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March 5, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast
33:49
The History of “The Diet”

Have you ever wondered how we all became so obsessed with going on a diet? In this interview, Susan Yager, author of “The Hundred Year Diet” explores the origins of counting calories and health food. Susan also weighs in on the sugar epidemic in our county and how it came to be in the first place.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Lyndon Johnson had a heart attack.
Then Dwight David Eisenhower had a heart attack.
And this was all blamed on cholesterol at the time.
Cholesterol got the rap for everything.
And the sugar people stepped in.
A lot of scientists were saying, hey, wait a minute, maybe sugar is part of the problem, too.
But the sugar people stopped in and hired ad agencies to kind of really propaganda.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Yes.
I'm joined today by Susan Yeager.
Susan is the author of The 100-Year Diet, a title which by itself is fairly intriguing.
And we're going to find out a bit more about that.
But Susan's expertise is in food studies.
She's an adjunct professor in the Department of Food Studies, Nutrition and Health, Public Health rather, at New York University.
It's been interesting looking through this book to understand a bit more about how we wandered upon the assumptions we all make about food in our life.
And many of the assumptions that we make, the fact that calories in, has to equal calories out, a bit of information about how nutrition, when it's still in its infancy, was crafted.
All these become important as we try to uncover some of the hidden assumptions that color the everyday decisions that we make in our lives.
So, Susan, thanks for joining the show.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
So before I get into Sylvester Graham, who many of you may not recognize actually invented the graham cracker and all the other stories, tell us about the title of the book.
Why did you pick the 100-year diet?
Well, because Americans have been trying to lose weight, not necessarily for any good reason to begin with, but have been trying to lose weight for about 100 years.
There wasn't a period in the 1830s when the Irish were coming over, when they went from famine-stricken areas to robust food supplies where they gained weight.
I mean, I remember reading some of the early work from Atkins and him finding material from 150, 200 years ago where people were talking about gluttony and the importance...
Oh, absolutely.
There have always been obese people in the world.
You could look at line drawings from thousands of years ago in caves, and there are some rotund people.
Shakespeare, Falstaff was heavy, Rubenesque women.
But it was pretty much a controlled problem in America as well.
About 25% of the population was overweight or obese, which are incidentally, of course, not the same thing.
Until about 1990, and then...
1890. Well, until about 1990, it was about 25%, and then it started exploding for a whole variety of reasons.
But yes, there always were corpulent people, and those people tried to lose weight, but of course...
If you think of it, at the turn of the last century, it was kind of a good thing to have some extra weight.
Infectious diseases, no antibiotics, it was a hedge against disease, and it was acceptable.
Lillian Russell, a big star, was a heavy woman.
When you think in 1913, we had a president, Taft, who was 300 pounds, and that was considered acceptable.
I was fascinated as a school kid about how they had to buy him a new tub.
It's because he couldn't fit in the old one.
So talk to you about Sylvester Graham.
Get us into the entire discussion through some of his observations.
Well, I wanted, you know, my whole concept was, my whole thoughts were, how did we get to this point?
Always trying to lose weight.
Why do we accept these diets?
They're all the same, but yet we fall for them constantly.
What was the foundation of this?
And about 1832, Sylvester Graham was a minister, And an advocate for healthy foods.
He got scared.
He saw white flour start to get into our bread.
He saw women not baking bread, but going to bakers to get it.
And he started to become very frightened.
We weren't eating whole foods anymore.
He was tied in with religion.
He thought that a lot of the new foods we were eating, spicier type foods and meats, would cause debauchery.
And he also...
Non-drunken debauchery.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, he looked...
He looked at prostitutes, he looked at young men in various countries where there was poverty, and he saw cholera.
And he didn't know what caused cholera, but he kind of based it on crowds and urban living and drinking water.
He was sort of right about that, of course, but...
No one knew why.
So what he was saying started to make sense to a lot of people, particularly young people, almost like today where a lot of young people are vegetarians, they're vegans, they are kind of the alpha people when it comes to diet.
The same thing happened there.
A lot of the wealthier people and the younger people adopted a Graham-type diet.
He's best remembered now, of course, for the Graham cracker.
Well, the graham cracker has some of the ingredients that we often don't advocate for.
Yeah, they don't taste very healthy now.
Yeah, but that's not how he made them, of course.
He made them with whole wheat flour, and they were a good cracker.
But here's why he had graham crackers.
He felt that yeast in bread was much too sexy a thing.
It multiplied, it swelled, you had it kneaded, it was singulous.
