What's Up with Fad Diets? ft. Liam "The Plant Slant"
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So I'm on this new diet and it's pretty legit. Oh no way, what's it all about? I eat a hard-boiled egg first thing in the morning, then I drink two quarts of coffee, then I crumble up half a wheat thin, and if I get hungry for the rest of the day, I just lick envelopes. That sounds effed up. This is a hot dog is a sandwich. Ketchup is a smoothie. Yeah, I put ice in my cereal, so what? That makes no sense. A hot dog is a sandwich. A hot dog is a sandwich. What?

Welcome to our podcast, A Hot Dog is a Sandwich, the show we break down the world's biggest food debates. I'm your host, Josh Ayer. And I'm your host, Nicole Inaidi. And today we have a very special guest joining us for the pod. You've probably seen him reviewing other people's What I Eat in a Days on social media. His objective is to make healthy living as easy as humanly possible. Liam Fisher-Layton from The Plant Slant. Welcome to the show. Hey.

I am so happy to be here. I'm mythical everything. I have been a mythical fan for years. Mythical, the conglomerate? What are we? What is mythical? It kind of makes you sound evil. Production, entertainment, business.

business company I guess I like uh dark empire no that's kind of nice it ropes people in that's I mean talking about roping people in where if we're talking fat diets that's all about roping people in uh my favorite fat diet is enveloping I've been doing it for the last three months it's really curbs your cravings once you start getting that feeling on your tongue have you seen that Seinfeld episode that the looking do you know what I'm talking about Liam I

I love Seinfeld and I don't know what you're talking about. I'm very upset about that. It's George's fiance. She's literally licking the envelopes for her wedding. And she dies because of it, right? Exactly. Not to spoil the Seinfeld for you. Oh my God. I've never seen a single Seinfeld episode. How did she die? From licking the toxic glue off of the envelopes. So don't do it too much. We do not officially condone enveloping. But no, Liam, the reason we love your content, the reason I love it specifically is that

I think health and nutrition is a lot easier than people think it is. And there's a lot of people trying to cloud your judgment on that because likely they want to sell you something. So we're going to go through the worst and weirdest fad diets and rank them in terms of efficacy today. You think we can do that?

I love this idea. I love fad diets. I mean, no one should do them. They're awful. But like studying them is very fun. The basics are boring. Eat your fruits and vegetables. Come on. Give me something I can work with here. Super boring. What are your personal favorites right off the bat? Okay. So I kind of want to – when would you think fad diets start? Let me ask you. When do you think like do you have a specific fad diet or a year that you're like, I think this is when fad diets started? When did women start corseting? I don't know.

Because that's probably when it started. I don't know. I know they use whale bones. That's about all I remember from that. I feel like it's whenever women started core setting. I think fad diets kind of were roped in there, like you said. I think that they were more conscious about how small their waist was.

So they would probably eat a little bit differently, especially people of like higher upper crust people. They probably had more, not restrictions, I would say, but their diets would be geared towards whatever their girlfriends were eating or their moms were eating or whatever, like the newest en vogue thing was. Yeah. I would go back to Fletcherism in the 1800s. I know there was like the Grammites with Sylvester Graham, but like that was a lot more religiously motivated in certain ways, whereas Fletcherism was

which is where you would, I believe, chew your food something like 85 times per bite while you're eating. To me, that's like what I would call the OG fat diet. But what do you have? So you brought up gram. I would personally say gram kind of

introduced people into the fad diet with his. So basically Graham was a clergyman and he believed that animal products led to increased lust, which is obviously terrible. We wanna get rid of that, right? He also didn't believe in spices. He believed in eating a very bland diet. And he warned about the dangers of processed flour.

So he decided to make his own flour. He called graham flour. And out of that flour, he decided to make a cracker. Have any of you ever heard of this cracker that graham might have made? Sounds very foreign. It increases my lust, but yeah, I have heard of it. Graham crackers increase your lust? Yeah, it's so hot to try. That is because they taste delicious now. They do.

If Graham knew what we did to his cracker, he would be rolling over in his grave. That is the worst thing you could do is make it out of enriched flour and put a bunch of cinnamon and sugar in it. He would have hated that. So I would say kind of that's where it kind of started. But I would go on.

to say, have y'all talked about one John Harvey Kellogg yet on this podcast? We sure have. Josh has talked about Kellogg on multiple occasions, and he loves the guy. Because you can trace it to Sylvester Graham, like a lot of these movements, yeah. But it was the same thing, right? Similarly with the vegetarian diet and no spices, except he put a lot more yogurt in people's butts.

Yes, the yogurt enemas were very common. He also believed that grapes were very detoxifying. So he would put people initially on an all-grape diet. Do you want to guess how many pounds of grapes people would eat in a day, typically? Fifteen. Fifteen.

