Obsess Less, Weigh Less: Why the Western Obsession With Diet Fads Does More Harm than Good

Why a little bit of Mediterranean and Asian WGAF can be good for you.

Before exploring very low-carbohydrate diets like the “Carnivore Diet,” I thought I’d post a quick follow up to my previous article about diet and fitness fads and the quacks who promote them.

In 1999, Paul Rozin from the Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, co-authored a paper with four other researchers hailing from the US, France and Japan.

Published in the November 1999 issue of Appetite, it seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the worlds of academia and diet fademia. I only learned of it several years back after reading a 2002 article by Dr Michel de Loregril, the head researcher of the famous Lyon Diet Heart Study.

The 1999 Rozin et al paper, which you can freely access here, doesn’t contain any ‘sexy’ research findings. It doesn’t claim you can accelerate fat loss simply simply by omitting a certain macronutrient. It doesn’t hail a new ‘superfood’ as an effective way to send tumors into remission. It doesn’t claim you can double your muscle growth by doing super-triple-giant set-rest-pause-lengthened partials with a 10.76 second eccentric phase and a ballerina twirl in between reps.

Which is why I’m guessing none of you reading this have ever heard of the study.

As a person keenly aware of the physical and psychosocial consequences of diet faddism, I think it’s a profoundly important paper. It might not have the instant gratification factor that seems to be mandatory for grabbing people’s attention, but it’s a paper whose findings desperately need to be absorbed and reflected upon.

The paper is titled “Attitudes to food and the role of food in life in the USA, Japan, Flemish Belgium and France: possible implications for the Diet–Health debate.”

Look, I can already see some of you yawning. Slap yourself, have a double-shot espresso, or whatever is needed to give that sagging attention span a boost, because this is important.

And the Fattest Major Country Award Goes to…

Before we discuss the paper’s findings, it’s worth reflecting on the obesity status of the countries included in the Rozin et al paper.

Currently, the most obese country on the planet is American Samoa, followed by a string of other small island nations and Kuwait. After these comes the United States, where 42.7% of the population is obese, according to 2017-2018 data. The mean BMI in the US for males and females is 28.8 and 28.9, respectively.

If slimness was positively correlated with the volume of fat loss literature a country produces, the US would easily be the leanest country on the planet. Instead, it is one of the most obese countries and the fattest major country in the world.

No other country comes close to churning out the volume of diet books and fads that the US does. However, an enduring national obsession with weight and an endless parade of health gurus extending at least back into the 1800s has done little for the average American’s waistline.

Now, let’s look at the other three countries examined by Rozin et al.

According to 2020 data, only 17% of the French population is obese.

In 2019, only 16.3% of Belgians and a piddling 4.5% of Japanese folks qualified as obese.

Obsess Less and Weigh Less

Rozin and his colleagues wished to test the hypothesis that different attitudes to food - particularly those related to stress and worry - may contribute to overall health.

They selected the US because of its prevalent concern about changing diet to improve health. Japan was selected because its citizens enjoyed the longest life expectancy in the world. France was a natural inclusion because of the so-called “French Paradox” and because of the dominant role of food in French culture. Flemish Belgium was also selected, because it shares some, but not all, of French cuisine and French attitudes.

Adults and college students from the four countries were surveyed about beliefs regarding the diet-health link, worry about food, the consumption of foods modified to be 'healthier' (e.g. reduced in salt or fat), the importance of food as a positive force in life, the tendency to associate foods with nutritional versus culinary contexts, and satisfaction with the healthiness of one's own diet.

What did the researchers find?

Overall, those associating food most with health and least with pleasure were the Americans.

In contrast, the French cared least about eating for health, ate the least salt- and fat-reduced foods, enjoyed the least worry about food (along with the Japanese), and were the most likely to eat for pleasure.

In all four countries, females, as opposed to males, showed a pattern of attitudes more like the American pattern, and less like the French pattern.

In either gender, French and Belgians tended to occupy the pleasure extreme, Americans the health extreme, with the Japanese in between.

Ironically, the Americans, who did the most to alter their diet in the pursuit of improved health, were the least likely to classify themselves as healthy eaters, while the French were most likely to do so.

The further irony is that the neurotic American attitude towards food may increase stress and anxiety, which in turn could lead to negative health outcomes.

Rozin and his colleagues posited several possible reasons for the disparity. One was the traditional American focus on individualism, and its attendant emphasis on individual causes and cures for problems, as opposed to a more societal emphasis in France.

Another possible factor was religion; Catholicism is the dominant religion in France, as opposed to Protestantism in the USA. Protestantism may encourage Americans to attach moral dimensions to eating (responsibility for health and body shape) more than the French.

