July Bonus: The '90s Diet Book That Gave Us the MAHA Blueprint

The whey back machine

I’m very late to this, but I grew up in a sugar causes anorexia (and almost everything) household. I can’t remember the whole thing now, but essentially the argument is that it’s like a rapid weight loss response to diabetes. Your pancreas “quits” and you lose tons of weight, but with delicious sugar. Please note, honey does not cause this, but fruit can. We had so much horrific diet culture from the 70s and 80s and there is no internal coherence.

I definitely gasped at the liver smoothie reveal... But the swamp juice name is so apt for a flax thing (flax seeds become viscous mixed with water) that it wins back 3 points from -9000 for that.

I feel called out as someone eating skittles while celebrating 6 months of sobriety 😅☺️

i was thinking about the braggs episode and wondering if there is enough story to do a bonus episode about dr bronners? is there anything there?

I vaguely remember my mother making Barley water in the 90’s. Then they released a cordial (flavoured water) called “barley water” and my mum bought the diet version. It tasted like ass 😂

This episode was a wild ride for me because it brought back so many memories of my parents’ crunchiest era! My mom had this book - I don’t think she made any of the recipes from it (or at least not the gross ones) and she was never anti-vax, but my family drank raw milk for about five years in the mid-to-late 00s 😬 Honestly at the time I loved it, because her main takeaway from the book was that low-fat diets were bullshit, so we got to drink whole milk instead of skim (which I thought tasted way better) and put butter on everything we wanted to! Luckily nobody in my family got sick, and my parents stopped buying raw milk well over a decade ago (also the book has long since disappeared from my mom’s shelves). I know now that the raw milk was a bad idea, but it was wild to hear how terrible the book itself was and the bizarre history behind it!

There's a MAHA cooking show!!!! mock them for 2 hrs? please?

This is the first time you’ve done an ep on a book that was in my house as a kid! My stepmom mostly just used the fermentation and sauce recipes, but I remember this book being open on the kitchen counter all the time. I had no idea what else was in there, what a wild ride

I wish I could forget about sweetbreads :(

i just watched this miranda kerr interview clip where she talks about foods she avoids and i need you guys to see it

The Raw Liver Drink almost made me scream. That is what they serve in Hell.

As someone who had an eating disorder, it was caused by a 90s diet mum approach, not fucking sugar. As someone who used to boil barley to feed to livestock, holy fucking NO.

I come here every month to say the same thing: you two make me so happy! I hope you never stop this podcast 😍

I avoid eating kidney and liver because I don't like the idea of eating a "cleaning" organ. Plus I don't like the texture of liver. So I don't eat organs really but not just because

Aubrey and Mike - i would love to hear what you all have to say about the rise in anti-birth control pill sentiment that seems to be very pervasive right now. I’m not saying that there are never bad side effects from the pill, but the narrative feels very MAHA-coded and alarmingly pervasive among even very educated women. Some of it is anti-fat too, with exaggerated concerns about weight gain. I’m tired of my friends telling me to count days between periods and track ovulation, lol

Just wanted to pop in and say, my 13 yo kid now asks me to play Maintenance Phase for their nightly audio book when it’s time to sleep. Particularly loves the taste test ones, but I’ve been playing a random selection and it’s going down a treat! So thanks! (Also I love it too).

We’ve known for 150 years that pasteurising milk kills Typhoid and makes milk reliably safe. The comparison to Oppositional Defiance Disorder was spot on. I’m a food safety practitioner (outside the US); it’s disturbing to see these fringe beliefs infiltrating public health policy.

i saw a bunch of copies of this book in a liquidation store. the cover art and illustrations were beautiful, i think that was the main draw.

Congratulations on being named in NYT Eight Podcasts to Add to Your Queue!

This episode really made me think of my friend’s grandma who died in her 80s after food poisoning from eating “tiger meat,” a Wisconsin delicacy involving raw ground beef on rye bread. While going through her house they found cocaine and boudoir Polaroids of her taken within the last year of her life. RIP to that lady, she died doing what she loved.

