Maintenance Phase
Maintenance Phase
Halo Top Ice Cream
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WE’RE BACK! A new diet ice cream is taking your grocery store by storm. But what even is it? This week, Mike and Aubrey talk biohacking, dieting for straight dudes and the extremely ill-advised "Halo Top diet."
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Links!
- What is biohacking? The new “science” of optimizing your brain and body. (Vox)
- Halo Top Is Now the Most Popular Pint of Ice Cream in America (Food and Wine)
- What It's Like to Eat Nothing but This Magical, Healthy Ice Cream for 10 Days (GQ)
- Is Halo Top Good For You? The Truth About Low-Calorie, Low-Fat Ice Creams (HuffPost)
- Seven in 10 young people would eat whole tub of low-cal ice cream (The Grocer UK)
Thanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!
Michael: Hello, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that is low in intellectual nutrition, but only because the serving size is small.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: How is that?
Aubrey: I like it.
Michael: I'm working on that for days.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.
Aubrey: I'm Aubrey Gordon. I am a writer, author, and fat lady about town. We're so thrilled to be back.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: Back for good is the plan. So, look for us every other Tuesday in your podcast feed [crosstalk]. Yay.
Michael: Doing it.
Aubrey: Folks have also asked us about how they can support the show and we are happy to announce that we have a Patreon.
Michael: Yes, we are Millennials and upon birth, everyone is given a Patreon.
Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah, it is patreon.com/maintenancephase and it's linked on our website at maintenancephase.com.
Michael: Yes, we are finally providing a way for listeners to support us and a way for Aubrey to pay off her gambling debts.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: So, that's a [crosstalk]
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right. A bunch of folks also asked about t-shirts. I think the number one request is for Methodology Queen shirts.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: I'm so happy to say, we have Methodology Queen shirts. Those are all at TeePublic. It's all linked directly again from our website, which is maintenancephase.com. We went with TeePublic, because they have the largest size range that we could find in the print to order world. Many of their designs go up to Hanes 5x. If folks are aware of other places that have larger size ranges that are still print to order, let us know.
Michael: We know that times are tough and weird, and if supporting us isn't right for you right now or you just don't want to, all of that is totally fine. We're not going to talk about it on the show, a ton. We're not going to make it weird.
Aubrey: Yes, we're here. If you want to toss us some money, great. And if you don't, totally no sweat.
Michael: You know what that reminds me of, Aubrey? It reminds me of our thoughts on eating ice cream. If you want to eat it, eat it.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: If you don't, don’t. I'm transitioning into the core content of this episode.
Aubrey: Seamless.
Michael: So, what are we talking about today?
Aubrey: We are talking about a diet food product that is very popular right the hell now and that is Halo Top ice cream.
Aubrey: Do you know what I think is the fundamental difference between us?
Aubrey: What is that, Michael?
Michael: I am not on Instagram.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I know that Halo Top is a thing, I guess, because I hear people refer to it. But I have not been privy to any of this Halo Top hype in the wild. The diet hype train goes through Instagram now. That's what Instagram is.
Aubrey: Yes. Before we get into Halo Top, it's worth saying, "This is not a Halo Top ruiner episode." So, people know, "If you like your Halo Top, you can keep your Halo Top in the parlance of the Affordable Care Acts." [laughs]
Michael: And if you're under 26, you can stay on your parents Halo Top.
Aubrey: [laughs] Halo Top is kind of an encapsulation of contemporary diet foods and attitudes toward dieting-
Michael: Ooh, okay.
Aubrey: -and as a window into our cultures around disordered eating and particularly disordered eating in men.
Michael: Oh, I'm disappointed that you're not just going to describe ice cream to me for an hour.
Aubrey: Sorry.
Michael: I'll call along for the sociological dissection of the trends that are encapsulated by Halo Top. It's fun.
Aubrey: Have you tried Halo Top at all?
Michael: No.
Aubrey: Okay.
Michael: I had never even heard of it before you said you wanted to do an episode on it.
Aubrey: What?
Michael: Yeah, I had to google it.
Aubrey: Oh, my God. In 2017, not only the most popular ice cream in the US, but the most popular packaged food in the US.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: Uh-huh.
Michael: No way.
Aubrey: Here's how Halo Top describes itself. This is from their website. "Halo Top is a light ice cream that actually tastes like ice cream," which sounds silly. But when Halo Top first found its way into grocery store freezers boasting fewer calories, less sugar, and higher protein than traditional ice cream, it became the first of its kind and created an entirely new category in ice cream. But we'll back up a second. Why did we want to make a light ice cream that tastes like ice cream? Well, it's pretty simple. We like ice cream so much that we wanted to eat it more. We created delicious creamy light ice cream, that's 280 to 380 calories per pint. We could do just that.
Michael: Oh, we're doing SnackWell's, again.
Aubrey: This is the next bullet in my notes? It is just like, it's the 2010s answer to SnackWell's.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: I would also say, they're saying that they created something totally new and a light ice cream. Light ice cream is absolutely not anything totally new. Skinny Cow was a big deal in the 90s. It was a low-fat ice cream, low fat, low calorie.
Michael: And a staple of the Hobbes household.