15 pounds is way too many. Well, he seems like an extreme guy. Yeah, sure. 3 pounds of grapes is already a lot. I'm going to say 15 pounds, Liam. You are very close. It is 10 to 14 pounds. Josh! Get the hell out of here. See? Yeah. And Price is Right rules, I would have gone over those, so you would have.

Now, he also believed in sort of the Fletcherism, the chew your food. It was at least 40 times, at least 40 times. I mean, you could go beyond. If you were like, you know, you really wanted to do it, you'd go above that. But at least 40 times you would chew your food. So, you know, you're eating 14 pounds of grapes. You're chewing them 40 times. And you're getting, typically it was about half a pint of yogurt. You just get yogurt into your body any way you can. Mmm.

I wouldn't know what is too little or too much yogurt for an enema. That's one of those where I wouldn't. I would say none is maybe the most medically recommended amount. I'm going to say none.

Yeah. I mean, he believes in your standard enema. I think he didn't think that most enemas went far enough. So he did, I believe, 15 quart per minute. Oh, Jesus Christ. Per minute? Per minute. 15 quarts per minute. So he didn't do that with yogurt. We have to give him something, right? Listen, this guy lived to, I think, 91 or 92. He was into his 90s. Maybe he's... I believe he also died a virgin.

Are we familiar with this, Laura? I believe he had like 21 children. I think they were all adopted. And that was normal back then. You just did that. You just did what? Adopted kids? 21 children? No, you lived like these insane lifestyles that were foretold to you by God. And like the funny thing about all these fad diets is I think there is always some element of...

of truth, right? And like if you look back into even down to his weird thing about like spices causing lascivious thoughts, like that kind of comes down to like the early forms of the temperance movement, right? Where it was like never get your, no drugs, no alcohol, no caffeine, all this stuff. And he was like, just one slight step further, no spices either. That just kind of makes your life too bright. We need to, you know, be puritanical for God here. Fletcherism, it's probably better to chew your food more.

Then, yeah, I agree. They do have actually a point with that. Chewing your food actually can, especially slowing down. I mean, I pretty much inhale food when I eat it. Right. We all, you know, you're watching, you know, your YouTube and you're just downing as much as you can as quickly as possible because your one-year-old is yelling at you. You have to do what you have to do. But typically it would be better if we kind of slow down. It usually takes around like 15 minutes for the signals to,

from your stomach to go, hey, you've actually eaten. So all of these have some truth. But I would say, kind of going away from the diet, in the mid-1950s, I loved, I absolutely loved the reducing slash slenderizing salons. Have you seen videos of these? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. They're the best. I love the idea. So basically you would go in and it would just squish you. It would just squish you and smush in various places, wherever you wanted the fat to go away from. And I absolutely love the idea that they're just sitting there like, you know what? This fat on my love handles, I don't really like it. What if we just push it around a lot? Maybe it'll go away. And this is just like when you don't have like

basic knowledge around these things, that's where you can get these fad diets where they're like, oh, I can kind of see a connection. How many ab videos have you still seen today? Basically where people are doing ab exercises to burn the fat from your core. It's still around. So there's still this like little bit that, you know, people connect to like, eh, that could be true. I like the idea of it. So I'm going with it. I know a girl whose mom used to own one of those like mummy wrap things.

things did you ever see those no I knew a girl whose mom so it's pretty much like a slimming thing where they would take a bunch of like gauze and then stronger and tighter gauze and then you would run on a treadmill for like 10 minutes

and you would do this like a few times a month and this would shed pounds and make you be, it was basically lymphatic drainage before lymphatic drainage became really popular. You would literally wrap yourself in these and they would like wrap your neck to make sure your like double chin would kind of go away too. Only a few times a month seems like a steal. That's great.

You don't have to do this every day. No. I can do anything a few times a month. It reminds me of those slimming clinics where you could just put your arm fat on like a machine. It would just jiggle you. It would just jiggle you. Yeah.

Yeah, similar to that. That's what these like slenderizing salons were. And I just, I love that so much. It's so great. I will. And then after like kind of around the same time, that's when the grapefruit diet came around. I'm sure you've like, we've all kind of heard the grapefruit diet, right? Basically, you would have a grapefruit before or with every meal. And you know, it's not,

that crazy. Like grapefruits filled with, you know, water and fiber. You could put it as most as many things. So the apple diet, the watermelon diet, who cares? If you're just eating a piece of fruit that's pretty filling with your meals, it's not that crazy. Yeah. I wonder why they chose grapefruit out of all of the citrus. I think you couldn't choose a good tasting fruit.