OMG listening to this made me feel so nauseous 😭😂

I fell for this one in 2015. I drank raw milk pregnant 🙈 I’ve changed I promise

The pink slime baby formula is killing me, I sincerely hope there were no babies subjected to that

Omg finally! My family was a hard Weston a price family and I read that slop cover to cover while drinking my raw goats milk still warm from the udder. I genuinely blame this book/culture (lol) for my life long struggle with orthorexia. Love hearing yall slam it. So healing.

I think the barley water might be a UK thing. Don't see it around so much now, but when I was a kid you could get it as a type of squash (the concentrated fruit type that you dilute to make juice). Like lemon barley would just be a kind of cloudy lemon squash drink. Robinson's sold it.

Barley water is a real thing! At least in Britain. I don’t think anyone really makes their own but there’s an iconic brand of it, Robinson’s, that used to sponsor Wimbledon. The barley element doesn’t taste of anything and it doesn’t usually contain whey …

I had barley water at farm school, made by my classmate from France, it’s actually really good 😅 Not sure if it had whey but I have to admit it was refreshing, when it comes w/out health claims 😂

Can you please cover the In Defense of Sunlight buzz/writer?

Carob is to chocolate as nutritional yeast is to cheese. Also, I only just realised that in an American accent, offal and awful are homophones (they aren't quite in British English) which is very funny.

justice for BARLEY WATER!!!! i'm asian and i grew up drinking barley water frfr, i love barley water and will not stand for this slander!!!!!!

My mom has this book!! Omg core memory unlocked, luckily she just dabbled in the bone broth section.

There is a movement pushing nicotine patches as cure alls. It's not smoking but . . . . They even suggest putting them on children. The same folks are anti "big pharma."

MACA - make America consumptive again! I mean, if we’re regressing back in time, we may as well get the “romantic” term back. 🙄

Carob's back on the menu, boys!!!

Anyone else read/listen to Yesteryear yet?!

My husband grew up in Guadalajara and would absolutely devour that “Mexican soup” if it had a regular amount of tomato paste. Pretty sure I’ve made a soup for him with better than bullion and a can of tomatoes.

This is not related to the cookbook but I have been wondering this every day for a significant amount of time: is Aubrey the voice of the FREE SHAVACADOO vine

I made the mistake of listening to this while eating breakfast 🤢

Have never felt more seen by the ADHD experience, I enjoy the rustic feel of Michael's sound quality, and I'm insulted that I also know you've been 100% correct and the insinuation that I should think for myself 🙄

looking forward to hearing you guys review rfk's new celebrity cooking show 🫠

Those feeding baby recipes are straight up child abuse. That is just as upsetting to me as James Dobson's "baby training" bullshit. Infant formula is very carefully formulated to match breast milk as closely as possible to make sure infants are getting the unique nutrients they need during the period that your body is idealing growing as quickly as it ever will. This shit is NOT giving them the nutrients they need in addition to having the ability to give your child a painful deadly illness. 😭

I am truly shocked the “recipes for infants” section didn’t have any recipes that called for a heaping tablespoon of raw honey. “We are simply retvrning to our species’s natural infant vitality statistics ☺️”

Allow to fester lmao

Please please please do a carob episode. Why & how did this chocolate gaslight ing ever happen?

You guys really needed a trigger warning with this one! I couldn't finish it thanks to my gag relex going off at almost every recipe description 🤢

barley water is actually good, i used the recipe from Alton Brown’s cookbook. also roasted barley tea (mugicha) is a japanese summer staple. the rest of the book sounds just beyond awful.

The connection between RFK Jr. and The Weston A Price Foundation isn’t speculative, it’s extremely direct and public—he has been a keynote speaker at their wacko annual conferences several times. He’s a full-on follower (though I guess they’re sort of mutually each other’s followers?) We’re all living in Sally Fallon’s world now thanks to his rise to power, and I have honestly long been confused as to why there hasn’t been more journalistic coverage of her. I was excited when I saw that Mike and Aubrey were doing this episode!