Yeah.
Pulsated.
Yeah, he didn't want any yeast because it was a living, sensuous thing, and so he developed graham crackers.
At that early time in the 1830s, was there an inkling about the fact that food caused weight gain and that there were some hazards associated with it?
A little bit.
As far back as 1757, there was a treatise written in London kind of connecting certain saccharines and, you know, what they would call those farinaceous foods, what they would call them in those days, with corpulence.
You know, that was based on observation.
They would, I imagine, see heavier people eating perhaps a lot of sugar, a lot of butter, a lot of fatty foods, and so they connected it.
But not really.
It wasn't until about...
1860 in London that a real connection was made.
And of course calories hadn't been recognized yet.
William Banting, I believe, wrote that.
Just to quote it, it's a letter on corpulence addressed to the public.
Yes.
Why did he write it?
What was his background?
And why did it take the nation by storm?
Well, his background was he was a coffin maker in London.
And kind of coffin making to the stars, you know, to the royals.
And he was a very, very corpulent man.
He couldn't bend over to tie his shoelaces.
And he went to a lot of different doctors.
No one could help him.
He was so fat that it was pressing against his ear drum, and he was even losing his hearing.
So he went to this doctor named Harvey, who had recently gone to a discussion about diabetes, what might cause it, and about hearing, oral loss.
And Harvey developed this diet for Banting based on all the foods that Banting loved.
So he said, no sugar, no butter, no milk, and so forth.
Banting followed the diet, lost, I think, 38 pounds in 35 days or something like that.
He was incredibly successful following this diet, which was in essence...
A low carbohydrate, lower carbohydrate, not low carbohydrate, but lower, lower fat diet.
So he was eating fewer calories.
People drank a lot in those days.
For one thing, water wasn't that pure.
So there was plenty of alcohol on this diet.
I mean, a tremendous amount of alcohol on the diet.
But nevertheless, he lost weight and he wanted to spread it to the world.
So he did.
He wrote a pamphlet about it and it caught on in London.
Didn't catch on right away in America, but about 20 years later, Americans started reading it, and they started following the diet as well.
In the absence of an understanding of calories, it's difficult to imagine how folks made peace with this concept that you could change the amount that you eat and lose weight.
So what did they think was happening?
Yeah, I agree.
There's that concept called vitalism, which means there's sort of an outside force.
It's not just science that is establishing what happens to the human body.
And many people thought it was a mysterious thing.
They thought it might be spiritual.
They thought it might be otherworldly.
This is why a lot of foods that people said not to eat when they were dieting would be foods that grew under the ground.
No beets, no carrots, because these were evil things.
They grew under the ground.
It was all a mystery.
You're quite right.
Before calories, it was very hard, and all it could be was based on observation.
If heavy people seem to eat a lot of fatty foods, well, don't eat fatty foods.
So let's talk about the discovery of calories.
I believe it was about 1890, 1895. Yeah, about that man named Atwater.
Why was he interested in this?
How did he actually discover the calories?
Those profound insights are so interesting to me.
It is amazing.
I mean, he literally burned...
He burned foods for kind of fuel in these calorie meters.
And he learned by doing that, that all carbohydrates have about, well, a gram of carbohydrates, all, no matter what they are, have about four calories.
A gram of protein has about four calories.
A gram of fat, actually, and I do say about, everyone says four, but it might be 3.9, it might be 4.1, depending on what it is.
And a gram of fat, nine calories.
Once he learned that, it was easy enough to extrapolate how many calories there are in food, just how much fat is there and multiply it by nine.
That's how many calories you have.
And that's what was done at the turn of the century.
That's how calories began to be quantified.
You had to multiply them out very carefully.
So how did that affect eating behaviors?
Did folks figure, hey, you know what, that's got a lot of calories in it, I'll shy away?
It didn't really change things tremendously, except for the very wealthy.
The very wealthy would go to these sanitariums.
People like Rockefeller and Ford and Edison all went to a very popular one in Battle Creek, Michigan, run by a man named Kellogg.
whose family, of course, also invented Kellogg Corn Flakes and all of the other breakfast cereals.
They would go there and they would meticulously write down everything they ate and chew very carefully.
Oh, that was another thing.
At the turn of the century, there was a man named Horace Fletcher.
And he believed, he was called a great masticator, he believed that to lose weight, you have to chew everything you eat at least a hundred times.
Believe it or not, even milk had to be chewed.
You had to chew it until it was a liquid pulp, then you swallow it, and you'll lose weight.
