If you're trying to eat healthy, for goodness's sake, don't data-load your eating

Manger bien et droit!

On her superlative podcast last week Bari Weiss had Dr. Casey Means on to talk about the really miserable state of American eating habits and, by extension, American health. One thing they discuss at length is Michelle Obama’s erstwhile “Let’s Move!” campaign. Remember that? Shortly after Barack Obama was sworn in, his wife set about to try and counteract childhood obesity by promoting healthier lunches and more exercise and whatnot. Her efforts failed comprehensively—everyone is fatter than they’ve ever been, including kids—but honestly, as Weiss and Means point out, the more surprising thing is that the campaign ever existed in the first place. It is incredible to think there was ever a time when you could openly suggest, “Kids are too fat and they need to get thinner.” These days you’re not allowed to say that anymore, you pretty much have to accept or even celebrate children being morbidly obese and developing debilitating chronic diseases from very young ages, or else you’re guilty of “fat shaming” or whatever. Time does go by.

Anyway, I’d urge you to listen to the whole thing, because Dr. Means is a brutal and incisive critic of the awful, nasty horrors of modern American food culture. We eat crap, all the time, constantly—just buckets and buckets of crap every day, ultra-low-quality meats and vegetables and high-processed food that isn’t really food at all—and as a result we’re getting fatter and sicker every single day. Yes, we should aggressively criticize this way of life and the system that begets it.

But I was disappointed to hear of Means’s proposals to, as she put it, “reverse the metabolic disease epidemic” that Americans have brought about due to their extraordinarily poor eating habits. She herself has co-founded a company called “Levels” that says it offers “real-time feedback on how your diet and lifestyle choices impact your metabolic health.” As Means tells Weiss:

“Levels shows you as an individual exactly how food effects your health in real-time. This allows you to have, for the first time, a closed-loop bio-feedback on what you’re putting in your mouth and how it’s affecting your body—closing that feedback loop from what used to be a really open system where you eat a bunch of stuff and then not know what your cholesterol or your glucose was for like a year, to an immediate system. And we do this by giving people a sensor that’s called a continuous glucose monitor they wear on their arm, and it’s running a lab test about every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, sending that information to your smartphone, and showing you exactly how your body’s responding in terms of blood sugar, to everything you’re doing, what you’re eating…”

In her defense, Means concedes that this isn’t the sole marker by which people should structure their health management and that she does not particularly want to do this for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, there it is: Data-driven dietary health. If you create a company based off that premise I think it’s safe to say you’re pretty invested in the concept.

But it won’t work. That’s my pretty confident wager. You’re not going to improve the eating habits of even a modest fraction of the population by data-loading people’s meals. That’s going to fail, perhaps as comprehensively as Michelle Obama’s elementary school Zumba campaign.

Why? Because making a data project out of your meals sucks. It just sucks. Everybody knows it. From the beginning it will make eating meals an unpleasant, awkward process; it’s hard to imagine something more inimical to pleasurable eating than attaching a “closed-loop bio-feedback” number to every bite of food. It turns your meals into an RPG game or a spreadsheet or something. It just sounds terrible.

You might argue that the point of the program isn’t to encourage pleasurable eating but rather healthful eating. Yet the fatal flaw in these sorts of approaches is that they often assume the two factors are mutually exclusive, or at the very least that your food can’t readily be healthful unless you’re painfully conscious about making it so. But the evidence pretty well demonstrates that this isn’t really the case. We can see, for instance, that in the global ranking of countries based on their obesity rates, a great many nations with authentically rich, gratifying, pleasurable culinary traditions—France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Germany, Greece, others—rank much lower, sometimes significantly lower, than the U.S. in their obesity levels along with the myriad other chronic diseases that are a regular part of American life. Whatever the differences between the food cultures of these various disparate countries, you can be pretty sure that “continuous glucose monitors” are not common to any of them.

So what’s the secret to beating obesity, if it’s not 24-hour personalized lab tests? Simply this, which a great many other affluent, developed countries have already figured out: (1) Eat high-quality, unprocessed food—good vegetables, good meat, good fruit, good grains—and (b) don’t eat a ton of it. That’s it! This is not rocket science; it’s barely even food science. Like most meaningful, practical solutions to serious problems, this one is non-technical, unsexy, completely easy in practice but somewhat difficult to sell.

But it has to be easier to pitch than “strap this diode to your arm and chart-track your body’s bio-signs six times every hour, indefinitely.” Which would you rather do: Just eat a normal amount of high-quality food, or, you know…that?

Means plainly has a better understanding of the rotten American food system than Michelle Obama did or does. But I would suggest that “Let’s Move!” and “Levels” are essentially two disparate solutions to the U.S. health crisis making the same fatal mistake of overthinking it. Just eat good food and make your portions of that good food smaller: Do that and you will be a healthy person. Life can be simple; solutions can be easy and non-technical and non-difficult. We don’t have to try too hard at this.