Diets | One Stomach Flu Away From My Goal Weight | 2
5/12/202642 min
What did it take for human beings to start controlling what they ate — and why did "health" so quickly become a cover
story for something else? How did a Venetian nobleman's wine-heavy calorie restriction become a blueprint for the
modern diet industry? And, when tobacco companies, Hollywood, and the beauty industry all decided women's body
anxiety was a market opportunity — who, exactly, was the diet really for?
Peter and Afua trace the history of the human body as a commercial battleground: from the first diet books in 1558,
through the birth of the calorie and the explosion of Weight Watchers, to the heroin chic 90s and the disordered eating
it left behind.
0:00 The Venetian nobleman who invented calorie restriction — and still drank 14oz of wine a day
7:30 George Cheyne: 32 stone, no meat, no alcohol, and a bestselling book in 1740
14:00 Empire, refrigeration, and why cheap food created the first diet industry
21:30 The discovery of the calorie — the invention Afua still resents
25:30 Freud's nephew, cigarettes, and the moment thinness became a product to sell
31:00 Weight Watchers, zero-fat yoghurt, and the 80s: cottage cheese as cultural trauma
36:30 The 90s: heroin chic, cellulite alerts, and the era that hospitalised a generation
40:00 Keto, Atkins, and the diet that keeps reinventing itself
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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm
Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions
Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Peter Frankopan· Host0:29
[gentle music] Afua, I haven't had a chance to try your vogue diet from nineteen seventy-seven from last time. [laughs] But I'm still thinking about this- This is not an endorsement, by the way- It's- ...
Afua Hirsch· Host0:41
before anyone sues me [laughs] ...
Peter Frankopan· Host0:42
eggs and Chablis and coffee, and then at the end of the day, a steak on top of the eggs and the Chablis and the coffee, which I think- But the steak, even the steak isn't tasty because it's with lemon juice and salt. Ooh.
Afua Hirsch· Host0:53
Like, there's no olive oil. It's not even fried. It's gonna be not the one.
Peter Frankopan· Host0:59
It's not gonna be the way we stay healthy. But then when we ended last time, w- you were talking about how ideas about empire plug into diets. I'm gonna be interested to hear about that and about the ways in which globalization is something I've, I've thought about, worked on quite a bit in the past about frontier economies, about how you push the frontiers further and further to get hold of new resources to bring back to the center, and often those are food related. Sometimes they're things like ivory and metals and things like that, but often it's to do with, with food.