[PREVIEW] When Parenting Influencers Slide to the Right

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Today, we’re going to revisit our conversation about Emily Oster, and her evolving views on kids, weight and health.

This episode first aired in November 2024, right after the presidential election. We’re now 8 months into Trump’s second term, and continuing to grapple with how America has slid to the right. So the story of a public health advocate and scholar who is now aligned with conservative media feels incredibly timely—especially because many of you are starting back at school this month, and Emily’s take on school lunches is particularly complex. That said, we also want to hold space for how much Emily’s work has meant to so many of us (including Virginia!).

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Dating While Fat

What to do when you miss your smaller body

Is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?

And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?

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Episode 206 Transcript

Virginia

I’m just going to say up front, I am nervous about doing this episode. It is a complicated one. People have very strong feelings about Emily Oster. But we are in our Extra Butter safe space, and I am trusting that.

So Corinne. You are coming in somewhat cold to this topic, because you don’t have kids, and Emily is primarily a parenting expert. What do you know about Emily Oster and her work?

Corinne

I know two things about Emily Oster. One is that she wrote a book about parenting or maybe pregnancy? And my main takeaway about that book is that it’s okay for you to drink a small amount of alcohol when you are pregnant. 

Virginia

Yes. This is a gift that Emily has given to the world. Unquestionably.

Corinne

And I basically just know about that from having friends who are pregnant. Then the other thing I know is that she was involved in some COVID controversies. 

Virginia

Uh huh. 

Corinne

The book came out before COVID, and then during COVID she started to become a controversial figure.

Virginia

She actually had two books come out before COVID, Expecting Better, about pregnancy, and then Crib Sheet, which is a parenting book. Expecting Better actually came out in 2013, the same year my first child was born. So it’s 11 years old. She’s been around for a long time!

Corinne

Did you use those books as a pregnant and child-having person?

Virginia

Well, Expecting Better was published on August 20, 2013 and Violet was born on August 18. So I did not use it for that pregnancy. But I did later read a lot of Emily’s work, and in particular the work she was doing around breastfeeding not being the most essential you-have-to-do-it-or-you’re-a-terrible-mother thing. She did a lot of really great research breaking down some of those myths and showing that the benefits of breastfeeding over formula are not as extreme as we’ve been told. All of that was super helpful to me during my own breastfeeding situations. So yes, she’s definitely been a parenting voice on my radar for a long time. 

Emily is also actually from New Haven, Connecticut, as am I. We are around the same age, but I don’t think we knew each other as kids. But we are both ladies from Connecticut. Emily has a PhD in economics from Harvard. She then went on to pursue research in health economics and is a professor of economics at Brown University. She is a mother of two, and her official bio says, “Emily was inspired by her own pregnancy and lack of clear information to guide her decisions. She decided to use her expertise in reviewing and analyzing data to help other parents navigate those topics. She’s a New York Times best-selling author.”

So we are both 40-something moms, originally from Connecticut. I think the other place our work has overlapped is that we both do some of this work of, “here is this mainstream thing you’ve been told that’s actually quite punitive towards mothers, and what if we looked at the data and flipped some of that on its head.” 

The work she did on pregnancy and breastfeeding was super helpful to me. It’s been super helpful to so many of my friends. My younger sister just had her first baby this summer, and she was reading Expecting Better. So I just want to go into this conversation saying I really think all of that work is valuable. 

Then more recently, as you noted, Emily launched ParentData, which started as a Substack newsletter that she sent out during COVID. Now it is its own standalone website. 

And during COVID she started sending out these newsletters that I think a lot of us, as parents, were living and dying by, because she was helping us calculate the risks. And then she started to push for schools to reopen before a lot of people were ready for schools to reopen. There was a lot of controversy around her takes at that point and how she was calculating risks. And in particular, I think, how she was calculating risks for kids from more marginalized backgrounds. It often started to sound more like she was just thinking about, “I want my kids back in school.”

 It was messy. I’m not going to talk a lot about her COVID stuff today, because we have a whole other issue to work through. But I do want to acknowledge that COVID is when a lot of folks started to feel very divisive about Emily. 

I also want to acknowledge right off the top that Emily blurbed Fat Talk and was a big supporter of Fat Talk and of my work. She’s interviewed me on ParentData twice, once before Fat Talk came out, once after. A lot of the early Burnt Toast community came from Emily’s community. So this is all the more reason why we should have this conversation. There are a lot of Emily Oster fans in our community. There are a lot of Emily Oster critics. We’re gonna talk about all of it. 

Corinne

I feel like we should say the reason that people have been asking us to do this episode is because she has recently joined forces with conservative journalist Bari Weiss and they are doing a podcast together. And there was an episode about childhood obesity? Feeding kids? Which a bunch of people have written to you, with questions about. 

Virginia

The new podcast is called Raising Parents with Emily Oster. It is produced in partnership with The Free Press, which is Bari Weiss’s publishing empire.

Do you want to talk to us a little bit about what The Free Press is, and that whole piece of things before we talk about this episode?

Corinne

Sure, yes. The Free Press is a website started by Bari Weiss. Bari Weiss is a journalist. She was hired by The New York Times after Trump was elected in 2016, in an effort to platform conservative voices at The New York Times. 

Virginia

They were trying to both sides it.