Well, of course you did, because you were eating very slowly, you were eating very little meat, because who wants to chew meat a thousand times before it's a liquid pulp?
Right.
And it's a good thing in a way.
I mean, part of this is good because, you know, satiety sets in.
Your brain has time to realize you're full.
And people lost weight.
So they would sit around chewing forever, jotting down every single thing that they ate, multiplying it out.
They would know how many calories they had.
That's what the wealthy did.
The great masticator.
The great masticator, yes.
But things really started to change in 1918 for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, we entered World War I. And we knew about calories.
We knew that calories could give you energy.
Well, Herbert Hoover was the food czar.
He was in charge of getting food to the troops.
And he said, food will win the war.
And don't help the Hun at mealtime.
And there were these posters everywhere.
At the same time, a doctor, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, medical doctor, became very interested in nutrition.
And she wrote the best-selling diet book, first one in America, and it was a bestseller for years.
It was called Diet and Health Were the Key to the Calories.
Lulu Hunt Peters explained what calories are, said there are certain amounts of calories in different foods, and told people exactly what they should eat and exactly what they should weigh.
No one knew what they were supposed to weigh before.
She had a formula.
She said, for example, if you're a woman and you're five feet tall, you can weigh 105 pounds.
And then for every inch after that, I'm 5'2", so every inch after that, you can have another five pounds.
So you knew how much you were supposed to weigh.
115 pounds.
If you're 5'2", you know, you could fall within that category.
No one knew this before, and it changed the country.
That combined with the fact that Luluan Peters would say, if you eat too much, you're a traitor.
You're not helping the war effort.
And it suddenly became a bad thing to be heavy.
There's less more to come after the break.
Speaking of Susan Yeager, she's the author of The Hundred Year Diet, which describes the history of dieting in this country.
We're up to the First World War.
You were about to say something.
Oh, no.
I was about to say that, yeah, I think, what did I read the other day?
About 10% of our healthcare costs are for problems related to obesity.
20% of our cancers are probably caused by obesity, at least that much of heart disease.
I mean, there are many reasons why the focus on it, they're humanitarian, independent of the money, but the money comes up as well.
The other thing that you brought up in the book, which I was intrigued by, is this whole concept of the flapper.
Or, you know, the thin, rosy-cheeked woman being more sensual and sexy.
So it wasn't the odolesque Or overweight woman anymore.
And was that just a cultural shift in the country?
Or is it done with some thought behind it?
I think it was a cultural shift.
I think what happened was at the same time all this was going on about food winning the war, women were winning the right to vote.
In fact, Lillian Russell, who had been that voluptuous, sexy, turn-of-the-century woman, she became a political activist and fought for women to get the right to vote, gave up on everything else, and just was an Asian for change at that point.
The women got the right to vote, and when they did that, they bobbed their hair, they wore shorter skirts, they wore tighter clothing, and suddenly, you know, you could hide being overweight with those Victorian outfits, but suddenly you couldn't hide it anymore.
So right about here is where I get intrigued because you make the compelling argument that when folks began to focus on weight, it actually in some way stimulated the obesity crisis.
So let's go back to how they could focus on it.
The average person probably couldn't weigh themselves in 1918. How would they do it?
Well, in the 20s, by about 1920, there was indoor plumbing in about 50% of the homes in America.
And once there was indoor plumbing, Detecto and other scale companies started selling scales.
Because if you had a scale, you could weigh yourself with no clothing on.
But even if you could do that, penny scales showed up everywhere.
There were scales on the corner, there were scales in department stores.
Very often people weighed themselves in the morning, then they went to the department store and they weighed themselves in the afternoon away from their husband's eyes and, you know, all that.
And then they weighed themselves again at night.
Everyone knew what he weighed in the 20s.
Because if you didn't know what you weighed, how could you control your weight?
And it started to become very important to do that.
In the 20s was the beginning of all of really the kind of loopy fad diets that extended into the 30s, which is kind of fascinating because we were going through the worst depression the country ever knew, and people were food insecure, and people were on bread lines.
And yet...
Really bizarre diets were flourishing in the 30s.
Give me an example of one that was larger than most.
Well, you know, they were all one or two food diets.
I think when things are spinning out of control, it's good to have control of something, even if it's just lunch, you know.
So it would be, you could only have tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs.
Big one was lamb chops and pineapple.
Yeah, the idea was that the acid in the pineapple absorbed the fat in the lamb chops and you wouldn't gain weight.
That was the concept behind it.