Aubrey: Oh.
Michael: Because as I mentioned, my mom was a constant dieter, so all I ever ate growing up was low-fat and no-fat ice cream.
Aubrey: Totally. Same in the Gordon household.
Michael: It was not good.
[laughter]
Michael: [crosstalk] It was only as an adult that I was like, "Oh, ice cream is actually like rich, and creamy, and nice."
Aubrey: Skinny Cow was low fat, Breyers launched CarbSmart in the 2000s. CarbSmart was low carb and Halo Top is attempting to do both.
Michael: Oh, okay.
Aubrey: It really plays into this deep desire and this refrain that we hear a lot about dieting certainly in the US and certainly in the 1990s and 2000s, which is 'eat whatever you want and stay thin.'
Michael: What is the origin of this weird brand?
Aubrey: Halo Top was founded in 2012 by two attorneys, actually. Justin Woolverton and Doug Bouton or Bouton. I'm not sure how you say it. Justin Woolverton, who is the guy who came up with the recipe. He was miserable practicing law, he spent a lot of time looking for joy elsewhere. He tried standup comedy, he spent a lot of time writing spec scripts. He wrote a spec script for the league.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: There's just a lot of street dudeness.
Michael: This is becoming the first 25 minutes of the Joker.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Where is this story going, Aubrey?
Aubrey: Hang on, I'm going to pull up a picture of him and send it to you, because that's where it gets out of Joker territory is when you see this actual dude and you're like, "Oh, no, no, no."
Michael: I hope he's not hot.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Oh, he's not hot.
Aubrey: [laughs] But also what I see when I see this dude is I'm like, "Oh, you look like a tech bro kind of look."
Michael: Yeah. He looks like he's in his late 30s, but then he has the haircut of a 17-year-old.
Aubrey: Yeah. One of his number one hobby's is intermittent fasting, avoiding sugar and carbs. "He'd regularly skip all food until 4 PM and then adjust two high-protein entrees such as a chicken burrito bowl from Chipotle and a pork shoulder omelet."
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: He felt this kept his mind sharp and his beach body taut.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: This is what is I think popularly referred to as biohacking.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: For folks, who are unfamiliar with the concept of biohacking, there are some folks who refer to it as DIY biology, which is a horrifying concept to me.
Michael: I just call it a fucking diet. They don't want to call it a diet, because diets are associated with women.
Aubrey: That's exactly it. Vox has a great explainer on biohacking. They define it as, "the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance outside the realm of traditional medicine." The idea is that you are experimenting with your own body and you are taking down the data of like, "how does this thing make you feel?"
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: A huge portion of this "biohacking world" is around food restriction.
Michael: It's all fine. Technically, this stuff is fine. If you like to eat chipotle omelets, like have a chipotle omelet, it sounds totally fine. I just hate the pseudo-scientific approach of this and this weird universalizing that always comes along with this.
Aubrey: Absolutely. There's nothing necessarily wrong or bad about this, except that I really do think there are many cases, where this is cloaking an eating disorder.
Michael: Yeah. It's also wrapped up in this bullshit culture of over productivity. So much of this is about having energy, so that you can stay up late all-night coding and you can have energy to work.
Aubrey: Absolutely. Biohacking is also what got us things like Bulletproof coffee, where you stir butter into your coffee, right?
Michael: And it's eight bucks.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: Neither coffee nor butter are expensive and yet together, that's really expensive and I don't know why.
Aubrey: Vox also has this great quote about biohacking. It feels it encapsulates a bunch of stuff. "What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it's a different genre of activity, but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don't need to accept our body's shortcomings. We can engineer our way past them using a range of high and low-tech solutions."
Michael: And when somebody else talks about their experience of chronic illness or fatigue, I can write a very long email to them telling them, "Have you tried biohacking miss, because I have four pages of weird blocky text that I need you to read?"
Aubrey: Yeah, that's right. In addition to being 2010 SnackWell's, this biohacking stuff is the straight men's equivalent of what we talked about with moon juice, which is the idea that there's something amorphous that's just not right with your body. If you just eat the right things, or do them in the right order, or at the right time, you can and will feel like you're in this optimal state and a bunch of other things about your life will fall into place.
Michael: Right. It's also very Silicon Valley in that it's very apolitical. There's nothing in the biohacking rhetoric about the food that we subsidize prices, subsidies, food stamps, all of the other systems and political decisions that go into the kind of food that makes it onto our shelves, it's fundamentally creating a two-tiered food system where the "good stuff" is available to people who can afford it.
Aubrey: 100% also, Halo Top is in no way a tech company, but it has very techie vibes.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: They have 75 employees, everybody works from home, they all chat on Slack, and if they need to meet, they are members of WeWork, which like, of course, they're members of WeWork.
Michael: Oh, God, yeah. I know there had to be a WeWork cameo in this episode.
Aubrey: Justin Woolverton also talks about how he starts his day at 10:30 and only works in three-hour blasts is how it is subscribed in this piece.
Michael: Oh, no. It's high intensity interval training for working.
Aubrey: It's intermittent fasting of work.
