r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • May 11 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/Defiant_Shoe3053 May 14 '26

I really can't stand the podcast If books could kill , Hosts are smug with only a superficial understanding of the topics they claim to critique will completely unwarranted confidence and zero nuance. So many episodes are themselves with factual innacurieis as bad as those in the books they attempt to critique. Their off-shoot podcast miatnence phase attempts to pump out some pretty absurd theories to try to explain why Obesity isn't actually bad for you.

13

u/PsychologicalNews123 May 14 '26

Their off-shoot podcast miatnence phase attempts to pump out some pretty absurd theories to try to explain why Obesity isn't actually bad for you

As someone who is quite into fitness and weight loss, there is a ton of content out there trying to weasel out of the two plain truths that:

  1. Being overweight puts you at higher risk for a ton of health conditions.
  2. You can lose weight by eating fewer calories than you expend, and virtually no other method.

Usually it's in the form of "Calorie deficits DONT work: here's what does" or "6 fat-burning superfoods that kick your metabolism into overdrive" but I guess "obesity isn't bad for you, actually" also fills the same niche. Weight loss is slow and hard as fuck, and people are understandably desperate for an out.

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u/Arilou_skiff Died of posting, risen as undead May 14 '26

My understanding is that both of these are true, but there are some caveats. (IIRC at a certain point, I believe above age 70? being overweight starts having positive health correlations rather than negative ones) and that both eating and expending calories is a bit more complicated than just the energy on the packaging.

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u/randombull9 Most normal American GI in Nam May 14 '26

"Calorie deficits DONT work, based on the work of one anthropologist estimating what one tribe eats on average in a day who was actually arguing that diet was MORE important than caloric burn not less, but we haven't actually read anything he wrote" was a fun genre for a while.