So glad to see Weston Price Foundation covered.

We in Cleveland do not respect the Weston A. Price Foundation as our own.

I can't wait for the bloom one!!

This was a way back for me too. Totally bought into this at the time because no one would believe me about what turned out to be fibromyalgia & endometriosis. Thankfully, my then husband reminded me that pasteurization existed for a reason. I shudder to think of what could have happened. Still, it all comes down to personal responsibility with them. And, subsequently, your own damn fault.

A follow up to this with a round table of Real Food for Pregnancy, Taking Charge of your Fertility, the fifth vital sign, Real Food for Fertility me, NFP in life and in women’s movements and Moira Donegan as your first guests it will be worth it. It is TERF, it is evidence based witchcraft it is primordially MAHA and also profoundly correct in so many ways but also all the sudden you’re at dinner with someone who thinks a birth control pill is as dangerous as a vaccine etc. Good times

I remember this book as a turning point in my doula career. Parents kept referring to her as we discussed evidence based information that I had gathered to help them make decisions. It has been over 15 years and still sometimes, as a pediatric critical care nurse with a master of public health in maternal and child health with published peer reviewed work, I am arguing with a cookbook author. It is so LOL as it is also WHAT THE FUCK.

I love organ meat (in small quantities and in like pho), but it (especially in the wellness/Liver King context) always makes me think of that King of the Hill episode where Bobby gets obsessed with liver and develops gout 😅

As a pediatric dietitian who works at a children’s hospital, I can confirm that when the massive formula recalls happened a few years ago, we had families sending us the Weston A Price Raw Milk Infant Formula recipe asking about using it in the place of regulated formula.

I was like: why is Mike hating on Brioche? 🥴🥴🥴

I'm recently coming to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a conservative. They're actually just regressives.

I still can't believe this raw milk fetishism. To be fair, leaving full fat armer's milk out for a couple of days is how my granny made sour cream. That is fine. But guess what? She boiled it first!

I currently live in the Pearl District and had to laugh. I'm not in a fancy expensive condo, just kind of a regular apartment. I can definitely see where it was gentrified to hell and back. But also, to hear the NIMBYs in the Pearl District Neighborhood Association talk, the Pearl is a horrible gross slum full of "the homeless" just doing drugs and pooping everywhere and ruining home values. It's a land of contrasts, I guess? Lol.

Grape cooler sounds like how us foreigners made illegal homemade wine when I was an English teacher in Saudi Arabia

Not gonna lie, I really thought they were going to say smoking is good for you because it kills toxins or some shit. Like Mike, I'm just waiting for the day they start trying to tell us that smoking is good, actually.

"Just give me recipes. Why are you angry?". My thought pretty much any time these MAGA freaks talk is "why are you angry?"

Alright who's making my MTGA hat?

Just diving in now (as our power was finally restored!) and I really really hope that one of you made a WAP joke.

Saving this and the main feed ep for my flight this weekend 🥲🥲🥲 so hard to resist but I’ll be glad for it later. Ty MP ❤️

The grape prison wine part killed me… 😂😂😂

“what in blazes am I doing here?” 🤣

Thank you for the glorious work you both do 🙏

Thank you for covering this. I've been to the events and meetings centered around this book, it feels very culty.

Is there any information about the administration trying to get rid of soy formula? I can’t find anything and this is very important to me.

The sugarcane chat reminded me of the first time I tried sugarcane juice, on a trip to Vietnam. Freshly pressed and completely delicious, but I did laugh when we said no thanks to a second glass and our local guide said, "You don't have to worry about the sugar because it's natural. Healthy!" Yeah, it's natural, but I'm still stopping at one glass of that super sweet juice. 😂

I'm half waiting for somebody in the whackadoo sphere to argue that Tuberculosis is actually a good thing because it has "tuber" in it and tubers are root vegetables which are good for you

True confession, I used to own this cookbook. The only recipe I ever made from it was small-batch kimchi, which I still make. The rest of the book was so weird, I gave it away.