Now, obviously, if you're only eating pineapple and lamb chops, you're not taking a lot of calories and you're going to lose weight as long as you can stand only eating pineapples and lamb chops.
Then you give it up and you gain the weight back, of course.
Talking to Susan Yeager, author of The 100-Year Diet, where she describes a history of eating in this country and a simultaneous rise of the problem that it's supposed to treat.
And we've gotten to that critical moment now in U.S. history where this becomes a bit more evident.
Dr. Roizen, who's joining us in Cleveland, take it away.
Now, Susan, did Prohibition change things?
In other words, how did it change things with alcohol?
Obviously, it had high calories.
It's no longer in the mix.
Well, it was no longer in the mix, except in a lot of urban centers where, of course, there were speakeasies and, of course, you could still get alcohol if you had money.
In fact, when The Joy of Cooking first came out in 1931, the very first line in The Joy of Cooking is, most cocktails are made with gin and ingenuity.
Because...
She knew, you know, she knew that a lot of people were still getting gin.
But for those people that couldn't afford it, they turned to sugar.
And never was so much sugar consumed in our country before.
And not far more now, but before that, as during Prohibition.
Because people without alcohol tended to turn to, for one thing, of course, calorically sweetened soda.
But a lot of other sugary things as well.
Restaurants would open up, they'd be all you can eat, all the desserts you can eat, and people would load up on three, four, five, six different desserts, especially in 1930 as the Depression was just a ponder.
So the substitute for alcohol was desserts?
To some extent, yes.
Well, actually, it's the reverse substitute now.
We say instead of having a dessert, have a glass of wine at the end of the meal.
We do.
So, Coca-Cola had this great rise from 1919 to 1933 during Prohibition.
Is that right?
Yeah, in fact, the man who developed Coca-Cola, Pemberton, was kind of a visionary because one of the things he was thinking, you know, he took caffeine, he took cola nuts, which don't really have, there is cocaine in that, but not really when you get into the mixture, just a drop of it.
But he took these things thinking that prohibition could be coming.
You know, he saw the rumblings of this.
And he thought, what if I created a drink that everyone could have if this happened?
And that indeed is what happened.
I mean, Coca-Cola became a substitute and a drink that everyone could have morning, noon, and night.
What intrigued me, as Susan was reading through the book, is you point out the supersizing concept that began as part of the marketing war.
Walk us through that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, that, of course, is a turning point.
There was a lot of talk about obesity epidemics in the 50s and the 60s, but it was just talk, and it was talk mainly brought on by these big weight loss companies trying to get people to buy products.
But what happened was, in the 60s, the Japanese developed, late 60s, a way to convert cornstarch into fructose.
And when that was blended with glucose, you got high fructose corn syrup.
So much cheaper, so much sweeter than sugar.
At the same time, Nixon had told his Secretary of State, Earl Butz, you better get the farmers planting, because he had been really criticized for subsidies, paying farmers not to plant.
The farmers were told, plant fence row to fence row.
What were they told to plant?
Plant corn and plant soy.
Suddenly we have this big corn surplus in the early 70s, coinciding with the invention of high fructose corn syrup.
Put the two together, you get very cheap, very sweet food.
And that's when supersizing began of sodas.
At the same time, all that soy, of course, and the corn went to feeding cattle, feeding livestock, and you got very cheap meat.
Well, the meat story was a bit more complex than that because I guess it was the restriction on meat consumption, especially during the Second World War, that in some ways stimulated our appetite.
Again, this recurring theme in the book over and over again points out the fact that as we pull ourselves back, we restrict what we can do, we want it more.
Yes, that's a very good point.
And during the Second World War, of course, there was rationing in America during the Second World War.
Not during the First, but during the Second.
And meat was one of the things rations, especially the fattier, more expensive, better cuts of meat.
So when the war was over, and again, you get these streams and currents coinciding to form epidemics.
Mm-hmm.
The war was over.
It just so happened that Ray Kroc spotted that hamburger joint in California, and a light bulb went off, and he said, I'm going to put these all over the country.
That coincided with the cheap meat and the cheap high fructose corn syrup, cheap soda, and we started having a lot of empty calorie food.
cheap food permeating the country.
Now, I'm not saying anyone, you know, no one forced Americans to eat this food, but it was delicious, they thought, and it was cheap and it was available.
Well, in other countries like Russia, for example, which has had famines, of course, in China as well, you sort of see the same phenomenon, do you know?
