Good Food, Bad Diet with Abby Langer RD | Koopcast Episode 48

trail and ultra runners what is going on welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and a fair warning before we get any further into this podcast this episode contains a reasonable amount of salty language if you have small children in the room or if you happen to be sensitive to four-letter words change the channel right now this podcast is definitely not for you okay for those of you that remain you are in for a good one on the podcast today i have registered dietitian abby langer i have come to appreciate abby's no-nonsense approach to nutrition where she not only eschews the fads the trends and other nonsense that is rampant in the nutrition world today but she actively combats it with a scientific base no bullshit approach make no mistake if you're a dietary charlatan a purveyor of nonsense or self-proclaimed guru abby's gonna come at you with a blend of pointed commentary scientific evidence and reckless abandon in order to debunk whatever garbage you are spewing she pulls no punches offers no quarter and make zero apologies in her blog which all of you should check out her most recent post is on the worst diet trends of

2020 to date and it starts out like this and i quote oh 2020 you're a fucking dumpster fire and not just with covid but with nutrition trends too it seems like things are getting more extreme science is getting more twisted and unqualified people are getting more bold in their nutrition advice end quote and i couldn't agree with her more her upcoming book good food bad diet will be released in january of 2021 and i cannot wait to get my hands on it as always you know i have zero financial interest whatsoever and anything i promote on this podcast i just want athletes and the listeners to have good resources and in this case have a little bit of fun along the way okay let's get right into it here's my conversation with registered dietitian abby langer so this weekend um after our initial conversation i was flicking through my instagram feed and i saw i got a targeted ad you know like happens with everybody right targeted ad from one of my favorite bullshit peddlers like he's he's one of my favorite ones it's ben green greenfield and only mention oh no he's the worst yeah he's one of the worst i used to actually respect him a lot because in how i know right well because i've been in the industry for a while and i think it was like this is a long freaking time ago like 2001 he was the nsa nasm personal trainer of the year which is like a really

esteemed thing to get like it's it's you know it's like a board of your colleagues or a constellation of your colleagues that kind of like votes on it and stuff like that it was kind of like early in his career and things like that but ever since then he's had a long time to undo that amount of esteem and he's done a really good job he's actually dangerous yeah i agree anyway this is so this is now that maybe maybe it's on the dangerous side we'll see what everybody thinks of it anyway i'm scrolling through my instagram feed and i get this targeted at it's like oh you know intermittent fasting is what was the what was the verbiage one of the most powerful tools you can use for your health no it gets better always you know i do yeah autophagy was used all that kind of stuff intermittent fasting is one of the most powerful tools you can use for your health and wellness here are the supplements you should use when you're intermittent fasting and i'm just like wait a minute and then he's selling the supplements right yeah so i'm like wait a minute hold on if this is one of the most if this is one of the best things you can do for your health and wellness why do you have to take something else i know i know or like if this is the best diet why is it so deficient in all these nutrients and then you have to add them from external sources like shouldn't you be just getting them from food it's so fucked up and you know along the same lines i got an email yesterday from this woman who had read my gundry um post and was like so angry that gundry

that i was talking against him and she she called him like the illustrious dr gundry and you know he's so innovative and she's lost so much weight and her friends have lost so much weight by going lectin free and i'm just like you're a fucking idiot lady when you get those is that actually do you even respond or are you just saying um only when people are particularly disgusting like when someone called me a what did he say a miserable liberal c word wow that's impressive because he was a carnivore and he didn't like the fact that i did like a whole thing with men's health magazine on like the carnivore diet and how fucking shit it is and i'm like well yeah i guess you got one of those things right but um fuck you like don't ever fucking but a lot of the um hate mail i got people like put fake names on whatever but i'm actually collecting it because i want to do a video of me reading my hate mail oh that's so good so fucking great that's so good i i don't want to do it with just any hate mail i want to do it with like you know the stuff that i get that was like so bad like the one i got where a guy is like why are you so miserable did your husband like fuck some other woman did your mother not breastfeed you did you yeah it was like yeah okay so here's the here's what i think is like the

interesting question with all that why has it become so contentious with diet yeah i know people take it personally their identity is wrapped up in what they eat and in in their chosen diet because they have nothing else in their lives so their entire life and their entire identity is wrapped up in that diet and when i come along and say listen the science doesn't back that up or i don't know why you're eating like that because it's dangerous like to eat only meat and water and salt um they get angry because it's they see it as an attack on them and then because they are in like a community of like-minded people otherwise known as an echo chamber um they feel like empowered to stand up against anyone who thinks the way i do or anyone who goes against them because it's all this us versus them mentality it's the same in politics now in the u.s it's like us versus them everything is political and you know like even the coronavirus they turned it into some like something political where like in canada it's like they don't politicize things like that they just like everyone work together and you know we're canadian and it's all to protect each other and meanwhile in the u.s it's like you know mass are bad and mass versus mass are good and it's like oh it's like so crazy but it

