Diet Culture is Especially Hospitable to Abusive Men

Because a system that equates control with virtue, shrinking with safety, and discipline with moral superiority will always mistake domination for leadership — and protect the men who embody it.

I read about longevity influencer Dr. Peter Attia’s name appearing nearly 2,000 times in the Epstein files while I was propped up in bed, recovering from surgery, floating in that strange space between anesthesia and clarity. It is a particular kind of disorientation to be healing your own body while watching powerful men joke about women’s bodies like they’re macros to track.

Dr. Jen Gunter has reported on the emails between Attia and Jeffrey Epstein, including an exchange where “pussy” was described as “low carb.” Even typing that sentence makes my stomach turn, and not because of surgery.

I’m late to this news cycle, but I can’t not write about it, especially after this year’s “real food” Super Bowl commercial with Mike Tyson struck a similar cord.

The part I can’t stop thinking about:

Men like Attia are not anomalies or outliers in wellness culture. They are part of it—grown in the same grifter-filled soil that grows nutrition misinformation, body shaming, anti-aging obsession, misogyny, weight stigma, ableism, and white supremacy.

Backing up a bit, it’s important to explain that diet culture has become increasingly sneaky.

It no longer just screams “lose weight!” Now, it hides in podcasts about longevity, in wearable tech, and in rigid morning routines framed as aspirational. It uses language like discipline, biohacking, and personal responsibility—all of which sound much sexier, and feel more focused on health.

The same industries and belief systems that sell all of this as a moral achievement are the ones that made Attia credible in the first place.

And…that feels like the logical outcome.

A system built on domination will always make room for the abusive men who practice it well.

To be clear, most people caught up in diet culture are not abusers (it’s the air we’ve all been breathing). Most are trying to survive in a world that taught them their body was a problem to solve. But systems don’t have to create abusers to protect them, they just have to reward the right traits.

I’ve been swimming in all of this lately—the way our cultural normalization of bodily control framed as “health” and “beauty” makes the management of bodies feel virtuous. And that dynamic is part of the protection and elevation of the men who embody it.

Some of the parallels I’ve noticed:

1. Rewarding control over empathy.

Diet culture celebrates the ability to override hunger, to push through pain, and to silence fatigue. It sells “hacks” for longevity and calls it evidence-based. It praises mastery of the body while making it sound like a collection of responsible choices.

It’s in the phrases:

“I’m just worried about your health.”
“This is for your future self.”

Industries and systems can use the language of concern to enforce compliance. Because when control is framed as care, coercion becomes much more difficult to name.

2. Confusing restriction with virtue.

We’re taught that eating less food (or “better” food) is a sign of moral superiority. We’re taught to see rigidity with food and exercise as respectable. It’s not suffering, it’s commitment.

And most of all, we’re told that we can see that virtue and commitment on someone’s body—meaning: appearance becomes proof of getting it right. Thus the more someone restricts, optimizes, and endures, the more authority they’re granted. In wellness spaces, that authority easily becomes entitlement (enter: podcast bros with supplement lines and carnivore diets).

3. Valuing outcomes over process.

Diet culture admires before-and-afters without asking how the “after” was achieved, and declares success even when harm is part of the method. In the biohacking sphere, metrics are often emphasized over someone’s lived reality, so biomarkers become more important than a true connection to your body. When data is used to override the true human experience, it’s a slippery slope into a world where harm becomes deniable—because the method is excused if the “results” look good.

4. Centering thinness, youth, and compliance in women.

We’ve been convinced we’ll be safe if we keep our body small, our appetite quiet, our skin looking like a 20-something model’s. But thinness, as I’ve written about before, isn’t really the point. The point is distraction and obedience, because a hungry body is easier to manipulate.

The theme of shrinking reaches far beyond the physical—it’s about having needs that don’t take up any space. It’s about being digestible, agreeable, easy to manage. And when smallness is framed as safety, the burden shifts onto women to contort themselves rather than onto systems to stop harming them.

5. Training people to internalize harm.

If it didn’t work, you didn’t try hard enough. If it hurt, you must have done it wrong.

This is essentially using self-blame to silence people, which turns structural violence into a personal failure. When we blame ourselves, we have a harder time identifying harm, and even when we finally see it, the whole system has been set up in a way to keep us from reporting it. Instead, we go quiet.

---

We see all of these patterns far beyond Peter Attia.

In the recent Super Bowl commercial about “processed food,” Mike Tyson—a man with a well-documented history of sexual assault and violence—was positioned as a credible authority on bodies and health. That choice wasn’t random. Diet culture routinely hands the microphone to men who have demonstrated control—even domination—so they can be a moral voice on self-control and “real food”, while treating their history as irrelevant. This ad felt like a prime example of how spectacle and certainty matter more than accountability. Abuse should have disqualified him—instead, it disappeared behind the crunch of an apple and anti-fat bias.

Psychological research shows this isn’t accidental. For example, weight stigma is intertwined with misogyny and racism.¹ Objectification increases tolerance for harm.² And when control over bodies is normalized, control over people becomes easier to justify.

So when men (like Dr. Peter Attia) profit from diet culture while moving easily through systems that exploit women’s bodies, it isn’t shocking at all. It should be. But it’s actually the logical outcome of a culture that equates domination with discipline and discipline with goodness.

If we want fewer abusive men elevated as health authorities, we have to interrogate the values underneath the wellness industry itself. We have to stop worshipping self-denial as virtue and confusing control with character. We have to stop mistaking optimization for ethics.

Body liberation was never just about food or weight. It is about choosing consent over control, care over coercion, humanity over micromanagement. It is the refusal to admire the very traits that make harm easier to excuse.

And once you see the pattern, stories like this stop feeling like surprising scandals.

They start feeling like evidence of what women know deep in their bones: a culture that sanctifies bodily abuse as “health” and “beauty” is already primed to protect the men who practice it.

I know that so much of the news around this is unbearably painful. I’m sending so much love and support to all of you, and appreciate your presence here. May we all be a little softer with ourselves today. If you’re open to it, I’d love to hear from you in the comments — whatever comes up.

1. Dr. Sabrina Strings wrote a book on this called Fearing the Black Body. Jessica Wilson’s book It’s Always Been Ours and Chrissy King’s The Body Liberation Project also delve into this in profoundly important ways. Please read!

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29195515/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37815050/