Beyond the Plate

The Case for Anti-Nutrionism, Part 1

Many athletes, coaches, experts, doctors, and other “health, wellness, and fitness” professionals and participants have come to worship at the altar of nutrition. While we’re obsessing over macros and treating social organisms like chemistry sets we’re starving for connection and movement.

Photo by Bao Menglong on Unsplash

Allow me to (re)introduce myself:

My name is Austin, I’m a BJJ black belt, licensed professional counselor, certified conditioning coach, certified sport nutrition coach, and reformed carnivore zealot.

Over the past year my audience here on Substack has grown quite a bit, so some of you may not know that I used to write a lot about nutrition. My interest in that field started 15+ years ago when these things called CrossFit and a Paleo Diet were hot and trendy and Bodybuilding.com forums were at their peak.

Like a lot of people, I figured that since I had to eat, I would try to do it the best or most intentionally as I could. There were some pretty sharp ups and downs from ~2010 to 2019, but I eventually got back in sync with “ancestral health” at large just before the “keto craze” kicked off and was slightly ahead of mass carnivore adoption at the start of COVID.

Regretfully, I took place in many of the antics and logical fallacies I’m critical of these days. But outcomes don’t lie. Conditions and demands sometimes change. In my case, I started eating carbohydrates again after about 2.5 years and drinking alcohol again about 1 year later. During that time I continued CrossFit style strength and conditioning as well as competed in and won BJJ tournaments as purple belt.

I fought the denial for the longest. I regurgitated all the talking points and PubMed citations over and over as if trying to convince myself more than anyone else. My recovery was flat as fuck, sleep quality tanked, and my social life was in the gutter.

I’m not making any excuses for bad behavior, but I could see the obvious writing on the wall. I didn’t exactly love the congruent images forming between myself and a Patrick Bateman type “American Psycho.”

Obviously, I wasn’t literally murdering prostitutes, but the narcissism of admiring my flawless abs while obsessing over small differences was fed by the infernal hype machine of social media.

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Reflecting on a troubling trend:

In the name of health and wellness, science and medicine, nutrition and food have not just become “medicine”, but proclaimed and crowned a panacea for all that ills us.

My observation is that somehow, especially over the last 5 years or so, food has become not just an tool for intervention, but a moral device on the level of religion and politics.

Diet tribalism has consumed many people’s identity. Even well-meaning professionals have succumbed to the idea that nutrition is the darling child and holy grail of health and fitness. This neglects almost entirely the very important, if not superseding, roles of community, movement, and spirit.

Here I want to kick around some ideas as to why this may have occurred and how we might begin to course correct, starting with ourselves — as all meaningful underground changes must.

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Context and Potential Cultural Causes:

The Moralization of Biology:

Various rituals of fasting, food cultivation, and preparation are tightly connected to all kinds of religious traditions. Even in the Christian creation narrative, ‘original sin’ comes down to an apple — or so the story goes.

There isn’t inherently anything “wrong” with food, and certainly since we all must eat, it brings a lot of people together regardless of whether we’re celebrating “our place among our ancestors in the stars” or “time without TV.”

It’s a bit of a stretch to say that nutrition has supplanted religion as a vector for judgment in the modern world. However, it is also irrefutable that various religious organizations have had their hands deeply woven into (American) dietetics for at least half a century.

Some of them have had more nefarious and transparent intentions than others — from the Kellogg family’s take on sexual promiscuity to PETA’s president wanting to be barbecued at her funeral.

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Frequency Rituals and Virtue Signaling:

On that note, for some, every meal becomes an opportunity to judge yourself and others. This is different from fitness or any other activity because you may only train once per day, but eat three times per day.

Biologically we’re driven to spend a lot of time thinking about, collecting, preparing, and of course eating, food. Throughout evolution, a lot of time and energy specifically went towards this process.

There’s also a different kind of intimacy with food that enters and becomes our body versus other types of exposure such as social / medical / military / educational “industrial complexes.” Food is something we must partake in for our survival. That creates a different relationship to “big food” and “big ag.”

If you want to play a trick on someone, read them the wrong horoscope and see if they still find a way to connect to it. The same thing happens (in reverse depending on how you phrase it) if you post identical progress pictures to both a vegan or carnivore chat group.

You get the same level of vitriolic push back telling a “carnivore” group you’re eating honey and sleeping better as you do by telling in a “vegan” group that eating salmon gave you your first '‘wet dream” since adolescence.

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Reductionist Control Proxies for Mental Health:

Nowhere in this article will I encourage people to eat junk food. Likewise, I have written many articles myself on neuro-cognitive and psychogenic effects related to nutrition.

