The Twenty-First Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast, my name is Dave. The mayor of New York City a place so nice they named it twice for a place nice enough to be named once, Eric Adams had this podcast project, a little indie thing he was working on for a while. He didn’t make a big deal about it, just told some friends, but, you know, everyone’s pretty busy. He was only really doing it for himself. Just wanted to make something, who cares if it went anywhere. Anyway. The only person who listened to it was a dogwalker in Queens named Dave.

So, the drought continues, Eric Adams hasn’t updated his podcast, and thus I’m going forward with my review of other content that he has generated. Today we’re going to discuss one of the two books he’s credited as having written, “Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses.” Adams is given the complete authorship credit, if there’s a person this was written with, they aren’t named. 

The book came out in late 2020, when nothing was going on, and obviously sales data has nothing to do with whether or not it was good, just whether or not it was popular. Sales data is also incredibly hard to come by, because the publishing industry is a cabal of goons that hates books, and there is no way to get reliable stats without paying thousands of dollars, and even then, best selling books are often best sellers because the publisher or author self-purchase a significant number of units because again this is a business run by the criminally insane. So you can only sorta glimpse the shadows of the data. Maybe the best actual free to the public data comes from the Seattle Library System, which puts the numbers for checkouts of books, audiobooks, ebooks, etc online in a searchable database and tells you the pure numbers for each book they hold. For the last 3 months of 2020, across the whole of the system, and across all platforms (ebook, audiobook, book book, etc) Adams’s book got about 25 checkouts. In the same time period, Killers of the Flower Moon was withdrawn over 300 times. These are apples and oranges in many ways, Killers had been out for a few years at that point, for one. But it was also optioned to be a movie by 2020 and was a work of history, whereas Adams has written something that can best be described as a cookbook smashed into a pep talk by a guy who has buttonholed you at a party and you’re starting to get the sense that you need to cut things off before he tells you the earth is trapezoidal and its core is edible.

Right, a couple things at the top. I’m going to talk about this book in detail, and this book is a diet and “wellness” book, and hopefully you heard the heavy air quotes there. I’m as skeptical as it’s possible to be about everything Eric Adams says, and I’m also extremely skeptical about the diet and wellness industrial complex. Honestly, in both cases, skeptical isn’t a strong enough word. The thing is this: in order to talk about this book, I have to talk about the ways it’s terrible and in the context of diet and wellness and health and the body, there’s any number of things in that vein that might enrage or trigger a perfectly reasonable listener. So I’m just putting up a blanket warning here. I’ll do my best to discuss what Adams writes in respectful ways, but in order to discuss what he says, I have to present it. I’m also going to talk at some length about my own uh issues around the meat prison that my consciousness inhabits and it’s not easy to talk about stuff like that, and for any number of reasons it may not be easy to hear it, so please take care of yourself, and if this starts to make you feel bad, there’s a whole lot of better things you could be doing with your time; I encourage you to do them instead if it helps.

Right, enough throat clearing, let’s get into it. We start with the introduction.

So, in Adams’ telling, he woke up one day in March of 2016 and was completely blind. His doctor tells him his A1c is out of control, he’s full blown diabetic and will be on meds for the rest of his life.

Adams acknowledges that this should not have surprised him. He comes from a family of diabetics, and he tells us a story that I’m sure happened about taking his mom to a reunion, finding out she didn’t have her meds, and, when he suggests going home to get them, her rolling her eyes and asking the room if anyone in the family has some MEDICATION THEY CAN SPARE and literally everyone holding up a bottle of pills. That sure sounds like it happened, because, among other things, famously, diabetes meds are cheap and plentiful and everyone carries more than they need.

Adams writes that much of the reason his diet was terrible was due to the the stress of being a police officer, and of the trauma he encountered. He coped by eating. I did the same thing when I was younger. I mean, I wasn’t a cop. I had a real job, I was a barista. Also before that I was a child and people kept trying to hurt me. So, like Adams, I ate a truly heroic amount of fast food and drank an insane amount of soda. I cannot say what the future will hold for me. I can say that my late mother, formerly the chief of endocrinology at a well regarded hospital, once told me that, due to my family history, despite the fact that I ate nothing but sugar and feelings for most of my teens and 20s, I will most likely never develop diabetes. I’m 45, my A1c at last check was 5.4. I’m a vegetarian, but I do any number of things that are ill advised from a health perspective. I have changed my diet because if you eat nothing but sugar you feel pretty bad a lot of the time, so I could tell you about the miraculous changes that quote unquote eating right has created for me, and I could try to sell you on following the Dave the Dogwalker/Podcaster’s plan for lifelong health, but my strong suspicion is that I’ve just got genes that break one way. And I’d still have to do something either surgical or pharmacological because, one of the ways my genes break is that my body holds weight no matter how much I eat or walk, and I walk 15 miles a day. 

And, to be honest, I lost a lot of weight, in an incredibly unhealthy and probably damaging way that I call “not eating food for a lot of my 20s.” Now that I’m in my 40s, and I have been forced to accept that I will never get the weight off of my midsection, and intellectually I understand that not only is the weight on my midsection not particularly a problem, or something the world should care about, that my negative feelings about it are socially derived and not based on anything logical - my whole relationship to food, to weight, to diet and to my body is still incredibly disordered, except that in America disorder is completely ordered. It became the norm once it became clear how profitable it is to sell the idea that a conventionally attractive, healthy body is just over the horizon and all you need to do is follow a new diet.