Michael: Yeah, I also feel WeWork in such a perfect metaphor for this, because WeWork's entire business model is literally just renting out an entire building and then sub-contracting out that building in little tiny units. You rent out one cubicle at a time. And yet, WeWork sells itself as some tech company or some innovator, when it's doing this extremely traditional business thing. I feel it's the same with Halo Top, where they're selling themselves as this innovative, unprecedented thing and it's literally just like, "It's a diet food, man."
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. I think it's worth knowing that Halo Top is also-- There's a ton of business journalism around Halo Top, because it has this rags to riches story. That is this guy, Justin Woolverton came up with this recipe using a $20 ice cream maker from Amazon. He came up with it in his house, and when he came up with it and when he started the company just two years before their biggest year in 2017, as they say, it is on the verge of collapse. They have massive debts. What ended up happening is that they fundraised from family and friends which is--
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: Tell me, tell me.
Michael: I was just going to say, every single business rags to riches story goes through, "I got money from my parents and my friends."
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: Every single one. [laughs]
Aubrey: Yeah, they raised, I think it's a million dollars from family and friends. They raised an astronomical amount which makes sense. They're both coming from very high-end law firms.
Michael: Yes. Whenever you hear one of these, we started our business in our garage stories, Ctrl F for parents.
Aubrey: Yes. [laughs]
Michael: Intergenerational wealth is the key to understanding these stories.
Aubrey: Yeah. What ends up happening is that Halo Top redesigns its packaging. Halo Top looks very, like, its packaging is very like millennially. One of the most prominent features on that packaging is in the middle, there's a giant outline of an ice cream scoop that includes the calorie count for the entire pint.
Michael: Oh, right.
Aubrey: It is the largest print on the entire package. It's larger than the name, it's larger than the flavor. Underneath the lid, it also has that foil on top. That's often on those premium ice cream pints. There's has slogans that say things like, "guilt freezone,"
Michael: Oh, no.
Aubrey: Or, "stop when you hit the bottom."
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: That's also part of the Halo Top mystique, is that there's all this stuff about, it implies a loss of control around food and then celebrates that loss of control.
Michael: When the only correct thing to have on the bottom of the lid is to do it like the Snapple container have fun facts.
Aubrey: Oh, my God, I would love it.
Michael: The seahorse is the only animal, where the male gets pregnant.
Aubrey: That's right.
Michael: That's what you need, Seahorse facts.
Aubrey: [laughs] So, in addition to billing itself as low calorie, it is also a very low-sugar ice cream. It uses two sweeteners, primarily, stevia which is a plant.
Michael: Natural, its natural, Aubrey.
Aubrey: It's natural, it's plant based, it's whatever.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: It uses erythritol which is a sugar alcohol. It's a byproduct of fermenting starches and yeast.
Michael: I've never heard of this.
Aubrey: Erythritol, and xylitol, and all of these different sugar alcohols show up a lot in keto diets.
Michael: Oh, really? Okay.
Aubrey: Uh-huh. Because they are ways to get some level of sweetness without sugar.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: Regular consumption of erythritol has been linked to weight gain. Paradoxically, it can also cause headaches and diarrhea.
Michael: It's also very interesting because part of the whole biohacking thing is rejecting "traditional medicine, Western medicine," however they're framing it. Yeah, it includes all of these ingredients that are extremely technological. There's weird dichotomy in these diet foods where it's always presented as natural, but they always include all of these unnatural, very scientificy ingredients.
Aubrey: Right.
Michael: It's like, "Which one do you want, man?"
Aubrey: You're not picking some erythritol off of an erythritol tree.
Michael: Right. [laughs]
Aubrey: There's also a number of nutrition professors weighed in and a number of the pieces that I read one from NYU had this to say about both erythritol and stevia are artificial sweeteners. Since sweet taste is normally a signal to our bodies that the food product contains calories, some researchers have hypothesized that eating a sweet product that is calorie free may result in appetite dysregulation and unfavorable metabolic responses.
Michael: SnackWell's.
Aubrey: Yeah. You eat a bunch of this diet food, because you think it will satisfy you. Because you think it's low calorie, it doesn't satisfy you. It messes up your appetite and may also mess up your metabolism to a degree. You're not necessarily any better off than when you started.
Michael: It's overlooking what we actually need to be healthy, which is adaptogens.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Guys!
Aubrey: I genuinely didn't see that one coming and it was a real delight. I was mid sip of water. [laughs]
Michael: I was trying to get a little Aubrey giggle out of you.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Go oriented [crosstalk] [laughs]
Aubrey: I like it, I like it. In addition to marketing itself around calories and sugar content, Halo Top has this claim to fame that is being a high-protein ice cream.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: A lot of diet foods that are marketed toward men are marketed under the guise of being high protein.
Michael: Dude, yes. I feel it's all based on this myth that somehow like men are not getting enough protein, when most men are already getting twice the daily recommended amount of protein. There's no lack of protein in the American diet, but we've been told over and over again that we need to be eating as much protein as humanly possible.
Aubrey: The example that I have, like, the archetypal dude and protein thing that I'm aware of, there is an absolute nightmare of a dude who's truly horrific on Bachelor in Paradise, which is one of the bachelor spin offs. His name is genuinely Chad. Bachelor in Paradise is filmed on a beach in Mexico and he brought a suitcase of clothes and a whole other suitcase of protein.