Corinne

Yes. And she notoriously quit with a manifesto-y letter, claiming that she was bullied or not really taken seriously. And then I think after that, she started this website, The Free Press. She’s someone who started out as somewhat moderate, and has become more of a conservative person. She’s very “anti woke,” I guess is what I would say. She’s very pro-free speech and anti-identity politics, that kind of thing.

Virginia

Yeah. I think Emily’s involvement with The Free Press is surprising and not surprising. I think what’s interesting about Emily Oster, kind of all the way along, is that she’s an incredibly smart person. I think her work really connects with a certain kind of smart, data conscious parent or person—especially moms. And I think she would say her personal values or political beliefs should not be in the mix at all, that what she’s doing is not political. And yet, of course, it is political. Health is political. If you’re going to talk about COVID, if you’re going to talk about breastfeeding, if you’re going to talk about—as we’re going to talk about—kids’ weight, it’s going to get political very quickly. 

It’s been interesting to watch this evolution. I think this sort of smart, data driven mom—which I certainly identify as. A lot of those types of moms who would identify as feminist were like, “yes, let me drink during pregnancy.” “Yes, tell me I don’t have to breastfeed.” That felt really resonant to us. And then there was this move in this other direction that’s been subtle, and sort of confusing at times. 

But I think aligning yourself with The Free Press is not subtle or confusing. So yes, we’ve got the new podcast, “Raising Parents with Emily Oster.” And episode three of the new season is called, Are We Feeding Kids The Wrong Foods? And this is the episode that a ton of you have been in my DMs and my email being like, what is happening here? 

So Corinne, do you want to read this quote from the top of the episode? This is from Emily, and it lays out the premise that she took into this project

Corinne

Yes.

While BMI is just a number and doesn’t magically determine health, it is the case that BMI in this higher range is associated with a substantially elevated risk of many metabolic or other chronic illnesses. The United States ranks 12th worldwide on obesity prevalence. The question is, why? And why haven’t we been able to reduce childhood obesity rates?

Virginia

So what’s your thought about just that quick summary?

Corinne

It seems like she’s both saying that BMI is a bad marker of health, and using it to determine that there is a problem.

Virginia

She’s saying the question is, “why do we have high rates of obesity in the United States?” She’s not saying, why should we care? Is that even the question? Is that even the problem? 

Corinne

She’s saying BMI is just a number. And also, let’s use that number to say that we have a problem. 

Virginia

There’s some both/and-ing here that’s uncomfortable to me. And, a refusal to question the basic premise. If we have elevated risks and metabolic and other chronic illnesses, why are we not talking about those illnesses? Why are we focusing the conversation squarely on BMI, which we just acknowledged is not a useful measurement? So that’s the starting point for the whole episode.

I’m not going spend a lot of time explaining why BMI is a bad measurement. I’m assuming a lot of us have that working knowledge, but we can link in the transcript to some background if you are new and are like, but wait a second, I thought BMI was great, and what is the problem? 

I will also link to a really great analysis that Christy Harrison wrote about this episode that we’re going to refer to a few times during this conversation. Because she did dig more into what is really just bad, lazy science that Emily is doing here. So I have a little snippet if you want to read. This is Christy Harrison, MPH, RD now talking about what has kind of gone wrong at face value here:

Corinne

In her previous work, Oster has always harped on how correlation, aka Association, is not causation, and how there are many other confounding variables that can explain these sorts of relationships. Yet in this episode, she takes at face value that the link between BMI and the risk of some diseases automatically means higher weight is unhealthy. In fact, there are many confounding variables to challenge and complicate that narrative.

Virginia

And then Christy links to a whole bunch of other resources that we can include as well. 

Why Is Emily Oster Suddenly Pro–Diet Culture?

So right off the bat, I was just struck by, Wait a second, Emily. My understanding of your work is that you are data driven. You analyze this so carefully, and yet, these basic tenets of good data analysis—correlation, not causation, and understanding the confounding variables—you are suddenly willing to throw out the window in order to do a whole episode about how do we get kids’ BMIs down. 

And then immediately after setting up the problem, she’s like, “We’ve tried all these things, to fight childhood obesity, and none of them have worked.” And she specifically starts to talk about, Let’s Move, which was Michelle Obama’s big initiative in 2008 where she danced with Big Bird and overhauled school lunches and was really focused on, we are going to get the childhood obesity rate down by 5 percent. And instead, that did not happen. Child obesity rates went up. So, you know, by its own metrics, Let’s Move was a pretty big failure. Then Emily also talks about Cookie Monster, who was part of the whole Michelle Obama stuff. There’s a famous Cookie Monster bit where he’s debating whether to eat cookies or broccoli. 

Then she says, “Cookies are very tempting. At the core of concerns about children’s weight is the fact that kids are eating an inordinate amount of unhealthy food.”

Corinne

Yikes. 

Virginia

I’m just already frustrated because we’re leapfrogging wildly. To be fair, the title of the episode is, “Are we feeding kids the wrong foods?” She wanted to do an episode about food. But then why do we need to frame it in weight?

Corinne

So her rise to popularity was for questioning these correlations we have between babies’ health and breastfeeding, or pregnancy and alcohol, but now that it’s about weight…she’s just buying into it. 

Virginia

It’s a really strange pivot. The next chunk of the episode is where Emily starts getting upset about food advertising and talking about how much advertising kids get, which, like, I don’t disagree. Food advertising to children is shady. 