Enter Eric Adams, here to tell us all what to eat and how to live. Quote:

“Comfort food helped me get through the aftermath of September 11. Hours after the Twin Towers crumbled, I arrived at Ground Zero to guard the search-and-rescue workers. We didn’t know yet who had attacked us, and we were in constant fear. NEarly every restaurant downtown was closed except for one, an Italian place on Canal Street that stayed open 24/7 for first responders. We’d stumble in at 4 A.M., covered in toxic dust. The restaurant owner would shuffle out of the kitchen with plate after plate of baked ziti and chicken. Most of us were still shell-shocked from teh attacks and shoveled the food down without thinking. We didn’t care how many calories were in the the buttered pasta, how much saturated fat was in the lamb, how much cholesterol was in the salmon. Food was a respite, a constant, a support…”

I don’t have a lot of rules about food, but one is that if you’re covered in toxic dust you can take the night off from counting calories. This is also just an insane way to describe someone doing you a kindness and feeding you when you need food, down to saying that the owner was “shuffling”.

One of the things that’s happening to me right now, as I’m reading, and writing this, as I’m coming to the first study Adams cites, as I’m noticing, still in the introduction, that the first study Adams cites is a limited study of 21 people with severe heart disease who were put on an intensive whole foods diet, presumably monitored intensely by the physicians following them and given direct care that most people cannot access; presumably this food was made for them and all these things make this potentially interesting but impossible to replicate for real world individuals who have heart disease - I have to stop myself right now because I can feel it as I’m writing this: this is turning into an Eric Adams adjacent version of Maintenance Phase. If you haven’t listened to Maintenance Phase, please do. Without reservation, without hyperbole, It is one of the best podcasts ever made. It truly helped me to become aware of just how insane the diet landscape is in this country, how toxic our relationship is to food and to diet, and how fatphobic and horrible all of this is. And the hosts, Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon, should they ever do an episode on this book, would do a much better takedown of it from that perspective than I ever could. Additionally, Hobbes has another pod, you probably don’t need me to tell you about it, with Peter Shamshiri, called If Books Could Kill, and it is also one of the best podcasts ever made. IBCK tears down books like Freakonomics or The End of History. If you haven’t listened to it, you should! I’m also trying to avoid in this episode doing what Hobbes and Shamshiri do. Adams’ book comes pre-debunked by dint of its authorship, and it didn’t really sell much or have much impact on the culture in the ways that the books on IBCK did, so I’m less trying to undo it from that perspective, and more trying to look at the breadcrumbs Adams has left us over the years to understand him. Adams is weirdly, riskily unguarded in his podcast, and I think that carries over here.

So, let me just say at the top: I make several assumptions that I just want to get out there.

1. Adams writes that Black people in America have statistically much worse health outcomes than white people. Higher rates, in particular, of heart disease and diabetes, and shorter lifespans. This is absolutely, obviously, the case.

2. Adams has a shaky relationship to the truth, but at the moment I have no reason to doubt him when he says that he did in fact turn his health around.

3. There are many different reasons that might happen. For example, he only cites one visit to the doctor, but it’s possible they caught him early, his numbers were unusually high due to a pancake breakfast or something that morning and he was still well within the time when he would be considered pre-diabetic as opposed to fully diabetic (also if you go blind, go to the ER immediately, not to your primary care physician. Any PCP who hears “I’m suddenly blind” is going to tell you to do that as well, so I assume that the meeting with his physician that Adams describes came after that ER visit.). It’s also possible that Adams is simply incredibly unusual due to some combination of genes or something. It is certainly possible that through a very carefully maintained diet - and constant awareness of one’s blood sugar levels - some people can manage their diabetes non-medically. 

4. I believe that the best thing to do when diagnosed as diabetic is to follow the medical consensus, and I’m fairly certain the advice Adams offers is not within the medical consensus, and that even if it were highly effective for most people (which I, a dog walker, think is unlikely) most people wouldn’t have the opportunity to engage with it.

5. Adams had the opportunity to do this in 2016 because by that point he was the Brooklyn Borough President, an elected position that’s more or less a figurehead. He had a cop pension, a salary from a job that didn’t require much actual work, city supplied health insurance, and active health monitoring. He had the time, money and health care access.

6. As I said, most people do not have that, and that is particularly true of Black people, the people Adams says he’d like to reach with this book. Most Black people do not have the opportunities, money and time Eric Adams had.

7. His book will not change that fact, it will merely serve to underline a fact that Maintenance Phase hammers, but also one that is immediately self-evident if you spend any amount of time thinking about it: the reasons that we have poor health outcomes in this country is that we treat health as an individual matter, rather than a social good. Adams wants to tell you what you can do. But most people can’t do it. Not because they don’t have the will. They don’t have the time and money and the access to medical care that time and money provide. Was Adams eating his feelings in his cruiser when he went to the drive thru at 2am? Sure. Was he also hungry? Yes. You need food to live. Adams was taking the available path. What else was he going to eat? He was diagnosed as diabetic well after that point, when he had other options. Most people are not the Brooklyn Borough President.