I am finishing up the main feed episode but had to check the comments here. I’m too old for this one I think, by 1995 I would have been 24 and didn’t diet like I did when I was a kid (started counting calories as a single digit year old kid, and looking back, I think it was because she did and I liked addition and rules?) living at home with my mom (thankfully). When she died in 2019, I went thru her hundreds of cookbooks and culled out the damaging diet ones (Scarborough diet, anyone), kept a couple diet cook books for nostalgia (Ford Model one, Pierre Franey’s Cuisine Minceur is another), and kept the few hundred rest. I love literally any cookbook related content.

Loved the episode! But thought what you described as the fake “cream cheese” sounded a lot like what we call “soured milk” in Poland. It’s a big part of the culture here and you can even buy it ready-made in any local supermarket (or possibly Polish stores in the US too). You leave the milk out on the counter for the night, maybe 24h tops and it sort of curdles. Doesn’t spoil, just gets sour, kind of like yoghourt. It goes fastest with raw milk, true, but that’s almost impossible to get, so we do it with lightly pasteurised (not UHT) milk, just takes a tad longer. Or if you have UHT milk, you need to add something with live lactobacillus cultures to it. Those suckers are tough and don’t let other bacteria grow. Hope that helps rectify the lacto-fermentation defamation! 😉

My poor baby would have exploded with gas and diarrhea if he ate that baby formula. He had a hard time with anything but soy (2012 soy boy), and had an upset stomach all the time. I feel bad for children born into families like this

The avocado wouldn't even float in a bowl of chicken stock/tomato paste. It would sink to the bottom. Saddest soup ever

"Maybe they are just 2 Joe Rogans in a trenchcoat" 🤣🤣🤣🤣

This diet was giving flashbacks to the autoimmune protocol diet. Tons of offal and game meat. I tried it to get my psoriasis under control - shocker didn’t work and was awful (wink wink). Would love to see if you guys cover that diet. Thank you so much! Love this podcast!

Not sure if anyone’s suggested this one yet, but would love to hear a deep dive on the Pritikin diet. My mom fell prey to this in the 90’s and bought all the flavorless Pritikin-branded convenience foods for our pantry (the instant soup cups were particularly cursed).

I'm a registered dietitian and I fell for this shit hook, line, and sinker when I had small children 20 years ago. It was all mixed in with attachment parenting, Waldorf education, crunchy crunch crunch. I'm ashamed of myself and so happy my kids survived my madness.

By the way, barley water is a traditional drink in the UK. Generations of posh kids have refreshed themselves with barley water cordials in the break of their school sports day.

These drink recipes sound like something kids make at slumber parties during truth or dare.

No one ever made that liver milk no no way

You know how babies are fascinated by babies? Well, maybe that's why your kids will like sweetbreads! 😅🙃😬

Merry Christmas everyone - TWO EPISODES 🎄🎄🎄🎄

Gotta jump in and say: the crank didn’t come up with that metaphor! It’s from Shakespeare (unless it was around before him)—in Lady Macbeth‘s soliloquy beginning of Act 1 Scene 5: „Yet do I fear thy nature—It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it“ Though I posit that unpasteurized, he would have plenty of illness

I feel like HR is going to talk to me about laughing too much at work after listening to that quack doctor's self published book titles.

I should not have listened to this while eating my lunch 😅🤣🤢

sorry but barley water is valid, its basically like herbal tea but with barley instead of leaves. theres a tasting history about it too

As someone who’s mother made a lot of steak and kidney pies when I was child, you can not sneak organ meats into your kids’ meals without them noticing. That was not a mushroom, mother

Underrated Aubrey pun: understanding the 'visceral' reaction to eating offal

Will you consider not using the word “kabal?” ❤️

Omg blast from the past! I was a senior in high school when this came out and read it and thought, sure let's try. I told my mom we needed some raw milk and organ meats and she said wtf no that is disgusting and then I didn't get E. coli. Thanks mom.