Michael: No way. What is it? Is it jars of peanut butter or whatever?
Aubrey: It was protein powders, but it was mostly just lunch meat.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: He just brought a suitcase full of sliced turkey.
Michael: That's so sad.
Aubrey: It's so sad.
Michael: He's being the opposite of a Chad.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: He's being kind of a beta right now.
Aubrey: Anyway, as it turns out, Halo Top has the same amount of protein as any other ice cream. Milk has a standard amount of protein, you can't increase or decrease that. Other ice creams aren't marketing themselves as sources of protein. They're marketing themselves as ice creams.
Michael: That's like the yogurt that advertises itself as gluten free.
Aubrey: That's right. The cofounders of Halo Top are aware that they have the same protein profile as other ice creams. Doug Bouton said, "nobody's going to eat 1,200 calories of Ben & Jerry's for the 20 grams of protein. We've maintained the protein while bringing the calories and sugar down. Ice cream has milk and milk has protein. We don't add protein powder. It's from milk, eggs, and cream just like Ben & Jerry's.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: The other thing that they do add to Halo Top is fiber.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: They add prebiotic fiber is how they bill it on the ingredients list.
Michael: What the fuck does that mean, Aubrey?
Aubrey: [laughs] It truly is a kind of fiber.
Michael: Prebiotic.
Aubrey: Prebiotics-- They are probiotics, which are the actual bacteria that folks are trying to add to their gut.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: Prebiotics are fruits, and vegetables, and whole grains.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: They're the things that feed good bacteria in your gut.
Michael: Oh. It just means that the bacteria food?
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: There's making up a scientific sounding term for just every banana you've ever eaten.
Aubrey: It is found in chicory roots, which is where many of these low-carb foods actually get theirs. So, a lot of low-carb foods are a little bit lower in carbs, but they pump in a bunch of fiber, which is a carbohydrate. But in diets, people subtract the fiber from the overall carb count.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: They talk about net carbs and net carbs means total carbohydrates minus the number of grams of fiber.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: It's like, it doesn't really count, even though it's totally a carbohydrate.
Michael: This is also very Silicon Valley. There's this drive toward quantification, but then food manufacturers also know about the quantification rubrics that you're using. So, they can very easily game that system. You could pump in a bunch of fiber and they know that that's going to be subtracted from the carb count. So, it's going to make it seem as if this is carb friendly when it seems they're just juking the staff a little bit.
Aubrey: A little bit. The other real secret ingredient in Halo Top is air.
Michael: Oh. What? They're whipping the cream?
Aubrey: Yeah. All ice cream gets churned and get some air turned into it. It's part of the reason that it's light and fluffy and you get that kind of ice cream scoop texture.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Each pint of Halo Top, two cups of ice cream is three quarters of a cup of air.
Michael: Nice.
Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah. If you let Halo Top melt, you will have little more than half a pint.
Michael: The pint that I bought is light. I didn't notice that when I was putting in my backpack. This feels it has a stuffed animal under it or something. It doesn't feel it's full of liquid.
Aubrey: Absolutely. The average Halo Top pint weighs 256 grams and the average Ben & Jerry's pint weighs 428 grams.
Michael: Oh, wow. So, almost double.
Aubrey: Yes.
Michael: Bullshit.
Aubrey: It's really a significant difference.
Michael: I'm not going to talk shit on foods that are mostly air, because that's meringue erasure.
Aubrey: Yes, souffles.
Michael: Oh, yeah. I'm pro souffle.
Aubrey: A number of dietitians were quoted in a lot of the stories that I read about Halo Top. Basically, their whole thing was like, "It's only healthier if you eat a regular serving size."
Michael: It's only comparable to other ice creams on volume terms.
Aubrey: That's exactly right. The nutrition facts, and the calorie count and fat, and all of that kind of stuff, for a whole pint of Halo Top, it really is comparable to a single serving of existing ice cream. So, even if you are counting calories, and fat, and carbs, and all of that kind of stuff, you really could just have a scoop of ice cream.
Michael: But that's not biohacking, Aubrey. That's just like eating food.
Aubrey: I will say, Halo Top is actually a more accessible option for people, who are diabetic. If you can't eat sugar, having a low sugar ice cream is probably your shot at having more than one spoonful of ice cream.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: There are uses for it like almost any diet food. It ends up creating more accessible foods for people with chronic illnesses when we should probably, actually just be creating foods for people with chronic illnesses without being like, "And it will make you thin, and you can eat a whole pint, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." These are not bad products in and of themselves necessarily, but they're contributing to really weird cultural attitudes.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: Okay. Before we get into the next part, let's actually just taste some Halo Top.
Michael: Thank you.
Aubrey: You got some Halo Top, yeah?
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: Okay.
Michael: I was specifically instructed by my cohost to get the peanut chunk something, something flavor. But then my local Walgreens did not have that and only had salted caramel.
Aubrey: Oh, great.
Michael: That's why I have in front of me. Got the fucking ingredients list.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: It's the paragraph of a Jonathan Franzen novel. It's massive.
