Feeding You Lies: How to Unravel the Food Industry’s Playbook and Reclaim Your Health

I have a long history with low-calorie diet food. After I got out of college, I ate a lot of Lean Cuisine frozen meals. I wanted quick, easy, and calorie-controlled dinners that I could eat after a long day working as a management consultant. All my girlfriends were eating them too; we’d discuss our favorite new flavors and their calorie counts. I’d pop those suckers right into the microwave, complete with their plastic wrapping, and have what I thought was a healthy, diet-friendly, ready-to-eat meal. I was convinced that my mother’s traditional foods from her native country India would make me fat, and that my only hope for losing weight lay in a frozen meal with clearly marked calories and fat grams.

I also tried Smart One’s frozen diet meals. They were recommended to me by a coworker who was on Weight Watchers, and they sounded like a good idea. The questionable flavor, appearance, and texture took a backseat to the meal’s convenience—a couple of minutes in the microwave—and its low calorie count. With those 250 calories and 7 grams of fat, it was a personal victory in each bite.

How wrong I was. This was a period in my life when I was easily fooled by deceptive marketing and packaging. I knew nothing about real food or chemically processed ingredients. I was slowly getting sick with asthma, allergies, endometriosis, and eczema but had no idea these problems were connected to my diet. These low-calorie “diet” foods I was eating were not helping me shed the pounds either.

Sadly, way too many people still believe the diet food lies. They still think that diet foods are healthy and good for their waistlines. That fake sugar is a miracle ingredient. That the best way to lose weight is to guzzle 0-calorie soda and nosh on 100-calorie snack bars. You’ve heard the mantra “calories in vs. calories out”; that’s what we’ve all been led to believe is true, right?

I confess that I fell for the calorie lie more times than I care to count. But not anymore. In the 15 years that followed, I became intimately familiar with the bleak reality of low-calorie diets—and that they are not all they’re cracked up to be.

Many people believe that it really doesn’t matter where your calories come from; as long as you don’t eat too many of them you’re on the right track. However, staying thin and healthy is not this easy, or everyone would be. When planning a meal, the thought How many calories does this contain? rarely crosses my mind anymore. I don’t count calories on a regular basis and you shouldn’t have to either.

Despite what many of us have been led to believe, not all calories are equal. Your body is not going to react to 100 calories of cotton candy the same way it would to 100 calories of plain oatmeal. To further illustrate, you can eat one Twinkie loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, bleached flour, artificial colors, artificial flavors, and polysorbate 60, and it will be 135 calories. On the other hand, you can choose to eat a large pear full of fiber, phytonutrients, copper, and vitamins C and K, and still ingest about 135 calories. Which would you choose? For me, it’s an easy choice, as I’ve learned which food will help maintain my weight and make me feel healthy and vibrant because it’s giving my body the nutrients it needs to thrive.

You see, your body treats calories differently depending on the source. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a medical doctor and epidemiologist, has studied how different types of foods are digested by the body and their association with weight gain. He says that although calories release the same amount of energy in a laboratory, the human body is much more complex. According to Dr. Mozaffarian in The New York Times, “… the evidence is very clear that not all calories are created equal as far as weight gain and obesity. If you’re focusing on calories, you can easily be misguided.”¹

It is true that, in a vacuum, all calories are the same. A thousand calories of Coke and a thousand calories of broccoli burned in a laboratory will release the same amount of energy. But all bets are off when you eat the Coke or the broccoli. These foods have to be processed by your metabolism (not a closed system). Coke and broccoli trigger very different biochemical responses in the body—different hormones, neurotransmitters and immune messengers. The Coke will spike blood sugar and insulin and disrupt neurotransmitters, leading to increased hunger and fat storage, while the thousand calories of broccoli will balance blood sugar and make you feel full, cut your appetite and increase fat burning. Same calories—profoundly different effects on your body.²

A recent study demonstrated that counting calories isn’t the key to losing weight, and rather, the key is to eat more whole foods. Stanford researchers found that subjects who cut out processed foods and sugar, without counting calories, were able to lose significant weight. The people in the study simply focused on eating healthy whole foods and lots of vegetables, and lost a lot of weight as a result. The study’s lead author, Dr. Christopher Gardner, went on to say, “We made sure to tell everybody, regardless of which diet they were on, to go to the farmer’s market, and don’t buy processed convenience food crap. Also, we advised them to diet in a way that didn’t make them feel hungry or deprived—otherwise it’s hard to maintain the diet in the long run.”³ This just goes to show that if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s not about portion sizes, carbs, and fat grams. So if you’re still obsessing about those things, I hope this helps you.