When you hold people back from buying the sugar that they would normally buy, which again also happened in the Second World War, and people would go out and buy tubs of the stuff and hoard it, or meat or whatever else, you stimulate unwittingly and undesiringly a craving for those products.
Well, we're certainly seeing a craving for opulence in Russia today.
And their diet is such that, yeah, we might very well see an obesity epidemic starting to hit there.
Chinese culture is different.
That will be interesting because it's a very low-fat culture.
The way they eat and meat tends to be a condiment more than the main course.
Asian cultures in general have the lowest rates of obesity in the world.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
So let's fast forward now.
We're in the 60s.
We've discovered, or 70s, discovered high fructose corn syrup.
We've got subsidies on meat now, which make it affordable.
We seem to like it more.
Is it that combination that causes us to get obese?
I mean, we don't have the shortage anymore.
My generation was born without ever having faced food shortages.
Certainly my children haven't either, yet our obesity rates continue to worsen.
Yeah, but your generation was born when a number of things were going on.
Fast food was all over the country.
Suburbs exist where people are driving rather than walking.
Budgetary constraints took phys ed out of public schools.
I mean, I think there are only 17 states left where there even is any type of physical ed going on in public schools now.
Cooking used to be taught in school, no longer taught in school.
Yeah.
All of these things happened, and it all started catching up with us in about 1990. So, the debate now that rages frequently about the role of sugar versus the role of fat in our diets...
Help us understand the political backdrop to this.
And I think, okay, I'm speaking to Susan Yeager, the author of The Hundred Year Died.
You do a nice job explaining why certain lobbies got involved and, you know, funded, for example, the Harvard School of Public Health, which is a very prominent institution in this country.
And they would publish papers along one side of the fence.
And all these, of course, ended up influencing the USDA and how they make recommendations about what we're going to eat.
Well, the sugar people caught on pretty fast.
We better do something about this.
We better get publicity saying that sugar is a good thing, not a bad thing.
And you have to realize that in the 50s and 60s, the country became very torn.
We had a Senate House Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson, had a heart attack.
Then Dwight David Eisenhower had a heart attack.
And this was all blamed on cholesterol at the time.
Cholesterol got the rap for everything.
Wow.
And the sugar people stepped in.
A lot of scientists were saying, hey, wait a minute, maybe sugar is part of the problem too.
But the sugar people stopped in and hired ad agencies to kind of really propaganda.
Say sugar is good.
Sugar is white.
It's pure.
It's good for you.
You know, fat is the evil nutrient.
One of the reasons I actually wrote the book is that it really bothers me when I see any nutrient vilified and low-carb diets, which started in the 30s but really got popular in the 60s and then the 70s.
Low-carb diets vilifying carbohydrates, I think, is probably the worst thing that ever happened to diets in America because it confused people so much.
All carbohydrates were linked together.
So fruits and vegetables and whole grains, which are carbohydrates, were linked with sugar and with white bread and with things of the bad for you.
Now, Susan, those really started with banting, though, 100 years earlier or 80 years earlier, right?
Well, yes and no.
Banting was really, Banting said no bread and no butter.
You know, people think of Banting as the first low-carb diet, but it really wasn't.
It was really a low-carb, low-fat diet.
Low-carb actually, the no-carb really started with an explorer named Wilhelm Steffensen, who was also a guy from Harvard.
And he went and he lived with the Inuit population for years of the time, and he lived off the land only eating meat and fat.
And he came back and said, this is a great diet and also a way to lose weight.
It's hard to pronounce his name, but you pointed it out in the book.
And I was intrigued that Stephenson, because he had lived with these people, saw their dietary habits and figured, you know what, if they can get away without any of this, it's better for us.
I can see why the meatpacker lobbies were backing them in a big way.
And by the way, I just want to, for all our listeners, this is sort of the big overarching message that I took from the book, that you've got lobbyists around industries, like the meat industry, like sugar industry, which understandably, and this is not an evil empire.
You're trying to, you know, you believe in your product, you work in the area.
So obviously you want it to be popular.
You don't want someone else vilifying you.
You end up, because it's easier to do, not separating simple carbs from complex carbs, proteins sort of the same way.
And all of a sudden you've got battles where none should exist.
Yeah, absolutely.
And of course, then along comes someone like Robert Atkins, who after all is a cardiologist.
He's a doctor.
People trust him.
They believe him.
He says, cut all carbs from your diet, all of them, not even fruits and vegetables are allowed.
And people buy into this.
And why does it happen?
Because of course, if you go on one of these low-carb diets, you're going to lose weight.
