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(upbeat music)

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- In the early days of the pandemic

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when it was still cold outside,

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and everybody was forced to be indoors

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bread of all things became an icon

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of a return to domesticity.

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Famously, no one could find flour

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at any of the grocery stores

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and King Arthur sales were
up something like 2000%.

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(bell ringing)
(record scratching)

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Instagram grids were awash
in pornographic crumb shots.

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Bubbly loaves fresh out of the oven,

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in quarantine we all
learned how to bake bread.

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And we also gave up on hating carbs.

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(record scratching)

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For the last several
years we've been obsessed

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with carb cutting diets, like
Atkins or the paleo diet,

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or most recently the ketogenic diet.

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Who's gonna work on a beach body

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if you can barely even go to the beach.

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So did the pandemic
kill the ketogenic diet?

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The body uses blood sugar as
its main source of energy.

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When we eat fewer carbs or no carbs,

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the body turns to stored fat.

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And that's how you get
that fat burning effect.

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In January of 2019

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Google searches for the
ketogenic diet peaked harder

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and higher than searches for
any similarly faddish diet.

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So what happened?

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How do we go from
bragging about weight loss

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to showing off our very
rotund sourdough loaves?

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Probably a global health crisis.

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I spoke to Dr. Marcelo Campos,

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a family doctor based in Boston,

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and he says that pleasure
has a lot to do with it.

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Quote: "It goes back to the
thing that food is pleasure

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"and there's not a lot
of pleasure these days."

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The pandemic has kept people

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from doing what they normally like to do,

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going out, seeing their
friends, going for a jog.

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And in the absence of these things,

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people have turned to the places

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that they can find pleasure, like carbs.

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No matter how diligent people were

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about their previous diets or
their desire to lose weight,

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the desire for pleasure is
really trumping all of that.

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Even Dr. Campos is figuring out

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how to make his favorite treats at home.

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And his patients are talking
about the quarantine 15,

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the quarantine 30,

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but it's really hard to blame Americans

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for engaging in a little self soothing

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during this incredibly stressful time.

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The real question is
will our pandemic-induced

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love affair with carbs
survive the next diet craze?

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That is a question for another day.

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(rain falling)
(thunder rumbling)