[PREVIEW] "Nutritionally Reversing" Disease Is Not A Thing

Quick note from Virginia: I recorded this before the Roe news this week, and to be perfectly honest, I am now having a hard time thinking about anything else. But I also know we can and will burn out if we stay locked into anger—so I’m hoping this episode gives your brain a break. It’s a lighter one, and maybe that’s what we need right now?

Chia seed pudding is an abomination. It is a food invented by diet culture. It is not something we need in our lives. And you will never convince me that it doesn’t taste ridiculous.

Hello and welcome to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting, and health. Today is your May bonus episode for paid subscribers! Thanks for being here.

This month, I decided to do more of a grab bag. We’re going to do one reader question, one diet, and one recommendation—because I really like doing the Butter for your Burnt Toast segment on the regular pod and I thought, why not bring it here and give the bonus folks a little extra butter?

PS. If you enjoy this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player!

Episode 42 Transcript

Q: I have an upcoming 15 year reunion with my college roommates. We will be sharing a vacation rental for a weekend, and spending all of our time together. So eating, there and at restaurants, will obviously be involved.

When we first started living together in college, one of the roommates’ sisters was in a public health program and was a teaching assistant for an intuitive eating course. Our roommate told us about it, and invited us all to take the class together and five of the six of us did. (Ironically, the one roommate who was not interested was studying to become a dietitian.) It is not an exaggeration to say the class was absolutely life changing and was the turning point for shaping my relationship with food today, as well as the launchpad for my passion for learning anything I can about anti diet culture, media literacy, food with kids, body image resilience, etc.

In the 15 years since taking the class, I have continued to see several of the roommates on rare occasions due to living in the same state. Through comments some of them have made over the years, it has become apparent that they have not all continued practicing intuitive eating. I will fully own that my personal journey with intuitive eating has had its moments of ups and downs, especially due to doctors trying to push specific dieting techniques to “help with medical conditions.” I’m really not trying to be judgmental about my friends here, just trying to prepare in advance for what to do and say when dieting and weight conversations will inevitably come up on this weekend where a group of 35 year old moms are all together after years apart.

In the past, I’ve generally just been silent. I think my friends are aware that I am still trying to eat intuitively. But I’m feeling more empowered now and want to be prepared for how to handle this scenario, both to protect myself when triggering topics come up, and because they feel a greater responsibility now for helping show others that there are alternative paths to lifelong dieting. 

I will link to the first question I answered in a previous Ask Virginia column which was from a reader trying to figure out how to talk about this with her mom, because I think a lot of the same advice translates here.

I think how we respond when these comments come up depends so much on our relationship with the commenters. When it’s people we don’t have close personal relationships with, you can often engage more easily because the stakes are lower, because you don’t really have that much to lose if you piss them off. But when it’s people we love and have a long-term relationship with, it is in some ways more important to have this conversation. And also: There are just a lot of other factors you need to weigh here when you consider how to proceed.

I’m saying this as kind of a note to myself, too: We’re not here to proselytize. That is not useful for any interpersonal relationship. It’s great you’re feeling more empowered about these topics and want to engage with them on this issue. But, consider how you would feel if the situation was flipped, and one of them wanted to tell you all about their great diet and why you should try that. It wouldn’t feel good, right? It’s important to sit with what your intentions are for this conversation. Because if you want to help them see the light, I don’t think that’s useful. People don’t change because we want them to change. You can’t fix their struggles for them. And you won’t necessarily help by making them feel bad for having the struggle. 

Now, I think a very reasonable intention is: I want to set a boundary so we don’t have to do a lot of diet talk all weekend because that’s going to make the weekend less fun for me. Maybe it’s a casual, upfront statement like, “Oh, guys, let’s not do the diet thing, let’s not do the body shaming thing, we haven’t seen each other in so long, there’s so much else I want to talk about with you.” Maybe you even send an email ahead of time. This is you saying, “I don’t want to go here with you, I don’t feel good about myself when we have this conversation.” You still love them, you want to spend time with them. You’re just letting them know what won’t feel good for you. 