In 1965, the chemist James Schlatter made an accidental discovery that would transform the American diet. At the time, he was working on a drug to treat stomach ulcers. However, in the middle of one of his experiments, he licked his finger to help turn a page in his lab notebook. To his astonishment, his finger tasted astonishingly sweet.⁴

What Schlatter had discovered was aspartame, an artificial sweetener 200 times sweeter than sugar. While Americans were already familiar with saccharin—that chemical had been packaged as “Sweet’N Low” since 1957—aspartame delivered the same sweetness without the metallic aftertaste.

At first, the invention of fake sweeteners seemed like a miracle of modern food science. People could experience sweetness without the calories. Thanks to a trick of chemistry, the molecule activated our taste receptors but remained indigestible in the gut.

These diet sweeteners have since become a $1.5 billion industry: the typical coffee shop is now filled with an assortment of pastel sweetener packets of Splenda (sucralose) and NutraSweet (aspartame), while supermarkets stock hundreds of products reliant on the chemicals, from “sugar-free” candies to low-sugar yogurts. (The artificial sweetener business is also extremely profitable, since the additives are typically distilled from cheap ingredients, such as coal tar and methanol. Yum.)

On the one hand, artificial sweeteners without any calories might seem like an important tool to combat obesity. At last, we can have our cake and eat it too. And we won’t gain weight!

But here’s the bad news: the latest science reveals that fake sweeteners do not help us lose weight or consume fewer desserts. In fact, these sugar substitutes might increase our craving for the very substances they are supposed to replace. Put another way: the diet foods are making us fatter. Well, isn’t that ironic?

The first troubling signs came from studies that examined the long-term link between artificial sweetener consumption and obesity. In a paper published in 2008, epidemiologists at the University of Texas Health Science Center followed more than 5,000 residents of San Antonio for nine years. They discovered a surprising relationship between fake sweeteners and weight gain, even after controlling for every conceivable variable. In their paper, the scientists raise the provocative possibility that artificial sweetener consumption might be “fueling—rather than fighting—our escalating obesity epidemic.”⁵

Another interesting study was published in the journal Circulation. Researchers tracked the health condition of 9,500 men and women, ages 45 to 64, for a period of nine years. They found that the typical high-fat, sugary diet promoted metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance—both preludes to diabetes. No surprise there. But there was one shocker: the study discovered that drinking daily diet sodas full of artificial sweeteners was associated with 34 percent increased risk for metabolic syndrome, at least compared to those who didn’t drink it.⁶

Of course, such data can’t speak to the possible causes behind the correlation. It’s entirely plausible that people who are most prone to weight gain are also the most likely to guzzle diet sodas.

However, a series of new studies—many of which look at the effects of fake sugar on the brain—raise troubling new questions about the long-term implications of consuming saccharine, aspartame, and other diet sweeteners. The first studies were led by Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson at the Ingestive Behavior Research Center at Purdue University. In a study published in 2008, the scientists fed rats yogurt sweetened either with sugar or a zero-calorie sugar substitute. When not eating the yogurt, the animals were given a standard lab pellet diet. Surprisingly, those rats fed fake sweetener consumed more calories and gained more weight.⁷

Other studies have found that animals fed sugar substitutes had slower metabolisms, displaying lower body temperatures and exercising less after ingesting sweet-tasting foods.⁸ This effect exists, the researchers say, because artificial sweeteners lead to a “dysregulation” in the brain, since the presence of intense sweetness no longer signals the arrival of energy (i.e., calories). Over time, this leads the animals to lose touch with the most basic needs of the body. Instead of eating in response to hunger, they start eating all of the time. Additional research suggests that people who drink the most diet soda actually show reduced brain responses to the taste of sugar.⁹ The end result is that they have to consume even more sugar—and scarf down even more calories—to experience the same amount of pleasure and satisfaction as someone who doesn’t drink lots of diet soda.