She quotes a mom from Ohio who talks about her kids getting influenced by Mr. Beast to want to drink some sugary energy drink. But then she also starts to blame parents, and in particular, she talks about how the average parent now only cooks four meals per week, as if this is like a major fail.

Corinne

Yikes. I mean, who has time? I might only cook four meals a week.

Virginia

I mean, that’s actually a lot of meals. Like, that’s most weeknights. You figure Friday and Saturday you might do something more fun and you probably need a break some other night. 

Why I Hate Cooking Right Now

Corinne

Especially if you’re working 40 hours a week or more than that. 

Virginia

Or work a job that has you out of the house at dinner time.

There are a million reasons why the average parent only cooks four meals a week. 

What I’m also noticing is this subtle, parent-blaming thread starting to come through. Which, again, feels so at odds with her earlier work, which was so grounded in the data. You can make your own choices about whether to drink. You can make your own choices about breastfeeding. Let’s give people the information and let them make their own choices. This is not that.

Corinne

It also seems like even if you were kind of following her logic up until this point, you could reach a different conclusion. Even if you’re saying, okay, yes, certain chronic diseases are on the rise, maybe part of the problem is the food system. Then leaping to blame parents for not cooking enough is just… tough. 

Virginia

Well, and it’s a very conservative approach, right? To use that angle, as opposed to looking at what are the larger systemic reasons. If we really need all American parents to be cooking dinner, what support do American parents need to be cooking dinner? You need to let people go home from their jobs at four o’clock. There needs to be an entire culture or shift that we have not made, and have made no steps towards. 

Corinne

Yeah, I’m thinking the problem might be capitalism, white supremacy culture, perfectionism. Lack of community care and involvement in raising children. 

Virginia

Yes, yes, yes. Who’s watching your kids while you’re cooking dinner? So many reasons why. Like, relying on American parents—and let’s be honest, we’re saying American mothers to cook dinner, to fight the childhood obesity epidemic? This cannot be the answer, guys. This is some Michael Pollan retrograde bullshit that I can’t believe I’m still having to talk about. 

Corinne

And that’s not even the end.

Virginia

Oh we are nowhere near the end. So the episode then pivots into a weird clip which is not credited, and I could not tell who it was, but it was some body positive influencer talking about the evils of diet culture. It’s a little sound bite she throws in and then Emily responds to the sound bite. So, Corinne, can you read this next block?

Corinne

There is today less stigma about weight, which is good. It’s really good. When I was growing up, I remember how cruel people were to overweight kids, and I know from being a mom that that kind of bullying still sometimes happens. What I think has changed is that such behavior is now considered wrong and despicable, and there is a growing stigma against people who bully in that way, rather than towards the overweight person. But the other thing that’s happened, perhaps inadvertently, is that people, including health experts, have stopped speaking out loud about the real health risks of obesity.

Virginia

Corinne, how do you feel about that the weight stigma is gone now?

Corinne

I mean. Said like a true thin person. Like, how the heck would she know?

Virginia

Well, she just knows. As a mother, she knows? 

Corinne

I really haven’t heard about anyone being stigmatized for bullying fat people. 

Virginia

No, that is new to me.

Corinne

Is there any evidence to back this up? Or is this just pure Emily Oster speculation?

Virginia

Just her musings, I think. I do think that, much like you were saying about the whole Bari Weiss, anti-woke culture, there is a certain group that complains, like, “you can’t even make fat jokes anymore.” In kind of the same vein as, “men can’t even harass their secretaries anymore!” I think it is hard that now we have standards for not being an asshole to people. But I actually don’t think that standard is that rigorous around weight. In a lot of social settings, fat jokes are still pretty accepted. I don’t think that we have made this much progress!

Corinne

This kind of reminds me of the whole #MeToo thing and how people were like, “But Louis CK’s career is ruined!”  

Virginia

How will these white frat boys get to a good law firm after Stanford?

Corinne

Obviously this is speculation on my part, but is she saying this because…you wrote a book? 

Virginia

I fixed it. Did you not know that? Did you not know that my book fixed it? 

Corinne

Is this your fault actually??

Virginia

You’re welcome.

Corinne

You wrote a book about fat stigma, and it stopped existing, and so this is your fault.

Virginia

I erased it, so now you can go back to being mean about fatness, because we have to make everyone thin. That was actually the master plan all along. 

I mean, this was a real heartbreak moment for me, because again, Emily has been personally lovely about my work and supportive of it in many ways in the past.

But I think that a lot of folks who work on “obesity prevention” have started to really grasp that it is important that they name the existence of weight stigma or anti-fatness. Anytime I interview someone who does mainstream obesity research now, they are fully willing to acknowledge that that is a terrible thing. Whereas five years ago, 10 years ago, when I was reporting on these issues, they were not willing to acknowledge stigma was real. They were framing weight as a personal responsibility problem. And now the party line is absolutely, weight is not a matter of personal responsibility. It’s biology—and that’s why we made these drugs. So we can fix it for you. That’s where they’ve gone. But that is not the same as saying that there is no stigma.

Their rhetoric against weight stigma is being used to sell more weight loss, which perpetuates the stigma. 

Corinne

Yeah. I mean, it’s obvious to me that weight stigma still exists.

Virginia

Because you fly on airplanes and buy clothes and move through the world.