Aubrey: [laughs] Here are the ingredients in vanilla Halo Top. You ready?
Michael: Give it to me.
Aubrey: Skimmed milk, eggs, erythritol, prebiotic fiber, milk protein concentrate, cream, organic cane sugar, vegetable glycerin, organic Carob gum-
Michael: Oh no.
Aubrey: -Carob.
Michael: Our old nemesis.
Aubrey: Organic guar gum and organic stevia leaf extract.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: Meanwhile, vanilla Häagen-Dazs is cream, skimmed milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, vanilla.
Michael: Ice cream stuff.
Aubrey: Yeah, ice cream stuff. I got peanut buttercup, because it is the most popular flavor in the US. The good news is you got salted caramel, which I believe is the most popular flavor in the UK.
Michael: I feel deep solidarity with our British listeners right now.
Aubrey: [laughs] All right, you ready?
Michael: All right, here we go.
Aubrey: Let's go.
Michael: God damn it, it's pretty good.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I am livid. [laughs]
Aubrey: I think it's fine.
Michael: It's pretty convincingly salted caramel flavor.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: Although, it does have the texture of like a sorbet. It doesn't have the dense, rich creaminess of a real ice cream.
Aubrey: Totally. I will say, as someone who makes ice cream at home from time to time.
Michael: Oh, you are a white woman in your 30s in Portland.
Aubrey: [laughs] One of the hardest things about making ice cream is making sure that it doesn't crystallize.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: They seem to have done a pretty good job of waiting crystallizing.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: I would not say that if I were in the mood for ice cream, I wouldn't be like, "Oh, somebody give me some Halo Top."
Michael: Yeah, me neither.
Aubrey: But I wouldn't necessarily turn it down.
Michael: I'm eating more, because I can't stop and have to get to the bottom of the thingy.
Aubrey: [laughs] You're following instructions.
Michael: I think if I was at a party at somebody's house or something somebody gave me just a bowl with a spoon and this ice cream, I think I would eat it, but I would also think that there was something off about it.
Aubrey: Yeah, it doesn't taste like Tillamook ice cream, or Ben & Jerry's, or whatever.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: But it doesn't taste bad.
Michael: I think what we're deciding now is that the rest of this episode is just going to be us finishing the pint and it's going to be ASMR. Just quiet mouth sounds and us not speaking.
Aubrey: Wait, what does your 'underneath the lid say?'
Aubrey: Mine says, "You had me at Halo."
Michael: Oh, that's actually pretty good. God damn it.
Aubrey: Yeah, it's cute.
Michael: Mine says, "I love to love you baby or something."
Aubrey: What?
Michael: I threw it away already, but it was something along those lines. But it definitely wasn't like a pro binge eating like, come see my bottom message.
Aubrey: Come see my bottom.
Michael: That was actually pretty good. I should be pitching this to the Halo Top people.
Aubrey: You genuinely should.
Michael: You know what it really needs, it needs some fucking nuts. It needs something to balance out the trickly over sweetness of it, because it's basically just air and sugar.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: But then you can't add nuts to it, because that adds a ton of fat and a ton of calories.
Aubrey: And fiber that is not necessarily prebiotic.
Michael: God damn it.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: This post-biotic fiber, fucking bullshit ass fiber.
Aubrey: Okay, so, here's where it gets fun.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: Are you ready?
Michael: Give me fun.
Aubrey: The reason that Halo Top got as popular as it did is that there was an immensely popular piece in GQ magazine in January of 2016.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: It was written by a guy named Shane Snow, who's another dude, who seems very focused on this kind of biohacking stuff. He takes his measurements every day, and weighs himself every day, and calculates his own body fat. He was talking to his super RIP Trainer in LA, who started telling him about Halo Top, this ice cream that he'd been eating that was healthy ice cream. This writer, Shane Snow starts from doing the math in his head and says, "Oh, my God, I could actually get to my protein goals per day if I only ate Halo Top."
Michael: [laughs] Wait, only ate Halo Top like ice cream or only ate Halo Top like three meals a day?
Aubrey: More than three meals a day as we will get into.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: He creates what he calls the Halo Top diet.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: He subsists exclusively on Halo Top for 10 days.
Michael: Shut up, Aubrey. No.
Aubrey: I told you this is where it gets fun.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: In his piece for GQ, he says, "For 10 days, I would do what surely a number of Homo sapiens primarily World of Warcraft addicts has done before, but never in the name of research and certainly, never with the hopes of getting skinnier. I'd be eating nothing but ice cream."
Michael: Okay,
Aubrey: Which also like, I don't know what people who play World of Warcraft ever did to this dude.
Michael: Yeah. Let's leave the World of Warcraft. They're not fucking with anybody. Those people are nice. I know those people.
Aubrey: Perhaps, unsurprisingly, within a few days he starts to experience some pretty profound side effects, because he's only eating fucking ice cream.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: He has these lingering headaches, constantly.
Michael: They are ice cream headaches.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: [crosstalk] Are we sure they are not ice-cream headaches.
Aubrey: No, they're not ice cream headaches. They're like, you-haven't-been-eating-real-food headaches.
Michael: Mm- hmm.