8. It is not a good idea to imply that people who aren’t the Brooklyn Borough President can do the same thing as The Brooklyn Borough President can when things like slipping into a diabetic coma are potential downsides of trying to follow the Brooklyn Borough President’s plan.

9. I am white and culturally Jewish, and Adams implies that the audience he’d most like to reach are Black people. It is almost certain that I’ll miss important nuances in that gap, and I’m going to do my best to be as sensitive as I can to that. I’m not here to do harm, but I recognize the risk and am always appreciative of feedback if and when I do fuck up.

10. I am here to do a podcast about Eric Adams and why he’s a really bad mayor. I am not here in any way to tell you what to eat or to not eat. Wanna eat like him? Go nuts. Wanna eat nothing but pop tarts and hamburgers? Also fine by me. The health impacts of either of those choices in the long term, IN MY NON MEDICAL OPINION AS A DOG WALKER WHO IS NOT GIVING YOU ADVICE, are marginal compared to the health impacts you’ll face from your own genetics, certain environmental exposures if you work in a high risk field, and your consistent access to consistent, and preventative, medical care. We also tend to think of healthy people as distinct from unhealthy people in the same way we think of rich people as distinct from poor people. But all people are part of the same bucket and a rich person can become poor. A healthy person today is a sick person tomorrow. Being healthy isn’t virtuous, being sick isn’t shameful.

11. But, again, this podcast isn’t really about that.

So, unless he writes something else truly deranged about the subject, I’m going to try to keep it to what this podcast is theoretically about: what Adams’s output inadvertently reveals about him, and why he’s a really bad mayor.

Immediately he says something deranged. He calls the doctor from the study that I was just meandering around debunking and asks him to explain to him how animal products were killing him. The way this is presented is that Eric Adams just dialed up Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic and the doctor, all too eager to explain his findings to some guy on the phone, talked him through it. I don’t know what happened here, but it wasn’t that. I’m guessing that whatever conversations Adams did have with Esselstyn were at the seminar Adams attended shortly thereafter at the Cleveland Clinic for several hundred people from around the country and I don’t know what it cost to have Dr. Esselstyn prepare sample meals for you and give the series of lectures Adams describes attending, but again, I’m not sure that the problem here is individual choices in diet.

At any rate, Esselstyn tells the assembled attendees that diabetes is a lifestyle disease. I googled a bit and found that in 2019, attending what appears to be a single day seminar run by Esselstyn in Oklahoma City cost $275 before travel and hotel costs. Also the bio mentions that prior to being an evangelist for a certain type of diet, prior to being a physician, Esselstyn was an Olympic gold medalist rower. 

One of the things I find so fascinating about people who feel that that they are successful, whether they’re unusually healthy, or unusually wealthy, or good at rapping or able to create a following online by posting pictures of themselves next to models and fast cars and eating steak or whatever, is that whenever they decide that it’s time to share their success, they always talk about their secrets, whether it’s Hard Work And Perseverance or The Key To Weight Loss or A Certain Number Of Rules To Power or Women Need To Be Kept In Cages, as opposed to Be A Lucky Person, which is what these people actually are. The reason success as these folks tend to define it is rare is self-evident once you see that. They didn’t do anything special. I mean, they worked hard. They rapped, or they rowed, or they built cages for humans or whatever, but they were lucky enough to be capable of doing that, or they lucked into being the right combination of talented and in the right place. Or they were simply in the right place, or not in the wrong place. Esselstyn also has a Bronze Star from Vietnam and I can’t help but wonder about the 5 feet to his left and his right for certain extremely kinetic moments of his service. And all of it can go away. Investments crash. Public tastes change. A healthy body gets sick. The Romanian police stop accepting your bribes. All of these people will point to their hard work, but no one is working harder to survive than the people you’ve never heard of. So much hard work goes into being just a normal surviving person in the world, and so much more hard work goes into being a person who is just scraping by.

As for Esselstyn, Adams seems to be basing his diet plan off of the one the good doctor advises. I can’t assess any of this for efficacy (at least one other physician at the Cleveland Clinic seems to have their doubts, if wiki is a reliable source) but I grew up in a family of doctors and most doctors seem to have their hearts in the right place. They’re also patient focused and not society focused. That’s for elected officials, right?

Adams points out, correctly, that when he returned to Brooklyn, he realized that a lot of his constituents didn’t have access to healthy food, living in - most people use the term “food desert”, he uses “food swamp”, whatever. He then says that before he healed his constituents he needed to heal himself and I feel like that’s not how being an elected official works? Also, why can’t he work on both? He has a job? His job is actually to take care of his constituents, his health is the secondary concern, as the job category Public Servant implies. Well, regardless, having identified a problem, I’m sure he’ll solve it at some point.