As someone with a degree in English I can say that we are experts…. in bullshitting 😭😂

Omg I’ve been waiting for this!!! My family got so many wacky ideas from this book when I was a kid

I'm about a minute into the episode and just want to say how excited and a little nervous I am to listen. This book had a HUGE impact on my life. I got a copy of it from the food co-op I worked at when I was like 17 or 18 years old, and I read it front to back. I think it's what first got me into cooking, which is still one of the most important things in my life. Something about the conspiratorial thinking mixed with "ancient wisdom" mixed with pseudoscience was incredibly compelling to me as an impressionable young hippie anarchist. I'm trying to think if I cook anything from the book still... I do soak my grains sometimes. Very eager to find out if that's completely pointless and/or dangerous.

My roommate in California in the early 2000s definitely had this book and was eating recipes from it. Hope she's okay

Twenty years ago my conservative family member served me what I thought was an unholy amount of refried beans. Each of us got our own plate. Tasted terrible! Turns out she had the grocery store whip raw beef to make it the consistency of refried beans. I was hungover but couldn’t say that. Not sure how I survived. Thought Aubrey would be specifically offended by this crime against beans.

My great aunt once served me egg salad mixed with chopped cow brains, when I was eight. My mother didn't tell me for years. I never quite forgave her!

This was incredibly difficult to listen to while eating oatmeal.

I own this book so I was super pumped to get Mike and Aubrey's take on the MAHA connection. I bought it back when I first got into home fermentation and it was touted as the gold standard cookbook, but when I opened it up I was like, "These recipes are gross," lol, and never cooked anything out of it. There are more appetizing fermentation cookbooks out there. Okay I have to be that "well actually" guy right now though, because Mike and Aubrey's revulsion to the fermentation process (leaving the milk and grape juice on the table for three days, etc.) took me by surprise. While Sally Fallon is uncontestedly a total whackjob and nobody should give meat juice to babies, leaving foods out to ferment for days at a time, even milk, is how home-scale fermentation works. Kombucha gets left out for 2-3 weeks! If all I had to work with was raw milk, fermenting it would be much safer than drinking it straight if I didn't know about pasteurization.

whispering to him "you're so lucky to have me. You have no idea. There's no organ meat in this at all. Such a lucky little baby, yes you are. No organ meat. No no no 🥰"

Me during most MP diet book deep dives: haha, how humorous, I can't believe the nonsense of American diet culture! Me during this one: Um. Uh. Okay, I guess I never read most of this book that I kept on my shelf for YEARS and felt vaguely guilty about bc I was submerged in Wellness Nonsense/untreated chronic illness/too poor for regular healthcare and thought this might be a skeleton key to feeling better. OOOF. I love that y'all did this but DAMN, I do feel like a fool even if I totally fell into a trap made for me by grifters, as Aubrey always says. Yikes!

I love hearing you guys read this freaky, angry cookbook! And oh my god carob is NOT chocolate. But! It's also not bad! It's just another food removed from its context and used in a weird diet culture-y way. I speak from the inside! My mother was macrobiotic *and* a chocolate lover, and I ate a lot of carob bars in the early 80's. I actually really like when it's processed into a chocolate-like texture, like a coating or chips. But it has to be appreciated for itself, not passed off by hippie parents as "just like chocolate", because my Yiddish grandmother was slipping me the Cadbury on the sly and I could tell the difference. Much later, I learned from Egyptian and Turkish friends how carob is actually prepared and eaten, and it's great! This all reminds me of cottage cheese, a cultural food from my own background (Polish Jews), not a diet food and definitely not some kind of ricotta substitute. America is a stew of weird substitutions!

Does Michael know that chocolate also tastes bad if you don’t put sugar and fat with it?

Re: An Aubrey Julie & Julia style recipe journey. Don't threaten me with a good time!!!!!