Corinne

Because I live in the world. Is there a way to measure weight stigma? 

Virginia

Well, actually, yes. We can link to the interview I did with Jeff Hunger. Jeff Hunger is a weight stigma researcher who I think would be quite surprised to hear that weight stigma no longer exists. 

Can We Conquer Anti-Fat Bias?

Corinne

Yeah, I recall him saying in that episode that there was a lot of proof that becoming aware of stigma and doing implicit bias training didn’t actually get rid of stigma.

Virginia

Yes. They don’t really know yet what works to reduce the stigma from a data perspective, because the traditional things have not been working. Because the stigma has not been going down. 

Then there is a study that came out of Harvard in 2019 which found that while some forms of bias are decreasing—like we are making some progress towards less homophobia, less anti-Black racism, there’s some shift towards neutrality there, not to say those biases aren’t still huge problems because they absolutely are. [Post-recording note: Again, this was recorded before the election!] But we were seeing tiny drops. We are not seeing that drop when it comes to anti-fat bias, and that was the bias in the study that was actually increasing the most. 

Corinne

Oh.

Virginia

Okay, so it’s going to get even worse. Well, I don’t know if worse is the right word? But it’s definitely going to get really weird and super, super retrograde. Something I kept thinking throughout this whole episode was: Did you make this podcast in 2009 because so much of the conversation just feels like, how are we still having this conversation? 

The thing that happens next is Emily brings on Sam Kass, who is the Obama’s former private chef. He made them dinner every night when they were in the White House. And he also partnered with Michelle Obama on Let’s Move. He was kind of like her chef consultant. 

So I want to be clear that Sam Kass is not a nutritionist. He is not a public health researcher. He is not a doctor. He is a private chef who has a lot of opinions about food. He’s also now on the board of Plezi Nutrition, which is Michelle Obama’s fruit juice brand, which I wrote about last year.

Michelle Obama Is Not Coming To Save Us

I don’t consider him a thought leader on the question of our children’s health, because he has no medical or scientific qualifications to be a thought leader on children’s health. But Emily brings him on the podcast and he starts to explain to Emily that his plan was to get into the White House, and the big thing that he and Michelle originally wanted to do was to get rid of the crop subsidies for corn and sugar that have made the American diet so unhealthy. Which, I don’t know how much you followed that story, especially back in the mid 2000s.

Corinne

I remember that being a big Michael Pollan thing. 

Virginia

Totally, totally. And I think that there’s a lot of logic towards changing the way the crop subsidy situation works, and not giving industry so much incentive to grow so much corn.

However, the Obamas were not able to achieve that in Washington. They made zero progress on crop subsidies. And so, as Sam Kass explains to Emily, that actually wasn’t ever the solution. That wasn’t the right thing that they should have done in the first place. So, why don’t you read the Sam Kass quote here?

Corinne

I came running into the White House ready to go, like we’re empowered now we can fix this. It’s not the subsidies that are producing our food environment, it’s our culture. And it’s our culture that has been influenced and shaped by the industry who has pumped billions, probably trillions of dollars, over the last 40 to 50 years to shape our attitudes, norms and behaviors, but fundamentally, our culture is supporting what we choose. I think we have a culture that has separated the connection between what we put in our bodies and the impact it has on our health.

Virginia

So again, this is another way of saying, “it’s our fault.”But what is culture? That is a vague entity.

Corinne

It kind of feels like they were like, “Actually, you know what? It’s too hard to fight back against the billions of dollars that the industry is using to lobby our government, and instead we’re going to blame individual personal behavior.”

Virginia

Which, again, is a weird conservative pivot. And there are lots of food activists and child health activists who have been critical of Let’s Move because of this, because they didn’t get this done. And clearly he has decided that it didn’t matter that they didn’t get it done, because if American moms would just fucking cook dinner, then we wouldn’t have this problem. 

Okay, so that was a lot. But then Emily brings on Pamela Druckerman. 

So Corinne, do you know who Pamela Druckerman is?

Corinne

I do not.

Virginia

Okay. Pamela Druckerman, is best known for writing a book called Bringing Up Bebe. She is a journalist who lives in France and writes about French culture. Bringing Up Bebe —which came out in 2011 so it’s almost 15 years old— is a book all about how the way French children are brought up leads them to be gourmet eaters and the way American kids are brought up leads them to be terrible eaters.

My main memory of her—the book came out before I was a parent, but I remember her appearing on The Today Show wearing a beret. And again, she’s American. But she was living in France and deciding to write about how amazing French children are and how amazing the whole French parenting system is. So it is a book about how to parent like a French person, and how to feed your child like a French person.

Corinne

You know what else I hear is really amazing about France?

Virginia

What’s that?

Corinne

The healthcare and postpartum care and stuff. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Virginia

The government-funded free preschool is probably also a pretty amazing thing. But Pamela Druckerman says no, specifically it’s the way French kids eat. Because, according to her, French kids from the age of like three are capable of sitting through a multi course dinner. They are capable of having dinner later at night. This is somehow super important, I guess, because it makes you cooler if you don’t eat dinner at 5pm? They can behave in restaurants. They don’t need to bring iPads into restaurants. They don’t eat Goldfish. They don’t need sippy cups, they are eating like tiny gourmet adults at all times.

Corinne

This also reminds me of the French Women Don’t Get Fat thing. 