Anyway, he goes plant based and in his telling the weight just falls off of him, though it’s never stated that his weight was the problem. People tend to take the mental shortcut that fat equals unhealthy, but that’s at best a spectrum over a large population, and also, depending on how you define it, an extremely large percentage of the population is currently fat, and clearly not all of them are in dire health. His doctor says he’s never seen medication be this effective, and Adams replies that he stopped taking his meds months ago. This is really dangerous! Adams doesn’t put a caveat on any of this that he is not a doctor and isn’t giving medical advice. If he’s lucky, he’ll get sued by people who survived taking his advice, and not by the survivors of people who didn’t live through it! He doesn’t advise planning your care with a doctor. He simply says that being vegan is the key to health. Veganism is comorbid with having the time to truly consider your food options and plan for them, because it’s not really possible to do it without having that time. Having time is typically comorbid with having money. There are plenty of vegans that aren’t wealthy, of course, and veganism is great for so many reasons - it’s also very difficult even in Queens, I’ve tried. But what percentage of positive health outcomes for vegans as a population are due to the diet, and what are due to having time and money? Later in the book Adams will point out that there is a huge disparity in lifespans based off of taking a trip of only a few miles in Baltimore, and that’s not because the people living Fairfield are meat eaters and there are only vegan people in SoBo (god they call it SoBo). Fairfield is poor and lacks services. SoBo (guhh) is rich. And I’m truly not here to get up anyone’s ass about any foods they want to eat. Eat a hot dog if you want, it doesn’t matter to me, and it shouldn’t be determinative of your health outcomes, nor would it be if we had better healthcare access, or really, like, basic healthcare access in this stupid country and fuck I’m doing a low rent version of Maintenence Phase again, sorry.

We’re still, somehow, in the introduction, and Adams is now introducing us to his friend Cliff, who used to be athletic, but broke his leg in his 50s, setting him on a period of declining health into his early 60s, when he had a heart attack. Quote:

“When Cliff told me what happened, I said, “Brother, you have to change up the food you eat! You need to cut out animal products and eat only whole-plant foods.” I told him about Dr. Esselstyn’s workshop in Cleveland and to check out the multitude of plant-based resources available online.

But was food Cliff’s problem? Unlike me, Cliff ate a fairly decent diet for most of his life. He didn’t eat meat or drink soda. He has a salad every day. But he devoured fish and dairy products. Cliff loved cheese, shellfish, lobster, crab and shrimp. Seafood is good for you, he had always thought. That’s what everyone was told.

…

[A]fter Cliff’s heart attack, his doctor simply prescribed cholesterol-lowering pills. “Just take these and keep doing what you’re doing,” he said.

The former NYPD detective wasn’t satisfied. “My friend Eric thinks I should try a plant-based diet,” he told his cardiologist during a checkup. “He thinks all that fish and cheese might have caused my heart attack.”

The doctor sighed, “That’s probably too difficult for you. It’s a lot of work changing your diet. The medication is a more realistic solution.”

“What do you eat,” Cliff asked him.

He tried to change the subject, but Cliff pressed the point. Finally, the cardiologist replied, “The research suggests avoiding animal products can prevent heart disease, so, yes, I eat a whole-food, plant based diet. Lots of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. And I don’t use oil - that’s also processed.”

1. Adams seems to know a lot about what went on in a private doctor’s appointment.

2. That said, the doctor raises an excellent point about the difficulty of maintaining this sort of diet.

3. Adams admits that Cliff was most of the way there on this diet, he already was a pescetarian, but he still had a catastrophic heart attack at a reasonably young age.

4. Have you met doctors? No doctor eats this diet except the one doctor, Esselstyn, who maintains that everyone else should to the point that he writes books and has seminars about it.

5. Cliff, if you’re listening, no one who responds to the news that you had a heart attack by telling you what to eat is your friend.

Anyway, Adams is happy to tell us that within a year of doing what Eric Adams advised instead of what his doctor advised, Cliff lost 30 pounds and was able to go off of “almost all” of his cholesterol controlling medications. This is the first time Cliff’s weight is mentioned and this is a common thing Adams does, and a lot of politicians do. Adams will say something like “We increased police presence in the subways 500% and 15 new restaurants opened,” but it won’t be clear at all that one had anything to do with the other. Was Cliff’s weight linked to his heart disease? Again, across the entire population it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that as weight goes up, negative health outcomes trend upwards as well, but the mechanisms of those outcomes are still the source of debate, and correlation isn’t causation, so: did Cliff’s weight have any bearing on Cliff’s health outcomes? Or was the 30 pounds lost to a body that didn’t really need to lose 30 pounds, but was simply suddenly eating much less in the way of calories because of a sudden traumatic hospitalization?

What percentage of his cholesterol meds is defined by “almost all” and what percentage is still being taken by this extremely real guy Cliff? Was Adams, who’d attended one seminar and was on this diet for maybe 6 months at all concerned that he was telling a person who’d just been through an extremely physically stressful event to completely alter his diet, based only on his say so? Did he have any reservations about potential impacts to the health and well being of a person who was already in the health and well being context of having had a fucking heart attack?

I should at some point bring up the number of times Eric Adams has been seen in public eating meat, so I’ll do that now, and probably will again. For any number of reasons, this pisses me off, including the fact that I am actually a vegetarian and to claim to be one I have to not eat meat.

