National Post (National Edition)
Is Dorsey diet just an eating disorder?
Imagine someone you love — your mom, sister, daughter or best friend — started eating only one meal of less than 1,000 calories a day and regularly powering through two-day stretches without eating anything at all.
What would you do? Panic? Drag her to the doctor? Park her in a therapist’s chair? Yes, likely all of the above, because you don’t need to be an expert to recognize what’s clearly crash dieting or, potentially, even disordered eating.
That is, unless you’re a big-shot dude in the tech world, in which case you get to call it “biohacking.”
Biohacking is an amorphous term, but in general it refers to a movement of people who experiment on themselves — often collecting reams of data — in order to fine-tune all aspects of their health, from exercise to sleep to, especially, diet.
Biohackers’ diets are similar to the next-generation nutrition fads that are popular in the broader culture, especially the ultra-low-carb ketosis diet and intermittent fasting, where people consume nothing but calorie-free fluids, sometimes for days on end. These diets have a few fundamental things in common: They spread by word of mouth on social media faster than they can be debunked. They require you to significantly restrict what you eat, when you eat or both. And in addition to not being supported by science, for vulnerable people, they can be dangerous.
Jack Dorsey, the 42-year-old CEO of Twitter and Square, is biohacking’s poster boy. He claims to eat only one meal each workday, consisting of fish or meat, vegetables and occasionally a small amount of berries, chocolate or wine. And he’s been experimenting with fasting all weekend long, drinking only water from Friday to Sunday. His drink of choice is the lemon, water and Himalayan salt concoction he calls saltjuice.
Other biohackers include lifestyle guru Tim Ferris, a keto believer who advocates cutting out carbohydrates that “are or can be white” and eating the same simple meals day after day; Geoff Woo, CEO of “human optimization” company HVMN, who kicks off his week by not eating for 36 hours; and keto fanboy David Asprey, the CEO of the supplements company Bulletproof, who calls biohacking “the art and science of becoming superhuman” and sells various blends of edible oils marketed as “brain-boosting, fat-burning, high-energy fuel.” Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote, regularly fasts for two to eight days straight, consuming only water and black tea and coffee. The list goes on.
These diets, many of which have been around for decades, are being promoted with the newfangled Silicon Valley lexicon of “enhancing,” “disrupting,” “optimizing” and “upgrading.” They sound “sciencey,” but they aren’t really science, says Tim Caulfield, a Canada Research Chair in health law and expert in online pseudoscience. Biohackers are, for the most part, not actual nutrition experts, are not subjecting their data to peer review, and are working with a sample size of one and a highly biased experimenter.
Biohackers and extreme fasters say they have science on their side, but the studies they cite are generally not powerful enough to form the basis of nutritional advice, Caulfield explained. Instead, they wildly extrapolate from animal studies or human studies that are correlational or observational, not experimental or well-controlled to rule out confounding factors.
True believers turn this around by calling their diets “cutting edge,” a sneaky way to say they’re based on preliminary research rather than settled science.
Other “ridiculous words — energize, vitalize, detox, cleanse” are “red flags for something that’s less than legit,” Caulfield said.
They’re based on the idea that there’s one correct diet and that it’s highly restrictive, when the evidence shows the exact opposite is true.
“Humans can thrive on a huge variety of different diets,” Caulfield said.
Soy and fish but little dairy or fruit are eaten in Japan, grains and vegetables alongside generous glugs of olive oil and wine are served in the Mediterranean, while fish, fruit and coconut are staples in Polynesia. All different, all healthy.
But fad diets that require massive amounts of time and energy to calibrate what you eat, or incredible discipline to go without eating for days continue to be popular. And they have led to speculation online that “biohacking” is simply culturally acceptable window-dressing that conceals disordered eating.
It’s not a crazy thought. A popular online keto “cheat sheet” lists 108 foods to avoid, including deli meats, starchy vegetables and most fruits. In practice, the eating habits of someone on this diet start to superficially resemble those of someone with ARFID, or avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder.
Dorsey says fasting makes him feel amazing — clear-headed and mentally focused. Meanwhile, the brain’s reward system, which makes most of us feel happy when we eat yummy, high-calorie foods, is severely out of whack in people with eating disorders such as anorexia. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, restricting food gives these patients a “false sense of being in control.”
Are these two things not one and the same? Is biohacking just disordered eating?
Not exactly, cautions psychiatrist Dr. Blake Woodside, who coruns the eating disorder program at Toronto General Hospital.
“People think that dieting causes anorexia, but eating disorders are heavily determined by genetic risk factors,” he said.
Crash dieting is not “on a continuum” with eating disorders.
That said, restrictive diets can trigger eating disorders in people with a genetic liability for them, Woodside said. But many different genes are involved and the science is not advanced enough to pinpoint exactly who is at risk.
That means there’s a danger to promoting diets that require a lot of time limiting and monitoring what you eat.
Such diets can tip some people into a full-blown eating disorder, including men, in whom these disorders get overlooked.
Eating disorders may present a little differently in men. They might be more likely to talk about fitness, biohacking or reaching an ascetic ideal rather than dieting, fear of being fat or their body image, which are culturally coded as female, Woodside said.
Tanis Fenton, a Calgary-based registered dietitian with a PHD in epidemiology who has researched both keto and fasting extensively, says the diets are “not sustainable, either psychologically or socially,” adding that the benefits have been overblown and the risks minimized.
Aside from the obvious — not meeting minimal nutrition needs — fasting leads to headaches and poor concentration that is not resolved by drinking water, Fenton said. Lab studies that link fasting to all manner of health benefits are not convincing on their own, she added.
“There’s a lack of randomized trials in humans. And how did the mice feel while fasting? Nobody asked them!”
Keto, on the other hand, is associated with constipation, kidney stones in as many as 1 in 10 dieters, and reduced capacity to exercise, except in elite athletes, Fenton said.
And on top of all that, it’s only the tiniest bit better for weight loss (think an additional one kilogram off each year) compared with traditional, less extreme diets. And it’s incredibly hard to stick to, meaning most people will regain the weight.
“That’s the problem with every one of these unsustainable fad diets. It’s that people feel like a failure. They’re promoted as easy and effective. Even if you’re not vulnerable (to eating disorders), failure doesn’t feel good at all. And it’s not just a feeling; it’s a self-labelling. I am a failure.”
THEY’RE PROMOTED AS EASY AND EFFECTIVE.