Aubrey: He also gets a really big canker sore that keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: He talks about being constantly shivering. He lives in Los Angeles, constantly shivering.
Michael: Well, don't eat cold stuff all the time.
Aubrey: He figures out that he needs to eat a pint of ice cream every two to three hours to keep from having a headache.
Michael: [laughs] Why do people do this? It's like those videos on YouTube, where people just set these absurd challenges for themselves. They're like, "Can I beat Super Mario Brothers with my feet?" It's like, "Why would you want to do that?"
Aubrey: Right. Totally, why would you want to do that?
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: The problem here isn't that it's ice cream. The problem is that he's only eating one food.
Michael: Yeah. Even if you were eating something "healthy," if you were only eating kale for 10 days, you'd also have weird side effects, because that's not how humans are supposed to live.
Aubrey: Yes. Here's actually a quote that I was like, "Oh, Lord." He keeps a food diary of this whole 10 days.
Michael: Of course.
Aubrey: "At 9:30 PM, I headed over to a lady friend's house reluctantly carrying the ice cream cooler pack with "breakfast." I remembered a story a friend told me about a guy she went out with. He was training for a bodybuilding contest and busted out a can of tuna fish every two hours."
Michael: Nice.
Aubrey: At least, I wasn't the tuna fish guy.
Michael: Well, what's the difference, bro?
Aubrey: You're the ice cream guy, bro.
Michael: Yeah. It's such a good metaphor for the reasons why fad diets don't work is because any fad diet that requires you to bring a fucking cooler over to the person's house when you're going to go get laid is not a sustainable plan. You can't just expect to have a cooler with you at all times for the rest of your life.
Aubrey: Partway through the Halo Top diet, this guy consults two nutritionists. They say that his canker sore that keeps getting bigger is probably due to a vitamin C deficiency, because you're not getting vitamin C.
Michael: So, he's getting scurvy?
Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah. They want to know whether or not he's caught a cold yet, because cutting calories, this significantly often weakens your immune system.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: They did say that they were pleasantly surprised that he wasn't experiencing more gastrointestinal distress, particularly, that he hadn't had diarrhea, because of the volume of erythritol.
Michael: On the underside of the lid on Halo Top, it should say, "Surprisingly, little diarrhea."
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: Okay. This is unfair, but there's something so fucking male about this idea of finding out about something that you didn't know about before. This thing is healthy, and it's good, and you're excited about it, and then eating only that thing, it's not enough to just be like, "Well, sometimes, I like ice cream. So, next time, I buy ice cream, I'm going to try this Halo Top stuff."
Aubrey: Right.
Michael: No, no, no. It's like, "This is good for me. Therefore, it must be good for me if I only eat this thing." It's just deranged thinking.
Aubrey: Right. There's also something childlike about it.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: At the end of the Halo Top diet, here is how he closes it out. "After 50 straight pints of ice cream, I clocked in at 143.5 pounds, down 9.9 pounds and 12% body fat, down 3%.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: I've lost some water weight, but no discernible muscle mass. I'd added half an inch of muscle to my chest and slimmed my waist. My canker sore was still massive and I had a cold."
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: He also talks throughout this, where he's like, "A friend of mine ate a hot dog and I thought about murder."
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: [laughs] He does a good job of being like, "This is not a good experience."
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: But I'm like, "Then why are you writing about it though, my guy?"
Michael: Yeah, exactly. Then why should we publish this and you know that people are going to take the message from this. "Hey, look at this miracle-ass ice cream."
Aubrey: Yes. The trick with all of this stuff and with all of these fad diets is that folks will then go out and evangelize the diet that they're on. This is part of the cycle of dieting. You lose weight quickly on a pretty drastic diet, you go and start recommending it to people. They also don't necessarily do the math on like, "It took me 10 days to lose nine pounds and I felt like shit the whole time."
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: They're also just recommending like, "You too can shiver and be mean to people. I have a giant canker sore and a headache all the time."
Michael: And keep a fucking cooler with you at all times, which I'm sure is very easy to incorporate into your busy life-
Aubrey: Totally.
Michael: -super sustainable. Does he say anything about what happens to him once he goes back to a normal ass diet? He probably just gains all the weight back.
Aubrey: He does not say, I think this is a short-term project. But he does say, as soon as he's off the diet, he's like, "I just wanted to eat eggs and spinach." I was like, "I get that."
Michael: This is the thing with fad diets as fad diets work as long as you are on them.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: Then once you go off of them, guess what? You're on a new diet now and then you have a new body to go with it.
Aubrey: Totally. And also, I think, look man, if you're trying to lose more than five to 10 pounds, even if you match the pace of a diet like this, someone like me would have to eat nothing but ice cream and be like a mean canker sore monster for nine to 10 months straight.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: I would have to have-- it would be like my year of eating ice cream.
Michael: Yeah. But think of how much weight you would lose when they have to cut off your gangrenous foot from having scurvy for seven months. I remember after Supersize Me came out which is a movie that we have to do an episode on, some nutrition professor went on the Twinkies and Doritos diet. We literally just ate the worst imaginable processed food for 30 days and he lost weight, because he restricted his calories. He'd only eat 1,500 calories a day, but it was all just shit food, and he ended up losing weight. It's like, "Yes, any diet where you're just restricting the number of calories you're taking in per day, you're going to lose weight on it." So, he could have done this with anything.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally.