I should also raise the issue that there are plenty of cultures, societies and countries that have a lot of animal products on the menu, and among the wealthy ones, the better health outcomes tend to trend with the ones that have universal healthcare and fuck I’m just doing Maintenence Phase again and Maintenece Phase does it miles better. 

But this shit is really bad. Insidious. I expected Eric Adams to spout pablum about how to be more like Eric Adams. I did not expect him to be doing a classical diet and wellness grifter book, and it’s horrible, in large part, because Adams is one of the most powerful Democrats in the country, overseeing a budget of billions that could be applied to creating better health outcomes. Making one day a week meatless in schools is not that. Telling people what and how to eat isn’t that either. Connecting people to consistent, free, preventative care, general practitioners, medications, that’s how we get better outcomes, not telling people that the problem is what THEY personally eat.

Anyway, uncontent to give unsolicited diet advice to his friend, he gives it to his 80 year old mom, who is also diabetic. She doesn’t go for it so he sends his friend over to her house to throw out her food. That’s a normal and good thing to do to an 80 year old woman. Adams’s mom died relatively recently, just before he was inaugurated, at the age of 83, so in his telling, switching to his diet, she lived another three years. That’s certainly not nothing, and in Adams’ telling, her diabetes came under control without meds (despite his admission that she still ate a lot of animal products and processed foods, just less of them, which was apparently not enough for Cliff). At any rate, having recently lost my own mother, I don’t want to appear to be diminishing Adams’s loss in any way. It’s a terrible thing to lose a parent, but he did tell a story where he threw away her food.

At any rate, now that Adams has written about a quarter of this book, he can wind down the introduction by informing us that quote:

“The onset of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and countless other chronic diseases begins in childhood, many decades before the first symptoms are noticed.”

Surely that’s the last time he’ll imply that Alzheimer’s, a disease who’s process remains a complete mystery to science, is somehow related to diet, but even for doing just that amount I feel like I should note, as someone who recently lost both of his parents to dementia: Eric Adams should absolutely lick an outlet while standing in a metal bucket full of salt water.

On to chapter 1!

Chapter 1 is called The Science of Plant Based Nutrition. It is, thank god, relatively short, and my goal is to engage with the science he quotes as infrequently as possible. I’m not a physician or an expert of any sort; I walk dogs and make weird podcasts. My assumption is that the science is probably bullshit, or at least misrepresented, but my goal, as I keep reminding myself, is to deal with Adams, not the logical flaws in his dietary grift. It’s a dietary grift, the whole thing is a flaw. I’m trying to come up with a unified theory of a bad mayor.

Adams starts off his chapter on the science of this diet by assuring the reader that it can cure, not only diabetes and heart disease but prevent breast, colon and prostate cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia (again, eat glass, Eric), depression (absolutely fuck yourself Eric), acne and eczema. I said I’d ignore the science and focus on the man, but, in my defense, snake oil salesman is a type of man. 

The other reason I shouldn’t spend a lot of time debunking science in this chapter is that there is virtually zero science presented in this chapter. It’s just more anecdotes. A famous doctor (who wiki informs me died at the relatively young age of 69) invented a diet kinda like this one. In another story, that doctor helped a lady who was sick. Bill Clinton went vegan and reversed his heart disease which is definitely due to the diet and not the physician access that comes with being the FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE FUCKING UNITED STATES WHO IS ALSO WORTH ABOUT 100 MILLION DOLLERS. It goes on like this. Some of the anecdotes are ones Adams seemingly repeats from other books about this diet, and contain virtually no information about the person they’re theoretically about, except that the diet worked for them.

Also Adams lets us know that he was told to turn in his driver’s license by his ophthalmologist after being diagnosed with diabetes related blindness and I’m pretty sure he didn’t do that, and he then claims his vision is now fine. For all I know it is, but it doesn’t seem great that Adams was like “let me keep driving while ignoring this and other medical advice in favor of a weird diet I don’t actually maintain, as I drive my car through this pedestrian filled plaza on my way to a private club where I think I’ll have the branzino.” It would potentially explain why safer streets advocates kept noticing that Adams’ personal car was illegally parked on the sidewalk during his tenure as Brooklyn Borough President.

Adams notes that cancer also kills Black people at disproportionately high rates, and he seems to think that Black people all eat the same thing, so that must be the cause of all their health problems, as opposed to many Black people facing similar systemic, racist, barriers to care, disease prevention and wealth accumulation. I mean, Black folks, generally, have less access to good food, but they also, generally, have less access to mansions. Meanwhile, most people who live in mansions live a lot longer, so it’s probably the mansions, and only the mansions, that are the issue.

This is an intentionally stupid and reductive way of making this point, but I think it’s relatively clear, yeah?

Adams next turns to a section on how to prevent Alzheimer’s and dementia. Apparently it’s with this diet. I’ve already given the reason I cannot assess this insane argument in a professional way, but fortunately you don’t come to me for professional behavior, so if you know Eric Adams, please roughly shove his head as close to the speaker as you can when I say the following: Eric Adams, stick a starving ferret face first up your ass and let it eat its way to freedom.

My mom was a vegetarian for 25 years.

Good news, Eric Adams wants you to know your dick will work better on this diet.