You know what I mean? It's just pick one that kind of tastes a little gross to a lot of people. That way, you know, they're not going to eat a whole bunch of it. Yeah. And that like, that almost signals that you're doing something good for yourself. Uh-huh. Because if it tastes a little bitter and bad. Then you, because grapefruits still have like a fair amount of sugar in them. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Grapefruit juice has the worst ratio of like good taste to sugar in it. I love grapefruit juice. My mom tells me I can't drink it because it's bad for my blood pressure. But I'm like, shut up, mom.

But I think the hyper-masculine equivalent of that is like dry scooping protein or pre-workout. Pre-workout, yeah. Because you just think you're doing something cool by making it feel bad. It's like, no, you don't need to introduce pain into your life. 100%. I love people that creme brulee their grapefruits because they know how to live. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like that guy knows how to live his life. Have you ever seen a grapefruit spoon? They're kind of gorgeous. Oh, yes. We should just bring those back for other things. Speaking of spoons, you know what else? Around a little bit later, a little bit after this, another diet I absolutely love, you've probably heard of, the cabbage soup diet. I was just about to say that. Yeah. Such a good diet. You can eat as much as you want. And that's what people want. Tell me I can eat as much as I want. Yes. Now what can I eat? Well...

A bunch of leaves, just like a whole bunch of leaves thrown into a pot with some water. And you know, you would also get like certain vegetables and maybe some brown rice. So like you get some diversity. Gosh, the catership diet. There's a part of me that like very deeply believes in the human condition. And even going back thousands of years, like something would not have existed and stood the test of time if it didn't cause some benefit. So like you said, with the grapefruit diet, it's like,

Well, yeah, of course, you're getting some water and fiber in you before a meal. That makes a little bit of sense. But everything always ends up like going towards this extreme. For something like the slimming clinics, is there any science behind that at all? Like, is there even a nugget of truth within this insane haystack?

Absolutely not. There is nothing. You can't just put you, there's no, where is the fat going to go? What are you just going to move it around to different parts of your body? Do you think like, maybe I'll just take it a little bit from like my abs and I'll put it up here. Like it just doesn't, it doesn't work. People think fat

Yeah.

It's not fun. So no, there's absolutely no truth. But again, it's fun. It's interesting. And I really enjoy it. We're going to be looking back at this era with that same lens. Well, we currently look at this era with that same lens because I had somebody incredulously say to me, you don't believe that cold plunging targets blah, blah, blah types of fat cells. And I was like,

Why do you think that this is gospel? Where did you even read that? Yeah. But no one can guarantee. If you like cold water, fantastic. Keep doing it, man. There's probably, it makes you, it wakes you up a little bit. Yeah. But we still have the equivalent of the slimming clinics today. We still have the equivalent of the gramite diets today. You know what it is? Have you heard of those plate fit classes? It's a literal class. It's a 30-minute workout class because you're only allowed to be on it 30 minutes. It's a platform that shakes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you do squats on the shaking platform. And you have to hold it. And you can only do it for 30 minutes because if you do it more, your literal brain starts vibrating whenever you get off of it. I swear the slimming clinics are just the plate fits of now. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. That's an extension. Yeah. It just vibrates right off. Worst class I ever did. Also, can I just say how susceptible I am to all of these fad diets?

I feel like I've tried almost every single fad diet in some capacity. I think they are geared more towards women than men, to be fair. But I think the one fad diet that's kind of like, quote unquote, stood the test of time is the Mediterranean diet. Like, I've seen the Mediterranean diet find different ebbs and flows throughout the years, but it's always been like fresh seafood using oil.

So

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When it comes to like diets, like fat diet versus like, what are you looking at? What is the definition of a fat diet? Yeah. The Mediterranean diet of all the diets is certainly one of the healthier ones, the more balanced ones. Anything that's like, hey, yes, you can have fruits and vegetables and legumes and nuts and seeds. Usually that's pretty good. It's the ones that, can we get into my favorite fat diet ever? Okay. Let's say, Nicole, you come into my office and you're trying to lose some weight. Okay. And see, go.

Hi, my name is Nicole. I'm trying to lose some weight. Oh, I have the diet for you. You have probably been told that you need to eat fruits and vegetables and reduce your sugar and stuff like that, right? Yeah, so much. Oh, what if I told you you could eat cookies all day long and lose weight? I would love that. Where do I sign up?

Oh, right here. Would you like a little, you know, initial plan of what your day would look like during the weight loss period of the cookie diet? I think that would make sense before I sign on the dotted line. Sure. Well, maybe I shouldn't have told you, but I'm going to do it anyway. So for breakfast, you'd wake up and you'd have two cookies. Then you'd have morning tea and you have a cookie. A snack would be a cookie. Lunch, two cookies. Afternoon tea, a cookie. Snack, a cookie. And then dinner, can you guess what dinner is? Cookie!