But if this is you wanting to bring them back to this thing they learned 15 years ago, or you want to explain to them all the stuff you’ve been learning in the meantime—this may not be the weekend for that. And they may not be the people for that conversation. If you are going to talk about it, try to start from a place of curiosity. It’s possibly quite instructive to understand why taking that class was life-changing for you, and not for them. There could be lots of good reasons for that. I mean, it could be that they got back into the rabbit hole of feeling bad about their bodies and dieting feeling like the answer. And you want to hold space for that, because that’s a very real struggle. And we are not always all one thing.

It could also be that the way the intuitive eating course was taught resonated really well for you, worked really well for you for some reason, but didn’t speak to the things your friends were struggling with. Maybe it didn’t acknowledge their journeys in the way it needed to, you know? I think there is lots that is good in intuitive eating, I think it’s a very useful model—but it is not a perfect model. If it was taught, as it often is, by a bunch of skinny white women, it may not have been taught in a way that felt like safe and inclusive to everybody, in every body, in every background. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important for you. But I would be curious about why it didn’t work for them. And listen to those reasons and try to understand them, before you come in hot with your own experiences and passions. 

I know I often give scripts (even though I’m also critical of scripts!). And I don’t have that for this one. The five of you that took the class have five very different relationships with your bodies and with food and more than five different reasons for why thinking about intuitive eating is helpful or unhelpful.

So start from a place of curiosity and compassion for them, instead of feeling like you need to change all of their minds. Because remember: That’s the diet culture mentality to go in with “you need to follow these rules or you’re doing it wrong.” And that’s what we’re trying to get away from. 

Okay, speaking of diet culture, now it is time for “Is it a diet? The answer is always yes.” I’ve gotten so many good suggestions of diets to cover here, and once I get the book finished, I have a whole list of reported pieces on diets that I’m going to be doing for the newsletter in the second half of this year. There are several diets that I do want to do a deep dive reporting on.

But this little segment is reserved for the quirkier, the more whimsical or the more just WTF diets that you send my way. And so what I’m going to do today is the Nutritarian Diet. So this is like vegetarian. And I guess it means you just eat nutrients, you eat nutrition? This is by Joel Fuhrman, MD.

I love when it’s a doctor, who, instead of being a doctor, has devoted his life or, at least, some amount of time, to running a website and selling vitamins and memberships and books and health trackers. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Eat to Live and Eat For Life. And he says, “The scientific evidence is clear. This eating style is a powerful way to lose weight, reverse chronic disease, live better, strengthen your immune defenses, and slow the aging process.”

So is it a diet? Yes, because the first thing he promises is that you will lose weight.

The next thing he tells you to do is to read his latest book Eat for Life. So it is a diet and it’s a diet where you have to pay money because you have to buy his book, right off the bat, in order to understand what the diet is. “The knowledge in this book will change your life forever.”

What I like about Dr. Furman is that he’s not holding back. He’s like, I am going to make completely outrageous claims, completely definitive claims. And I’m not going to back away from that for a minute.

Okay, let’s read a little more:

What is the nutritarian diet? This nutrient rich plant-based diet is based on the following principles. […] The eating style focuses on the nutrient rich foods that unleash the body’s tremendous ability to heal, achieve optimal weight and slow the aging process. ‘Eat mostly plants’ means only animal products in small amounts, if any, such as meat, fish, dairy and eggs. ‘Whole Foods ‘describes natural foods that are not heavily processed. Basically, the majority of our diet is made up of fresh and clean produce rather than food that comes out of a package.

So how is this any different from the Whole30? Or clean eating? This is just another version of the same thing. I’m waiting to find out the new twist. He says:

No SOS means we don’t add salt, oil or sugar to our recipes or to our prepared food. Because these ingredients have been shown to have a negative impact on our health. When we eat the whole nut over just the processed oil we are eating the fiber and protective nutrients, too.

He’s removing all the fun foods—including things that just flavor food and make it taste good. I’m not even all the way into this website and there are already so many scientific claims we can debunk. A big one is that you absolutely do need oil or some kind of fat on most foods—both to make it taste good and to make you absorb the nutrients it contains. Also, your brain runs on glucose, and your body needs a certain amount of salt. These are necessary. 

A nutritarian diet meets your nutritional needs by focusing on natural minimally processed plant foods and turning up the G-bombs. Nutritional Research demonstrates these foods give us the greatest protection against cancer and other diseases. G-bombs is an acronym for greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. These are the most health promoting anti cancer superfoods on the planet. Make sure you include some of them in your diet every day.