You know, you're going to lose water weight instantly, and so you're going to feel good, and then you're not going to be able to stand it, and you're going to go off the diet and gain the weight back, and that is a very frustrating and upsetting thing to happen to people.
So Lisa, let me ask you, as the voice of female reason in the room, besides our author Susan, so when you hear Susan talk about the fact that cutting carbs by themselves is not the solution, you obviously appreciate the difference between complex and simple carbs.
If you had to, wouldn't you cut carbs out, simple carbs is your first step in a diet?
Who, me?
Yeah.
No, because I don't eat meat.
I would have nothing to eat.
As a vegetarian, Atkins is really impossible.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
But you have complex carbs.
Yeah, but you just said would I cut out carbs out of my diet?
Or simple carbs.
Oh, you mean like, yeah, well, we wouldn't...
In an ideal diet, I don't think we'd be eating simple carbs anyway.
We'd eat real whole foods, which are complex carbohydrates, and you have sugar in its natural form, which is a fruit.
So Susan, back to you.
Exactly.
Is that the first recommendation you'd give someone, one of our listeners, wants to lose weight?
Oh, wait.
Go ahead.
It shouldn't just be what she said all along.
It shouldn't be one element.
I heard that.
That's why I'm asking this question.
Yeah.
I'm not saying it's the only thing you do, but would it be the first thing you did?
Okay.
Getting back to Lisa's point for just a minute, though, there are only three macronucreants.
I mean, there are fat carbohydrates and proteins.
So to vilify any one of them or to cut any one of them out of a diet really makes no sense.
So I would say any diet that says to do that, you should sort of run away from it.
But if I had to cut one thing, yeah, I would cut sugar.
I mean, If I were to tell people one thing to cut out, it would be sweetened beverages.
It's 7% of the calories in America today that people consume are in calorically sweetened beverages, which are, you know, I mean, no nutrients, just empty calories, and do nothing for you except put on weight.
So yeah, the first thing I would do would be to say, don't ever drink soda.
That message is given over and over and over again by just about every nutrition expert I've ever spoken to.
For a hundred years.
For a hundred years.
So the fact that it hasn't happened, in fact, the opposite makes me concerned.
And I'll go one step further.
I know the folks who make these products, they're not evil people.
They're making products because we eat them.
They'd prefer...
Believe it or not, that we didn't drink these sugared products because they've become a commodity now.
They're actually not a big profit center compared to making an exotic green tea mix or some other punchy drink that actually has real fruit juices where they can actually charge a higher margin.
But what is it that's kept us addicted to these products?
Oh my goodness.
Well, firstly, people are not great at making decisions, often choose the wrong things.
And also, obesity is, in a sense, it's contagious because we mimic the people around us.
There was a very interesting study published in 2007 in the New England Journal of Medicine where a couple of guys, a political scientist and a physician, Got a hold of all of the records of the Framingham Heart Study.
That's 32 years of data.
And BMIs are recorded every few years.
It's more than 12,000 people.
So this is really rich data to take a look at how obesity works and how it affects other people.
And what they found out was that if your best friend, or not even best friend, if a friend, If a friend of a friend becomes obese, you have a 20% chance of becoming obese as well.
It's contagious.
It catches.
People mimic other people's behavior.
It's also really cheap.
The soft drinks and processed foods are kept artificially at low prices with these subsidies.
That's right.
It's cheaper to buy a huge soft drink than it is to buy a bottle of water.
So that's going to encourage you.
Before you go to break, palm oil.
You talk about it in the book a bit.
Why is palm oil worse than many of the other oils that it's replacing?
Because it's incredibly highly saturated.
Far more saturated, for example, than lard.
So it's one of the worst things you can eat.
But again, to Lisa's point, it's cheap.
And so it's used.
You sort of finish up the whole process talking about this 1977...
Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which is a very famous point in the role of government on giving nutritional advice.
And in this, just a quote, it says that Americans should reduce their consumption of animal fats, table sugar, and salt while increasing consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
This is 1977. What gave?
Why did it end up being watered down?
Why haven't we been able to focus on this?
Well, you know, with all of these diets, with all of these recommendations, the USDA recommendations came out in 1980 saying exactly the same thing.
It's tough.
You know, people, fast food is cheap.
It's easy.
People stop learning how to cook.
They stop cooking for themselves.
It's tough to go out to the supermarket and buy wonderful foods and cook them if you don't know how to do it.
Kids have got to start getting educated in school on how to shop and how to cook and how to eat right.
Susan Yeager, thank you so much for joining us.
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