James Collier on Dietology and How Food Choices Shape Our Organisational Culture

There's a term in well fed that really stood out for me. Dietology. What's, what's dietology, James? Well, it's a, James made up word. It's a portmanteau of diet and ideology and we see a lot of this on social media. But what's been around for decades, maybe something I'm researching in more depth, but maybe even hundreds of years. You know, the definition that I've, I've given to it is a dietology is a dogmatic commitment to a nutrition related belief that's not based on a critical appraisal of the available evidence. And worse, sometimes it goes further. Often when evidence is presented to the contrary, people double down on that belief. So they start think ignoring any evidence. I think it's getting worse at the moment and I think it's a bigger problem than just diet. But here's a claim that I've made in previous podcasts and previous interviews. I can't back this one up, so maybe I'm being ideological here, but I'm saying that nutrition is more polarizing than politics. People have their beliefs when it comes to nutrition and they're going to stick to them. Now there's good reason for this. Let me explain a couple of them. Let's say firstly that someone wasn't very healthy, maybe a bit overweight, they weren't going to the gym very much. And then they, they see what some influencers in good, good shape and talking about the diet they've done. And so this individual follows that diet, maybe it's the carnivore diet for instance, and they follow that and they start exercising and they feel great and they think, okay, this is really good, this diet has worked for me. Maybe they have indeed tried other diet strategies before and for whatever reason hasn't worked out. They want to tell everybody about this and they know the answer because they've got the answer. They're witnessing it. Now there could be two things here. Maybe that diet strategy just simply suits them better their lifestyle, maybe on a physiological basis, but doesn't mean it's going to benefit other people. And the other one is I would question if they, you know, maybe they haven't properly tried other regimes and just the act of improving what they're eating, cutting out all the junk, doing more exercise, they're going to feel great anyway. So that's where it comes from. But I don't even think that answers on my own question well enough. I think there's something deeper here and this is on a belief level now Let me give you. Let me illustrate this using etymology, the origin of words. There's one word that I think is really interesting, culture. We use it so much these days. We use the word culture when we're talking about how we behave, how we dress, how we dance and just certain beliefs we have. We use it in the. More. More recently in sort of business culture, more other institutional cultures. We criticize other cultures. But let's look at where the word comes from. It actually comes from the tilling of the land for food, the act of acquiring food from the land. Look at the word agriculture. Agri comes from field. So acquiring food from a field, the word cultivate, which is, you know, to get food from the land. So is it no wonder if the word culture actually comes from food? It demonstrates us how we believe, you know, where our beliefs are linked to. So is it no wonder in some respect that people are ideologically committed to the. Their food and their diet? So the word dietology tries to explain that.