translates into like the way people think about other things in their life as well right 100 percent and it's so different well i've i've i've kind of started feeling like bad for the registered dietitians and the nutritionists out there because especially the ones that have been practicing for any appreciable length of time because you get into you get into that vocation to help people right people come to you they want help they want to learn how to eat healthier they want to better their lives and things like that and now i feel that a lot of the registered dietitians and the nutritionists out there they spend more than half their time and maybe almost all of their time like just having to like bat down nonsense as opposed to what they got into seriously yeah i mean is that is that your experience as well like you're just having to like i made a brand out of it though yeah yeah yeah yeah like i if i was working for somebody else it would be worse than it is now but because i made a brand out of doing just that then it's good for me i do i like to see it happen no of course not it makes me so furious like people like gundry or ben greenfield or any of those people like it infuriates me that they are confusing people so much and that they're even they even think they're qualified to spew such nonsense like mark hyman like he's the worst like who

but he has so many followers and because he's a doctor people listen to him and i have to go behind him and clean up all his mess that's the way we all feel all of the dietitians yeah like i said i've i've i've had this conversation with a lot of nutritionists over the last like three or four years and the way that i summarize it is if they have a person or i'm in the athletic space obviously a lot more they have an athlete that comes to them they want help they spend like the first 80 of the first six months working with them debunking everything that they've heard on the joe rogan's podcast and then yeah and then they can after that's kind of all unwound which takes a lot of time then they can actually kind of like move like move the dialogue and the and the practice forward it is really frustrating i have to say it's frustrating but you know that's part of the job i guess so what so what's the solution like other than the call to arms in the registered dietitian and the nutritionist type of community to like go out and like actively like kind of combat all this stuff what like there is none there's no solution there's always going to be snake oil sales salespeople in every profession they've existed since the beginning of um i don't know whenever people started to sell things right i mean we're snake oil salesmen like in the pioneer days right the tonic

yeah but um so you don't there there's not necessarily a solution other than trying to educate the general public about how to how to discern from bad information bad information from good but even then you're still going to get these people who try to convince others to about bullshit to line their own pockets so okay this is this is what people i think that there's a lot of people out there just genuine genuinely want to get to that end they want to figure out how they discern from i'm going to listen to this person and not that person right and i feel bad for them i like feel bad for the people that are trying to just like i feel bad for the nutritionists i feel bad for the people that are trying to do that because they're they don't have an educational basis to make that decision so how like what's like the toolkit or the skill set or whatever that people can use to like figure that stuff out as they're getting bombarded on a daily basis with some nonsense and some good stuff you know i think it's important to take a step back whenever you hear of a headline or a study um or someone says something about nutrition that sounds fantastic because it that's all there's a lot of that going on and i think people are so quick to jump on it because they see it in the media but just to realize

that the media takes things all the time all the time and like any kind of new study and they spin it to be something it's not we've seen it recently with an egg study with a meat study um it's like we see it all the time and and and so people should realize that just because they see something in the media or um someone is a doctor and they're saying something doesn't mean it's necessarily true you take a step back don't jump on it right away and um it's also important to realize that you know one study or one finding is fine but in order to be applicable to a large population study results for example like meat causes cancer okay can they replicate that those study results again and again it's because people like they take the one study as gospel when in reality um to in in order to apply it to a large population of the general population you really should have several studies on that subject that replicate the outcomes do you understand i i know i get where you're coming from i take it a step even like further back from that are the studies done on human or mice just start with that you know you'll see like in my book like i don't i try not to have any studies

over five years old i try i try not to have any studies done on animals at all or in lab dishes like these are really basic uh flags if you will that i look for in studies like is this study done in a petri dish on cells like i don't give a shit about it then because honestly i mean maybe it's preliminary research but you certainly cannot extrapolate that to humans nor can you extrapolate animal studies in most cases to humans right there's a there's that um famous study that people choose to use to like prove that sugar is addictive right and it's done on rats who have been um who they withhold sugar from or withhold food from and it's like this whole the methodology was so bad yet it's used to try to prove a point and it doesn't prove anything but it's repeated over and over again by like james de nicolentino who like is a big like low sugar no carb guy um like all these people and you know it's like p and he's not even a medical doctor he says dr james right but he's not actually he's like some sort of PhD or chiropractor or something like that people need to wear be aware of that too well i think i think the one you're referring to is a classic one where they compared sugar addiction to cocaine

