Clique-ville
Creating an identity and lifestyle around a single-focus diet is bad for your health — and society
American dieters have a bad case of one-thing obsession. Every diet that getting traction in my lifetime has boiled weight loss down to one thing.
The thing changes, but the oneness doesn’t. You know: fat, carbs, sugar, meat, gluten. There are two problems with one-thing obsession — one obvious, and the other, not so much. First, the obvious one: It’s not effective. Decades of research show people lose weight at first, then they stop. And then they regain.
The proof of these diets’ failure is in obesity rates that don’t quit. If any one thing was the answer for everyone trying to be thinner, we would’ve reversed the trend already.
Yet the media — particularly social media — is filled with people shouting that their diet is the One True Diet, the answer to our prayers. Which brings me to the less obvious problem, which I will let Dr. Seuss explain.
“Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches Had bellies with stars.
The Plain-Belly Sneetches
Had none upon thars.”
The starred Sneetches decide they’re better and want nothing to do with the Plain-Bellies. Enter entrepreneur Sylvester McMonkey McBean, with a machine to put stars on bellies. The Plain-Bellies pay to get stars upon thars, to the horror of the Star-Bellies, who then pay McBean to get their stars taken off. And so on.
If you’re on Twitter, perhaps you’ve noticed people who identify themselves by their diet. It’s there in their profile. Sometimes, it’s even in their name — a little C for carnivore or V for vegan in a circle.
I am not unsympathetic to this. I’ve lost weight, and kept it off, and
Given the choice, babies prefer a food they’ve seen a native speaker eat over food eaten by a nonnative speaker. We associate food with “us” and “them” from a very early age. And it’s downhill from there. As Yale psychology associate professor Yarrow Dunham said in an email, “groups become more acrimonious when they are defined in opposition to one another.”
it’s a compelling experience. The tendency to believe the thing that worked for you will work for others is strong, and I understand wanting to shout it from the rooftops. I’ve done it!
But making your diet part of your identity has unfortunate repercussions: It’s bad for discourse, and it’s bad for you. Unfortunately, we’re hard-wired to do it.
Katherine Kinzler, a University of Chicago psychology professor and author of “How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do — And What It Says About You” studies in-group and outgroup thinking in children and infants.
“Human infants have to learn about what to eat,” she told me, “and a lot of what we learn is through social modeling. You’re not trying all the foods, you’re mimicking other people.”
Which raises the question: Which other people?
Given the choice, Kinzler told me, babies prefer a food they’ve seen a native speaker eat over food eaten by a nonnative speaker.
We associate food with “us” and “them” from a very early age. And it’s downhill from there. As Yale psychology associate professor Yarrow Dunham said in an email, “groups become more acrimonious when they are defined in opposition to one another.”
Spend time on diet-related social media and you’ll see what he means. It’s dispiriting when people call each other vile names because they disagree about meat’s impact on LDL cholesterol. Or some other one thing.
Of course, the fight isn’t about the one thing. It’s about us. And them.
“Once you have a category and imbue that category with meaning,” Kinzler explained, you end up with a kind of mission creep. So vegans aren’t just people who don’t eat animal products. They’re the kind of (fill in the-blank) person who makes that choice. And that makes them easier to insult!
We all read “Lord of the Flies” in school, so we know about our tendency to divide ourselves into arbitrary groups and then build a hill to die on. Social media makes it easier.
Once you define yourself, it’s harder to see evidence clearly.
We’re seeing that dynamic play out with COVID-19. You wouldn’t think your political affiliation affects your ideas about virus transmission, but a recent poll found 32% of people with Republican stars on their bellies, but only 3% of those with Democratic stars, believe masks do not limit spread of the virus.
Once a particular belief gets associated with something you consider essential about yourself — your values, your affiliations, your identity — confirmation bias kicks in, and your chance of figuring out if your one thing is wrong plummets.
Diet preferences aren’t as arbitrary as Sneetch stars, of course. They’re also personal. It doesn’t matter if a diet doesn’t outperform others in trials if it works for you. And if you’ve found one that works, I’m delighted for you! Weight loss is hard. I get that you want to spread the word.
But here’s what I’m asking: civility. The public conversation is better without name-calling, sneering and smug superiority. We might have a fighting chance, together, of figuring out what’s actually true, if we’re good to one another. But the biggest reason I try to be civil in public is that it leaves the door open for me to change my mind. Meanness digs you in.
The Sneetches learned the hard way. They paid Sylvester McMonkey McBean to take stars off and then put them back on until the money ran out. By then, they had lost track of who was who, and they all just went back to being Sneetches. And they started being nice to one another.
Next month: the green eggs and ham diet.