With that said, the world is chaotic — politically, economically, and socially. You can’t control the housing market or your boss, but you can control (the perception of) every gram of macronutrients and microgram of minerals that enter your mouth.

No amount of magnesium will de-stress you enough to fix your failing marriage. Mega doses of creatine won’t help you think your way past the grief of a deceased parent. Fasting and ketosis won’t sooth the aching heart of childhood attachment wounds.

With all due respect to Chris Palmer and others in the nutritional psychiatry movement, the marketing of these ideas and interventions often flattens identity and agency. Dr. Palmer himself, in long interviews, has noted that “it’s not as simple as everyone should do a keto diet and that’ll just fix you right up.”

Effectively we’re still treating symptoms — through nutrition or pharmacology. That’s fine, though it does point to a broader problem of identifying pathology purely by symptomology.

Biological dysfunction may manifest certain neurological symptoms that we describe phenomenologically as “depression” or “anxiety” or “mania.” That’s not to say that alleviating these things isn’t a net positive, it surely is.

It is also to say that reducing human experience (psyche) to biological inputs runs roughshod over and whitewashes the ineffably complex depths of human suffering — rape, war, famine, torture, human trafficking, child abuse, grief, heartbreak, racism, infidelity, suicide… need I go on?

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Optimization Arms Race:

AI has put an exponent on the internet’s commodification of knowledge. In it’s current form of LLMs (large language models), AI is not actually “intelligent”. However, it does overwhelmingly favor (and thereby provokes) binaries and gears for the probability of certainty — which is sometimes far distinct from observed outcomes.

As such, nuance and context are increasingly rare. Our biographies are being overwritten by (curated) facts and (presumed) truths as if human beings are only synthetic replications and equations of gene expression and tissue growth.

There is a heavy skew in our perception that measuring something makes us feel more scientific, more objective, more accurate, more “correct.” Certainly, what gets our attention is more likely to change. Though, while change may require attention, it’s not inherently manifested through attention alone.

Spreadsheet fetishes have run rampant and downstream from academic “experts” to “doctors” to “coaches” to “athletes” because while there are endless combinations of reps and sets, intervals, equipment, etc. our ability to train is limited by our recovery.

We can futz and fiddle with our food multiple times per day. There are dozens of vitamins and minerals (not to mention their combinations!) to read endlessly about on online.

This quick fix feels like we’re getting ahead, but in reality we’re wasting precious emotional and cognitive CPU cycles. Have you seen pictures of all the “fit and sexy” people on Muscle Beach in the 60’s and 70’s? There was not a single FitBit or smartphone in sight.

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Shoe Salesmen and McDonald’s Olympians:

Confirmation bias is a real problem. When a “vegan” or “carnivore” or “keto” athlete performs well it’s used as exemplary of what “the diet can do for you.” In reality this is the same sales pitch as shoe commercials. Is Nike vs. Converse really going to help you ball like Jordan?

There are numerous examples throughout history of the opposite. Steph Davis has been a “hardcore vegan” for forever, and has notched some of the most insane free solo climbs and wingsuit / BASE jump flights in history. Remember Usain Bolt’s chicken nuggets? GSP and Travis Stephens notoriously ate McD’s before competitions because it kept their routines on track no matter what country they were competing in.

Why is it that some people can perform so well perhaps “in spite of” their diet? It’s been well documented, and seemingly ignored, that the effects of movement on mortality and survival are even greater than diabetes and smoking (Mandsager, 2018).

Rather than bask in our envy and dismiss these people out of our own spite, would it not be more prudent to inquire what we can learn from them? What other factors are at play?

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Mass Psychosis and The Absent Identity:

Mass formation psychosis was a term re-popularized during COVID, but for our purpose here consider that it’s underlying factors are:

• a leader of a movement

• channeling public anxiety

• towards a specific event or threat

• offering a unifying cause

• creating a sense of belonging, purpose, and reinforcing conformity.

Sound like any trendy diets you can think of?

I’ve often cited Robb Wolf’s great lecture “Longevity, Are We Trying Too Hard” where he explores the concepts of “why paleo didn’t save the world.” The short version is that accountability and self-actualization are difficult and take work.

Tribal binaries like “just don’t eat carbs/plants/meat/etc.” abdicate us of the responsibility of thinking for ourselves. For our conformity we’re granted a messiah and scapegoat all at once.

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Moving Forward:

Next week I’ll have a follow up article exploring “Ancestral Health, Actually” that discusses ignored variables in many of the above reductionist models and narratives, as well as respecting humanity and building communities and lives we want to exist in.

#onward

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