The Two Finger Diet: How the Media Has Duped Women into Hating Themselves

Why Do Women Hate Their Bodies?

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Once the concept of cleanliness had entered the realm of eating, it was only a matter of time before the basic idea spread contagiously across Instagram , where fans of eatclean could share their artfully photographed green juices and rainbow salad bowls. A typical Reno eat-clean meal might be stir-fried chicken and vegetables over brown rice; or almond-date biscotti with a cup of tea. In many ways The Eat-Clean Diet was like any number of diet books that had come before, advising plenty of vegetables and modestly portioned, home-cooked meals.

Meanwhile, a second version of clean eating was spearheaded by a former cardiologist from Uruguay called Alejandro Junger, the author of Clean: During this phase, Junger advised a largely liquid diet either composed of home-made juices and soups, or of his own special powdered shakes. They are all charismatic human beings. I do think the clean-eating gurus believe in it themselves. They drink the Koolaid. O ver the past 50 years, mainstream healthcare in the west has been inexplicably blind to the role that diet plays in preventing and alleviating ill health.

When it started, eatclean spoke to growing numbers of people who felt that their existing way of eating was causing them problems, from weight gain to headaches to stress, and that conventional medicine could not help. In the absence of nutrition guidance from doctors, it was a natural step for individuals to start experimenting with cutting out this food or that. From to , the number of Americans who actively avoided gluten, despite not suffering from coeliac disease, more than tripled. It also became fashionable to drink a whole pantheon of non-dairy milks, ranging from oat milk to almond milk.

I have lactose-intolerant and vegan friends who say that eatclean has made it far easier for them to buy ingredients that they once had to go to specialist health-food stores to find.

Someone who observed how quickly and radically eatclean changed the market for health-food books is Anne Dolamore, a publisher at the independent food publishers Grub Street, based in London. Almost all of the authors of the British clean eating bestsellers started off as bloggers or Instagrammers, many of them beautiful women in their early 20s who were genuinely convinced that the diets they had invented had cured them of various chronic ailments. Every wellness guru worth her Himalayan pink salt has a story of how changing what you eat can change your life.

Perhaps the best-known diet-transformation story of all is that of Ella Mills — possessor of more than a million Instagram followers. In , Mills was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome, a condition characterised by dizziness and extreme fatigue. By the time her first book appeared in January , her vast following on social media helped her to sell 32, copies in the first week alone.

There was something paradoxical about the way these books were marketed. What they were selling purported to be an alternative to a sordidly commercial food industry. Yet clean eating is itself a wildly profitable commercial enterprise, promoted using photogenic young bloggers on a multi-billion-dollar tech platform. After years on the margins, health-based cooking was finally getting a mass audience. The irony, however, was that the kind of well-researched books Dolamore and others once published no longer tended to sell so well, because health publishing was now dominated by social media celebrities.

Some would argue that, in developed nations where most people eat shockingly poor diets, low in greens and high in sugar, this new union of health and food has done a modicum of good. For this, you need something stronger. You need the assurance of make-believe, whispered sweetly. Grind this cauliflower into tiny pieces and you can make a special kind of no-carb rice!

Sugar tax: Osborne's two-tier levy brings mixed response

Avoid all sugar and your skin will shimmer! Among other things, clean eating confirms how vulnerable and lost millions of us feel about diet — which really means how lost we feel about our own bodies.

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We are so unmoored that we will put our faith in any master who promises us that we, too, can become pure and good. I can pinpoint the exact moment that my own feelings about clean eating changed from ambivalence to outright dislike. I was on stage at the Cheltenham literary festival with dietician Renee McGregor who works both with Olympic athletes and eating disorder sufferers when a crowd of around clean-eating fans started jeering and shouting at us.

Its main picture is of her topless, two middle fingers covering her nipples. Do you know what I mean?

Why we fell for clean eating – podcast

But since then they have explored many issues, such as mental health, money, fertility and chemotherapy, with aplomb. Did you, at the start of this? James gurns and shakes her head. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in November after finding a lump under her arm; she had just finished breastfeeding her son, Freddie, now two, and was trying for another child with her husband, Steve.

There are others, which is why her podcast exists. More useful were the like-minded souls Bland discovered on social media, particularly on Instagram Stories, where lots of women — although there are men too, she adds quickly, and many young people — post about living their ordinary lives around their treatment. Many scientists, especially British ones, remained sceptical.

When Yudkin looked at the data on heart disease, he was struck by its correlation with the consumption of sugar, not fat. He carried out a series of laboratory experiments on animals and humans, and observed, as others had before him, that sugar is processed in the liver, where it turns to fat, before entering the bloodstream. He noted, too, that while humans have always been carnivorous, carbohydrates only became a major component of their diet 10, years ago, with the advent of mass agriculture.

Sugar — a pure carbohydrate, with all fibre and nutrition stripped out — has been part of western diets for just years; in evolutionary terms, it is as if we have, just this second, taken our first dose of it. Saturated fats, by contrast, are so intimately bound up with our evolution that they are abundantly present in breast milk.

John Yudkin was born in , in the East End of London.

Why we fell for clean eating | Food | The Guardian

His parents were Russian Jews who settled in England after fleeing the pogroms of By way of a scholarship to a local grammar school in Hackney, Yudkin made it to Cambridge. He studied biochemistry and physiology, before taking up medicine. After serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the second world war, Yudkin was made a professor at Queen Elizabeth College in London, where he built a department of nutrition science with an international reputation.

