Listen to this review on Earth Eats.
Maybe you’ve fallen victim to a health fad or two. As both a young impressionable person and a fat person, I definitely can say I have. What we’ve come to understand as “healthy eating” is often misguided health information and an insane amount of anti-fat rhetoric all wrapped up in a pretty bow. In a world where “skinny” seems to be the goal, the things we eat quickly become sources of judgment from others and take on meanings that something like a sandwich probably shouldn’t have. And more importantly, the lack of informed discourse on these health and wellness issues can get in the way of learning how to properly take care of ourselves. The podcast Maintenance Phase addresses this by, in their own words, “Debunking the junk science behind health fads, wellness scams, and nonsensical nutrition advice.”
Maintenance Phase was launched in October 2020 by its co-hosts, Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon. Hobbes is a journalist employed by HuffPost, and Gordon is an activist and author. Both write about the misinformation many of us receive about our health.
The show brings a format that we don’t often see in podcasts. In each episode, the hosts alternate roles: there is the teacher and the student so-to-speak. One person will thoroughly research the chosen topic and present those facts in-depth, while the other listens and offers insight, questions, and commentary as they go along.
The information is easy to follow, and they cite sources that allow the audience to follow along with the hosts as they unpack their chosen topic.
The hosts often start off the show with an unbiased position; they simply present the facts to their co-host and the audience. However, as it continues and the topic narrows, their personal views on the subject matter start to become very clear.
The conversational nature of their show makes it feel inclusive to listeners. Many podcasts can make you feel like you are observing through a window, but Maintenance Phase practically opens the door and pulls up a seat for you at their table.
Additionally, they’re humorous in their delivery and relatable in their responses to the research they present. They offer vulnerable, personal perspectives when needed and find ways to lift the mood if it gets too heavy. Essentially, the show spends its time debunking the myths of diet culture through storytelling. For instance, In one episode, they might expose the misinformation spread by a falsified weight loss program and in another, they could pick apart the supposed health solutions offered by a celebrity-owned brand. They appear to enjoy the process of their celebrity takedowns, but at the same time, they simply expose the lies and share the truth.
A recent favorite of mine was their episode titled “Is Being Fat Bad For You?” This episode dives into the years-long battle of data between epidemiologists Katherine Flegal and Walter Willett. Flegal conducted and published a study in 2005 that found being overweight was associated with a lower mortality rate compared to being a normal weight, and being obese was associated with a higher mortality rate. Willett disputed Flegal’s findings, prompting an academic battle that lasted almost a decade. Here’s a short clip sharing a little bit of what Aubrey and Mike had to say about these events.
Mike: Basically, the number one finding of her paper is that like people in the BMI overweight category are slightly less likely to die. So, a little bit of fat has some protective effect on mortality rates. The other big finding is that skinny people are more likely to die. In the fattest category, like the obese category, she logs 26,000 deaths. In the skinniest category, she logs 33,000 deaths. One of the quotes that goes around about this, this is how it ends up in the mainstream media coverage of it is, given current government guidelines it appears that the average person is better off being 50 or even 75 pounds overweight than five pounds underweight.
Aubrey: This is a thing that also gets sort of thorny. It's worth noting very thin people are more likely to die than very fat people and there is no cause for you as a lay person to then start talking to very fat people or very thin people about how they're going to fucking die.
Mike: I like it when you stand up for thin people.
Aubrey: [laughs] Won't someone think of the thin? [laughs]
Mike: I like it when you say thin rights. There're all kinds of actually cohort studies that show the same pattern of this weird spike for thin people, a little bit reduced mortality for people that are like a little bit overweight, and then a higher curve for people that are fat. They call it the U-shaped curve, even though it's like more like a Nike swoosh, but it's an extremely consistent finding in this kind of research. We now find ourselves in 2005. There's this 2004 paper that finds that obesity is really bad for you, overweight people are going to die, fat people are totally going to die, it's just really, really, really obvious deep line, and we've got 365,000 deaths caused by obesity every year. And we've also got Katherine Flegal’s 2005 paper that says it like, “It's really not that many people. Once you subtract the lives that it saves from the lives that it takes, it's like 25,000 deaths a year due to obesity.” And there's this weird thing with like skinny people being less healthy. It seems actually, it would be like good, to be like 5% to 10% overweight. There're now these two papers, both of which are from the CDC saying completely different things.
From a political standpoint, the show is clearly left-leaning. However, it’s much more than politics. They want to inform and help individuals grow and shape their opinions with the whole truth of what is beneficial or harmful to their health beyond what society thinks a healthy body should look like.
As I mentioned earlier, I myself am a fat person. I have been my whole life, and coming across a podcast like Maintenance Phase was a game changer for me. I’ve never had any particular media that devoted itself fully to cracking down on the misinformation and harm that can come from the health and wellness industry. For reference, I come from a generation where “Supersize Me” was an educational film used in my health class, and now, as many of us know, that film’s message turned out to be saturated in a whole lot of bad science. Hearing the type of discourse that Maintenance Phase supplies provoked an immediate onslaught of reflection for me. It made me think back to my early adolescence when any diet seemed good as long as the numbers on the scale would just go down. No one encouraged me to look into how the diets would serve my body or if they were even good for me. Maintenance Phase makes you stop and unpack the trends you decide to try and look further into the science and common sense behind them. They are the media a younger me wished she had.
It’s important to remember that humans are diverse; we come in all shapes and sizes, and what works for one person's body, may not work for another. We often let health and wellness science reduce our everyday lives down to trying our hardest to follow designated and often arbitrary “food rules.” And those rules themselves can end up being harmful to us. However, food is meant to nourish us, not punish us. Maintenance Phase does a phenomenal job of reminding us of this.
Daniella Richardson is an associate producer with Earth Eats through the Cox Legacy Scholars Program at Indiana University. She’s also an Ernie Pyle Scholar at the IU Media School.
