Your Diet Sucks

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Somewhere in the last few years, cortisol became the answer to everything. Tired? Cortisol. Puffy? Cortisol. Gained weight, lost sleep, can't stop scrolling? Cortisol. A hormone you would die without got recast as the thing wrecking your face, and a $4.8 billion supplement economy showed up to fix it. This episode asks how that happened, and whether any of it is new.

It isn't. Zoë traces the lineage: Hans Sely...

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"No days off" is a slogan, a t-shirt, and a diagnostic criterion, depending on who's reading it.

This week: exercise addiction. Whether it's real, whether "addiction" is even the right word, and why the whole concept was popularized by a psychiatrist who also thought clinical depression was a choice you could simply make differently.

We trace it from a 1970 sleep study that fell apart beca...

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There is no plastic spoon in your brain (unless you put one there). There is no credit card in your diet. We regret to inform you that this does not mean everything is fine.

Both of those numbers came from real studies, and both got mangled somewhere between the paper and your feed. Kylee walks through what actually survives scrutiny, where the fertility conversation outruns its evidence,...

BPC-157. TB-500. MOTs-C. If those sound like droids from a Star Wars spinoff, congratulations on your healthy relationship with the internet. For everyone else: peptides are the injectable wellness trend that jumped from bodybuilding forums to med spas to your feed, promoted for healing, muscle, fat loss, and living forever. But what does the science say, and what are peptides, actually?

Some of them became legitimate blockbuster dr...

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Keto promised something no other diet could: cut the carbs, flip a metabolic switch, and burn fat without counting a single calorie. A magic loophole in human physiology. So does it actually work?

This week we trace keto from a deaf Victorian undertaker who accidentally invented the first diet book, to a 1920s epilepsy clinic that turned fasting into medicine, to the bankrupt Atkins empire, to the shirtless guy...

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This is the most requested episode in two years, and the one strangers corner Zoë about the second they find out she hosts a nutrition podcast. Seed oils. Did they secretly poison the country, or did the internet just find a new villain with a great backstory?

We go claim by claim through the anti-seed-oil case. The omega-6 inflammation pathway. The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, which turns out to matter more for some p...

You were taught that hunger is a trick question. Before you're allowed to eat, you have to clear the suspects: you're bored, you're thirsty, you're emotional, you're just not disciplined enough. Somewhere at the bottom of that list, if it makes the list at all, sits the radical possibility that you might simply need food.

This episode is about where that interrogation came from and why most of it is nonsense. Hunger isn't one thing....

In 1879, a chemist named Constantin Fahlberg sat down to dinner without washing his hands after a day spent handling coal tar. His bread tasted strangely sweet. So he went back to the lab and started tasting everything on his bench until he found the source. That was saccharin, the first artificial sweetener, discovered because a man would not wash his hands before dinner. Nearly 150 years later, we are still arguing about whether ...

Should you count calories? A century ago, a Los Angeles doctor named Lulu Hunt Peters sold two million copies of a book that taught American women to count calories as a patriotic duty during WWI. She invented the 100-calorie snack pack. She set the 1,200-calorie floor that still haunts diet apps in 2026. The framework she popularized is still running your relationship with food.

This week, Zoë and Kylee dig into the question e...

This week, Zoë mailed a chunk of her hair to a stranger in Florida. For science. For journalism. For your benefit, really. The $60 hair sample test came back flagging her as "highly reactive" to 210 foods, including emu, ostrich egg, hot dog, and ground horse meat. Reader, she has not eaten ground horse meat in over a decade.

The food sensitivity industry is a multi-billion-dollar grift built on real symptoms and fake frameworks. We...

In 1997, a 14-year-old named Nathan Zahner convinced 43 out of 50 classmates to sign a petition banning a dangerous chemical called dihydrogen monoxide. The chemical was water. This episode is everything that happened next, scaled up to a $50 billion industry and, eventually, federal food policy.

Zoë and Kylee trace the naturalistic fallacy: the assumption that natural equals good and artificial equals bad. It's the implicit logic b...

Find full episode transcripts, show notes, and research at yourdietsuckspodcast.com. Grab merch at teepublic.com/user/your-diet-sucks. And if you want bonus episodes, early access, and our eternal gratitude, support us on Patreon at patreon.com/YourDietSucks.

Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance on earth — and somehow it's still got two extremely loud camps screaming past each other. On one side: the wel...

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Diet culture is really good at one thing: finding the places people go to belong, and nesting inside them. This episode follows that instinct back to one of its oldest sources, the American evangelical church. Zoë and Kylee are joined by Leslie Schilling, RDN, CSSD, sports dietitian, eating disorder special...

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Whole30 has sold millions of books, built a coaching empire, and partnered with Chipotle and Walmart — all without a single peer-reviewed clinical trial. In this episode, Zoë traces the program from its origin on a CrossFit blog in 2009 to its multi-million dollar licensing ecosystem, digs into the loaded vocabulary (sugar dragons, tiger blood, sex with your p...

Intermittent fasting is the most Googled diet-related term on the planet, except everyone who does it will tell you it's not a diet. It's a protocol. An eating window. A lifestyle. An optimization hack. Definitely, absolutely, under no circumstances a diet. You just don't eat for sixteen hours. Totally different.

In this episode, we trace IF from ancient religious fasting traditions through its secularization and commodification, af...

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The wellness industry wants you to believe your body is on fire. Tired? Inflamed. Bloated? Inflamed. Sad? Believe it or not, inflamed. But what does inflammation actually mean, and should athletes be worried about it?

In this episode, we trace how inflammation went from a specific biological process to a wellness Rorschach test that can sell you anything from turmeric latte...

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Can you build muscle, train hard, and actually perform on a vegetarian diet? Do plant-based eaters need more protein? Is iron deficiency a real concern or just wellness industry noise? This week, Zoë and Kylee dig into what the research actually says about vegetarian diets for athletes and active peopl...

We brought the husbands on for this one. Sean Van Horn and TJ David join us to talk about eating disorders in men, disordered eating in male athletes, and how the wellness industry preys on masculine insecurity with different packaging but the same playbook.

First up: a game called Influencer or Dictator, where the guys guess whether quotes about discipline and suffering came from David Goggins or Joseph Stalin. It was harder than i...

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Every January, gyms overflow and 91% of resolutions get abandoned before spring. In this episode, we trace the surprisingly ancient history of New Year's resolutions—from Babylonian harvest promises to Roman offerings to Janus—and explore why our brains are so ...