No, it's 250 grams of lean meat or fish and vegetables. This was very simple. And then a snack, you'd have another cookie.

So the cookie diet was created by Dr. Siegel, and he was a bariatric physician. So I love that. Already you've got some oomph behind it. Like he's a bariatric physician. He should definitely know this sort of thing. And he created these cookies that were all like 52 1⁄2 to 60 calories. So I can't imagine they would have tasted good. They must have tasted terrible. But he had a proprietary blend of amino acids that he said would curb hunger.

So amino acids are like the building blocks of protein. And so first off, proprietary blends are the greatest thing ever. If you're trying to sell supplements, get on the proprietary blend. Basically, you can just put a long list of things and say there's this much in it, and you don't have to say what's actually in it or the amounts that are in it, I should say. Right, right, right.

And then they would give you like one kind of regular dinner. And the whole day would be about 1,000 calories, like 800 to 1,200 calories. And they would say you would lose 11 to 17 pounds in a month. And, you know, you might, honestly, eating these, I'm assuming, terrible cookies. What is the average caloric intake for an average woman? So, I mean, the 2,000 calorie thing, you know, typically they'll say 2,000 calories for women, 2,500 for men. But it just varies so much. And it's tough to get an actual, like,

what it would be for the average person. And this diet was 1,200? About 1,000, you know, 800 to 1,200 calories. Starvation station. But you get to eat cookies all day long. That's what's so great about this diet because so many diets are like, okay, you can't have sugar, you can't have this, I can't have cookies. Oh, what if we told you you could eat basically only cookies and lose weight? Talk...

When it comes to fat diets, it's all about roping people in with something. Something that really is like, oh, that sounds fascinating. Push the fat out of your body. You can eat cookies all day long. That's what gets people through the door. Nicole, what fat... Okay, so I feel like...

Every diet works. I know people that are incredibly fit and strong, don't know their blood work, whatever, but I know really fit people who are vegetarian, who are vegan, who are carnivore, who are keto, who eat one meal a day, who eat nine meals a day. It's like there's so many different ways to skin a cat here. In a sense, if you have the basics down...

you're kind of 90% of the way there. The key is being consistent with it and using it as like a lifestyle and not just rebounding and yo-yoing. What have you found in all the fad diets you've used? And Leigh-Anne, I'm curious about your opinion on this. If you've ever done any fad diets, what has been like the most sustainable for you? The most sustainable? Keto but drinking. Okay.

That's an honest answer. That's a very honest answer. Keto, except I take mushrooms like once every four hours. No, no, no. I've actually never done mushrooms before. I would just be keto for the most part and I would eat very little carbs and I would eat very little sugar. Like I totally deleted sugar.

from my entire diet, which I was consuming way too much sugar. But then I started like taking like collagen peptides, which had like, like what did it have? Like stevia in it? Like fake sugar. Yeah, yeah. And then I started drinking more like diet sodas, which I used to be so,

so against I literally was so I was like I'll just drink like half of a regular soda instead of a full diet soda but then I like totally turned to diet soda and it worked so well and I felt so good and then but also I would like I was I'm a social butterfly like

I have an active social life, so I would go and have a cocktail or three while still maintaining a really strict diet. I wouldn't eat tropical fruits. I wouldn't eat bananas, papayas, pineapples,

I wouldn't eat any of those fruits, just low glycemic, quote unquote, fruits like berries and then beans maybe like three times a week. And that was my diet. And then just a lot of meat and a lot of vegetables and a lot of water and sometimes coffee, but not all the time. What I will say for fad diets, like the reason that keto and a lot of these diets work is –

What makes things hyperpalatable? What makes things super tasty? Spices and salt and fat. So the combination of fat and sugar. When's the last time you saw someone with just a bag of sugar and a spoon go into town? It's been a little while since I've seen that, right? You don't see it very often because sugar on its own, it's fine. But I'm not going to sit there and just eat spoonfuls of it. But when you take sugar and you add butter,

and then you add flavoring, and you make cookies. Oh, forget about it. I could eat a million cookies. So it's this combination. You don't really see the simple carbs and fats generally combined in nature too often. You could maybe say like nuts have a little bit, but for the most part, it's like carbs or it's fats. So this combination is what

humans, we kind of crave and what makes it taste delicious and I want more of it. So anything keto, when you remove the sugar, remove the carbs, you're removing that. So same thing with low fat. If you go low fat and you remove that, it can also work. The problem with low fat diets is you kind of need fat, but