Rozin et al note that prohibition was enacted only in Protestant countries, and cite research showing American college students believe people who consume ‘junk’ foods are morally inferior to those who consume principally fruits, grains and vegetables.

A third difference lies with beliefs about the causes of illness; Americans and American medicine tends to attribute illness to external causes, such as germs, toxins and diet, while French medicine traditionally places greater emphasis on internal imbalances.

Here’s what Dr Michel de Loregril and his colleagues remarked about these findings:

“The group associating food most with health and least with pleasure was the Americans, and the group most pleasure-oriented and least health-oriented was the French. Ironically, the Americans, who make the greatest efforts to alter their diet for the sake of health, are the least likely to classify themselves as healthy eaters. Actually, the way the French drink (essentially wine, every day, during meals and rarely alone) is very different from the way that is prevalent in many Western countries (binge drinking on Saturday nights, to make a caricature). As often cited, binge drinking is a way of trying to forget a difficult life, whereas wine drinking is often associated with pleasure and conviviality, two aspects of a happy lifestyle.”

Anyhow, Have Some Capocollo

The kind of relaxed dietary attitudes Rozin et al observed are hardly confined to the French and Japanese. If you’ve ever spent any amount of time in Italy or Spain, or with post-war Italian migrants adhering to their traditional eating habits, you’ll have noticed their mealtimes are typically jovial and unrushed affairs.

In traditional Mediterranean cultures, eating is not simply a mechanical act that exists purely for the purpose of ingesting required nutrients, but an event and an end in itself, one that should never be rushed.

As with the French, this unhurried and uninhibited approach to eating serves Italians and Spaniards well. Ranking among the top countries in terms of life expectancy, they also enjoy far lower rates of heart disease and obesity than the US.

The Asian Diet

If you were to believe Western diet gurus, especially those from the anti-carb camp, Asians have it completely wrong when it comes to diet. Their main staple is white rice, which is - shock, horror, gasp - a refined carbohydrate!

If you’re a Paleo or ‘ancestral’ diet devotee, grab something sturdy, because white rice is also - wait for it - a cereal grain!

Ooh, aah.

If carbs were as fattening as all those clueless Western diet gurus claim, then Asians should all be a bunch of right porkers.

But the opposite is true.

I was in Thailand earlier this year, and one of the first things I noticed was how little space the average Thai takes up.

If you’ve ever been to Thailand, you’ll know there are a lot of Westerners getting around, both as tourists and expats. It makes for an interesting contrast. If you were to dismantle the average “farang,” you could use the raw material to build two adult Thais. In some cases, three.

Throughout South-East Asia, intake of fruits, vegetables, and herbs is higher than that typically seen in the West. Primary carbohydrate sources include white rice, white rice, along with white rice. Coconut and palm oil – whose fatty acids are almost entirely of the saturated variety - are popular cooking fats.

As with Southern Europeans, South East Asians are fond of allium vegetables and hot peppers; garlic, onion, leeks and chili are key ingredients in a wide variety of Asian dishes.

But they’re not adding in garlic, leeks and chili because Studies Have Shown™ they reduce platelet aggregation, boost the immune system or kill non-existent viruses.

Nope, they do it for the taste.

Because food that tastes good is enjoyable.

Many people in the West have come to believe healthy eating means enduring a life of self-denial, abstinence and Spartan food. They loudly boast on TikTok/Instgram/Facebook/YouTube of their vegan/low-fat/low-carb/zero-carb diets, and their bragging is often accompanied by an especially annoying and often pious evangelism. People who don’t recognize the superiority of these diets are unenlightened dumdums and those who, heaven forbid, criticize them are stupid evil heathen who must be eternally trolled, stalked, threatened and defamed by these influencers and their peanut followers.

If a person proudly proclaimed they completely avoided sex because it was “unhealthy”, many of us would assume they weren’t the full quid. But when someone proudly proclaims they avoid animal foods, naturally-occurring fats, or carbohydrates for the same reason, many accept this as a mark of virtue, even though the evidence of harm for these items is every bit as flimsy.

Meanwhile, Southern Europeans eat meat, dairy, and consume around 40% of their calories as fat. They also drink coffee and alcohol, eat rice, pasta, bread and pastries, and use sugar – but they do so in a more temperate manner. The end result is that gluttony, binge-drinking and excessive caloric intakes have traditionally been far less common in Southern Europe than your typical English-speaking country.

They may have a far less stifled approach to eating than Americans, but the great irony is that Southern Europeans and the Japanese nonetheless eat healthier, eat less, weigh less and live longer than Americans.

There’s a monumentally important lesson to be learned from that.