Diets | One Stomach Flu Away From My Goal Weight | 2
Legacy
Original Legacy Productions
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
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
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Stay connected with Legacy:
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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Afwa, I haven't had a chance to try your Vogue diet from 1977 from last time, but I'm still thinking about this. This is not an endorsement, by the way, before anyone sues me. Eggs and Shabbly and coffee. And then at the end of the day, a steak on top of the eggs and the Shabbly of the coffee, which I think. But the steak, even the steak isn't tasty because it's with lemon juice and salt. |
| 0:21.5 | Like there's no olive oil. |
| 0:23.6 | It's not even fried. |
| 0:25.4 | It's going to be not the one. |
| 0:27.6 | It's not going to be the way we stay healthy. |
| 0:29.4 | But there were, we ended last time. |
| 0:31.1 | You were talking about how ideas about empire plug into diets. |
| 0:36.5 | I'm going to be interested to hear about that and about |
| 0:38.7 | the ways in which globalization is something I've thought about, worked on quite a bit in the past, |
| 0:44.5 | about frontier economies, about how you push the frontiers further and further to get hold of |
| 0:49.1 | new resources to bring back to the centre. And often those are food related. Sometimes there are things |
| 0:53.5 | like ivory and metals and things like that, but often it's to do with foods. I'm going to be interested |
| 0:58.2 | to talk about how new things being recovered or being claimed. But have you interested in |
| 1:05.1 | new ideas, new foods? Are you quite ambitious, therefore? Will you eat things you haven't eaten |
| 1:09.6 | before? Do you go and try new things? |
| 1:11.7 | Or do you prefer things you already know? This is the biggest source of conflict in my household, |
| 1:16.8 | because I love to experiment. I'm so curious. I always want to do something new. I hate eating |
| 1:22.9 | the same thing twice in a row, even twice in a week. Like my idea of a good food life is one where you're |
| 1:28.9 | constantly in search of some new thing. You haven't tried. My family would be quite happy to |
| 1:34.8 | eat the same thing every single day as long as it's the thing that they know and like. They're |
| 1:39.2 | like tried and tested. That's all we need. So I just find that so boring, you know, I don't want to eat the same |
| 1:46.5 | thing every day. So yes, I am a big fan of experimenting in food and I live with people who are not. |
... |
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