New vegans. Let’s talk about diet culture, diet history, and fear mongering with foods.
I’ve been vegan over six years at the time of recording this video, and now after being a nutrition coach, I’ve always wondered and sort of researched why we get so, so swept up in these diet trends. And frankly, nutrition lies sold to us by food marketers across the country. And that’s just it. It’s people trying to sell you their product, whether that be their food product or their cookbook or even their diet plan.
We do live in a diet culture and everything ultimately comes down to money. Now I just want to be a dork and look at the food scare tactics that we have to deal with in the vegan movement. This gets pretty messed up and is one of the most interesting things to me personally. Can I start with soy? I’m gonna start with soy. There are all kinds of myths and lies circulating about soy.
The most ludicrous one, that soy gives you boobs, especially men, when obviously, if there were any food known to increase your breast size, it would be the world’s most expensive and top selling supplement of all time. There’s also lies that soy supposedly lowers testosterone, supposedly gives women breast cancer, supposedly lowers thyroid function, supposedly causes infertility and hormone imbalance, and supposedly causes poor absorption of vitamins and minerals.
It’s absolutely insane. This all started to take traction, really, in the nineties. There were campaigns like Soy alert and books like the whole soy story that started many of these soy myths. And unfortunately, to this day, the majority of Americans still regard them as facts, even though we’ve had numerous meta analyses and systematic reviews that have debunked them time and time again.
I could go in and at GPT and generate a list of them in seconds. No surprise, the puppeteers behind the curtain are meat and dairy food giants, animal agriculture lobbyists, and even animal feed producers because it affects their money. Let’s be real. They have such a huge foothold in the US that the only reason the price of meat and dairy stay low is because of government subsidies.
That’s right. Even as a vegan, your tax dollars go to meat and dairy farmers to help pay for and artificially lower the cost of meat and dairy products in grocery stores. You want to research the programs. Organic Dairy Marketing association program, Commodity Credit Corporation, Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. And here’s my favorite.
You know those commercials that show food with ridiculously stretchy cheese? I won’t name the companies, but ridiculously stretchy cheese pizza or cheeseburgers. This is my favorite. Every time one of those commercials airs on tv, that food company, that restaurant, gets paid a kickback by a government program called checkoff programs.
Isn’t that insane? Okay, that’s enough of my vegan torquitus. My point is that soy has been turned into a major food villain since the nineties. Despite being long debunked, it’s still popular belief soy allergies, even though they are listed in the big eight. I’ve seen several articles that announce that soy is the least common of the big eight, yet people often self attest to having soy allergies way more often than being actually diagnosed them.
A lot of the time. This is because there’s confusion about what a food allergy actually means. So soy allergies are actually most common in children under ten years old, and the majority of these children grow out of their soy allergy. This is the case with most food allergies. Next, let’s talk about gluten. Now this one is more recent and probably more touchy.
Gluten free diets really started to take off in the early two thousands say that one actress in particular really started the whole thing. I’m not going to say names, but I’ll let you google that if you’re interested. So people started claiming that gluten caused all kinds of health issues, and mainly gluten caused weight gain. Also, they claimed gluten caused inflammation and gastric upset, like gas bloating and diarrhea, even if they don’t have celiac disease.
And even more. Really, celiac disease is very real, wheat allergies are very real, and food sensitivities are very real. But. But there is no actual test or list of concrete symptoms that allows healthcare providers to diagnose gluten sensitivity. The gluten free trend led to many people self diagnosing gluten sensitivity and then switching themselves to a very restrictive gluten free diet when it wasn’t medically necessary.
There are lots of reasons why people can experience discomfort digesting things like gluten, and I’m going to get to that shortly. So how did the gluten free diet gain traction? It was mainly promoted by celebrities and it just really took off. So why were people so quick to latch onto this? Well, simple. It’s jumping on the outdated diet trends that brainwash the world that carbs are bad and carbs cause weight gain, and ultimately the carbs are evil trend came into popular
belief because of the marketing success of the Atkins diet, which is basically the grandfather of the keto diet Atkins diet is a low carb, high protein, high fat ketogenic weight loss program. Doctor Atkins sold people on the idea that eating too many carbs, especially refined carbs, leads to weight gain, blood sugar imbalances, and heart problems.
But we know that the science is much more complex than just blaming carbs in a vacuum. Let me be clear. Carbs are good. Carbs are great, and carbs do not cause weight gain. Eating too many calories causes weight gain. Another diet, another diet that demonizes certain carbs is the South beach diet, which basically had everyone ban white flour and sugar entirely from their diet.
So that leads us to sugar. Sugar has been villainized as a bad food since the 1960s, going way back. The general consensus of what happened, in a nutshell, was that there was a war between the sugar industry and butter, specifically aka the dairy industry. They say that the dairy industry funded studies that pointed to sugar as the cause of heart problems and not butter.
And they say the dairy industry funded studies that downplayed the link between sugar and heart disease and instead blamed saturated fat. And this also started the other false belief that fat makes you fat and that the fat you eat is the fat you wear. Okay guys, stop. Just stop. I need you all to erase this nonsense from your brains right now.
We all need a healthy range of many types of fat in our diethyde. And the last diet fad I want to touch on vegetable oil. Basically the paleo diet, which is the grandfather to the carnivore diet. By the way, the Paleo diet convinced the world that the only healthy diet is the one that cavemen ate. And that because there was no such thing as oil in the caveman diet that it is inherently bad for us.
So what is the paleo diet? It’s high protein, moderate fat, low to moderate, and carbohydrates, high in fiber and low in sodium and refined sugars. Oh, and also, of course, zero processed foods. The long and short of it is our society has programmed us to feed our foods for decades. But in reality, any food can be harmful or even poisonous. If we eat too much of it. The dose makes the poisonous. It’s the first law of toxicology.
Thank you Soki Carpenter for teaching me these words. If you like this video, please give me a thumbs up and subscribe. And if you’re looking for vegan nutrition coaching, or if you’re looking for someone to help you make the transition to a balanced vegan lifestyle, go to veganproteins.com personal training. Again, my name is Alice from vegan proteins and I’ll talk to you soon.
