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For reasons that really don't bear rehashing, I spent the last two years getting told to go on diets. Every kind of diet. No "nightshades." No acid. No gluten. No dairy. Low-FODMAP (bans dairy, gluten, soy, legumes, and half of all fruits and vegetables.) Low-fat. "Eat nothing but bone broth that you made yourself, and if you don't simmer it for six hours, it's no good." "Microwaving food destroys its nutrients." At one point I had successive doctors tell me to go on a low-fiber diet and a high-fiber diet.
Every single diet-pusher, whether doctor or rando, said or implied (usually explicitly said), "If you don't do this, you'll never get better. Don't you want to get better?"
This was especially infuriating given that I was so underweight that I had symptoms of malnutrition. And also that in two years of dieting, there had never once been any indication whatsoever that my illness was caused by diet or that changing my diet was helpful. I eventually came to the conclusion that Americans are fucking insane about food and that a primary manifestation of sexism is controlling women by controlling what they eat.
Anyway, I am not dieting now. But now that I am slightly less likely to hit NEON RAGE APOCALYPSE at the word "diet," I clicked on a link and fell into an internet rabbit hole of diet advice. Like the evolved forager that I am, I bring you my findings for amusement, analysis, and mockery:
- A comparison of wild fruits and vegetables with cultivated ones, concluding that eating fruits and vegetables is unhealthy because they are unnatural and not what the cavemen ate.
By that reasoning there is literally nothing we can eat unless we get air-dropped into some untouched stretch of rainforest to forage for wild bananas.
- Eating fruit makes you fat.
- Humans did not evolve to eat fruit.
We're PRIMATES.Monkeys love bananas.
- Corn causes Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
- Corn causes ADHD.
- Corn causes autism.
- Corn causes cancer.
- Broccoli causes cancer.
- Hot water causes cancer.
The last one, from a study saying that drinking hot beverages can cause cancer, had the best response: David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Britain's University of Cambridge, said: "In the case of very hot drinks, the IARC concludes they are probably hazardous, but can't say how big the risk might be," according to the Australian Financial Review. "This may be interesting science, but makes it difficult to construct a sensible response."
- A Breatharian – as defined in the book A Year Without Food – is a person who chooses to live mostly, or completely, from Pranic nourishment. Israeli author Ray Maor claims that once Breatharians have trained their body to absorb this energy from the air and sunlight, they are no longer dependent on food. Many of them continue to taste food for enjoyment, but do not need it for survival, he says.
Umm.
- Brian J. Ford has suggested that ketosis, possibly caused by alcoholism or low-carb dieting, produces acetone, which is highly flammable and could therefore lead to apparently spontaneous combustion.
The Atkins diet will make you burst into flame!
- Our ancestors NEVER ate a carb. They ate meat and fat and that was it. On that diet, they grew, improved their lot, invented the wheel, survived in caves and hinted in groups.
Bad history aside (even in the Arctic, people ate seaweed and lichen), anyone who's ever lived in a small town or attended school knows that a major human activity is indeed hinting in groups.
Every single diet-pusher, whether doctor or rando, said or implied (usually explicitly said), "If you don't do this, you'll never get better. Don't you want to get better?"
This was especially infuriating given that I was so underweight that I had symptoms of malnutrition. And also that in two years of dieting, there had never once been any indication whatsoever that my illness was caused by diet or that changing my diet was helpful. I eventually came to the conclusion that Americans are fucking insane about food and that a primary manifestation of sexism is controlling women by controlling what they eat.
Anyway, I am not dieting now. But now that I am slightly less likely to hit NEON RAGE APOCALYPSE at the word "diet," I clicked on a link and fell into an internet rabbit hole of diet advice. Like the evolved forager that I am, I bring you my findings for amusement, analysis, and mockery:
- A comparison of wild fruits and vegetables with cultivated ones, concluding that eating fruits and vegetables is unhealthy because they are unnatural and not what the cavemen ate.
