Big Tobacco -- sorry, Big Food -- fights back.

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Toward the end of my time in DC, I was in a bad way. I had been on and off diets for about 50 years, losing hundreds of pounds, only to gain them all back, plus some. I was on two high-priced drugs for type 2 diabetes, one of which was Ozempic. I knew that diets didn't work, and yet every doctor I saw told me I needed to go on another one. When I resisted, I was called noncompliant. The whole dance stressed me out and gave me a binge eating disorder. 

Then a therapist told me about health at every size. The idea is that the scale is not the be-all and end-all -- that your weight doesn't matter as long as your blood pressure, etc., are fine. I glommed onto the idea like a life preserver. The therapist sent me to a dietitian, who recommended a book called The F*ck-It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy. (The publisher put the asterisk in the title, not me.) A lot of what the author wrote made sense to me, so I decided to try eating whatever I wanted, whenever I was hungry.

My fasting blood sugar shot up to about 180. (Note to those who know nothing about blood sugar readings: a fasting reading of between 70 and 100 is normal; 200 is high; at 400, you need to go to the E.R.; and if it's as high as 600, you could go into a coma and die.) I started to maybe think I was being sold a bill of goods -- that as a diabetic, maybe I couldn't eat whatever I wanted. When I broached the subject with the dietitian, I was a titch confrontational -- but the upshot was that she didn't know whether a fasting blood sugar reading of 180 was dangerous for a diabetic or not. We parted ways immediately. Very shortly thereafter, I also parted ways with the therapist who'd sent me to her.

This was not my first run-in with dietitians and nutritionists, although it was the most egregious. So this past week, I wasn't terribly surprised to see this article in the Washington Post: "As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice". It's a gift article, so feel free to click through and read it. The bottom line is that big food manufacturers like General Mills are co-opting the health-at-every-size message and turning it on its head. They claim to be empowering people to reject fat shaming and eat anything they want -- including, of course, Big Food's highly-processed products. To get there, they're enlisting dietitians as social media influencers, even to the extent of paying them to promote the manufacturers' products. (That link is also to a gift article. Both are the result of a new partnership between the Post and The Examination, a nonprofit news organization that specializes in coverage of public health issues around the world.)

The worst part is how these food manufacturers are distorting the health-at-every-size message. Its roots are in the 1960s civil rights movement, according to the article; the original goal was to promote equal access to healthcare. By 1995, the movement had come up with "intuitive eating" as a way for people, including those with eating disorders, to learn to listen for internal hunger cues that diet culture had taught them to ignore. 

As interest in intuitive eating increased, Big Food began to pay attention. Clearly, the industry is scared that the anti-diet movement, along with the success of drugs like Wegovy (aka Ozempic formulated for weight loss) in tamping down desire for junk food, are going to upend their business model. After all, obesity has been deemed a healthcare crisis. So the industry is manipulating the movement's message by "essentially shift[ing] accountability for the health crisis away from the food industry for creating ultra-processed junk foods laden with food additives, sugars and artificial sweeteners," as last week's article says.

This looks suspiciously like the sort of propaganda that Big Tobacco employed for decades to convince its customers that its addictive, cancer-causing products weren't really that bad, and were even healthy.

Last fall, according to the Post/Examination article, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on a number of influencers and food industry trade groups for not being explicit about who was funding the influencers' posts. But that just means the influencers have to be clear about who's paying for their messaging. They don't have to change their advice.

I'm not trying to discredit all dietitians. I'm sure many of them offer nutritionally sound information and don't take kickbacks for social media posts from anybody. But we've received so much terrible information about nutrition from "experts" over the years -- eggs cause high cholesterol (LOL, nope), margarine is better than butter (actually, the trans fats in margarine make butter the better choice), high fructose corn syrup is fine (not so much), dairy fat is bad (that one's being disproven, too) -- that, well, just be careful about whom you listen to. Especially if it's a paid influencer on social media.

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By the way, I didn't lose any weight on Ozempic. See, Ozempic makes your appetite go away. But a big appetite was never my problem; my problem was binge eating due to stress. I ate whether I was hungry or not. It wasn't until I retired, moved cross-country, and started low-carbing that I've lost weight and kept it off.

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These moments of doughnut moustrapping have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!