So it’s Whole30 plus superfood bullshit. Do I really have to debunk all this? I’m tired just thinking about it. These foods are good. Berries are good. Greens are good, but they are not the be all, and they are not super powered foods. Nutritional science that claims that one food offers X, Y, and Z benefits is usually poorly done and extremely reductive. They’re talking about benefits that they can isolate when they’ve studied the food in a petri dish or fed it in really high quantities to mice. They are not studying what happens when human beings eat these foods as part of a normal diet. And in reasonable quantities. Of course, that last part doesn’t matter, because Dr. Fuhrman doesn’t want you to eat them in reasonable quantities. He wants you to eat tons of greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds. Probably to distract you from the fact he’s not letting you have salt, sugar, oil, or many animal products.

What’s interesting is the person who asked me to look at Nutritarian Diet mentioned that a lot of people who do that potato diet, which we talked about last month, often graduate from the potato diet to the Nutritarian Diet. And I’m confused by that. Because if you were happily eating French fries, how do you go over to this plan where you don’t get any salt or oil?

Well, because this is how crash dieting works. We try a plan. We do it for a while. It stops making sense, because you realize you’ve only been eating potatoes. And then you shop around for the next plan. And this one, I guess if you’ve only been eating potatoes, looks like a really long list of foods. 

So I’m looking at the menu. Breakfast is a berry bowl or chia seed pudding. Chia seed pudding is an abomination. It is a food invented by diet culture, it is not something we need in our lives. And you will never convince me that it doesn’t taste ridiculous.

Lunch is a big salad. Let’s talk about how just calling something a big salad does not mean that it is a big or being satisfying. You can eat a really big salad and still be really hungry because you didn’t have any oil on it. Red lentil chili. Ooh, fancy!

Dinner is a queso dip with carrots and celery and Thai curry. I’m gonna say from the photo that this queso does not look like cheese. It looks like, I’m guessing cashews or something. So cool. Pass.

And then dessert is an Avocado Chocolate pudding. Okay, I’m going to just sidebar and say I actually have a recipe for Avocado Chocolate pudding that I think is delicious. I weirdly do think that is quite tasty even though it is very diet culture-y. It is the opposite of chia seed pudding to me. Sometimes they have like one good idea, but they really should have quit while they were ahead with Avocado Chocolate pudding. We needed nothing else from them.

Feel healthy, energetic, and more vibrant as you lose excess weight. Joel Furman is a board certified family physician and an internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing, who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional methods.

Okay, so I just want to be clear: A board certified family physician is a real thing. He went to medical school. He passed his boards. He has that certification. But a family physician has no nutritional expertise. That is not part of their standard training. They may have done some continuing education. They may have a personal passion for it and have done a lot of research. But family physician does not equal nutrition expert. It’s not a requirement of his profession.

And then he adds on that he is an “internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing,” but that doesn’t mean anything. I could call myself an internationally recognized expert on fuzzy socks and you would not be able to disprove that. (I’m not actually. I don’t know why I said fuzzy socks.) There’s no test for that. There’s no designation. He is just putting words on a website, because that is legal for him to do that. But he doesn’t have any additional credentials that makes him that kind of expert.

“Specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional methods” is just all the red flags, I mean, all of them. How can you prove you’ve prevented something just through nutritional methods? If someone doesn’t get the disease, they could have not gotten it for all sorts of reasons. They could be genetically not predisposed to it. They could be doing something else lifestyle-wise that prevents it. You can’t prove that it would have happened otherwise, if they didn’t follow your diet that’s impossible. 

As for “reversing disease:” That is so scary, because that is when people start thinking that they shouldn’t take medication, or have actual medical care, because they should just be able to “eat themselves healthy.” And man, the “food is medicine” people have done a lot of damage with that. Food is great. Food is a part of a healthy lifestyle. But if you have diabetes or cancer or any other serious chronic condition, you should work with a doctor and get medical treatment, and not try to reverse your disease through nutritional methods alone.

He definitely wants to sell a lot of vitamins. He will be your personalized vitamin advisor. So that’s cool. And I think this is always so funny, because once they want to sell you vitamins, the language changes. Now he says says “eating well may not be enough.” But didn’t you just tell me that you could nutritionally reverse my disease? No, you also need to have a supplement plan, of course, because that is how they can make more money on you. So this is nutritarianism. This is what the nutritarians are doing. It’s definitely a diet. And it’s definitely a scam. 