addiction it's the worst fucking piece of shit study it makes me so angry um because and i did a blog on my my site about it because i just couldn't stand it any longer like i can't cope with these people are like sugar's addictive it's actually not addictive okay and if it is we don't have that research to back it up you may feel like you're addicted to sugar but it's not a true addiction it's not and people will argue with me over and over but i'm like don't give me these rat studies they're bullshit and like it's not a true addiction you can say you feel like you're addicted but don't say that it's like crack it lights up the pleasure center of the brain just like sex just like buying a nice shirt at nordstrom just like you know whatever seeing your friends anything pleasurable in your life but you know that doesn't prove that it's addictive but nobody's demonizing those things like they demonize no no it's crazy so i i i get kind of riled up when i hear the sugar is addictive or just as addictive as cocaine or you know whatever other hard drugs or cheese yeah casein is like a dick it's the same thing and who i forget who did that study or like who talks about it a lot but they're such a bullshitter it's like one of those doctors who wrote a diet book recently and they're like oh it's addictive as cocaine or whatever cheese it's like crack and i'm like fuck you because if you've ever

known someone who's addicted to crack you would never make that comparison it's actually a disgusting insulting comparison you know and it's not true yeah besides everything else you know okay let's not go down that rabbit hole too far or rattle we should start calling it that since we're talking about studies on rats um i kind of want to get down to some of like the central themes of your book because you're notoriously anti-diet yes i am okay so first off what does it mean to be anti-diet so i have to make a distinction here because there are a lot of anti-diet dietitians who i don't identify with okay i don't like diets i don't put people on diets i never have put people on diets to me a diet is a restrictive eating pattern meant to help someone lose weight so that's how i define it so um but an anti-diet dietitian is one who basically believes that any weight loss that's intentional is not not cool like that it's it's due to you know um disordered eating or restriction and dietitians shouldn't be helping people lose weight all of that i truly believe that weight loss can coexist with um with normal eating what a novel concept i know i know but right now the profession is very

polarized like there's people who are anti-diet health at every size like intuitive eating trust your body whatever and then on the other end of the spectrum are like hardcore like keto intermittent fasting blah blah so i fall somewhere in the middle i think some of the intuitive eating concepts are amazing and i do use them in my book but i don't think it applies to everyone and in fact i don't think anything applies to everyone so when you my book is not a diet it's not going to give you like a meal plan i hate meal plans um they don't teach you how to make choices or self-manage your food um it's not going to give you like grocery lists and tell you what to buy it's also not going to tell you exactly what to eat when it is a book that first off talks about why you eat the way you do and and what is happening in the background as you try diet after diet after diet why are you so compelled to go on all of these diets why do you feel the way you do about your body and about food so we go right back to like negative core beliefs where they started um and then we because we all have negative core beliefs and then we switch those negative core beliefs into positives you know a lot of books they they tell people what to eat but they don't that's just a band-aid i i believe that true

meaningful change will never happen with nutrition unless you get to the why did your publisher like when you submitted the manuscript or you said are you submitted the proposal they push you to give more answers because that's what people want right people people people want like oh just tell me what to do tell me what to eat tell me what good what food is good and what food is bad i know and i say to those people at the beginning of the book this isn't a diet book i'm not going to tell you what to eat i'm going to help you figure out your shit so that you i'm going to help you fix your shit so you can lose weight you're not going to lose weight and then fix your shit it's like cleaning out your closet i mean i use i have all kinds of negative core beliefs that i talk about so like i will i give examples and i help um people find if they have other ones i help it's like a whole like you do the work first what are the negative core beliefs that you see most frequently i'm not worthy unless i weigh a certain amount so identification with a number yes like i am not worthy of love unless i weigh x um food is protection food is safety so like people will eat because it makes them feel safe so i i do give examples like real life examples of these things and you know people who have these negative core beliefs will be like wow that sounds like me

now how do i fix it so then we take that negative core belief and through a series of uh steps we learn to turn it into a positive and we also talk a lot about negative self-talk because i see this all the time like i've had people they get out they get into a meeting with me or um a one-on-one session and they're like they immediately insult themselves i'm so fat i feel like a whale i have no self-control blah blah blah and i'm like do you hear how you're talking to yourself if this if i was if you wait i usually say if you were talking to your best friend would you ever say any of these things to them would you ever tell your friend they're so fat and they have no self-control you'd never say that so why would you say that to yourself people start to cry yeah because they're like you're right why am i saying this horrible shit to myself and then we we try to figure out how often they say it and most likely they're saying it to themselves all day wow unbelievable i'm i'm worth nothing because i i ate this i have i have no willpower which is such bullshit willpower is like the concept of willpower is like the worst invention of the diet industry ever but and it's it's sad so we go through all of that and how to um figure out how to um turn that negative self-talk into a positive and how to figure out