And your skin will be clearer. Well maybe. Maybe your depression will be better on this diet. Adams says, quote:

“Milk-producing cows are typically milked while pregnant, resulting in hormones that may trigger acne breakouts in humans. Studies also suggest that other skin conditions, such as eczema, are linked to dairy products as well.

Finally, a plant based diet isn’t just good for your physical health; it might help your mental health as well. Depression, of course, is a deeply complex condition that is best combated alongside a mental-health professional, but recent studies do suggest that diet plays a role.”

May, studies suggest, might, studies do suggest. Boy, I’m convinced.

Look, again, I’m a vegetarian for complex and personal reasons, you don’t need to sell me on a diet without a lot of meat in it. But a diet that’s going to revolutionize your whole life is being promoted with a lot of mays and sortas.

On to Chapter 2 The Real Origins of Soul Food.

Adams does some broad strokes assessment of the origins of three soul food dishes: fried chicken, chitlins and mac and cheese. He points out that the first two were survival foods for slaves, and the last was probably the product of slaves preparing the dish for slave owners, and then, after emancipation, migrating it north and mingling with Italian immigrants. This seems relatively uncontroversial. From my own ethnic background, consider the potato knish. While I have done very little research on the origins of the food, it’s clearly diaspora based: it’s made reasonably quickly from easily acquired ingredients, it’s calorie and nutrient rich, it’s fist sized and portable, and dense enough to throw at someone chasing you.

I love a knish, but there’s a lot of food like this out there. It’s hard to read The Grapes of Wrath and then look at fried dough at the fair the same way. Of course, Black Americans experienced a shockingly, uniquely appalling history, and the foods that have survived to now are borne on that history. I don’t feel particularly qualified to comment on Soul Food beyond that, but then, apparently, neither does Adams, pivoting to a truly strange and vaguely conspiratorial discussion of how urban fast food franchises became Black coded places to eat, which… look: Black people are 12% of the population and about 25% of Americans live in city cores, about 50% live in the suburbs, and the rest are rural. McDonalds wants everyone to eat McDonalds, and Donald Trump wouldn’t be eating it if it was Black coded. Urban Black populations certainly received narrow, demographics based outreach in those markets, but white folks in the exurbs also see a lot of advertising that features people who look like white folks in the exurbs pulling their extremely large vehicles up at drive thru windows.

Once you start down a rabbit hole of there being shadowy forces at play in just about anything (as opposed to, in the case of urban Black Americans, straightforwardly racist policies by established local governments and the feds enacted out in the open, like redlining and not granting Black soldiers access to the GI Bill, to name just a couple) it doesn’t take long to start talking about who those shadowy forces might be, and for reasons that are unclear to me, conspiracists typically land on those of us who love a knish. Maybe just talk about things that are actually happening.

Adams does at this point, to his credit, pivot again to discussing health care access and treatment disparities in America, highlighting the fact that a few miles difference will knock decades off your life expectancy in areas of the country like Baltimore and Chicago. He does not talk about the costs in healthcare, and the toll that poverty takes on access, but he does make a reasonable assessment of the systemic and internalized racism in the medical community when dealing with Black patients, which has been proven to generate negative outcomes. The good news, he says, is that it’s never too late to change your diet. Literally, this is his solution. Quote:

“We are also at the mercy of a health-care system that fundamentally treats African Americans differently than white Americans.

…

[T]his sort of internalized racism means that Black patents too often are not given the same care and attention that white patients are.

…

It’s a self defeating cycle and it means that Black folks are getting sick sooner and dying earlier than everyone else in America. And the health-care system isn’t doing anything to stop it.

The good news is, as we saw in the previous chapter and as my own experience shows, it’s never too late to change your diet.”

Yes, you’ll have to take care of yourself, because while it would be nice if there was someone in, say, the position of chief executive of the largest city in America who had written about recognizing these problems who could therefore advocate for systemic and legislative changes to address these disparities, unfortunately etc etc this joke is making me tired and sad.

It’s not really that weird for me to say to someone else something like “I don’t think the government is gonna help us get the medications we might need, so we probably need to figure out a way to get them for ourselves.” And then pick up a crowbar.

Eric Adams, however, has been a politician for closing on 20 years, and his solution for the problems plaguing the society that hired him to positions of power is: people should buy his diet book with a diet that doesn’t work because no diet has ever worked, if diets worked, they would have worked by now. It reminds me of the episode of his podcast when his own homeless services team was telling him over and over again that the barrier to housing was housing costs and he kept redirecting to individual mental health. The man doesn’t seem to understand that the role of government is to govern.

Chapter 3 Eric’s Guide to Becoming Healthy at Last

Adams writes that he doesn’t need for you to follow all of his steps or follow them in order. He wants you to work on his plan in whatever way works for you. So don’t stress, the only thing he asks right now is that you immediately start a plant based diet of mostly whole foods.

Now that you’ve done that, create a network of support. Sure, easy shit. Everyone has a tight knit group of people around them who don’t have much going on so they can snap into action to support an individual diet. Also, he says, you’ll need a supportive doctor. Thankfully we have universal healthcare access in this country, provided free at the point of care, so that’s easy peasy.