Michael: This entire experiment says nothing about Halo Top.
Aubrey: Here's where it gets a little dark, again.
Michael: The canker sore eventually ate him alive?
[laughter]
Aubrey: No, the darkness is that a bunch of media outlets replicate this.
Michael: Wait, what?
Aubrey: Yeah. Yahoo News does the Halo Top diet, Spoon University, which is a food website for college kids.
Michael: Wait, what? Instead of pointing out how trash this entire endeavor was, they decided to do it themselves?
Aubrey: Mm-hmm.
Michael: Even for online journalism, that's shocking.
Aubrey: Each of these pieces talks quite a bit about the side effects, but the closing of all of these pieces is like, "But I lost a lot of weight."
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: They're all like, "Pretty amazing. How much weight I lost."
Michael: This is 99% the fault of the fucking editors as usual. Writers pitch pieces, it's fine. People do odd experiments of their bodies, it's fine. But the fact that somebody is working at these pretty major nationwide publications can't see a pitch like this and just be like, "Oh, it's a fad diet. We publish a million articles like this. We've gone through a million fad diet cycles by now. We're not going to publish this, because it's not very responsible."
Aubrey: The headlines for these are all like, "There's a new diet. I tried this new diet and I lost this amount of weight." We're all enticing you into this is a good idea. As all of this press around the Halo Top diet "ramps up," so do the sales of Halo Top.
Michael: I'm sure, yeah.
Aubrey: It becomes a big enough deal that their Chief Operating Officer, Doug, who's one of the co-founders makes a statement about it and is just like, "Hey, don't do this."
Michael: Okay. That's vaguely responsible.
Aubrey: But at the same time, Doug is saying, "Don't do this. We don't recommend it." Justin, on the other side is saying, "Actually, we had this really fun GQ article come out and it was really key to the brand success" in how he talks about it. Both of them talk about eating ice cream for breakfast most days.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: Yes. So, they're talking about this not as a dessert substitute, but they're just like, "Sometimes, you can just eat it for a meal."
Michael: I don't know.
Aubrey: I don't necessarily object to these dudes. I don't necessarily object to the existence of this product. I do strenuously object to promoting it as a diet or as a diet food.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: I think the biggest thing is and this is where they've gotten knocked publicly the most is that, advertising ice cream as you're going to eat the whole pint of this is really hard to think of that as doing anything other than normalizing, or promoting, or reaching out specifically marketing to people with issues of binge eating. When they have been called out on this binge eating disorder thing, Justin Woolverton issued a response in one of the pieces that I read and here's what he had to say. "Everybody has their own definition of healthy. For us, it means foods that are as unprocessed as they can be. Halo Top is something where people can eat the whole pint for a lot more than a quarter of a cup of ice cream."
Michael: Wait, listen to this motherfucker that just said unprocessed.
Aubrey: Right.
Michael: Read the fucking ingredients, again.
Aubrey: Carob gum, Guar gum.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: What definition of unprocessed allows for all these ingredients that I've never fucking heard of. I'm a weirdo that reads about this shit all the time.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. It just doesn't hold any water at all.
Michael: Yeah. Because holding water requires processing, Aubrey-
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: -if you process things to hold water.
Aubrey: According to the co-founders they estimate it within Halo Top that their customers are eating between five and 10 pints of Halo Top per week. Their success isn't necessarily that everybody under the sun loves Halo Top. Their success is, the people who love Halo Top buy way the fuck more Halo Top than any other brand of ice cream that they would get.
Michael: It reminds me a lot of the alcohol industry, where we all see beer ads everywhere and this idea of having a beer with friends. But 60% of alcohol is consumed by 10% of the customers. Fast food, I believe has the same structure, where there's what are called heavy users, people that are eating a lot of fast food and it's actually the majority of the market. I don't want to shame anybody that eats a pint of ice cream, because sometimes you need to eat a pint of ice cream. But also, it seems like the company is taking on the same structure as these other industries.
Aubrey: Yeah. This doesn't get from me a full throated like, "This is fucked up and these guys need to be stopped." Do you know what I mean? I don't feel that way about it, but it does not sit well with me. Slate ran a piece about Halo Top and this quote I thought really encapsulated the ways in which the line gets blurred between dieting and disordered eating. All any dieting person really wants and I am extrapolating from personal experience here is to eat a whole container of something. Preferably, that thing will taste good or at least not bad, but what's crucial in the end is getting to eat all of it. What Halo Top does so brilliantly is tap into Americans love of bingeing.
This writer goes on to say that she doesn't blame the creators of Halo Top for that love of binging. I'm like, "No, of course, you can't pin it on these two guys." But it doesn't seem frankly very ethical to me. The last piece that I want to talk about in terms of Halo Tops marketing is, its most recent ad campaign from I think last year. The title of that ad campaign is "Stop Shoulding Yourself."
Michael: Oh, no.
Aubrey: S-H-O-U-L-D.