um how to stop it you know this is the stuff that we do this is the work we do in the book first and then we go into you know let's talk about proteins let's talk about fats let's talk about carbs and beverages and alcohol and all this stuff and how um science what science says um about it and how to incorporate these things or not into your diet and then the last part of the book are the 10 tenets of high value eating which basically helps you put everything into practice but i don't like want to hold people's hand because i can't hold your hand forever right you're trying to make them autonomous and that's what i particularly identify with with registered dietitians that kind of like take that practice they're putting the autonomy in the hands of the client or the athlete right versus just giving them a plan and this is like kind of one of your points is like the diets is just a plan that's honestly like just lazy that's a lazy fix or you can't follow what are you gonna do follow that for the rest of your life yeah and i know it's sometimes in some cases an example of what you should be doing but people like no they need more guidance i think people do need more guidance than um just eat according to how you feel and like eat according to your hunger we do go through that in the book but people want more guidance but they don't want so much guidance that they're like you know no carbs and don't eat sugar and eat three servings of meat a day like that's no it's crazy making to people so it's it really lands right in the middle of the spectrum and i'm hoping that um it's it's easy

for people because that's how you make changes you fix your shit and then you give people a a sort of like guidelines that they can incorporate easily into their lives and really live their best life while doing it yeah well so but i think what we've kind of gotten down to in terms of the prescriptive element of a lot of the diets that are out there is they're trying to put they're trying to put everything in like a neat little box right that people can easily kind of unpack okay this is what happens step one this is what happens step two this is what happens a lot of like multi-step diets exactly yeah exactly and because well it's almost i feel like it's like building ikea furniture right did you get the same like little diagram exactly exactly but that way you pay for it so so what you would advocate for is the non-ikea diet like something that you actually have to genuinely invest in you have to do some freaking work in order to accomplish something but at the end of the day it would be it's going to be meaningful to you once you start to see those results yeah and taking that a step further um it's really individualized to the reader so they figure out their own negative core beliefs they figure out their own likes and dislikes and what's going on with their diet and and they have to take and um one of the 10 tenets of high value eating is is take a look at your lifestyle and build what you eat around that your diet your lifestyle shouldn't fit your diet yeah your diet should fit your lifestyle and by diet i don't mean restrictive

i just mean what we eat right um that word has been sullied i know it's kind of crazy you can't even use the word anymore right i said you can't even use that word diet anymore without it being like charged or polarized yeah whatever but yes okay i want to i want to ask you something like really specific about something that we see that we that we see in the athletic spectrum and you probably see it as well uh along the weight loss side and that is it worked for me so we see a lot of information that's kind of like peddled peddled down from person to person to person yeah it worked for me and like you have to so so we both work with people yeah i always have this jackal and hyde approach with that it's like okay high five we'll give you a high five that it worked for you but then it gets disseminated amongst everybody else what are your thoughts on that well it's that's horrible i mean first of all and i don't give a shit how many times it worked for how many people anecdotes don't equal science a thousand of your anecdotes is not going to give me one scientific study it's not going to hold the weight plus we don't know what else you did for you know like if you said i did x and it worked for me what else did you change did you change anything else like this woman who went on a lectin-free diet the other day she emailed me and she was like this lectin-free diet worked for me la la la and you know she was like throwing a few insults in there to me and whatever and i was like yeah but what else did you change about your diet or your lifestyle is it necessarily x

just x or did you change y z abc right and then the other problem is that when people disseminate this uh anecdotal evidence and recommendations to everybody they fail to acknowledge that we're all different we all have a different socioeconomic status well i mean we could that's a possibility we all have different genetics we all have different tolerances we're all different we're all different we all have different likes and dislikes and lifestyles and you know like work hours and activity levels and all of that so what works for this person probably won't work for everybody and the problem is that there's this thing now i don't know what it is but like people are just they love to to say that a diet will work for everybody but usually in in confusing it usually there's like one thread of truth or one like mechanistic plausibility that goes along with the anecdote right yes the perfect example is the carnivore diet so there's a ton of people who who went on the carnivore diet i don't know where they are now they're probably eating carbs again but when it first became big people were like yeah i've been eating meat um only for three months and all of my rheumatoid arthritis or you know like whatever else um uh disease um autoimmune disease symptoms