Virginia

Correct, correct. 

Corinne

It’s also just like, what? So the solution is just we all moved to France? Or…?

Virginia

Yes, yes, that is one solution on the table.

Corinne

Or we get government-funded childcare? 

Virginia

That would probably do so much more. That never gets suggested in this episode. Emily never suggests that the government should fund child care. But she does talk to Pamela for a long time about how the French people get their kids to like food.

Pamela explains that you can make kids like vegetables, if you just tell them they are delicious and serve them sitting down at a table.

So that’s some really useful advice for all of us. 

Corinne

Yeah, it notoriously works great to just tell someone they like something they don’t.

Virginia

“Carrots are delicious!” I can just imagine my children staring at me in absolute disgust. 

So Emily responds to Pamela talking about the carrot thing by saying, “I can hear all the American parents now, but what about my picky eater? In their defense, there’s pretty clear data that between the ages of two and six, children get pickier, but France has a fix for that!”

And then Pamela explains what the fix is. This is a really long quote, but do you want to read this?

Corinne

Partly, what happens in France is that kids don’t eat between meals. So when they come to the table, they’re hungry. You kind of learn from an early age to tolerate not starvation level hungriness, but like having a slight pit in your stomach where you want to eat, and that pit has not been satisfied. So you get to the table and you’re more apt to eat what’s put in front of you because you’re hungry for it. You haven’t been snacking. You know, your mom didn’t give you a banana 20 minutes ago, because you were whining, she said, We’re going to eat in 20 minutes. Go play and come back, and then the first thing that’s served in this moment in the meal is a vegetable. It’s not rocket science, any of this.

Virginia

I want Pamela to come to my house and talk to my children 20 minutes before dinner. I just am so annoyed about this! I don’t know. Tell me what you’re thinking.

Corinne

It just sounds like if your kids are hungry enough, they’ll eat vegetables.

Virginia

Yes, and that they should be accustomed to walking around with a pit in their stomach all the time because you don’t let them have snacks.

Corinne

Hungry children are annoying. 

Virginia

They are!  

Corinne

I mean, even just speaking for myself, I am not the nicest, funnest, smartest person when I’m hungry.

Virginia

Nope, nope. I find this really insidious, this idea that we should teach kids to tolerate hunger is a really creepy notion to me. because I think any girl who came of age in the 90s has a lot of experience with learning to, quote, tolerate hunger. And it didn’t work out great for us. This is not the goal. This is a dieting behavior. 

Corinne

Isn’t the whole thing that when you feel really hungry, that often backfires and ends up with like bingeing or overeating?

Virginia

It just seems like you’re teaching kids to live with this experience of deprivation, which some kids bodies might do totally fine with, right? People get hungry at different rates. There are people who can eat only three times a day, and that works really well for them, and that’s awesome. But that doesn’t mean that’s going to work really well for everybody. And little kids in particular have small stomachs that empty fast. They don’t want to go six hours without eating. That is going to be meltdown city.

Corinne

It’s also like, when does this start? Because I don’t think anyone’s telling breastfeeding mothers, “Wait until your baby is starving and has a pit in their stomach to feed them.” You know?

Virginia

I think as soon as they’re off, breast milk is when it starts. Because she talks about being at the playground at 10am with the toddlers, and nobody’s carrying around little bags of Cheerios because the kids don’t expect to have snacks at the playground. Because they know they’re going to wait till they go home and eat lunch. I drive around in my Subaru at all times with a box in the back of my car filled with snacks. And we don’t always need them. It’s fine. But I don’t want to get caught somewhere with a hungry, grumpy child. If I’m sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and it’s taking 40 minutes when I thought it was going to take 15, I’m really glad to have that bag of Goldfish. 

She’s equating snacking with sloth and excess when it’s just like parenting your child, responding to their needs, recognizing that they are getting hungry, and maybe you are too, and everyone will feel better with a snack.

Corinne

Yeah, it feels like a confusing solution.

Virginia

And again, just not very replicable. She describes the way the French schools serve lunch and how it’s this very elaborate presentation, and they get three year olds to sit around a table and use silverware. Nobody is trying that in the United States. Even if there are lessons we can learn from that, nobody is attempting to replicate that here. So any individual parent trying to replicate that at home is just making their lives really complicated.

Corinne

This is where we get into the systemic versus personal stuff again, too. Maybe it works in France because they have a totally different system. Maybe parents have more energy to tolerate kids screaming when they’re hungry because they’re not working 60 hours a week. Maybe kids are less hungry when they get home from school because they have a nice five course meal at school. You can’t take one part of the system and and bring it over here and just blame parents for not doing enough. 

Virginia

Exactly.

So then Emily decides she needs to find an American mother who is doing this so we can all learn from her. She brings in a woman named Ellie, who I think we would affectionately call an almond mom. Ellie never lets her kids buy the school lunch. She cooks from scratch at home. They are a vegetarian household. She doesn’t shop the middle of the grocery store. She only shops the perimeter, and she doesn’t let her kids have fast food or really, any processed food. Do you want to read this quote? 

Corinne

Wait, I need more information. Is Ellie, like a friend of Emily’s? Who the f is Ellie?

Virginia

No. She’s just a mom. Sprinkled throughout this episode, she just brings in regular moms to share their stories of feeding their kids. Her producers probably cast around to find people.

