The fight between fat and carbs rumbled on for a millennium.
Then, suddenly, it got boring.
The world needed new villains.
Ones more specific.

Gluten. Grain. Insulin. Cortisol. Fruit. Veg. Salt. Sugar.

Once near-universally agreed health heroes. Now waiting patiently to be dunked in the brown water at the fair. Thus beginning their transformation into the industry’s latest freak shows.

Supermarket Sweep

Fitness influencers and wellness experts are gleefully ruining people’s already painful supermarket experience.

Not just roaming the ultra-processed aisles, giving you the side-eye.
(A brown eye would be less offensive)

Worse… invading the fruit and veg section, abusing defenceless baby broccoli, and screaming “sugar bomb” at innocent blueberries.

Some abusers are topless. So far, only men have been spotted.

I pray most of you never witness this first-hand: the confidence to pick up a punnet of blueberries and tell a stranger, “This is why you’re failing. This is why you can’t lose weight. This is what’s killing you.”

I ache with jealousy.
How I long to be this much of a cunt. (in public)

In my quest to defend the defenceless, I diligently do my rounds of the local supermarkets, hoping to run into one of the elusive topless female experts – long overdue for a piece of my mind.

You put what on your Weetabix!

E460. E461. E462. Oxalic acid. Methylparaben. Styrene. Butylated hydroxytoluene.

Sounds like some of the chemical nasties unleashed at Chornobyl.

All ingredients in a blueberry…

But I thought E-numbers and scary-sounding ingredients were the devil’s work?

The dose makes the poison.

Some don’t find a reason to believe fruit and veg were the problem, then form an opinion. They’d already formed it. Then went looking for something, anything, that would let them keep it. No matter the evidence against it.

Look at Amazon. Thousands of diet books. Only a smattering are any good. The rest? A mix of bad and charlatan drivel.

Keto. Carnivore. Vegan. Paleo. Omnivore. Vegetarian. Kale. Farts.

• Everyone eats
• Everyone diets
• Every charlatan oozes unfathomable confidence...

Spending their evenings in online forums that confirm what they already knew: their diet is the only diet. Occasionally feeling the need to take an online stranger down a peg — armed with the knowledge they picked up from several minutes of in-depth AI research.

The pitch’s always the same: this worked for me, so it’ll work for you.

Feed a half-baked opinion enough confirmation, and eventually it becomes an absolute.

One teeny-tiny issue. Once you’re on ‘this diet’, it’s hard to leave.
Like a cult.

I always thought steelmanning an argument you disagreed with—stating the other side’s case as well as the person who holds it—was ambitious.
Most people never get that far.

Strawmanning it instead, building the weakest version of someone’s opinion, the easiest one to knock down, isn’t just easier.
It’s enjoyable.

Then, when it’s in a heap, exhausted from being talked over and peppered with “Google facts,” douse it in petrol, pull up a cheap foldable chair, and watch it burn.

Some people just like watching the world burn...

Pick your food. Your diet. Your exercise.

They will either die a hero or live long enough to see themselves become the villain. Your confirmation bias will make sure of it.