are gone and so this is the best diet you know everyone should be should be using it but meanwhile are they the symptoms gone because of number one the placebo effect number two but not because of the carnivore diet per se but because they've eliminated potential triggers because they basically aren't eating anything like what is it right so we don't know and these people don't know all they know is that it worked for them right and then the mechanistic plausibility is it's like yeah you limit you eliminated something that was contributing to that yeah everything except for meat it's easy to pick on the carnivores though but they're so vociferous it's crazy yeah but it's easy to pick on the carnivores because they have been the most disgusting vociferous and non-evidence-based people ever like really they're so aggressive and so rude and they don't it's like they're in they completely espouse that us versus them we hate everybody who doesn't agree with our diet or even we just hate everybody who doesn't do the diet right right and dietitians have been making people sick with the food guide meanwhile like no one ever followed the food guide so they don't know what they're talking about you know it's just they just make the the grossest claims and it's just it's

easy to target them because they've been assholes but i mean if you ask any dietitian on who's on social media they'll say low carb high fat and carnivore are like the two most aggressive um and insulting and just like just yeah like the worst groups to deal with because they're just so brutal i like how i like the fact something a trend that's emerged recently i like the fact that a lot of the well-intended registered dietitians who all know their shit have started to kind of like band together in this like we got your back type of system where they see something they see somebody getting dog piled on and you're a good example of that right you get dog piled on frequently but other people will come into the mix and be like no like this like you're abby's right you guys are all wrong and here's why yeah but it doesn't matter because it will and then you start wasting fucking hours of your time on twitter which is why i don't go on twitter that much anymore because it's like it's such a time sucker someone disagrees with you and then everyone piles on and then suddenly you have like all these you know notifications and you're trying and i don't even try to defend myself anymore because i don't want to waste my time i just can't waste my time with these people because they don't they're not open to learning i am if listen if you show me evidence that says that what i'm that i'm

what i'm saying is wrong and i mean evidence i don't mean a youtube video i don't mean anecdotal evidence i don't mean a rat study if you show me like legit evidence i will i will make a correction and i will change my tune and i have i have done that before yeah but none of these people have anything of value and they're not they're not concerned with that they just want to like they spend their day in their parents basement like just insulting people like i see dietitians arguing with like iver cummins and like all these people are like so radical and i'm just an extreme i'm like why are you wasting your fucking time like why well so here so here's what i ask people i mean this kind of goes back to my original questions like how does the average person discern who's peddling bullshit and who's actually got their stuff organized and together i always encourage them to ask whoever they're trying to figure whoever they're trying to suss up what would it take to change your mind on whatever particular subject and the the the unthoughtful person who's already made up their mind can't come up with a good answer or they have to stumble through it or they you know it's blah blah blah blah there's like long-winded they use a zillion different anecdotes and things like that to come up with you know some something the person who has their shit together has already thought about that because they're because they're thinking about the world in a like a in a bigger context

outside of the echo chamber that they have kind of created for themselves that's like that's the litmus test that i give people it's like what would it take to change your mind well a lot it's funny because yeah a lot of people who and i don't mean to sound like an asshole but i'm gonna say that a lot of people who argue continuously on twitter who are like that who don't don't want to change their mind no matter what are not smart and they don't know what the fuck they're talking about there's so many people who are like engineers and um engineers are are like programmers or like they're all like dealing bitcoin and they're just like well i don't have a degree in nutrition why yeah but i read this study and yeah well it works for me and you're just like okay well that's nice but you know you're a fuckhead and like like seriously well the telltale sign is going back to the the the mechanistic plausibility piece right the telltale sign of that is is they take one they take one biochemical pathway and use it to explain every everything everything everything and i just shake my head i'm like do you realize how complicated the human body is but it's inflammation yeah right there you go and people like don't even know what that means they don't even understand that actually

some inflammation is is normal right but it saves your life yeah inflammation yeah exactly exactly well i mean i can remember like i've been in this long enough and i actually grew up in dallas right next to the cooper institute there where all of the anti-inflammatory everything all the over supplementation and things like that started to come stomach come out of that clinic and it was well intended at the time because that's that was that's what the body of research was saying at the time but come around you know 20 years later and you have to actually like change with it but to your point on inflammation if if you're looking at somebody and they're saying okay there's this one thing that controls inflammation we have to do everything that we can to stop that exact one thing it's like mark hyman yeah you don't understand it all these anti-inflammatory foods and you know it's like change these and you'll live forever and blah blah blah and you're just like are you an idiot like seriously you're actually still a doctor well a lot of those people have got their medical license yeah pardon me a lot of those people have gotten their medical license revoked not mark hyman i know well maybe he still works for like the cleveland clinic that's just is it the cleveland clinic wherever he works it's it's a shame like that's that's really bad okay let's let's go let's go down the final final rabbit hole um and i want to ask you about the worst diets of 2020 what's coming up on that 2020 is not done yet this podcast will come out with a scant two months left in 2020 so there's there's time for it to change but what's gonna what is going to make