These studies capture an emerging scientific consensus: fake sugars are definitely not the miracle products we were promised. Coca-Cola wants you to believe you will lose weight if you drink their diet sodas, but the truth is far more complicated. That artificial sweetener is messing with your head, making it harder for you to regulate your appetite. This is why a lot of people never reach their weight loss goals: they are constantly being pushed around by these chemical artificial sweeteners that trick the brain and body.

The negative effects of artificial sweeteners are only one example of how so-called diet foods turn out to be a big food lie. In large part, this is because the very chemicals they use to trick the tongue—to make their fake food seem real, or at least edible—are often associated with weight gain.

Take Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches. They might seem like a responsible option—each sandwich only contains 150 calories!—but even a cursory glance at their ingredients list should make us think twice about eating them. To compensate for taking fat out of the ice cream, they bulk up the texture with a ton of additives, including corn syrup, cellulose gel, and cellulose gum. You’ve probably heard the bad news about corn syrup. (Hint: it’s a refined form of sugar that’s really bad for you.) But you might not realize that cellulose—an additive often obtained from wood by-products—has also been linked to serious digestive issues and weight gain.

For food manufacturers, cellulose is much cheaper to obtain from wood than from real food ingredients. It can be manipulated in a laboratory to form different structures (liquid, powder, and so forth) depending upon the food product it is used in.

Humans cannot digest cellulose.¹⁰ This substance just passes through your body, while lining food industry pockets. Nice!

The gelling action of cellulose when combined with water creates an emulsion, suspending ingredients, making processed food products creamier and thicker than they would be otherwise. This is why it’s a common ingredient in low-fat diet products.

While cellulose is often used to give low-fat products a creamy mouthfeel, recent research published in Nature, one of the most prestigious science journals in the world, highlights its potential dangers.¹¹ In the study, scientists at Georgia State University fed mice two of the most popular emulsifier additives used in food: polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose (aka cellulose gum, a form of cellulose). They were careful to give the animals doses equivalent to those regularly found in processed foods, such as ice cream sandwiches.

What did they find? That these common ingredients altered the makeup of the microbiome (gut bacteria) in the mice, and not in positive ways. Within days, the bacteria living in the gut of the animals showed changes consistent with increased inflammation, an underlying condition associated with many gastrointestinal disorders. And all it took was a few weeks of consuming an additive that’s in most of your favorite diet foods.

What’s more, these additives also induced metabolic syndrome in the poor mice: those animals exposed to the common emulsifiers had more body fat, ate roughly 20 percent more food, and had significantly higher blood sugar levels. The scientists conclude that “dietary emulsifiers may have contributed to the post-mid 20th century increased incidence of IBD [irritable bowel syndrome], metabolic syndrome, and perhaps other chronic inflammatory diseases.”

So put down that Skinny Cow. Don’t chug another Diet Coke. Avoid products that promise you sweetness without any calories. They’re not helping you lose weight. And they might be making you ill.

Food Babe Truth Detector: The 100-Calorie Snack Fib

No doubt they’re convenient, tempting, and filled with promises of self-control, but let’s consider the small print on the label: salt, corn syrup, sucralose, cellulose, natural flavors, hydrogenated fat … this translates to highly processed and all for 100 calories.

As you dust the salty remains off your fingers, do you feel like you just ate something healthy?

I compared these snack packs ounce for ounce to the same product packaged in super-size versions, only to discover that many food companies were charging me more than twice as much for essentially the same item. This marketing ploy quickly convinced me that there are better choices that are more nutritious for the calories and a smarter use of my food dollars.

The same goes for 100-calorie products that are packaged to seem as healthy as possible. Healthy Choice Country Vegetable Soup, for instance, seems like an extremely responsible meal. The package even features brightly colored veggies! Well, if you look closely at the ingredients list, you’ll soon discover that Healthy Choice soup is not such a healthy choice. While it does contain vegetables, it also contains soybean oil, added sugar, a ton of salt, and hidden MSG in the form of yeast extract. (And it also doesn’t taste very good.)

