Diet and Health With Key to the Calories, Michelle Stacey is an author and contributor who writes about the history of the American diet. I’ve written about food and food in America for years, and we have a long history of food fad-ism. She says that diet are uniquely American.
I mean, even back in the 19th century there were crazy fads. There was one thing that was called Fletcherizing, and it was the idea that you had to chew every mouthful of food hundreds of times, which is grotesque when you think about it. Most of the rest of the world really thought about food as first of all sustenance, but also largely pleasure, tradition, joy, sharing, and Americans have long wanted to discount that part of the equation.
Michelle says that a big part of this is America’s fixation on the calorie, a unit of energy that somewhat nonsensically became the center of our food and diet world, but it didn’t really have to be that way. Our national way of looking at it is very numbers-oriented and very control-oriented. I was researching the history of the calorie, and I had an old diet book I’d picked up years ago, and I was flipping through it, and this little pamphlet fell out, and it was by Lulu Hunt Peters, and it was literally printed in 1929.
When it comes to diet fads in America, movements have come and gone. Right now, Ozempic is the new craze, but Michelle says it all goes back to this woman named Lulu Hunt Peters. She’s the person who got America obsessed with calorie cou.
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