Michael: I know where this is going. It's so dark.
Aubrey: Tell me where you think it's going.
Michael: It's going to be pretending to free you from diet talk when it's actually just another form of diet talk.
Aubrey: You just nailed it.
Michael: Damn it.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: I'm spoiling your episode. I'm sorry. You were going to lead me there by the hand and I ran in front of you.
Aubrey: No, no, no. It's perfect, because you really can kind of see it coming a mile away.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: This is their quote from their 'Stop Shoulding Yourself' website.
Michael: Oh, no.
Aubrey: The ad is essentially it's a 32nd spot. It is a plus size woman dancing in her bra and panties.
Michael: I'm with you so far.
Aubrey: While she's dancing around there, these slogans that pop up on screen that say, "I should work out more, I should eat more salads, and I should skip dessert," and she is eating Halo Top.
Michael: Oh, man.
Aubrey: At the end of the ad, she sees that one of her neighbors is looking in through her apartment window and she's just like, "Whatever, I'm going to keep dancing." It's just like, "I'm going to be free and easy and I'm going to live my life. Here we go."
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: The idea here that this ad seems to be playing into is what a lot, a lot, a lot of diet companies and diet food companies are doing, which is like, "It's okay to be fat. So, buy this ice cream that will make you thin."
Michael: Yeah, it's so gross to be using this stuff to sell people fucking ice cream.
Aubrey: It's so gross. Because essentially, if you look at the track of what's happening here, fat activists and eating disorder advocates have done a shit ton of work to make sure that people understand that dieting is not a sustainable way of being that it can actually lead people to lose weight that it fucks up your physical and mental health. Essentially, what is happening right now, culturally, is that all of that stuff, dieting is just getting a search and replace for like, "It's not about dieting, it's about wellness, and it's not about restriction, it's about empowerment, so that you can restrict if you choose to respect."
Michael: What is the purpose of eating Halo Top if not to lose weight?
Aubrey: Right, totally.
Michael: It's not calories and carbs tastes bad and you want to avoid them for that reason. It's like you're telling this woman to lose weight while you're being like, "You're fine as you are." It's so fucking cynical.
Aubrey: This is also a place where people are like, "Look, the culture around food is changing. The culture around fatness is changing." Again, what they're talking about isn't concrete experiences of fat people, or people with eating disorders, or people, who experience a lot of food policing for any number of reasons. What they're talking about is ad campaigns.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: That feels there's more acceptance and I would argue.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: That means that there's more explicit policing of fat people, not that there is more acceptance of fatness of fat people.
Michael: Right. If only she had Halo Top, she wouldn't be so fat.
Aubrey: Totally.
Michael: That's the message we were going to get.
Aubrey: She is eating Halo Top. So, she's on her way, she's doing the right thing, she's becoming thin.
Aubrey: You know what reminds me of?
Aubrey: Mm.
Michael: The ridiculous cynicism of those-- Was it Winston ads that were like, "You've come a long way, baby."
Aubrey: Oh, totally.
Michael: It was like, "We're feminists and look at how great we are with women's rights. Hey, here's a stick that's going to kill you."
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: It's just immediately sucking up feminism into the fucking tractor beam of capitalism with using this genuine advancement of women to do it and it's exactly the same here. It's like, "Body positivity is great. Look how happy you are with yourself. Take this thing that's going to make you different."
Aubrey: Totally.
Michael: Also, fuck them. The whole thing came out of this biohacking, intermittent fasting, I'm going to tweak my body thing like Halo Top is another should. I should be eating Halo Top instead of this normal Häagen-Dazs.
Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely. I just saw that ad and I was like, I feel gross, and I hate it, and I don't know why.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: I saw this, when I was not PMSing. So, that was a genuine neutral response. [laughs]
Michael: I think by doing all this marketing, they're shoulding themselves in the foot.
Aubrey: [laughs]
Michael: How was that? I'm sorry.
Aubrey: I have to say, I'm very delighted that you stumbled upon that and I'm also very delighted that we're almost at the end of this episode, because there are so many fewer opportunities for more shoulding.
[laughter]
Michael: I know it's good you saved this for last, otherwise the whole show would be full of these.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally.
Michael: [laughs]
Aubrey: I feel the thing that I want to say to close this out is just like, "Totally eat what you want, but please don't conflate marketing with nutritional education."
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: This is one of those cases where a brand is saying, "We're good for you for all of these reasons. So, our brains go, "Oh, these things are good. It's good to have erythritol, it is good to have stevia." Please, please, please know that the people who are telling you that are trying to sell you erythritol [laughs] or stevia.
Michael: Yes, the purpose of companies is to sell you as much of their product as possible.
Aubrey: Right.
Michael: Anyone, who's telling you like, "This is the best probiotic, antibiotic fiber or whatever, they have no incentive to tell you the truth."
Aubrey: As you say, Halo Tops job is to make money and they are doing a bang-up job of making money. They are not your source of nutritional education nor is a fucking GQ story about eating ice cream for 10 days.
Michael: Yes.
Aubrey: Please, please, please, please, please.
Michael: However, if you're really interested in getting a canker sore, now, you know where to go.
Aubrey: [laughs]
[music]