By that reasoning there is literally nothing we can eat unless we get air-dropped into some untouched stretch of rainforest to forage for wild bananas.
- Eating fruit makes you fat.
- Humans did not evolve to eat fruit.
We're PRIMATES.
- Corn causes Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
- Corn causes ADHD.
- Corn causes autism.
- Corn causes cancer.
- Broccoli causes cancer.
- Hot water causes cancer.
The last one, from a study saying that drinking hot beverages can cause cancer, had the best response: David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Britain's University of Cambridge, said: "In the case of very hot drinks, the IARC concludes they are probably hazardous, but can't say how big the risk might be," according to the Australian Financial Review. "This may be interesting science, but makes it difficult to construct a sensible response."
- A Breatharian – as defined in the book A Year Without Food – is a person who chooses to live mostly, or completely, from Pranic nourishment. Israeli author Ray Maor claims that once Breatharians have trained their body to absorb this energy from the air and sunlight, they are no longer dependent on food. Many of them continue to taste food for enjoyment, but do not need it for survival, he says.
Umm.
- Brian J. Ford has suggested that ketosis, possibly caused by alcoholism or low-carb dieting, produces acetone, which is highly flammable and could therefore lead to apparently spontaneous combustion.
The Atkins diet will make you burst into flame!
- Our ancestors NEVER ate a carb. They ate meat and fat and that was it. On that diet, they grew, improved their lot, invented the wheel, survived in caves and hinted in groups.
Bad history aside (even in the Arctic, people ate seaweed and lichen), anyone who's ever lived in a small town or attended school knows that a major human activity is indeed hinting in groups.
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From:
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Speaking as a depressed, chronically ill person with digestion issues: they can all go screw themselves. Food is for a) sustaining the body, which works differently with every body, and b) pleasure and social bonding, when possible. Not for finding yet another way to be miserable and Wrong.
From:
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...until I got a two-year avalanche of in-person demands to diet and accusations that I was deliberately making myself sick by eating as I pleased and being told that there's no such thing as too thin and guilt-tripped if I said that dieting stressed me out and so forth. It made an already-miserable experience way worse, and I'm sure contributed to me losing so much weight that if the cause had been anorexia, I'd have been hospitalized. It was incredibly fucked-up, unhealthy, and literally life-threatening.
From:
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Once a medical busybody tried to lecture me into giving up soda because SUGAR BAD and I told her that ginger ale is a reliably positive sensory experience for me, lack of those was much more dangerous to my health than sugar, and she could pry my ginger ale from my cold dead hands.
From:
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I do think it's a synecdoche of how fucked up Americans are about food that when I said I couldn't do a diet because it made me extremely stressed and depressed, removed everything I enjoyed eating, and led to me eating almost nothing and losing weight, when I was already so underweight that I'd stopped menstruating and my hair was falling out... They universally said I needed to do it anyway. Or everything would be my fault.
In contrast, when I told doctors that side effects of medication bothered me, they almost universally responded by suggesting that I switch to a different drug. I don't think I ever got "You need to take it anyway (or everything will be your fault." And that was mostly side effects much less serious than depression and malnutrition.
From:
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The same doctor later refused to treat me when I had a rash swelling my eyes shut on the grounds that the only available treatments would increase my risk of cataracts several decades on.
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From:
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I think the fact that my body already makes food an Issue is part of why I get very aggressively dismissive of diet crap. Like... no. Not allowed! Running a body is already hard enough, people want to make it even harder for stupid nonsensical reasons??? NO. I will draw a line around the positive interactions I manage to have with food and hiss at anyone who tries to cross it. Or something.
Also, having family and friends with a variety of different dietary requirements and medical conditions has made it really clear to me that one person's ideal diet is the next person's poisonous disaster, so all blanket rules for What People Should Eat are inherently flawed. We're all stuck trying to figure out what kind of fuel our particular systems run best on. While being sabotaged with floods of terrible dieting "advice." :(