the list this year and i also want to know like not just because it's bullshit you always back your stuff up with science why is it bullshit okay so my number one pick is extreme fasting now i know that intermittent fasting does have some great evidence behind it for certain people yes not for everyone for sure especially if you have any kind of like even a whisper of an eating disorder like don't even go there but people now are taking it to another level they're eating like two hours a day um or they're skipping multiple days of eating all together in a row um and i mean they're they're saying well it promotes autophagy and like you know the the mitochondria blah blah blah the cells and it's like there's no evidence in humans that says that extreme fasting is more beneficial to your health than anything else any other diet at all or just normal caloric restriction exactly it's another tool in your toolbox to create a caloric caloric deficit and you know there's people email me all the time they're like you're wrong i lost all this weight on you know i fasted i'm fasting and i lost 40 pounds and it's not just because it's caloric restriction i'm like yeah it is actually it is

but maybe that's the easiest way for you so it works for you when other diets didn't however when someone turns to extreme fasting which means eating very few hours a day or you know going at whole days without food they really put themselves at risk for nutrient deficiency and you know people will say i'll just take a supplement right but this troubles me for a couple of reasons first of all humans have never replicated some of the compounds found in food primarily like antioxidants but still there is a synergistic quality to the you know the nutrients macro and micronutrients that we consume in food and we can't get that from a supplement second of all and just as important is what are you doing to the rest of your life when you only eat for two hours a day or for not at all for days in a row how is that making you feel physically how is that affecting your emotional health and your relationship to food in your body how is that affecting your social life which is very important you know all of these things ripple out do you have kids are you are they watching you eat like this what are you teaching them so i think we tend to shove that kind of stuff to the back burner in favor of like but it's

gonna help me lose weight but it's like you gotta consider the cost benefit of this eating plan to your life well and sometimes i think it's a short-term game long-term loss like we're gonna look back at some of those behaviors like 15 years from now and those the people that are peddling it are gonna be like oh my gosh or they've just moved on to something else which is probably more likely their kids grow up their their kids grow up like the seven-year-old seven-year-old i had in my office who wouldn't eat and i took the mom into another office i took her away from the girl and i said have you been dieting and she's like i've been dieting in front of her for years well why do you think she's having problems with food now she is seven yeah that you know this is what happens and these people grow up parental influence around food and eating has a huge impact and there is research behind this long-term research has a huge impact on someone's uh attitude towards food and eating well into adulthood yeah here's the here's the rabbit hole we can go down just based off of diet number one i knew this was going to happen let's let's let's like take a bookmark here so the first one is extreme intermittent fasting but to to that very point abby one of the biggest issues that i that i've had with people who take this this diet worked for me it works for everybody is social media allows them to punch above their weight in such a way that they are influencing people that

they have no idea how they're influencing them to the extent of which you just brought up an example where it's the the person's daughter right and son or daughter the child but in social media you don't know if you have a hundred thousand followers intermittent fasting is awesome and a sliver of those hundred hundred thousand followers are actually going to have some sort of negative outcome because of that influence of course and the whole fitspo culture and wellness culture and there's this big kerfuffle among dietitians who are anti-diet because there's a lot of influencers who are using um the hashtag body positivity and they're like posing in bikinis and you know all of that stuff it's it's cringe worthy i mean and yeah as a mom of two girls two preteen girls i i shudder to think of what my daughters see online and you know the best we can do is sort of just bring them up with you know good eating habits and the ability to you know suss out whether or not something's legit but you know and the influencer very rarely knows that they're creating that negative impact because all they have are people like yeah they just have people that are like reinforcing their belief or bias in their own echo chamber and then people like you people have to come to people like you and people like me that says hey this really screwed me up why yeah they don't hear that

absolutely and um it goes without saying that a lot of these influencers and i have met a couple more than a couple um have issues themselves yeah i mean they don't eat properly a lot of them some of them do but you know that influencer holding that green smoothie may that may be the only thing she eats all day their life and this is what i actually tell my daughters as well you know what you see on social media is not even close to what happens in real life like these people are curating their entire life they live their entire life for the next instagram post it's sad i've seen an influencer walk down a street 50 fucking times so someone taking their picture could get the right shot i know it's crazy and as she pouts her lips it's like so gross you know but that's the that's the world we're living in right and it's you know it's sad because they get they get reinforced these influencers get reinforced in their own body issues yeah yeah oh you look so skinny you look so pretty oh you've lost weight it's like yeah but what are they doing otherwise and my kids my own kids see me like taking instagram pictures with like the house is a mess and i'm like have a total like bathroom tile is a marble background they see like what happens behind the scenes that it's not all perfect right but a lot of people don't and they want to be like these influencers and because with social media