Corinne

Um, does she also share Ellie’s income?

Virginia

She does not.  

Corinne

Okay. Anyways, Ellie says about her children. 

They say, can we have Cheetos and mac and cheese? And we’re like, there’s nothing in that that nourishes you. Every single element of that meal is chemicals. So we might look at the box or something and talk about the difference between the way chemicals make things taste good and just the taste of food.

Virginia

So to be clear, this quote is presented with zero context or follow up, even though it contains wildly inaccurate statements. First of all, all food is chemicals, water is a chemical, air is a chemical. 

Christy Harrison broke this down really clearly about why Emily should have called out the chemical thing as just being blatantly wrong. You cannot say that mac and cheese contains more chemicals than homemade pasta. They are all foods. 

So Emily is bringing in this woman’s story and holding her up as an example, even though the woman’s position is “no processed foods, no matter what.” But Emily has already written about the fact that the processed foods debate is overblown and the health risks have not been proven by the data.

Corinne

Yeah, it’s also like, what is the proof that this parent is doing something better? That her kids aren’t fat?

Virginia

Yeah, that’s a great point. We never hear actually any details about her kids. But I’m going to go out on a limb and guess they aren’t fat just because I don’t think Emily would have brought in the mom of a fat kid and held her up as an example.

Corinne

But also, just because the kids aren’t fat now doesn’t mean that they won’t be fat someday.

Virginia

It also doesn’t mean they’re not freaking losing their minds and eating all the Cheetos when they go to their friend’s house.

Corinne

Yeah, they go to your house and eat nine Oreos. 

Virginia

You don’t let them buy school lunch and you control the food in your house, but your kids are growing up and going out into the world where all of this food is—and you have been telling them that it’s poison and they shouldn’t want it, and yet they know it tastes good.

And Emily really celebrates that this mom says, “we have a dialogue about it. And we always explain why something is bad and they can’t have it.” And that is held up as if, that’s good communication between the parent and child. But it reminds me a lot more of the protein mom weighing her food and explaining to her daughter why she’s weighing her food. Just because you’re giving your child a lot of information about your food decisions does not mean you are teaching them to have a healthy relationship with food. 

Protein Moms and the "Eating Enough" Myth

The other reason I know Ellie’s kids are not fat is then because Emily does want to hear from the mom of a kid in a bigger body. So she brings on Karen, and Karen has a six year old in a bigger body who she’s really worried about in terms of feeding her child. 

And Karen’s story in this episode really breaks my heart, because she’s the only person in this whole episode who has directly experienced any anti-fat bias. She talks about having experienced herself growing up, and then how it’s kind of doubled since she had a child who’s in a bigger body. She’s constantly made to feel like she’s doing something wrong, that it’s a moral failing that her daughter is in a bigger body. She also talks a lot about her guilt that she had to formula feed her daughter as a baby, and how she was constantly wondering if she was overfeeding her or if formula is the reason why she’s bigger.

She says the constant thought in the back of her mind was, “Are you giving your baby too much food?”

Corinne

Oh, that’s so sad.

Virginia

It’s so sad. I’ve heard that story a lot, that that is the message, especially parents of bigger babies get around formula. And it’s just, I mean, to your point earlier, no one would say to a breastfeeding mom, are you feeding them too much? Like it’s such hypocrisy.

This clip, I think, was Emily’s attempt to throw a bone towards the importance of combating anti-fatness, because Karen does sound like she’s really trying to push back against that pressure. She wants to raise her daughter to feel good about her body. She tells a story of a kid at a birthday party called her daughter fat, and her daughter was just like, we don’t talk about people’s bodies. And good for that kid, for handling that so well. So she sounds conflicted, but like she’s trying to not raise her daughter to feel ashamed about all of this. 

But then Emily just kind of drops that story and gives no support for that perspective. And she makes this really odd speech. So another long one for you to read, Corinne.

Corinne

Karen’s experience with her daughter brings up the bigger question, how much of obesity and overweight is in our control and how much is just biological? Shaming people for being overweight is unequivocally wrong, but sometimes, especially in recent years, the goal of trying not to offend people has led to a shift in the conversation and a lot of confusion about the very real effects of obesity on health.

You might hear it’s possible to be healthy at Every Size. While yes, it’s absolutely possible to be healthy at a range of weights and sizes. And no, not everyone needs to be a size two to be healthy. And in fact, for some people, a size two would mean they are not healthy. But it’s also true that, on average, many diseases and health complications and health outcomes are more likely for people who are obese.

Virginia

So again, it’s like, “Don’t shame people. Shaming people is so bad. Also, people are so unhealthy if they’re fat.”

Corinne

She’s saying people have become scared to say that the problem is being fat or something. 

Virginia

Yes, yes. They’re being silenced. And again, I think every fat person who’s been to the doctor really feels like that message isn’t getting out to us.

Corinne

Right? And again, the correlation versus causation thing, she’s implying that all of these diseases, health complications, and health outcomes are the cause of obesity, when we really don’t know that.

Virginia

Just to break down correlation causation further: When we say these diseases are more likely for people with high BMI, we don’t know that the high BMI is what causes the increased risk for thes diseases. We know that these two things happen together in some cases, but we don’t understand the relationship. 

So it could be that the diseases cause the weight increase. It could be that the weight increase sometimes causes the diseases. It could be that they are two unrelated things, but they have a shared root cause.

