I define bullshit as that which does not replicate when put to the ultimate test, that being reality or practice. This can be advice, a scientific claim, whatever…This is especially prevalent in the wellness industry, be it dieting advice or fitness advice. Someone will make a claim that a certain diet or macro is optimal for weight loss, and then when ordinary people try it, the results tend to be much more underwhelming than promised, if not downright useless. This can be ‘eating windows’/timed-restricted eating, claims of certain foods being more satiating or filling, or certain restrictive diets (like the so-called honey diet, the rice diet, or the potato diet).
A major issue here is survivorship bias. Many of these internet “experts” and diet gurus have massive platforms, making it statistically inevitable that some people will see results from any given diet—whether it’s intermittent fasting, diet breaks, or consuming only honey and sugar. When enough people try something, a few will experience weight loss purely due to statistical variation, which follows a normal distribution.
The problem is that these outliers who see success, are the ones who post glowing testimonials, while the majority, who don’t get results, stay silent. This skews perceptions and makes these diets seem far more effective than they actually are. On top of that, it doesn’t establish causality. Maybe someone lost weight that week because they were hitting the gym harder or happened to be sick. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, but the internet often treats it that way.
This has always been the problem with advice. Due to all the caveats and how much people differ in terms of circumstances and ability, *advice is for no one*. It’s just ‘plane meme’:
A common claim is that carbs are more addictive or less satiating/filling compared to protein or fat.
For example, from Rob K. Henderson Action Beats Inaction:
Modern food is designed to defeat your self-control. No one binges on apples or steak. But Doritos? Ice cream? These foods are chemically engineered to override your brain’s natural stop signals.
Eat apples and steak! He just solved obesity. Come collect your Nobel Prize. How many people only eat half the steak at steakhouses or half the lobster at Red Lobster? Despite the absence of carbs in either of those meals, people have no difficulty consuming large quantities of either of those extremely-calorie-dense foods in a single sitting. This alone should be sufficient to debunk this claim, yet of course it persists online, not because it’s true, but people want to believe it’s true or it seems or feels plausible. Carbs are seen as less virtuous compared to protein by being equated with junk food, so surely they must be worse.
Steak is so calorie dense you don’t need to binge to get fat with it. A small package of beef and pork sausages at my local store has six servings, each 150 calories. I could easily eat the whole thing, and it would already be 1/3 of my estimated daily calorie allotment, and not that filling either. I would soon be craving something sugary. Can confirm having tested this. People who have never been overweight or obese or had an overeating problem who give diet advice all too often come off as clueless by people who have actually tested those theories (the bullshit rule applies again).
All food, regardless if high-carb or high-protein or fat, produces a dopamine and insulin response. Higher calorie density food tends to provoke a stronger response, which is why a fatty steak or a buttered lobster is so appetizing and pleasurable, in much the same way cake is, despite the macros being different. It’s the calorie density more so than the macros that regulates this response, which is why apples, which are mostly water, are not that addictive. The problem is obese people eat too much of all food, not just junk food. The participants on My 600 Pound Life are overeating everything. They eat too much steak, chicken, cheese…whatever. If restricted to steak, they would just eat shit tons of steak and still be fat.
Again, when these experts and gurus claim it’s impossible to overeat steak, what they are saying is they cannot do it. But obese people are capable of eating significant quantifies of food at once, or soon get hungry again, or have cravings for other food.
Other examples of bullshit is the claim that certain countries such as France or Japan have low levels obesity due to walkability. Again, the bullshit rule applies because this does not work when ordinary Americans try to reproduce this. It’s much more than just walking, like genes (I am not saying it’s only genetic, but to reduce it it walkability or blaming cars is overly reductive). Americans are arguably the most active in generations, like gym memberships, fitness apps, and daily step counts, and still the fattest ever. I can attest that I walked everywhere when I didn’t have a car and still gained.
Same for the claimed cultural superiority or heath consciousness of Eastern Asian cultures in explaining low levels of obesity, as something that can be emulated in the US. I argue that both of these claims are false: such countries at not as healthy or health conscious as commonly assumed. Those countries have tons of sugary food, and the same fast-food chains as seen in the US, like McDonald’s and KFC. The food is prepared differently, but still the same in terms of macros and calorie density as fast food in the US:
Fast food is global. These multinationals sell their food everywhere. Moreover, Westerners attempting to adopt their dietary habits with the expectation of achieving the same results are likely to fail due to fundamental cultural and biological differences.
But the satiety index has many citations (856 according to Google), so it must be true? Again, this is where the bullshit rule applies. If it actually worked, we’d see the results. Obese or formerly-obese-people would only eat the most satiating or filling of foods according to the index and lose weight or not regain, but when theory or advice is put to practice, the results are much more disappointing. The body isn’t so easily tricked. An apple won’t satisfy cravings the same way that calorie-dense, sugary, or fatty foods do.
Other studies fail to replicate even when cited over a thousand times, like that famous ’92 dieting study mentioned earlier. Science is useful in so far as it can be applied. Otherwise, it’s just theoretical and doesn’t rise above the level of advice as far as practicality. This why it’s as waste of time to click those links about mouse cancer therapies or claimed breakthroughs. The joke is, scientists have been curing mouse cancer forever.
There is nothing new under the sun. People have been trying (and mostly failing) to lose weight long before the advent of social media.
Whether it’s timed-restricted eating or the self-reported satiety of certain foods, this stuff has been studied forever. Obese people have heard and likely tried most of these diet tricks or hacks, and the results speak for themselves, which is to say with worldwide obesity rates at record highs, there are no results to speak of.
In the past, when a celebrity lost a lot of weight, the default explanation or assumption was gastric bypass surgery. Now it’s Ozempic or a related drug. No one who loses a lot of weight is ever accused of secretly doing keto or secretly intermittent fasting. People have internalized, correctly, that medical interventions are more effective compared to lifestyle ones.
Given that 75% of the US population is overweight or obese, if something actually worked, we’d all know about it by now and it would be common knowledge instead of constantly debated. We would not need the same influencers pushing said diets or techniques, because everyone else would be talking about it and doing it.
This is why everyone on social media is talking about GLP-1 drugs, because the majority of people who take those drugs actually lose weight. This is not to say such drugs are perfect and not without potentially serious side effects, but they do work for most people, and not just survivorship bias or cherry picking. By comparison, it’s only fake-experts and gurus who are praising timed eating or keto, almost never ordinary people like we see with GLP-1 drugs.