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No More, Please, I’m Banting

The origins of diet culture

George Dillard
Rooted
11 min readDec 30, 2024

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Lord Byron (public domain)

Dieting is a fixture of American culture. It’s a $76 billion industry. Forty-five million Americans try it every year, usually after gorging on food for the holidays. But it mostly doesn’t work — only 5% of the 45 million people who start a diet every year actually keep it up in the long run.

Many people see dieting as a virtuous thing to do, while others see it as part of our modern unhealthy relationship with food. I tend to agree with Michael Pollan, who has argued that binge-and-diet patterns are the result of food marketing and an unstable food culture. He wishes Americans could be more like the French:

Compared with the French, we’re much more likely to choose foods for reasons of health, and yet the French, more apt to choose on the basis of pleasure, are the healthier (and thinner) people.

How can this possibly be? [Psychologist Paul] Rozin suggests that our problem begins with thinking of the situation as paradoxical. The French experience with food is only a paradox if you assume, as Americans do, that certain kinds of foods are poisons.… A food-marketing consultant once told me that it’s not at all uncommon for Americans to pay a visit to the health club after work for the express purpose of sanctioning the enjoyment of an entire pint of ice cream before bed.

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Rooted
Rooted

Published in Rooted

Deep journeys through food and drink culture. A boostable publication

George Dillard
George Dillard

Written by George Dillard

Politics, environment, education, history. Follow/contact me: https://george-dillard.com. My history Substack: https://worldhistory.substack.com.

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