11/12/2025
Extreme diets.
I keep hearing people say they don’t want to go on extreme diets.
People who are happily, unironically, and unthinkingly chomping down on muffins, sandwiches and crisps and washing it down with diet cokes.
How is this not the definition of an extreme diet?
These ultraprocessed foods have become completely normalised over only a couple of generations.
They became part of the food landscape because some researchers fought to control the narrative about the cause of heart disease in the 1970s—and won.
It wasn’t because they possessed unassailable scientific truths. It was because they created a narrative and knew how to sell it.
That’s cheating.
In fact, all the evidence from randomised controlled trials debunked their theories. Some was even covered up for decades, like the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, because the researchers were “disappointed” in the results.
They wanted to prove that they were right about saturated fat causing heart disease. When they proved it didn’t, they didn’t want anyone to find out that they were wrong. So they hid the truth. For decades.
Meanwhile, anyone that disagreed with the rapidly growing cadre of corporate-sponsored experts baying for low-fat diets found themselves in an increasingly hostile environment, where they could either agree with the dogma or disappear from the scientific community.
Politicians, particularly Senator George McGovern, and the food industry, under the auspices of the USDA, were instrumental in sculpting the food landscape we see now.
Even at one of the initial discussions about saturated fat, one prescient person noted that the new low-fat, low-cholesterol dietary guidelines would create opportunities for processed foods to fill the palatability vacuum created when fats and cholesterol were replaced by sugar and starches. This was because, not just flavour, but texture, mouth-feel, and aroma are impacted by removing dietary fats and cholesterol-rich foods.
He was right.
These dietary invocations ushered in a new era where the most important attributes of food were preached from pulpits afforded to anointed scientific luminaries by the mainstream media. These became the calorie count (the amount of heat given off when you burn something, not an indication of how a nutrient or toxin impacts metabolism), total and saturated fat, cholesterol, salt, and now red meat, choline and carnitine. We’re told that to be healthy, we must minimise or eliminate these nutrients and foods based on straw men arguments that don’t make sense.
The negative impact on palatability (let’s face it, grass seeds and potatoes boiled in water or even baked are bland and stodgy) created a branch of science geared towards replicating the sensory experiences of real foods naturally rich in cholesterol and saturated fats. Real foods like beef, cheese, ham, and bacon.
The opportunity for the nascent processed food industry in the 1979s and ‘80s was too good to miss. The only threats and barriers to dominating the food market were scepticism by people that didn’t buy into the dogma around fats and carbohydrates.
And then Big Food went one better by hiring scientists to research the perfect ingredient combinations to make their foods irresistible.
Or should I say addictive?
“Once you pop, you can’t stop.”
These new “foods” are only foods in name.
Sure, they include a few food ingredients. But they’re mostly chemistry experiments. Added artificial colourings, sweeteners, flavourings, preservatives, emollients, and more.
Chemicals that are often known to be metabolised to toxins inside our cells, like formaldehyde.
Chemicals that have been proven to alter the gut microbiome and damage mitochondria.
Chemicals with minimal safety studies and where concerns about safety are often downplayed or hidden.
This is what’s paraded as being the sensible, normal diet.
A diet that never existed anywhere in the known universe for any animal species at any time prior to the twentieth century.
A diet that had no randomised controlled trials on its safety or efficacy up until the last decade or so. And all studies that I’ve read on these Dietary Guidelines for Americans reveal that people do worse on them than on pretty much any other diet, including the Standard American Diet.
A diet that is difficult to follow using real foods prepared in your own kitchen and even more challenging if you wish to eat appetising meals without turning to ultraprocessed foods. And practically impossible to meet micronutrient recommended intakes without “fortified” and “enriched” ingredients. That’s not even taking into consideration all the antinutrients, such as:
*preservatives (because apparently bacteria and fungi aren’t the only things those are toxic to),
*heavy metals (mined calcium used in fortified foods can contain lead, cadmium and other heavy metals, rice is a significant source of arsenic), and
*artificial sweeteners (aspartame is metabolised to formaldehyde).
Have you ever questioned how we should define an extreme diet?
Is it really a diet consisting of real foods prepared using ingredients you throw together at home yourself but not a concoction of toxins that would make Macbeth’s witches shudder in horror?
Let me spell it out for you…
If you’re claiming that what you are eating is normal and you’re consuming processed foods made with ingredients you can’t even pronounce, then you really need to sit down and have a long, hard think about what you consider normal. Because I’m afraid we’ve all been brainwashed.
“Extreme diets” is a marketing strategy used to stop you from using your own, perfectly good brain to question what they’re putting in your body.
This strategy is meant to make you not turn the magnifying glass on what they’re serving you. It’s about deflection.
It’s just another of those hypnotic phrases, like anti-vax or science-deniers. Ironically, used to shut down scientific debate while censoring anyone who’s spent more than 3 seconds thinking about something.