But not just any doctor: you need one who believes that you can reverse your disease, not manage it, and who doesn’t want you to take drugs. In other words, if your current doctor believes you should take “medications” for “diseases”, you should leave them. If your doctor doesn’t believe that plant based diets are best, you should also leave them. Outside of this being bad advice from a survival standpoint, and outside of the potential lawsuits that Adams would have faced had anyone actually read this book, have you ever tried to switch physicians? It’s time consuming shit to find someone new who takes your insurance and has open appointments within the next decade.

Adams says you need a doctor that’s up to date on the latest research, just like former police officer, State Senator, and at the time of the writing of this book, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.

Another question you should be asking your doctor is whether they believe heart disease, diabetes and cancer are solely hereditary diseases and I guess that’s a fun way to get a very educated person to say “literally no one believes that.”

Having said that you need to start a plant based diet of whole foods right now, Adams, now that we’ve gone on a journey of like 5 pages, says that it’ll probably be too hard to start a plant based diet of whole foods right now, so maybe dip your toe with Meatless Mondays.

The next advice Adams gives is to smile and laugh. That's pretty good advice, so I suppose I’ll try to make some time to do whatever the opposite of reading this book is.

It’s time to find out what to eat, so Eric Adams tells us to eat a plant based diet and then literally lists everything he eats, and not just the dishes themselves, but, like, he goes on a tear of listing vegetables like we’re complete dipshits who’ve never heard of kale. Then he tells us fruits exist and basically names every fruit.

All that padding and he can’t muster more than a half a page to explain why we shouldn’t cook with any oil, and his explanation is, essentially, “I personally don’t believe that oil is good for you.”

On to fiber, about which Adams writes, quote:

“One of the most wonderful parts of a plant-based diet is that you will learn that you can have daily, easy bowel movements.”

Thrilled to know that the shit’s just sliding out of my mayor.

Salt and sugar are bad, writes Adams, breaking the news to exactly no one. This kicks off a section of filler where he basically just reminds us what foods are considered healthy and what foods are not. Green veggies have calcium, you don’t need that much protein, candy is bad for you, vitamins are good for you, etc. 

Eric Adams encourages you to be adventurous and try foods that Eric Adams hadn’t heard of somehow. Like tofu, or tempeh. In the year of our lord 2020 Adams literally includes a pronunciation guide for quinoa in his book.

Adams next includes a section chiding us to remember that just because a food is vegan, that doesn’t make it healthy. This is incredibly obvious, so I’d skip including it, except that this is the second or third time he’s given a chunk of the book over to this point without seeming to realize he’d done so.

He lists more fruits and vegetables and tells us what they are as if the reader has never heard of, like, peas or cherries.

Shop smart, Adams exhorts us. He reminds us that the goal is to eat plant based whole foods, so when going to the grocery store we should buy plant based whole foods, and just for the sake of making sure we’ve really got it here, and certainly not because the word count is still too low according to the publisher, why not list some more plant based whole foods? He does that for a bit.

He offers us some important money saving tips: buy in bulk and comparison shop. And that’s it for the money saving tips. All of this is the sort of padding one does when you’ve run completely out of time. If he wanted to pad his book more competently he’d mention, like, coupon sites and places you can buy online. He’d bring up finding credit cards that offer cash back on groceries, and so forth. Not that these are necessarily good ideas, but they’re just ones that come to mind when thinking out loud in a relaxed kind of way. But, if you’re in a panic because the publisher needs the manuscript right now because you sat on it until the last minute, you might find yourself listing fruits and throwing in “comparison shop” before pivoting to a section written while looking around your kitchen at what gadgets you own.

So, Adams tells us to buy the following: A food processor, a mixer, a hot air fryer, a pressure cooker, a spiralizer, a mandolin, a hand blender, a steamer, something called a Yonanas banana dessert maker, and, uh, spices.

Don’t worry, though, you can still eat out while on this diet (the mayor himself does so all the time and is often photographed eating meat when does so). Just order side dishes and appetizers. Or, you know, go to restaurants in New York City, or just about any major city, almost all of which, even the steakhouses, offer options to cover most diets and lifestyles. To be fair, one might not catch a change in dining culture that happened about 15 years ago if one eats primarily at private clubs run by one’s criminal cronies.

Now in order to be healthy you also need to get some exercise. Fortunately the mayor has some incredibly vague tips towards that end like taking the stairs and moving your body. Take a walk on the lunch hour you definitely get at work. Stop using that robotic vacuum you definitely own and start using a regular vacuum for the carpeted floors you definitely have. If you have an assistant, don’t give them all your work. Use an exercise machine when you watch your shows. Who has an assistant but hasn’t heard of quinoa? Who has a rowing machine in front of their TV in a closet sized NYC apartment? Who is the intended audience for this book aside from whomever was telling him that if he didn’t hit a certain word count he’d have to give back the advance?

An answer might orbit the home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Eric Adams owns. It was never actually clear that he met NYC’s residency requirements to run for mayor.

Adams advises walking your dog. As a dog walker vegetarian who has struggled with body image issues my whole life, let me just say that this advice solved all my problems and I do not hate Eric Adams.