I feel that there’s kind of a special place in hell for doctors who market this stuff because doctors already have so much power and arguably too much power. But when they lean into marketing themselves this way, and they know that that MD is lending credibility to everything they claim, even though the claims are wildly outlandish and irresponsible, it’s so dangerous. If you do have a chronic disease, and you’re freaked about it, this is going to seem like this really reassuring solution. And it’s going to feel easier and probably more affordable than accessing actual medical care. So this is why people are super vulnerable to this. And it makes a lot of sense. But it probably isn’t that affordable by the time you’re done buying all their  vitamins, and going on the retreat, and paying for the online classes and access to the recipe database. I mean, this is a major moneymaker.

So that is my first taste of Dr. Furman and the Nutritarian Diet. I honestly thought this was going to be more wacky and less infuriating. And now I feel like maybe I need to do a reporting piece on this.

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

Okay, it is May. We are at the start of real spring in most places. Summer, I think most of us would agree, unofficially starts Memorial Day weekend. So we are a few weeks away from pools opening and beach weekends. And you may be feeling feelings about swimsuits. I am recording this right after I got back from a trip to Jamaica where I did a lot of swimsuit shopping beforehand because this was our first real vacation since the pandemic and it had been a minute since I wore swimsuits. So, I have two recommendations for you.

One is Land’s End, which everyone’s heard of. But I do think Land’s End has a reputation as being just mom suits, like dowdy, old lady, frumpy swimsuits. And I now have two of their one pieces. They’re both from the Draper James collaboration that Land’s End did with Reese Witherspoon’s fashion brand. And they are super cute.

One, which I can’t link because it’s not available anymore, is navy with a ruffled collar. Collar? Swimsuits don’t have collars. You can tell I was not a fashion writer. A ruffled neckline. And it’s eyelet lace, ruffled neckline.

And the other one is more of a traditional swimsuit shape. It’s navy on the bottom and hot pink on top and has lime green straps, which I am very into but it also comes in black and would be great either way. Here is a photo of me scowling in it because I am not a swimsuit influencer, but I’m actually having a very good time:

They’re both really comfortable. They’re really well made. They are holding up well to repeated wearings. They feel like quality mom suits that they cover my body, and that’s nice. I don’t feel like I’m displaying myself. This is why we’re not doing swimsuit science, you guys. I am very awkward talking about swimsuits! It’s very awkward.

But there are times you want to be able to be at a pool and not be thinking about your body so much. Maybe because you are there with your extended family, or like lots of people from your neighborhood. It is a weird thing that being at a pool or a beach requires us to be more naked. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with being naked at a pool or a beach—bodies are great! Bodies are bodies. But maybe you don’t want your body to be on display. It’s weird that we default to feeling like a swimming experience requires visible cleavage. So Land’s End for your swimsuits, when you want some more coverage, comfort, you can move in them, they stay where you put them.

And then my other recommendation would be more for swimsuits where you do not mind some visible cleavage but still want some support. Especially if you, like me, are at the higher end of the bra alphabet and need support and straps that hold things up. Bare Necessities is my go-to for bras in general. They have excellent sizing advice. They have a very wide range of sizes, lots of plus size stuff. I’ve gotten really good bras there and they also do bra-sized swimsuits and plus size swimsuits. The styles can be very hit or miss. But Birdsong is a brand I really like and I have a great teal bikini from them that fits super well and is comfortable and stays put and yeah, two thumbs up. (Here’s the top and the bottom I got.)

I also really like Nettle’s Tale if you’re looking for definitely pricier but a super sustainable brand that is super, super size inclusive. Really nice patterns, really high quality. 

So those are three swimsuit brands to check out! And I hope that helps make the start of summer and feelings about swimsuits a little easier. And remember, as many Instagram influencers will tell you right now: Everybody is a beach body. Everybody is a bikini body. But you also don’t have a moral obligation to wear a bikini if you don’t want to. You can show up, you can be in the pool, you can be on the water. You belong there, and your swimsuit doesn’t even have to be cute but if you want it to be cute, it can.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

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