Instead of overpaying for this processed soup, I like to make a big batch of Mexican lentil tortilla soup and pack it into individual portions. It’s not only much better for you—it actually tastes delicious.

But maybe you don’t have time to make soup. Here are some suggestions for healthy snacks that you can make yourself in virtually no time and take with you anywhere.

Celery with organic almond butter
Plain organic yogurt with blueberries
A banana, large apple, or large pear
An orange and a handful of walnuts
A handful of frozen grapes

While most Americans are oblivious to it, there is a powerful industry group controlling the narrative when it comes to calories and diet foods. Many of the dollars spent to promote the belief that low-calorie processed diet foods are good for you come from the Calorie Control Council, mentioned earlier. This is a trade group of junk food and chemical companies who have banded together to fool the public about their products. Although they no longer publicize their industry members online, tax filings show the Calorie Control Council is associated with major makers of low-calorie sweeteners, such as Ajinomoto and Merisant, as well as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.¹² To spread their message, they offer accredited educational courses to health professionals, fund research, sponsor blogs, and run several propaganda websites—including Aspartame.org and CaloriesCount.com.¹³

They engage in some undercover work to feed their lies about calories to the public. According to the Pulitzer Prize–winning organization the Center for Public Integrity, the Calorie Control Council has “a long history and a penchant for stealthy public relations tactics. The organization, which is run by an account executive with a global management and public relations firm, represents the low- and reduced-calorie food and beverage industry. But it functions more like an industry front group than a trade association.”¹⁴

Needless to say, business is booming. The Weight Watchers Smart Ones brand alone enjoys millions in sales every year. Diet Coke outsells every other soda except for Coke itself. We spend millions more on untested diet supplements, many of which are full of caffeine and artificial sugars.

Overall, Americans are fat. The industry is banking on the assumption that we want a fast fix—and they are more than ready to sell it to us, even if it doesn’t work. Just look at the stats. In 1960, about 13 percent of Americans were obese. By 2010, that percentage had nearly tripled to 37.9 percent. (Another third of us are overweight.) Nearly 8 percent of Americans are severely obese, an increase of more than 500 percent since 1960.¹⁵

These dire statistics help explain why, at any given time, roughly 75 million of us are on a diet. For Big Food, the diet industry is a big business opportunity, a chance to sell us more highly processed chemicals and GMO ingredients. In short, the same food industry that is making us sick has capitalized on our growing girth to make and market products that promise to alleviate the very symptoms it has created.

But they don’t work. We keep getting fatter and sicker; diabetes rates are surging. Diet foods haven’t solved anything.

Recently, a friend showed me U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of its “Best Diets” in America.¹⁶ Taking a quick glance at the list, I knew that something wasn’t right. Many of the best-ranking diets rely almost solely on unhealthy, processed foods, full of additives—just like those “diet” meals I used to eat all the time in my 20s. What’s more, they dissed diets that advocated eating fresh, whole foods. They’ve gotta be kidding, right?

When I began investigating some of these “lose weight fast” diets, I became even more outraged with what I found. This upset me because I know that most people are really trying to eat right, and these programs are feeding into desires to get the weight off as quickly as possible without considering the consequences. I came to see that these commercial diets put zero focus on the quality of the food and no care into whether the food is unprocessed, natural, organic or free of chemical additives. Although they’re convenient, they’re often just concoctions of health-injuring chemicals.

While slashing your calories using an out-of-the-box diet program full of low-calorie shakes, bars, and packaged meals might help you lose weight in the short term, it can be detrimental to your long-term goals. This is because the ingredients that the diet industry is packaging up for you contain risky additives that you would never cook with at home and promote an addiction to processed foods that can carry on for years.

These low-calorie products consist of dozens of chemical additives blended together with the “correct” ratios of protein, carbs, and fats, along with some synthetic vitamins and fiber mixed in to make them look healthy on the “Nutrition Facts” label. Unfortunately, the calorie count and Nutrition Facts label don’t tell the real story, and you’ll get a whole lot more than you bargained for when you choose to eat these foods.