You know, anything that kind of removes the combination of these things will generally work pretty well. I never thought that – I have never heard it put in such clear terms. Yeah, so clear. But that makes so much sense, especially from like a cook standpoint of like it is the combination of those. I think an upsetting truth is that we have so many diet-related problems because we've simply made food too – it's too good. It tastes –

Food is too good. And too abundant. Like processed foods. Sure, but I mean even the availability of something like sugar, which is a processed food, of course, but like the availability of it. And I never understood this until I read a – God, it might have been in a Michael Pollan book, An Omnivore's Dilemma, but he talks about the introduction of high fructose corn syrup. And I don't believe it is necessarily like the worst thing for you. I think if you substituted an American Coke for a Mexican Coke, I don't think your life would be that different. However –

when the Japanese scientist that created it tried his he artificially synthesized fructose for the first time he tried it and went we have officially broken the boundaries of sweetness like he was Oppenheimer but for sugar he was

He was like, now I am become death purveyor of, you know, syrup. And so, like, we have, like, fundamentally changed things. And, like, it's not that it's doing anything bad on a chemical level. It's just that, oh, man, that's really good. I wish I had another handful, you know? Have you ever stopped at two Doritos? I haven't. I can't tell you the last time that's ever happened. It...

Food just tastes amazing. And so like a lot of my content, I see people say going in grocery stores saying this is terrible, this is awful for you. And it's like, I understand where they're coming from because we're eating a lot of it, but it's not some specific ingredient in it. It's the fact that it tastes amazing.

And it rocks. So much of it. And it's so good. I love Oreos. Two, you know, a serving size of Oreos is two, maybe three. Who's doing that? No one. So like, that's why a lot of these diets that really just like, um, that eliminate that generally do pretty well. I want to, I would kind of want to ask, ask you too.

If you were to start a fad diet, would you have a direction you would take it? Do you have something in mind that you're like, it's something, because basically we kind of need to keep it simple, right? We kind of need to keep it basic so people can understand the rules. You know, I kind of want to see, I want to give you, I came up with something. I think this, I think this would do super well. Okay, ready? Hear me out here. Go for it. The gorilla diet.

Okay, the gorilla diet. Okay, so gorillas, obviously super muscular, huge, jacked, right? Who does, so many guys would love to look like a gorilla. So if you just eat like a gorilla, you'll look like a gorilla. Does that work at all? Of course it doesn't, but that doesn't matter. That is how we rope people in, right? Now there's problems with it in that like an adult male gorilla can eat 40 to 45 pounds of vegetation per day. That's a little bit of an issue, but here's how we get around it. We lie.

We just lie about it. Okay. Okay? All right. So we can have them kind of eat whatever they want. But again, we just kind of need to get rid of this combination of fats and carbs, right? We need to lower the processed foods. So we just say you eat fruits and vegetables, which is what mostly a gorilla would eat.

And then like protein. Now, they pretty much just eat bugs for protein, but we'll let people eat whatever they want. I feel like we won't be able to rope people in with bug eating. Maybe if they're super serious. Yeah, we're not quite at the bug stage yet. Give it a few years. Let's see what happens. But right now, I say we just let them eat whatever protein they want. And I think people would be all in on the gorilla diet, especially with this whole trend now of like, can 100 humans beat up a gorilla? I don't know if you've seen this going on. You need to launch now.

Yeah, so like that's what I'm saying. We get it out there now. People are like, oh, I need to be the gorilla beating up 100 humans. So eat like gorilla, be like gorilla.

That's my pitch. That's incredible. We're just going to go in with you, man. Three weeks. Awesome. Wait, no. I have mine. Hear me out. This was inspired by my own diet, which I've actually come to really, really love my general diet and lifestyle choices. I feel like I'm at the point where I can ride this out forever and be pretty happy. That's awesome. But I call it, we need to not brand it with another company, but I call it the Tom's Model.

Oh, like the shoes. You guys remember the Tom's shoes? Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You buy the shoes and then they give the shoes to someone else? It's one for you. It's one for them. For me, I have a perfect split down the middle of just half lean protein and vegetables meals. And that includes whey protein and fruit in the morning. Okay.

And then half whatever I want. And so if you just fully cut it in half because it's simple, it's easy to explain. Yeah. You know? Because you couldn't actually just say like, what is it? I believe Marian Nestle said food nutrition or nutrition science hasn't changed since World War II. It's all just been eat food, not too much, mostly plants. But that doesn't sell you anything. So you need to have some sort of easy pitch. Sure.

And so I think it's the Tom's model. It's just half your meals are just, you know, 250 grams of lean protein and vegetables. Okay. Or fruit and like, you know, whey or yogurt. Okay. And then the rest go nuts. But...

