Fad diets work — until they don't. On this Skeptical Sunday, Nick Pell reveals why a sustainable regimen always beats restriction for lasting weight loss!Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1139On This Week's Skeptical Sunday, We Discuss:Most fad diets work primarily through inadvertent caloric restriction, not some kind of metabolic magic. When you eliminate entire food groups (per keto's commandments) or shrink eating windows (as with intermittent fasting), you're essentially performing a disappearing act on hundreds of daily calories. The weight loss isn't mysterious — it's mathematical.These diets often resemble nutritional extreme sports — thrilling at first, but impossible to maintain over the long term. Like trying to hold your breath underwater, eventually you come up gasping for carbs.The Standard American Diet (ironically abbreviated S.A.D.) sets such a dismally low nutritional baseline that almost any structured eating plan looks miraculous by comparison. When researchers celebrate a diet's success, they're often comparing it to a nutritional landscape where frozen pizza qualifies as a vegetable serving.Many of these diets carry surprising biological price tags — keto's potential kidney damage, carnivore's digestive rebellion (pooping "once every three days" is less a feature than a warning sign), and nutritional blind spots that could leave your body wondering what happened to all those essential micronutrients it once enjoyed.The most effective diet isn't the most restrictive or trendy, but simply the one you'll actually maintain. Like finding your soulmate, the best nutritional approach matches your lifestyle and preferences while gently steering you toward better choices. The best diet is the one that you'll stick with. Consider finding your personal sweet spot between nutrition science and real-life application by making modest, consistent improvements rather than dramatic overnight overhauls. Your future self will thank you for the balanced approach.Connect with Jordan on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] and let him know!And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/dealsSign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
What are fad diets and why do people follow them?
I'm very firmly in the camp of people who think seed oils are bad for you.
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And thank you for the support. All right, back to Skeptical Sunday. Okay, so this is probably a totally different Skeptical Sunday in itself, but I've heard about the seed oil thing. And so seed oils are what stuff like sunflower oil, canola oil. I don't even know what that is because canola is not a thing, right? Vegetable oil, basically anything, but there's a couple exceptions.
Olive oil and what, coconut oil? So it's a whole thing, right? What's the logic? It's that in nature, you'd never get this much of that seed in one place unless you were just like... OCD collecting those particular seeds and squeezing them. It's just not a natural amount of that oil that you could get in your system. So we're not evolved to deal with it. Is that the logic there?
It's not so much that, though I think that's like not a bad place to start thinking about it. A lot of the stuff is used in industrial processing originally, which again is so what? That doesn't make it bad for you. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of not a bad place to enter that. Vice President J.D. Vance will not eat seed oils and neither will I. My girlfriend is Jewish.
She picked up a thing of vegetable oil to cook with. And I told her I was as opposed to this as she would be if I brought lard into our house. So what did she do? Did she respond well to that? She put it back and got coconut oil just to like explain to her, do not bring this home. There's a lot of stuff I think is gross, but like seed oils, like, no, do not bring seed oils into our home.
Yikes. I probably eat so much of these. So what is the reasoning behind the seed oil thing? I had my swing and a miss at the guess that it was just you're getting too much of one thing that you normally wouldn't get. But what's the other reason?
Look, that may be it, but I'm always skeptical when the basis for something is like, it's not natural. We haven't evolved to eat this. It's like, this is ridiculous. The problem with seed oils, as I understand it, is that there are endocrine disruptors, at least when they're heated, which means it messes up your hormonal system. And do I think that's like the thing that makes Americans so fat?
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