And in every one of those scenarios, the concern should be the disease, not the body size. What can you do for the disease? And if that changes body size, fine. But if it doesn’t change body size, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed if you can make improvements on the disease.

I feel like I have been making a version of that speech for 10 years now, and yet this episode is still out there, so that’s fine. I’m tired. 

Corinne

It just sucks because it felt like Emily Oster was someone who could wrap her head around that.

Virginia

I did think that.

But part of why I think she is not wrapping her head around that anymore—at least in this episode,—is because she then brings in another expert, this guy, Robert Davis, PhD, who is the author of The Healthy Skeptic. He is a health journalist with a public health PhD, but again, he’s not a doctor or a researcher. He writes mainstream, commercial books. 

But if you didn’t understand his background, you would interpret him in this episode as being the voice of medicine and science. He is brought in as a very credentialed expert who we are going to take seriously as having the final word on this topic. And this is what Robert Davis has to say about Health at Every Size:

Corinne

The pendulum has swung too far when it comes to the idea of body positivity and HAES. The effort to fight those ideas from diet culture is a good thing. But if we then say, well, let’s just forget about promoting weight loss or promoting a healthy weight and let’s just say people should be able to sort of eat what they feel like and eat dessert at dinner and go with intuitive eating and what they feel like eating. I think that’s a big mistake, because, again, we know that these foods that we’re talking about are designed to trick our brains and make us want more of them.

Virginia

So, it’s great to fight back against diet culture, but don’t go so far as to eat dessert at dinner. That’s a bridge too far for Robert Davis.

Corinne

Fighting diet culture is good, but we shouldn’t go far as to say that weight loss isn’t good.

Virginia

It’s unclear what he wants to fight from diet culture, because he really wants to keep quite a lot of diet culture. And I should also say Robert Davis just published an article on The Free Press, with the headline, “Diets are Bad. Ignoring Childhood Obesity is Even Worse.” The subhead is “Activists tell parents not to fat shame an overweight child, or make them go on a diet, but parents who refuse to tackle the issue are putting their kids’ lives at risk.”

And by activists, he means me, because he calls me out in the article as a “prominent ‘fat activist,’” who he thinks is getting everything wrong about this. So obviously, Robert and I are not going to, like, go to dinner and hang. 

Corinne

Even if we agreed that child obesity was a problem, there’s still not a solution. Dieting or putting your kid on a diet isn’t going to solve it. So it’s just very confusing to be like, “parents aren’t fighting back against this thing.”What does Robert want us to do? 

Virginia

I’m glad you asked. Let’s go to his article, because he does have a lot of a lot of specific ideas that I will try to read with a straight face. So he says: “Avoid restrictive diets. They don’t work and they can make the problem even worse. Instead, children should be encouraged to eat mainly whole foods, including colorful fruits, veggies, beets, beans, nuts, seeds, fish, lean poultry and whole grains.”

Children, famously fans of seeds.

Corinne

And fish. 

Virginia

That’s an easy sell. 

Virginia

“Involving kids in grocery shopping and cooking their own food gives them a sense of agency and will get them excited about eating well and using cookie cutters to slice fruits and vegetables into fun shapes like hearts and stars, where serving veggies with dips can make these foods more enticing.”

Corinne

This is really reminding me of Kids Eat In Color.

The Ballerina Farm of Kid Food Instagram

Virginia

Yes, yes, it is. 

Corinne

And once again, I feel like the problem is capitalism. Like, sure, I will cut celery into stars if I don’t have to have a job.

Virginia

I cannot listen to a white man tell women to cut their kids fucking vegetables into hearts and stars. I cannot do it.

I am incandescent with rage about this. I am sorry.  Mothers have enough to do. We do not need your guilt trip. I do not need to hear that I need to stop using Instacart and take my kids to the grocery store, an experience that will make all of us cranky and tired.

Corinne

Do we think that Robert J. Davis has children? 

Virginia

He probably does? But does he have a wife who does all of this? Also probably yes.

This advice is so simplistic. It is so ignorant of the context of family’s lives.

If you have a kid who is picky, I mean, genuinely picky and rigid around food choices.

If you have a neurodivergent kid who’s reliant on a lot of processed foods as the safe foods.

If you are on a tight budget.

There are one thousand reasons that you cannot eat like this.

He does go on to say, “How about we also get rid of screen time?” So that’s another helpful suggestion. “Have a regular game day on weekends where the entire family enjoys a fun physical activity out of the house, like hiking or bike riding.”

Corinne

My God. I just really feel like these people don’t live in the real world.

Virginia

Like, my kid’s dad takes them hiking every weekend. They may still end up in bigger bodies. If it’s something you all enjoy, that’s wonderful. This may not move the needle on body size, because body size is not determined solely by lifestyle habits. And if you’re telling people that they have to do all of these things to control body size, and it doesn’t work, that’s going to backfire and cause bigger problems.

So I’m just very tired. I’m very tired of all of this. 

Corinne

I am determined to find out if this guy has kids, and just for the record, he’s not wearing a wedding ring in his videos. I just feel like there’s no way this guy is speaking from personal experience, you know? Like he’s just spouting bullshit that he read somewhere. 