But, but, but, but, put yourself in like an eight, put on an eight minute timer for those meals. It's like the purge, the Tom's purge. You can't call it the purge. Oh yeah. You can't call it the purge. Sorry, sorry. I met the movie where they're violently killing people. Not the eating disorder. I actually didn't even think of that, but that's great. See, this is why we have a group round table to troubleshoot these things. A think tank, if you will. And of course, why we have a woman in the room. A think tank, if you will.

Putting men together on a podcast is never a good idea. Yeah, you always need us to soften the blow. Good thing there's only like 10 men with podcasts. Only 10.

I don't think I would ever come up with a fad diet because I think they ruin people's lives if they don't do well. No, you have to sell out hard. But at the same time, it's almost like it's not people's fault because this is what they're being taught. Like, for example, my mom and the snack wells and the cottage cheeses and the 100 calorie packs, I truly don't think it was her fault. I think that is what was being fed to her literally. So she didn't know any better. And I think us as humans...

We don't know any better either. So I would never want to contribute to that. Sorry. Okay, but back to the gorilla diet. Listen, listen, I'm saying it's... Hear me out here. Gorillas are 98 plus percent same DNA as humans. Now, listen. Do people in the know understand that 1.7 percent difference or whatever? It makes a mass. It makes everything. Of course, of course. But...

But if you just put on like we're 98.3% the same as gorillas, eat like them, be like them, we would sell. We would sell hard. I mean, we would ruin a few lives probably. But like we would get very rich doing it. You know what the downfall of this is, especially for our target demo, is when they Google how big is the penis of the gorilla. Yeah. Less than one inch. Bye, guys.

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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. All right, Nicole and Liam, we've heard what you and I have to say. Now it's time to find out what other wacky ideas are rattling out there in the universe. It's time for a segment we call Opinions Are Like Casserole. Okay, Josh.

Sorry, were you doing something? I was... Scatting? I was scatting the music. For someone who hasn't watched Seinfeld, you just did the Seinfeld thing. You literally said you did the bass line from Seinfeld. I also can't keep any melodies in my head, so I don't know what things sound like. I'm like rhythm blind. What the...

All music sounds the same to me. That's why I only listen to the loudest kinds. Oh my God. So before we get into our peanut butter casseroles, we're going to rate... Actually, Liam is going to rate the worst diets in the world on a scale of 1 to 10. Liam, are you ready?

I think in general people like me, and after this, I feel like that's going to change real hard. But like, you know, YOLO, as the kids don't say that anymore, as they used to say, YOLO. We're not kids. I'm like 31, so whatever. Okay, so let's start off with...

Atkins, the Atkins diet. What do you rate that? For me, it's kind of middle of the road. It's like a five. If you really enjoy low-carb, and there's many people that do like low-carb, it's great for them. I think I would die without carbohydrates. They are in my blood, literally. Okay. Raw vegan. Raw vegan.

Two, two, this and the vegan diet I think can be very great. Raw, not cooking your food is rough. That's so rough. I'm gonna, I don't wanna give it a one, but I'll give it a two. I'll bump it up. Weight watchers or point systems. Oh, the points, really they just change calories for points. So like if you like points, then that works for you. I'll give it another five. It's fine. Cool.

carnivore or animal based? I'm going to say it's the same for me as raw vegan. It's a two. I don't want to give it a one because in very select situations, I think it can be useful, but otherwise we'll give it a two. Oh, mad.

One meal a day. Only one meal a day. Some people love that. I don't know how they function without food the rest of the day. But if you do, that's so awesome. I'll give it. No, I don't want to give it a five. I don't want to give it a five. I'll give it a four. How about a four? Let's go with that.

Intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is everything. Autophagy. Sorry, I can't help myself with that. Intermittent fasting, again, some people really love it. When you only do the eight-hour window, at least it's better than OMAD. So I'll go six, six and a half. Slim fast. Oh, so the drinks and everything? Or like a meal replacement, like a meal replacement thing.

I'll give it a five. I'll give it a five. And finally, fruititarianism. Fruititarianism. So, okay, I believe they do get some nuts, I think, and I'm really stretching. I'm trying so hard for the people that like these diets, but you're tying my hands here. What do I do?

I'll give it a three because there's two food groups as opposed to like carnivore. I guess they have to. No, I'll give it a two as well. Let's just give them all a two. Well done. Give them a round of applause. That's tough. That was tough. You honestly did a great job. I made so many people probably mad, but oh well. A balanced diet. That is what I recommend. That is what I love. That's the right thing. I'm sorry for promoting that. It's tough. Yeah.

I remember the first time somebody described intermittent fasting, they're like, I only eat from noon to eight. I was like, oh, you're just skipping breakfast. Yeah, that's okay. A lot of people do that. That's fine. Cool for you for using Latin words, though.