we feel closer than ever before to celebrities and people of any stature in the community you know it feels like if we follow them and they respond to our comments and we eat like them and we see that little glimpse into their day that we can be close to them and that we can be them and it's not correct and nor would you probably want to be them yeah 100 well as as you can attest to having the folded laundry in your background which will get shown on the one minute audiogram clip that'll come out you know in advance of this podcast like just keep look for people who are keeping it real um okay so our first our first thing that we want to go away is extreme intermittent fasting or i would say at least even if you even if you find some benefit to the extreme intermittent fasting the hoopla and the nonsense that comes about with that or comes alongside with that yeah okay what's number two uh the cert food diet i don't like the cert food diet it was created by two trainers at a gym in the uk and it is the diet that adal used to lose a quite significant amount of weight um it's essentially a diet that's built around certs um which are situans which are proteins um in the body that we believe affect aging and weight um to some degree um but in particular aging and metabolism whatever so

these guys did a study on their own with like 15 people in their gym who paid to be in the same it was like the worst methodology in the world it hasn't even been like printed or i mean published um and then basically came out with this diet that's a starvation diet the first week is like a thousand calories the set the next two weeks the maintenance phase quote unquote is 1500 you have to drink like this green juice and eat um foods that are high in sirtuins or that you know like red wine and chocolate and certain things but it's very restrictive this diet and it's essentially like a low calorie diet but because adele lost weight on it people are going nuts over it and it's just it's ridiculous it's ridiculous it's a starvation diet anybody can lose weight on a starvation diet but after the diet is over and this diet doesn't have any follow-up it's basically like three weeks and then what do you what do you fucking do three weeks really i didn't realize it's short i believe it's three weeks it has the initial phase and then the maintenance phase but then it's like you know doesn't have a follow i guess you're just supposed to keep going back on it or like you just do the maintenance phase forever but you're consuming such a low number of calories that i mean it's just never going to work in the long term do you think that it's dangerous yeah for sure it's dangerous i mean and i think again this is an example of two idiotic nutrition people who call themselves like

nutrition coaches or whatever the hell they are they're trainers um who are saying that this diet is great for everyone and who are taking really badly done research that they did plus research that was done on sirtuins but is on animals and extrapolating that to humans and you can't do that with any of that that's not the way that any of this works you know what's funny you know it's really funny so the first two that you just mentioned we've kind of like come back to a few themes throughout the course of this discussion the first two diets that you mentioned have almost identical themes flowing through them first of them yeah you're probably there's your next book and plus you they always don't allow gluten and dairy those are like the two fucking that's a red flag okay anyone who says that gluten and dairy are not good they're inflammatory and nobody should be eating them turn around and run the other way because like dietitians just roll their eyes we're just like fuck you know so can you choose two other foods to villain villainize or vilify you know because gluten and dairy have had their day and we're sick of that now it'll be two things 10 years from now trust me they're all the same all of these diets are the same they just have like one twist yeah and and the the themes through the first two we're gonna get it to at least three let's let's try let's try to

get through three but the themes for the first two is one there's really poor research that backs it up either it's on animals or poor research in the second case that's that's done by humans or both um they're both versions of extreme caloric restrictions which likely produces any of the positive benefits that you're getting from it just you're reducing calories and you're losing weight and you get a benefit simply uh simply from that and they both have some like plausible mechanistic uh reason of action right they both hang on like one kernel of thread one kernel of truth involves an animal study right exactly exactly that that's inconclusive so like what is that but the lay person doesn't understand how to read scientific research and these the developers of all these diets count on that fact right 100 right um and it's the same for the third diet the mayor method so this is a diet that rebel wilson another celebrity influencer the pork girl like she's called fat amy in the pitch perfect um movies which is but she lost a lot of weight on this diet and it involves again caloric restriction and like the belief that um your normal diet is is toxic toxic and certain foods are toxic and um you know there's a mayor clinic in several parts of the

world where you go and have bloodletting and fucking whatever like all these wackadoodle bullshit treatments like detoxing foot baths and it's just it's super expensive too but that's besides the point that none of it means anything and it's just you're again not eating anything you're not eating anything so that's the mechanism of weight loss obviously not eating anything it all kind of comes down to that i didn't even know i didn't even know that that last diet existed and i had to look it up in advance of this it's pretty ridiculous thing you know what you know what i have a fourth really quickly the all-in diet by teddy mellencamp which is getting so much shit online now teddy mellencamp is a real housewife in um california and she has this program it's called an accountability program it's basically fucking 500 calories a day she's getting so much shit and she's defending it she has these coaches quote unquote whose only qualifications she proudly states are having completed the program no medical or any kind of other training people have to take a picture of their weight on the scale every day they have to take a picture of every meal um they get screamed at and berated and talked down to if they like uh apparently like if you eat a burger that has a half a bun and or and not is not wrapped in lettuce or if you eat chunky soup instead of plain