Virginia

He talks about having been in a bigger body himself and his mom putting him on diets as a child. And I have all the empathy in the world for that. But please do not think you are helping anybody by telling us to cut fruit into a fucking heart shape. I will take my cookie cutters and melt them down. My child would not eat a kiwi if it was shaped like a star if I paid her. It’s not gonna happen.  

So, I think it’s pretty clear where we land on all of this, but Emily does have one final speech in the episode which sums up where she is landing on this. And we can read that and then have feelings. 

Corinne

What will it take to get more vegetables and fruits into the hands of kids and families? That, in my view, is the core question. But the cultural problem is just as pernicious. As we learned from Pamela in France, Carrots are just delicious, objectively. In America, that’s not a fact. I’d say here, Doritos are objectively delicious, and therein lies the problem.

What would it take to have more parents like Ellie who simply refuses to give her kids fast food, who prioritizes fruits and vegetables for them because she knows and has told her children that that’s what’s good for bodies. She’s setting them up for a much better chance at good health.

Virginia

She’s also setting them up for a much higher risk of an eating disorder. I mean, the fact that we’re ending the episode by saying Ellie—who is the most restrictive parent in the episode—is doing it right, really says a lot to me about where Emily is landing on these issues now. And, just how useful this whole conversation could be to any parent, if the takeaway is you need to be rigorously cooking from scratch, getting your kids to like fruits and vegetables at any cost.

None of this is new advice. None of this has worked before. This is the Let’s Move playbook, which Emily herself acknowledges did not do anything to move the needle on childhood obesity. 

Corinne

Yeah, and this whole thing about it being like a cultural problem is so mind boggling to me, because when I hear “but it’s a cultural problem,” I’m like, yes, it’s a systemic problem. How is Ellie telling her kids that carrots are delicious solving a cultural problem? That’s just one person? 

Virginia

You’re defining culture as social systems and structures, and she’s defining culture as personal preferences. And that is not accurate. This whole pivot into personal responsibility, again, I feel like, is really at odds with her earlier work. And it’s just very aligned with The Free Press and with being in a more conservative media outlet, which is what’s happening here. And I’m sorry to see it.

Again, I do think Emily is fundamentally a smart person. I’ve had a lot of respect for her work over the years, and it’s hard to see this transition. 

The last thing I’ll say is on a personal note: Emily, if you listen to this episode, I hope you’re still letting your kids eat their Halloween candy. Because one thing I did achieve a few years ago was persuading her not to count out her kids Halloween candy anymore. And I just hope you haven’t changed on that one, because I really want your kids to enjoy their candy. 

All right, well, I’m excited to hear what everyone thinks about all of this. I’m sure there will be many diverse opinions. We welcome you in the comment section.

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Butter

Corinne

For my Butter, I want to shout out this new collaboration between Universal Standard and Jordan Underwood. They did send me a pair of pants and a tank top for free, So little caveat there. And I will say that I tried them on and then ordered some more stuff, so…

Virginia

They sent it for free and and were effective in getting you to buy more of it! 

Corinne

Yeah, it definitely worked. It’s a little capsule collection of some clothes that I think Jordan had something to do with designing, and they’re more androgynous pieces. There’s a pair of cargo pants and a cropped tank and a flannel and some sweats. But they’re really cool, and I think people should check them out.

Virginia

I am obsessed with the crop tank. I think I need it.

Corinne

Yeah, it’s really nice because it’s both high neck, which I feel like can be kind of hard to find in a tank, and it hits right at your pants waistline. 

Virginia

It’s like, the perfect amount of crop. It’s not belly-baring, which would be fine, but we’re getting into colder weather here. It’s just the right fit. 

Corinne

Also seems like it would be really great to wear under stuff, because sometimes you don’t want a long tank under a shorter shirt.

Virginia

I’m very excited to check out the collaboration. 

Corinne

What’s your Butter?

Virginia

My Butter is something I have talked about many times, but it is not in the official library of Butter, which seems important to remedy. So my Butter is Meredith Dairy Marinated Sheep and Goat Cheese, which is the world’s best cheese. I will die on this mountain forever. I thanked this cheese in the acknowledgements of my book, 

Corinne

Oh my gosh. 

Virginia

I thanked other people, too, Corinne. I thanked you! But you know, I did shout out the cheese. And when I updated the paperback edition, I continued to shout out the cheese. Stand by that forever.

It is a really good creamy goat slash sheep cheese, and it comes in this really delicious oil. Again, I’ve talked about it so many times. I feel like people are gonna be like, yeah, yeah, we know the cheese. But I just need it to be officially in the records as the best cheese. 

Corinne

I have never tried it, so I am going to search this out. 

Virginia

I know Costco sells it. It’s not a super hard to find thing anymore. A lot of grocery stores are carrying it. I know at Costco you can even get a bigger jar. I get it from a local grocery store, but I’ve definitely seen it more and more places. Because whenever I talk about it, people around the country tell me how much they love this cheese. So I know people in Wisconsin are having it, people in Oregon are having it.

It is a great cheese, and you can eat it straight. You can put it on toast with some jam of some sort. It’s very delicious. I also like to as when the jar is almost empty, save the like final bit of cheese in the oil and use that in pasta or salad dressing, and it’s life changing and delicious. 

Corinne

That sounds really good. 

Virginia

Yep, I’m just glad to have it officially in the record of butter. That was something I needed to remedy, so thank you.