If Yudkin published a paper, Keys would excoriate it, and him. He was a mild-mannered man, unskilled in the art of political combat. That made him vulnerable to attack, and not just from Keys. In his prose, Yudkin is fastidiously precise and undemonstrative, as he was in person. Throughout the s, Keys accumulated institutional power. He secured places for himself and his allies on the boards of the most influential bodies in American healthcare, including the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health.

From these strongholds, they directed funds to like-minded researchers, and issued authoritative advice to the nation. This apparent certainty was unwarranted: But Keys held a trump card. From to , he and his fellow researchers gathered data on the diets, lifestyles and health of 12, middle-aged men, in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, Netherlands, Japan and the United States. The Seven Countries Study was finally published as a page monograph in It showed a correlation between intake of saturated fats and deaths from heart disease, just as Keys had predicted.

The scientific debate swung decisively behind the fat hypothesis. Keys was the original big data guy a contemporary remarked: How many do you have? Despite its monumental stature, however, the Seven Countries Study, which was the basis for a cascade of subsequent papers by its original authors, was a rickety construction. There was no objective basis for the countries chosen by Keys, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he picked only those he suspected would support his hypothesis.

After all, it is quite something to choose seven nations in Europe and leave out France and what was then West Germany, but then, Keys already knew that the French and Germans had relatively low rates of heart disease, despite living on a diet rich in saturated fats. Originally developed to study infection, Keys and his successors adapted it to the study of chronic diseases, which, unlike most infections, take decades to develop, and are entangled with hundreds of dietary and lifestyle factors, effectively impossible to separate.

To reliably identify causes, as opposed to correlations, a higher standard of evidence is required: In its simplest form: At the end of the trial, assess the health of those in the intervention group, versus the control group. This method is also problematic: But a properly conducted trial is the only way to conclude with any confidence that X is responsible for Y.

The sugar conspiracy

Although Keys had shown a correlation between heart disease and saturated fat, he had not excluded the possibility that heart disease was being caused by something else. By then it was too late. The Seven Countries study had become canonical, and the fat hypothesis was enshrined in official advice. Only occasionally were they asked to reconsider. In , John Yudkin was called from London to testify before the committee, and presented his alternative theory of heart disease.

A bemused McGovern asked Yudkin if he was really suggesting that a high fat intake was not a problem, and that cholesterol presented no danger. The criteria for elite status included funding, number of publications, and whether they were members of the National Academies of Science or the Institute of Medicine. Searching obituaries, the team found who had died before retirement.

They then looked to see what happened to the fields from which these celebrated scientists had unexpectedly departed, by analysing publishing patterns.

Junior researchers who had worked closely with the elite scientists, authoring papers with them, published less. At the same time, there was a marked increase in papers by newcomers to the field, who were less likely to cite the work of the deceased eminence.

The articles by these newcomers were substantive and influential, attracting a high number of citations. They moved the whole field along. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling. This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it.

I n a series of densely argued articles and books, including Why We Get Fat , the science writer Gary Taubes has assembled a critique of contemporary nutrition science, powerful enough to compel the field to listen. One of his contributions has been to uncover a body of research conducted by German and Austrian scientists before the second world war, which had been overlooked by the Americans who reinvented the field in the s.

The Europeans were practising physicians and experts in the metabolic system. The Americans were more likely to be epidemiologists, labouring in relative ignorance of biochemistry and endocrinology the study of hormones. This led to some of the foundational mistakes of modern nutrition. After it was discovered inside the arteries of men who had suffered heart attacks, public health officials, advised by scientists, put eggs, whose yolks are rich in cholesterol, on the danger list.

But it is a biological error to confuse what a person puts in their mouth with what it becomes after it is swallowed. The human body, far from being a passive vessel for whatever we choose to fill it with, is a busy chemical plant, transforming and redistributing the energy it receives. Its governing principle is homeostasis, or the maintenance of energy equilibrium when exercise heats us up, sweat cools us down.

Cholesterol, present in all of our cells, is created by the liver. Biochemists had long known that the more cholesterol you eat, the less your liver produces. Unsurprisingly, then, repeated attempts to prove a correlation between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol failed. For the vast majority of people, eating two or three, or 25 eggs a day, does not significantly raise cholesterol levels. One of the most nutrient-dense, versatile and delicious foods we have was needlessly stigmatised. The health authorities have spent the last few years slowly backing away from this mistake, presumably in the hope that if no sudden movements are made, nobody will notice.

Why we fell for clean eating

In a sense, they have succeeded: To his credit, Ancel Keys realised early on that dietary cholesterol was not a problem. But in order to sustain his assertion that cholesterol causes heart attacks, he needed to identify an agent that raises its levels in the blood — he landed on saturated fats. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute decided to go all in, commissioning the largest controlled trial of diets ever undertaken. It did nothing of the sort. At the end of the trial, it was found that women on the low-fat diet were no less likely than the control group to contract cancer or heart disease.

This caused much consternation. The field moved on, or rather did not. In , researchers from Oxford University undertook a Europe-wide study of the causes of heart disease. Its data shows an inverse correlation between saturated fat and heart disease, across the continent. France, the country with the highest intake of saturated fat, has the lowest rate of heart disease; Ukraine, the country with the lowest intake of saturated fat, has the highest.

In the last 10 years, a theory that had somehow held up unsupported for nearly half a century has been rejected by several comprehensive evidence reviews, even as it staggers on, zombie-like, in our dietary guidelines and medical advice. Many nutritionists refused to accept these conclusions.

The circular logic is symptomatic of a field with an unusually high propensity for ignoring evidence that does not fit its conventional wisdom. Gary Taubes is a physicist by background. Then you have something to explain. In nutrition, the game is to confirm what you and your predecessors have always believed. W hen obesity started to become recognised as a problem in western societies, it too was blamed on saturated fats.

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