Intermittent. We all get busy. Okay, Josh, hit us with the first opinion about diet culture. We're going to read our fans' opinions about diet culture. And this one's special to me because I've lived it. Red Bull and cigarettes is the absolute best way to start your day. Low calorie, curbs your hunger until lunch, and keeps your mind sharp. They call this intermittent fasting in the biz. Liam?

Mind sharp. I'll give it, yeah, you'd probably be, you'd get some stimulants. It has stimulants, and I really enjoy those. Clearly, I've been yelling this entire time. So, yeah, I'll give it that. Let's maybe not, you know, lung cancer and stuff. There might be a few downsides, but I do like the stimulant part of it.

This reminds me, have you ever seen like Nick Kroll pretend to be European? He's like, for breakfast, we have a bar of chocolate and then we have cigarette and then we have another bar of chocolate and then another cigarette. For lunch, something super light like a bowl of heavy cream and a cigarette. That's literally

Literally that. This was, okay, so after me and all of my roommates, we were all Division I shot put discus hammer throwers in college. And we were all like, you know, carrying extra weight because we needed that for our sport. And we all decided to do a little weight loss competition immediately when our senior season ended. And speaking of fad diets, we were also just poor. And so we adopted the cigarette and almond diet.

where we would just smoke cigarettes and eat almonds to curb our cravings to see how much weight we could lose. And I will never forget the moment. I think I went anemic.

Because I was benching like 50% of, not even 50, it was like 40% of my max, and I got pinned underneath 135 pounds. No one was there spotting you? No, I didn't think I needed a spot. I was 135. I was losing weight so rapidly and so light-headed from the cigarettes. I don't smoke anymore. Is that all you ate? It's just almonds and that? That's it? And then like some leftovers from the catering company that we all worked at. But it was, I mean, we must have been eating...

Yes, such low calorie. I don't think we're going to be able to sell this fad diet, Josh. I'm sorry. We can try, but it's not going to... So almond mom of you. I won the weight loss competition. I do not recommend this. College is a crazy time. Okay, I have one. Anna Dion 94 says, all salads are healthy. I don't care what you put on it. Fried chicken, ranch dressing, etc. If it's on a salad, it's healthy because I'm eating it on a base of raw vegetables. So

So what I talk about a lot on my channel is just like adding, not restricting, right? I love that mentality. I love adding to things. Now, eventually it can, you know, it might not be so great. If you put like a little bit of like sesame seeds on just like your food that you normally eat, maybe that is maybe that's stretching a little bit. But I love the idea of adding things to a salad. I talk about like chicken nuggets. People like I love chicken nuggets. Throw them on a salad. That's great.

I mean, you know, I think I like the idea. I think it could be taken to the extreme and maybe not be perfect.

I agree with this, and I think eating vegetables with the side of something you're a really, really big fan of in order to consume the vegetables, so be it. I wouldn't brand it as necessarily quote-unquote healthy, but I think it's better for you instead of just doubling up on the ranch dressing and the chicken tenders. Healthy is a spectrum, right? What were you doing before compared to now? Yeah, so true. I think there's a really weird...

Original sin in the diet that we grew up eating in America where we take our meats and we heavily process and salt and fry them. We grew up on chicken nuggets and fried chicken patties in school and hot dogs and hamburgers. And then we just, like, don't season our vegetables. Right? Right. You know? And so I kind of love this, like...

Vegetables taste delicious. Put delicious things on your vegetables. Don't learn to fear them. Make it a treat. I eat thousand calorie salads all the time because they're delicious, not because I want to do something healthy, but also I am getting a ton of volume of food. I am getting a lot of micronutrients and I'm teaching myself, not that I need to be taught, to love vegetables, which I think is a problem. So yeah.

I can't tell you how many times somebody has said, does adding cheese or ranch cancel out my vegetables? And I die a little every time I hear one of those. It's always canceled. Is that cancel it out? If I eat a donut after a workout, should I have just not done my workout? And I'm like, oh, God. Oh, man.

Yeah, your body actually just like shits out raw undigested kale and cheese because they're like, nope, canceled it. All right. Another one that I feel personally, yeah, towards drinking an absurd amount of diet soda to satisfy my sweet tooth without knowing the health implications is so worth looking snatched.

I will say diet soda gets a horrible rap. Aspartame is this terrible thing. We always say in the biz, the dose makes the poison. I got that tattooed on my arm. Yes, that's Paracelsus, the father of toxicology. The dose makes the poison. In order for aspartame to...

potentially, and I say potentially be an issue. If you're 200 pounds, you'd have to drink around 19, 20 cans of Diet Coke a day. And that's even getting so like the ADIs, which is the acceptable daily intake, which is set to be very safe. Like it's very low. It's like a hundred times lower than the amount shown to cause adverse effects in animal studies or below the amount that's shown to cause adverse effects in animal studies.