Oh my goodness, the amount of times a "Weston A Price protocol" was recommended on allllll the mommy Facebook groups I was in ten-plus years ago!! I definitely went down the pipeline a bit with the full fat dairy, coconut oil stuff. Missed me with the offal though! 🤢

Wow I really regret listening to this while eating breakfast

Should’ve known better than to eat breakfast while listening to this episode and unfortunately the cream cheese “recipe” coincided perfectly with me eating a bagel and cream cheese. Luckily my cream cheese did indeed come from inside my fridge

The cream cheese recipe is sparse (and confusing) but it’s not actually as bad as yall think: this is basically how you make crème fraiche. Where it confuses me is 1) I’m not sure where you’d acquire already cultured cream (usually you add yogurt or some kind of culture) 2) if you do it with milk it’s not going to turn into anything except maybe yogurt (you heat yogurt, generally, though) and 3) it ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT SEPARATE.

The reason why Russia is less regulated than the United States is because their system of government abruptly stopped and shifted at the whims of the elite in the 90s. I’m not saying capitalism or communism is better - I’m just saying the fall of the USSR absolutely rocked everyone’s shit in Russia and that’s the reason there’s less regulation and things are “sketchy”. Not because the people are dark or eastern or whatever

We’re not getting enough offal… 🤢🤢🤢 As a vegetarian for over 25 years, let me tell you, the lack of offal has been fine by me! 🤪🤪😵‍💫😵‍💫

Barley water is very much a thing in the UK! Generally in an ~ultra-processed~ form these days, usually a squash (= cordial, not vegetable) with some kind of fruit. Lemon barley water is the one I see most often but I'm also very fond of peach + barley.

Acerola powder?? No WAY. Okay so acerola is a tropical fruit, a really round really red berry that looks deceptively like a cherry but which is pretty sour on its own. I live in the US but my mom’s family is from northeastern Brazil and my grandma has acerola trees in her backyard. She used to make acerola juice for us all the time, which I think these people would horrified to know had to be like 50% sugar to be palatable to children. Anyway, I’ve never seen it here and I’ve never heard any American talk about it EVER. Apparently people like that it’s really high in vitamin C, which is probably why it’s in the horrible liver slurry for babies. Criminal.

Y’all I literally thought of Kings Hawaiian when you said we had the first time and then you ruined my poor innocence with baby animal or meat

I know that MP tends to get a lot of "that minor comment is problematic" comments, but the fact that Michael seems to believe "oppositional personality disorder" is real is troubling to me. It is a "diagnosis" given mostly to traumatized/neurodiverse Black people to justify a lifetime of medical and legal abuse. Quite honestly it is something that I hoped MP would cover, as it is a baseless quasi-medical "disorder" created to further systematic marginalization.

I’m so excited for a new episode! Perhaps you could do one on groggins or like how in 2026 men suddenly discovered “looksmaxxing” (which is just diet and skin care for men, no?)

Carob talk reminded me of when my dad made “chocolate” by dissolving cocoa powder in coconut oil and let it harden and tried to tell me “it’s just as good as the stuff you get in the supermarket”

I'm new on Patreon; can someone tell me if the regular episodes are also on here, because I can't find them, or do you have to have another podcast service for those?

TWO maintenance phases in ONE week? #blessed 🎉🎉

Mainfeed AND a bonus episode? Is it my birthday already? 🥳

'Cheryl - hold my butter' 😂

my older sister went to woo woo nutrition school in the early aughts and they made her read this. I had to unlearn a lot of indoctrination she gave me from this book when I was an impressionable young person

I always hear her name as “Sally Fallow-Morals”.

I have been waiting for you to take a look at this one. I’m so excited. I can’t tell you how many people recommended this to me back in the day. Including one guy who told me coconut oil was so healthy, he and his wife were eating multiple tablespoons of the stuff each meal.

I think the US did become a diet dictatorship, its got all the same things but you dont feel the weight of it hehe