This diet boasts that you can lose up to 16 pounds in four weeks, but relies almost 100 percent on processed food. This means you’re sure to be eating insane amounts of preservatives and added sugar, both linked to major health risks. Jenny Craig uses some of the worst additives in their food, like carrageenan (associated with cancer and intestinal inflammation),¹⁷ cellulose (a driver of inflammation and weight gain),¹⁸ and the artificial sweetener sucralose (tied to leukemia and weight gain).¹⁹

Just look at their Philly Cheesesteak, which would definitely not pass muster in Philadelphia. The very long ingredients list reads like a greatest hits of foods to avoid. There are corn syrup solids, monoglycerides, DATEM, l-cysteine, azodicarbonamide, sodium phosphate, methylcellulose, yeast extract, dried soybean oil, caramel color, smoke flavoring, and many other chemicals that should definitely not be in your sandwich.

It blows my mind that this is considered an acceptable diet by anyone. On SlimFast, you knock down chemical-filled processed drinks for two of your meals, along with three of their processed snacks every day—and then you get just one homemade meal per day. You’re basically gulping down tons of artificially thickened sugary drinks loaded with fake sweeteners, artificial flavors, and emulsifiers that can cause inflammation and disrupt your healthy gut bacteria. Gross.

On this diet, you eat five of its “100-calorie” products every single day, along with one home-cooked meal. The majority of the time you’re eating food full of heavily processed proteins, excitotoxins, artificial thickeners and sweeteners, and synthetic vitamins and amino acids (instead of naturally occurring ones). This is nowhere near real food, which is why the Medifast Chicken Flavored Noodle Soup contains no actual chicken. (The first ingredient is “textured soy protein concentrate.”) Not only is this diet severely low in calories at 800 to 1,000 calories per day on average, but it’s not sustainable. Considering women are supposed to eat at the very minimum 1,200 calories per day to prevent malnutrition, the lack of calories alone on this diet is risky. Of course you’ll likely lose weight when you restrict your calories to this extreme level, but what happens when you stop this diet? You guessed it. The weight pops right back up.

On this diet, you eat boxed-up and processed Nutrisystem food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sounds convenient! The only catch is that the meals are all filled with dozens of risky additives, corn syrup, and hidden MSG. When you eat sweetened fake food spiked with MSG, you’re falling into a trap that spurs an addiction to unhealthy processed foods. The simple sounding Roasted Turkey Medallions, for instance, come loaded with mono- and diglycerides, BHA, BHT, autolyzed yeast extract, turkey flavor, carrageenan, sodium phosphate, corn syrup, natural caramelized onion flavor, and caramel color.

Are You Filling Up on Fattening Chemicals?

There’s a new foe that’s thwarting our efforts to lose weight: chemicals known as “obesogens,” which are found in foods like pesticide-sprayed fruits and everyday items like plastic food and beverage containers.²⁰ So it may not just be the triple-dip banana split that’s plumping out your tummy and hips. It may also be the plastic cup it comes in.

Obesogens are endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that have been linked to obesity and higher body mass index, as well as to reproductive issues, diabetes, and cancer. Exposure to obesogens can cause your body to make more or bigger fat cells, slow your metabolism, increase your appetite, and decrease your satiety. How? EDCs essentially wreak havoc on the hormones that regulate your weight.²¹

Here are the most common obesogens and how to protect against them:

High-Fructose Corn Syrup. This is a highly sweet, chemically concocted version of corn syrup found in most processed foods, including bread, sodas, crackers, and cookies. HFCS influences the hormone leptin, the body’s appetite switch, increasing appetite and fat production.²²

Hormone-Treated Dairy. Many dairy farmers inject their animals with hormones to increase milk production. One study that analyzed research from 10 different universities revealed that these hormones may be associated with the obesity epidemic.

Bisphenol A (BPA) is present in many plastics and the lining of food and beverage cans and on cash-register receipt paper.

Tributyltin (TBT) was formerly used to preserve the bottoms of boats, which allowed TBT to leach into the water and our seafood. It’s also in plastics like vinyl shower curtains. Research determined that prenatal exposure to obesogens like TBT can make you more likely to be overweight.²³

Phthalates are plasticizers found in everything from food packaging and vinyl flooring (often in combination with TBT) to detergents, cosmetics (they help keep nail polish from cracking and hair spray flexible), air fresheners, and household cleaning products. They correlate with insulin resistance, which encourages fat storage in the body.²⁴

Synthetic Pesticides, which are found in larger amounts on conventionally grown (nonorganic) produce, grains, and even in the meat of animals who feed on GMOs and conventionally grown grains.

Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) creates the nonstick surfaces on some pans and in some microwave popcorn bags, and is found in stain-resistant products. It has been shown to seep into our foods, with potentially dangerous results. A 2010 study concluded that a higher concentration of PFOA in the blood is associated with thyroid disease.²⁵

What You Can Do: Limit pesticide exposure by eating organic vegetables and grass-fed meats. The conventional produce most likely to be coated in pesticides? Strawberries, spinach, nectarines, apples, grapes, peaches, cherries, pears, tomatoes, celery, potatoes, and sweet bell peppers (according to EWG’s Dirty Dozen list). Choose organic grass-fed dairy. Use glass for food storage, and never heat or microwave plastic. And drink out of glass or stainless steel. Cut down on canned foods, particularly acidic ones like tomatoes, which are more apt to absorb the chemicals from the lining. Although it’s challenging to avoid these things 100 percent, you’ll get a health benefit by limiting exposure—and perhaps a smaller waistline.

As a former dedicated calorie counter, I now know how risky my old way of thinking was. When your primary concern becomes calories when looking at a food, it’s far too easy to throw everything else out the window. If you’re not careful, pretty soon you’ll find yourself saying, “Who cares if this snack bar contains sucralose, BHT, carrageenan, and caramel color? It’s only 100 calories!” That is a slippery slope that can lead to a whole host of problems much bigger than losing those last 10 pounds. So, instead of focusing on how many calories a product contains, focus on what it’s really made of. The ingredients you are putting into your body are all that really matter.

The best solution is getting back into your kitchen and cooking real food at home, using the least processed ingredients possible. I realize this sounds old-fashioned and time consuming. But the research is clear: it’s one of the best things you can do for the health of you and your family. When you cook at home, you are in complete control of the ingredients and know exactly what you’re putting in your body. You’ll probably notice that you don’t eat as much either, as homemade food cooked from scratch is far more satisfying when it’s not spiked with additives like MSG and “natural flavors” that coax you into overeating.

Consider your gut bacteria. We’ve already learned that many of the emulsifiers used in popular diet foods, such as Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches, can strip healthy bacteria from your intestinal lining. This leads to inflammation, other serious gastrointestinal illnesses, and ultimately weight gain.

However, there are reams of evidence that you can nourish your healthy gut bacteria by eating real whole foods, especially plant-based foods that are low in sugar. (Think leafy greens, vegetables, and fermented foods.) Having healthy gut bacteria is one of the keys to a healthy weight. Similar to how antibiotics (which destroy gut bacteria) are used to fatten up farm animals, it only makes sense that an unhealthy gut could fatten us up too.²⁶

During my investigation into diet foods, I found an eye-opening study published in 2014 in Annual Reviews of Public Health that reviewed the health implications of every major diet. After looking at a vast range of data and hundreds of studies, the scientists concluded with the following advice: “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with healthy promotion and disease prevention.”²⁷

This seems so obvious. Yet, in the 21st century it’s also a radical idea. We’ve been trained to associate health and losing weight with low-calorie shakes, fortified frozen foods, and dangerous supplements. When we need to lose weight, we overspend on artificial diet foods that are full of fake sugars that condition us to crave the very calories we’re trying to avoid. It’s a crazy downward spiral.

But the good news is that we know how to escape the spiral. All we have to do is eat real food. Long before I read this study, I’d been forced by my own health issues to investigate the lies of the Big Food industry. And that’s when I discovered that the secret to staying in shape, feeling vital, and being healthy is eating a natural, whole food, and predominantly plant-based diet.

The way to create lasting change in your body is to eat food as close to nature as possible. Since I began eating this way, I have never had to diet again, and I’ve kept my weight off despite the challenging environment we live in with an abundance of tricky marketing, food lies, and addictive food additives.

We can’t control what they are doing to our food, but we can control what we put in our mouth.