And even to get to that, again, you'd have to drink like 19, 20 cans of diet soda a day. Now I'm not telling you to get all your liquids from diet soda. I think you should drink other things, but it's totally, I'm speaking to myself too. I drink coffee. And so I, you know, it's, it's totally fine. If you're someone who likes a diet soda, don't let people tell you, you can't have it. That's what I'm just trying to get at.

I'm sorry for judging you for all those years of eating and drinking diet sodas when I was having full sugar sodas. I'm sorry. No, apologize for Halo Top ice cream. Sorry for Halo. I never ate Halo Top ice cream. I said I did. You would judge me for it. You go, why don't you eat two bites of real ice cream? Well, yes, I still agree with that. Real ice cream tastes better than Halo Top tastes like butt. I

I am now a part of the diet soda train. I mean, sometimes do I still dabble in the spray? What's your favorite? Honestly, I flip-flop between a Diet Dr. Pepper

Are you not in the zeros yet? Are you only diet? Have you not gotten to zeros? I like flirt with the zeros, but like diets kind of been the only thing I've been like exposed to. Do more flirting. Flirt more. That's all I'm going to say. Get yourself an A&W zero or, you know, there's a Barks zero. A&W has a cream soda zero. It's so good. Okay, I'm going to try it. It's so good. Okay, I'm going to try it. But sometimes I need a real soda to remind myself of what reality tastes like.

Totally fine. Everything in moderation. You're right. You're right. Oh, now I have to say one? You're up, dude. Okay, hold on. Let me pick a really good one. A really good one. Give me one second. Chance X Muse says, everything we've been fed about the human diet is a scam and has been to promote the big food corporation. Oh. Exclamation point. I don't think we have enough time left for me to really get into the weeds on what that all really means.

But I would say just eat a balanced diet and don't worry about what they're trying to feed you. It's everything in moderation, balanced diet. That's what it comes down to. Don't fear every little thing. All that good stuff. What Liam said. I mean, really, yeah. But at the same time,

I don't know. I don't know. Sometimes I imagine that like corporations, yeah, do they want to make a buck? Of course, obviously. But I do believe there's like some people that work in the corporations and

that do want to benefit human life. I don't know. Maybe I'm just being a positive Polly instead of negative Nancy. I think corporations want to make money no matter what, just as long as they make our food as tasty as we possibly can, and that makes us more money, whatever that entails. Yeah, in the health and wellness sector, though, I do imagine that there's people in that sector that do want people's lives to be benefited with the foods that they're creating. But maybe, again, I'm just being a toxic positivity person.

And then I think they get really depressed when they find out how a corporation works. Actually, Marian Nestle wrote about this in her book Food Politics where she said she would have executives from these companies who got into it from things like Kraft Heinz or whatever. They would come up to her and say, I got into this business because I wanted to make healthier food for people. And then I started getting the pressure of –

we need 10% increased profit every single year and people can't keep consuming 10% more calories every year or spending 10% more money and realizing that the system overwhelms the individual, which is sort of how this all functions. But that said, you can exit the matrix. Eat a salad. Eat a salad. Put some cheese on it. You know what I mean? Eat a salad. Throw some chicken nuggets on there if that's what makes it taste better. It works. Brought to you by Purdue Chicken Farms.

I think they'll be in on it. They'll be fine with that.

Let's get that for doing money. Liam, this was such an absolute treat, man. I can't thank you enough. It's been a long time coming and I had a blast with you. Same. Thank you guys so much for having me on. Huge fan of the show, fan of everything mythical. And it's just been, it's been a dream to be on here. Thank you so much. Of course, man. Where can people find you? I think I'm the plant slant most places. So I just say, look that up, you know, YouTube, the Tiki Talks, all of those good things. And you'll find me somewhere ranting about something else, I'm sure.

He'll just come up on your algorithm. You don't even need to search anymore. He just came up on my algorithm. If you're anywhere near food, there's probably a good chance. He popped up on my algorithm with our shirt on. Oh, yeah. And that's why he's here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, man. Oh, go ahead. And on that note, thank you all so much for listening to A Hot Dog is a Sandwich. We got new audio episodes every Wednesday. The video version out on YouTube on Sunday. If you want to be featured on opinions or like casseroles, hit us up at 833-DOGPOD1. And for more Mythical Kitchen, check out our other videos. We launch new episodes every week. We'll see you all next time. Liam, drink some more coffee. And diet soda.