor at George 0:24:00.080 --> 0:24:04.080 Mason University an author of a book called fat History. 0:24:04.240 --> 0:24:07.600 The classic story is that until the late nineteenth century, 0:24:07.680 --> 0:24:10.000 if you were a little bit plump, it was probably 0:24:10.000 --> 0:24:12.520 a sign a that you were healthy because you had 0:24:12.600 --> 0:24:15.960 enough to eat, and be you were successful because you 0:24:16.000 --> 0:24:18.679 had enough to eat. And that just that just begins 0:24:18.720 --> 0:24:22.720 to drop off, and the fashion begins to emphasize slenderness. 0:24:22.960 --> 0:24:27.440 What Peter is getting at is that along with changing technology, 0:24:27.520 --> 0:24:31.720 this time also brought some pretty drastic changes to Western 0:24:31.760 --> 0:24:35.680 beauty ideals. At a time when people struggled to get 0:24:35.840 --> 0:24:39.960 enough to eat, being thin was just proof of that. 0:24:41.080 --> 0:24:46.320 It was also more common having curves being heavier. That 0:24:46.359 --> 0:24:51.080 meant you were wealthy and successful, and compared to thinness, 0:24:51.119 --> 0:24:57.280 it was unusual. As industrialization brought more prosperity and with 0:24:57.359 --> 0:25:01.920 it less physical activity and more process foods, the tables 0:25:01.960 --> 0:25:07.320 turned think back to Renaissance paintings hundreds of years earlier, 0:25:08.000 --> 0:25:11.920 in the time of our favorite early diet guru Luigi Cornaro. 0:25:13.280 --> 0:25:19.199 Artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Tysian famously painted curvy women, 0:25:19.960 --> 0:25:27.240 often naked. In Rubens paintings, you see flesh, rippling, fat roles, 0:25:27.920 --> 0:25:34.359 even sally light. His subjects might be called Rubenesque today. Really, 0:25:34.520 --> 0:25:38.639 Luigi was ahead of his time because back then then 0:25:38.880 --> 0:25:44.359 was not the standard. You can see beauty ideals begin 0:25:44.720 --> 0:25:49.040 shifting in art at the time, like the influential drawings 0:25:49.040 --> 0:25:52.240 of women done by the artist Charles Dana Gibson in 0:25:52.280 --> 0:25:58.560 the nineties. The women in his work were known as 0:25:58.680 --> 0:26:03.960 Gibson girls. Gibson girls had thick, glossy hair piled on 0:26:04.040 --> 0:26:08.639 top of their heads and impossibly tiny waists. They wore 0:26:08.680 --> 0:26:14.280 impeccable gowns and often glamorous furs. They became the new 0:26:14.359 --> 0:26:19.320 beauty ideal for American women. They're featured in magazines like 0:26:19.560 --> 0:26:24.199 Life and scrib Neers. Remember this was before TV, so 0:26:24.359 --> 0:26:28.520 magazines were an even bigger deal. They were the subject 0:26:28.560 --> 0:26:35.520 of songs and even wallpaper designs. The Gibson girls are curvy, 0:26:35.720 --> 0:26:38.720 but in a very different way than the Renaissance women 0:26:38.840 --> 0:26:44.320 painted by Rubens and Titian. They have pronounced hourglass figures. 0:26:45.000 --> 0:26:47.480 Women wanted to look like them in the same way 0:26:47.680 --> 0:26:52.639 women want to look like Kardashians Now. Fashion would transform 0:26:52.760 --> 0:26:56.399 even further in the coming decades. A small waists and 0:26:56.480 --> 0:26:59.879 the corsets that made them possible fell out of style 0:27:00.160 --> 0:27:04.120 in favor of the nine twenties flapper look. We're also 0:27:04.280 --> 0:27:14.560 familiar with. Hips were out and then was in. The 0:27:14.600 --> 0:27:17.240 Flapper look comes into style at a time that a 0:27:17.359 --> 0:27:21.240 