Dietary Dreams of Immortality
The following is a guest post from Travis A. Weisse, author of Health Freaks: America’s Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness which tells a new history of modern diets in America by exploring how the popularity of diets grew alongside patients’ frustrations with the limitations and failures of the American healthcare system in the face of chronic disease.
For my entire life, my parents have lived for the singular, relentless pursuit of optimizing their health and extending their lives–primarily through their diet. Since the late 1970s, they have experimented with many different dietary programs, but their underlying goal has always been the same: to eat as healthily as humanly possible. Their obsession with perfecting their bodily health is steeped in decades of familial trauma. We’ve had relatives who made poor choices too early in life, of course, but we’ve had others who seemingly follow everything their doctor advised and slip away all the same. In the most infuriating of these cases, medical care itself precipitated their declines: over-filled prescriptions, false diagnoses, premature releases from hospitals.
Witnessing other friends and family members suffer and die from preventable conditions only inflamed my parents’ shared passion to take their health into their own hands. My mom’s attitude toward all this can be bleak and unforgiving: “If you didn’t put any effort into your health, then you got zip. I don’t care how much money you have, you’ve got nothing. I watched lots of people ready to retire, who did all the right things except for their health, then their kids get all the retirement and they get nothing. And that’s sad.”
Despite believing firmly in science, my parents resent the health care system for many reasons: its cost, its emotional emptiness, its arrogance in the face of its own limits, and most of all its conspicuous neglect of preventive health measures. “You have to care about your own health,” my mom cautions, “because doctors can’t see you long enough to care about you.” Negative personal experiences and decades of alternative health media have also sowed in my parents a certain reluctance toward using technocratic interventions like chemotherapy, pharmaceuticals, and radiation or even dental X-rays. Fortunately, they don’t shy away from vaccines.
Still, by rigorously policing the inputs to their bodies, my parents strive to avoid the fates of so many of their friends and family. They seek nothing short of extinguishing all future risk of their developing cancer, heart failure, diabetes, and all of the modern world’s other killers. They don’t just want to live into the fabled “Blue Zone,” they want to be capable and strong as centenarians. Their chief goal in my mom’s words: “To have the longest ‘healthspan’ [they] can possibly have.” If they could stay active and independent, they would do anything to live forever.
The success of the diets featured in my book did not depend on the accuracy of the science or evidence of the tangible health benefits . . .
The figures in Health Freaks felt largely the same way as my parents do still: obsessed with death and its staving off, righteously skeptical of the medical mainstream, and convinced that a popular diet and/or lifestyle program is their key to the good life. Of course, just as with religion and politics, visions of the good life vary and diets vary accordingly. The ideal worlds that diets imagine even differ on the most basic of nutrition facts. Nevertheless, they all agree that modifying what we eat away from a heavily processed “Standard American” diet is of the utmost importance because none of them trusts orthodox medicine to keep us all healthy. Popular diets all trace the roots of chronic illness and the promise of its repair to this place.
The success of the diets featured in my book did not depend on the accuracy of the science or evidence of the tangible health benefits (let alone weight loss) accrued by their followers–which is not to say that all diets are equally or necessarily wrong! The more interesting and important elements of their success were their ability to tap into the unique pathos of neglected patient groups, to appeal to the vision and ethos of social movements, and generally to give people’s lives renewed meaning. The best of them did these things skillfully and all at once and thus formed an indelible piece of our national culture.
Learn more in Health Freaks: America’s Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness
Travis A. Weisse is visiting assistant professor at New Mexico State University.