broth for dinner dinner is always a soup that's it um you get like kicked out of the program or severely like scolded and the online is like reddit is full of people saying that they did this program and they actually made themselves vomit before they got on the scale because they were afraid that their coach was going to yell at them so needless to say i'm not going to have links in the show notes to any of that shit just to not perpetuate any of it i wrote a facebook rant about it the other day actually new york magazine the cut just interviewed me about it the journalist was like i want to interview you about um telly mellencamp's all in the controversy and i'm like what what do you even talk about so i looked it up and i was like oh my god i have so much to say about this and it's all bad so this is again celebrity culture infiltrating diet culture and like vomiting all their shit all over the place so people believe that if they've starved she's basically teaching people how to starve themselves so they can look like teddy mellencamp like who the fuck wants to even look like that well so i want to i want to try to like pivot a little bit of this because you've seen it devolve right we've just gone through what the end point is is why is how it's all devolved do you think can we like leave the listeners with any sort of like optimistic is there a turning point do you think that

it'll actually like come back to some sense of normalcy or have an equilibrium you know there always is the pendulum swings right and we know that um there was a swing towards restrictive diets now there's a swing towards anti-diets and intuitive eating and i think people those things will always be here and people will always still come out with diets that are crazy however i think we're getting smarter and i think that um we're more able um through the power of social media and just like being more aware of the tricks that these celebrities or diet gurus use um we're more able to discern what is a legit diet and what we would be able to do for ourselves and i think we're also coming into us a place where we are starting to understand that all the pain of restrictive diets isn't worth that extra five pounds and that we really need to be living our best life yeah i think i think the the the wrinkle that i'll add to that is is we do typically view this as a pendulum that goes on natural cycles right back and forth and back and forth and remember the snack well days and you know yeah i lived through that yeah exactly but i i think i think that it's it's equal parts natural cycle but also there have to be people in place that also help bring it back to normalcy because left it's like chaos theory right

like left unchecked it'll just get more and more chaotic the more and more salacious that you can get that's the more eyeballs you can get it on and so on and so forth yeah i agree so i agree and that's my job there you go there you go there you go that well you'll be you'll be in business for a while because i don't think i don't even when it comes back to the middle it'll go back to another side people will push it back to the other side of course there's always some vociferous you know diet guru anecdotal diet warrior ready to tell everyone what worked for them diet warriors why are we in a world where we have to like pair those two words up because people assume the identity their identity based on their diet well their instagram handle and their twitter handle and things like that when it includes their diet philosophy or their diet i can't even wade into that pond anymore of people's like literal identity being whatever it is vegan high fat your life should be so much more than what you eat and unfortunately for a lot of people it's not yeah i agree with you okay what do we what else do we need to know about the book comes out in january good food bad diet 2021 you can pre-order it now on amazon um in the u.s and canada and i believe the uk if you just go to amazon.com in the uk it it like flips you over to the amazon uk um link for it because if you go to search it on amazon uk

apparently it doesn't come up i don't know but yes and it's out january 5th and people are going to get down to the why of what is going to cause what what is causing their eating behaviors yes exactly not a plan not eat this don't eat that right no it's not your typical it's not your typical i don't think any book exists that is like my book and um it's gonna be great it's gonna be great i can't wait to get my hands on it personally i'm gonna send you a galley oh yeah awesome i can't wait to get it well when when the book actually comes out and you get all of the hate mail from the book you'll have to come back on and then we can just go we can just rant on all that stuff because that'll present it that's another level right when you have a physical piece of literature that's out there it's just more ammunition for people to attack absolutely and we will go through it and we will debunk all of it nice all right good or not maybe they'll change my mind or maybe maybe maybe you're so convincing that you change everybody's mind and that's what gets the pendulum back to the middle that could be how great would that be i have faith it would be amazing all right abby thank you for time uh last thing where can people find you on social media i think everybody should give you a follow because it's hilarious and informative and you pull no punches all at the same time so facebook i'm at um abby langer nutrition and uh instagram and twitter it's at langer nutrition

awesome thank you abby for your time appreciate it can't wait for the book to come out it's gonna be awesome oh boy that was fun thank you to abby for coming on the podcast today that was a hoot hope to bring you back once your book comes out in the early part of 2021 i wish you all the best of luck with that thank you to all the listeners for sticking with us today realize that that was a little bit of salty one but hey what are you gonna do we're all people here and we all have our own individual personalities and as i mentioned on the onset of this podcast i really appreciate abby's personality with how she handles all out of the nonsense in the nutrition world today i do think it is a breath of fresh air and something that can help people cut through the clutter if you have any feedback please feel free to hit me up on social media or leave a review on apple podcast appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you listeners and as always we will see you out on the trails