lot is changing for American women. Many of them started 0:27:21.240 --> 0:27:24.720 working during World War Two, with men away fighting the war, 0:27:25.520 --> 0:27:29.240 and women soon gained the right to vote. Flappers were 0:27:29.280 --> 0:27:32.760 rebelling against the way women had lived their lives before, 0:27:33.440 --> 0:27:38.240 including through what was fashionable. The shift to thinner bodies 0:27:38.280 --> 0:27:43.159 being valued and prized happened really quickly. It's kind of 0:27:43.160 --> 0:27:46.160 funny to think about that today when it can feel 0:27:46.160 --> 0:27:50.679 like being skinny has always been desirable. There was a 0:27:50.760 --> 0:27:55.240 famous French stage star named Sarah Bernard who came to 0:27:55.240 --> 0:27:57.840 the United States I believe in the eighteen eighties, and 0:27:58.000 --> 0:28:00.880 she was ridiculed because she was so thin. People did 0:28:00.880 --> 0:28:04.399 not find her attractive. She came back in the nineties 0:28:04.400 --> 0:28:06.640 and she was a wow, this is exactly the way 0:28:06.880 --> 0:28:10.679 people are supposed to look. There's also a medical side 0:28:10.720 --> 0:28:14.280 to the shift. Remember this is the era of the 0:28:14.400 --> 0:28:20.320 calorie and more sedentary lifestyles. Scientists are becoming concerned about 0:28:20.440 --> 0:28:25.399 people eating too much. Now they're getting evidence that seems 0:28:25.440 --> 0:28:29.399 to say pretty clearly that weighing too much is bad 0:28:29.480 --> 0:28:34.880 for you. The reality is actually more complicated, though that's 0:28:34.880 --> 0:28:38.280 something we'll get into later in this series. There is 0:28:38.320 --> 0:28:42.600 at this point there's well established scientific evidence that we 0:28:43.040 --> 0:28:47.680 definitely relates to health, definitely relates to mortality. Chances concerned 0:28:47.680 --> 0:28:52.320 about issues like heart attacks and blood pressure go up markedly. 0:28:52.920 --> 0:28:55.400 I mean, the old causes of death are beginning to 0:28:55.440 --> 0:28:57.960 recede in favor of some of the causes we worry 0:28:58.000 --> 0:29:02.320 about today, and wait in body shape clearly enter into 0:29:02.320 --> 0:29:06.800 those causes. People aren't dying as much from infectious disease 0:29:07.160 --> 0:29:10.440 a k A. The old causes of death. Because of 0:29:10.520 --> 0:29:14.760 better treatments and public health measures, the new public health 0:29:14.800 --> 0:29:19.760 concern now is weight, and specifically the health risks of 0:29:19.840 --> 0:29:25.000 carrying around extra pounds. Consumption of calories in excess of 0:29:25.080 --> 0:29:30.680 body needs is the single most extensive nutritional problem affecting 0:29:30.760 --> 0:29:35.320 public health in this country. People should be informed that 0:29:35.440 --> 0:29:40.520 overweight is preventable. Before this, when people weighed themselves, they 0:29:40.640 --> 0:29:45.480 might have used agricultural scales in public places Lord Byron style. 0:29:46.480 --> 0:29:51.480 Now scales start getting used much more widely. Hospitals start 0:29:51.520 --> 0:29:55.320 buying them in the late eighteen hundreds. By the twenties, 0:29:55.720 --> 0:29:59.920 skills make their debut in people's bathrooms, and doctor's offices 0:30:00.120 --> 0:30:03.640 are regularly weighing people when they come in for an exam. 0:30:03.760 --> 0:30:06.800 You have to be a really old fashioned doctor by 0:30:07.960 --> 0:30:10.320 not to know that weight could be an issue. In 0:30:10.360 --> 0:30:14.440