Following this is a series of headings and maybe three short paragraphs under each containing the least essential information I’ve ever read. These are:

Find a spiritual practice. Don’t beat yourself up. Ask for help if you need it. Go at your own pace. Don’t brag. Have fun. And don’t forget to connect with Eric Adams via email, on social media or at his lectures. He doesn’t give an email, links to his social media, or a place to find out about his lectures.

Chapter 4 is recipes. He apparently asked like 50 people, including Moby and Alan Cummings to give him some recipes.

It’s the single most half-assed thing I’ve ever seen, and I went to a liberal arts school, I once saw a music major play a recycling bin full of broken glass with a hammer in front of one of the most famous living classical composers. 

She plugged her ears.

Some of these recipes don’t look half bad, but they also contain ingredients that would be hard for people other than Moby to source, like millet, or arrowroot powder. Or ingredients that Adams specifically called out as being bad for you, like orange juice, (he made a whole thing about the sugar content). Or they just straightforwardly contain sugar, like the sweet potato cornbread, which has a half a cup of it. It sounds really good. But it’s clearly not within the guidelines of the diet Adams is espousing. The pasta with kale and sausage contains beyond meat sausage, which is also delicious, and roughly as good for you as regular old sausage. It’s a sodium bomb, full of fat, and I love it, but why is it in this fucking book? The whole point of this book was to tell you to eat plant based whole foods, which Adams defined as three ingredients or less. Beyond meat sausages are hyper processed and contain over 30 ingredients. The peanut butter cookies have a full cup of maple syrup, which Adams called out, correctly, as just another type of sugar.

And then the book just ends. Adams doesn’t wind it up or anything. There’s a fruit pizza recipe, end notes, some pro forma acknowledgements and we’re out.

So what conclusions can be drawn about New York’s weird and pretty crappy mayor from this book?

Adams doesn’t seem to be great with financial advice. He talks about how inexpensive his diet is, but a) time cost is not part of his calculation, and clearly this will take a considerable amount of time. Among the reasons fast food is popular, outside of tasting really good and being reasonably inexpensive is that it is fast. B) The recipes require a lot of specialty ingredients and Adams wants you to buy a bunch of specialty equipment. I don’t want to over read here, but there may be evidence in these pages for the reason the NYC budget is suddenly, surprisingly, completely out of hand.

Adams is weirdly unguarded with his advice. His advice is terrible, of course, but it’s not unusual to find terrible advice in a diet or wellness book. It is pretty unusual for a book of medical advice to do no ass covering, particularly if it’s written by a person who is at a significant risk of being sued, like a politician. But, unlike a lot of politicians, Adams isn’t a lawyer, he’s a cop. And cops are used to just saying shit like they’re authorities. Some of them even come to believe the things they say.

Like a lot of people in positions of authority that they didn’t really earn, Adams also seems to think his word is as good as action. Talking isn’t doing, but Adams doesn’t really seem to know that.

Adams seems to believe that if he doesn’t know about something, no one knows about it, and, writing in 2020 he wants to tell us about kale as if it’s some big secret, and not an item that was added to McDonald’s menu in 2016.

Adams is a grifter and likes hanging out with the morally flexible. We’ve pretty well established that his campaign took a lot of money from people who probably were not supposed to be giving money to campaigns, and that seems to be the focus of more than one ongoing investigation. He seems to have a lot of folks around him who’ve committed fraud or received bribes, or, you know, tried to commit murder, like Remy Ma, who blurbed his book, and did a six year stint as a guest of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women for straight up shooting someone in the stomach outside of a Manhattan club. Funny how it’s always the law and order types, right?

Adams is half assed, the entire back 2/3s of the book falls completely apart, I’ve talked about how padded it is, it’s honestly barely a book at all. But Adams is also calculated in his half assedness. It’s very clear that he’s willing to work hard at what he thinks is important or self-enriching. Even with padding, it takes effort to write a book, particularly to convince someone to publish it. In a similar way, and on a much larger scale, it takes effort to become the mayor. It takes a lot of work to be the mayor, and Adams is energetic as hell, he’s out all the time, operating on almost no sleep, living a life that I’d find exhausting. But, that’s all stuff he wants to do, or that he thinks will help him personally. Meanwhile, throughout the book he identifies and talks about the many systemic factors that create health care access issues for Black people in America, that create bad outcomes for Black people, that literally kill Black people, that take years off of the life of the average Black American, and, now that he is the mayor of the largest city in America, he has done absolutely nothing about it.

Welp, that’s it for this book. As of this writing there hasn’t been a lot of movement on the Eric Adams investigations front. There’s some news on the budget, but it’s moving fast enough, and you’ll be shocked here, weirdly enough, that I think it best to give it some room to settle out a bit before I talk about it, so I’ll leave some time for that in the next episode. For now, just know that the mayor has restored some funding, said some unsettling shit, and tried to get the publisher to recall the insane book that kicked off the interest we’re all suddenly showing in his literary output, but my copy just arrived in the mail, so in our next episode I’ll be discussing 2009’s Don’t Let It Happen by Eric Leroy Adams.

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My thanks, as always, to John Coyne.

I’ll talk to you next time.