Some cool folks

Posted by Alexandra Moe

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/03/girls-sports-physical-football-wrestling/686416/?utm_source=feed

At the turn of the 20th century, a sporty American woman would have had relatively few arenas to test her skill: croquet, maybe, or archery, or basketball played gently in an ankle-length skirt. Public displays of aggression were almost universally condemned, and colliding was especially unsavory. To avoid it, women’s-basketball competitions prohibited “snatching” the ball until the 1960s.

Although men’s and women’s sports generally follow the same fundamental objectives today—stealing the basketball is a smart tactic in anyone’s game—physical contact in women’s sports remains controversial. When Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese exchange elbows in the WNBA, outrage and concern inevitably follow. Meanwhile, NBA players sparring over the ball, or NHL players outright brawling, is typically treated as business as usual.

And yet, girls seem to be more interested than ever in contact. Ice hockey, rugby, and football (of the tackle, seven-on-seven, and flag varieties) are all among the fastest-growing sports for teenage girls. And at American high schools last academic year, more girls played on teams for wrestling than field hockey, gymnastics, or dance.

A high schooler today can join any number of sports teams, including, in some districts, rodeo or bass fishing. Basketball and soccer remain among the most-played girls’ team sports, and typically the first ones that girls play at a young age, Karissa Niehoff, the CEO of the National Federation of State High School Associations, told me. But by high school, not everyone can make the basketball or soccer team, and private leagues can be both competitive and expensive. That leaves a deep bench of untapped players for newer and less conventional sports—bass fishing, yes, but also roller hockey, flag football, and, for girls, sports that traditionally haven’t allowed them to play.

[Read: What’s lost when only rich kids play sports]

Girls’ participation in such sports is growing so quickly in part because it’s starting from a small denominator. But they also seem to offer girls something that traditional options don’t. Some are particularly welcoming to beginners: They take all comers, are relatively affordable, and consume less time than other popular sports. Flag-football games last about 40 minutes—half the time of a typical soccer game—and practice usually precedes the game, making scheduling relatively easy.

Many high-growth sports appeal to a rising cultural sense that women and girls can—and should—bulk up. Girls drop sports at twice the rate of boys, and nearly half cite body-image concerns for doing so. “Thin to win” narratives are still deeply embedded in certain sports, such as long-distance running and Nordic skiing, Nicole LaVoi, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, told me. In wrestling, too, competitors sometimes resort to unhealthy strategies to stay in a given weight class. But in flag football and rugby, this preoccupation is largely irrelevant. Flag is about agility; several players I spoke with lift weights to help them achieve faster, more explosive movement. A girl interested in playing football 10 years ago may have been teased for being too masculine, LaVoi said. But the popularity of girls’-football programs today suggests that Americans are more likely to accept that a middle-school girl can be a linebacker.

Flag football, which has seen particularly steep growth over the past five years among teen girls, is technically a noncontact sport, which is part of what makes it appeal to safety-conscious parents of both boys and girls; the NFL started promoting it heavily in the past decade, when youth participation in tackle football was declining amid concerns about concussions. But it is viscerally physical: Players dive for catches and tumble into one another as they pull flags. It’s notable that girls are seeking out this sort of play at a time when so much of adolescent socialization happens over screens. Research from the Women’s Sports Foundation shows that social connection and friendship are the main reasons girls play sports.

[Read: You’ll become a fan of these strange, fierce girls]

Evelyn, a 13-year-old linebacker on a flag-football team in Washington, D.C., told me that flag football’s culture is “nicer” than the culture of the softball, lacrosse, baseball, and swimming teams she’d previously joined and then left. When she joined the flag team, she had an easier time bonding with her teammates, she said. “When I make a good flag pull, my team immediately surrounds me—like I did something good. I did it for my team.” Other sports that put kids in close physical proximity are associated with their own social benefits. For example, a recent study of Turkish adolescent boys found that wrestling may improve psychological resilience, not just because athletes become more physically dominant, but also because the close physical encounters require sustained attention and emotional control, which may promote self-regulation.

Contact sports may lead more girls to play team sports of any kind—something they could benefit from for the rest of their lives. Girls who play sports throughout childhood tend to have better physical health in adulthood compared with those who never played or dropped out. Kids who play sports are likely to experience better mental health, stronger friendships, higher confidence, more positive body image, and superior academic achievement, according to research from the Tucker Center. In a 2014 survey of 400 female corporate executives, 94 percent had played a sport. Sally Roberts, the CEO of the nonprofit Wrestle Like a Girl, credits her high-school wrestling career with setting her up for success elsewhere in life: She was the first in her family to graduate high school and college, and became a three-time national wrestling champion. The growth of more gladiatorial girls’ sports has been successful enough that professional leagues are starting to make long-term investments in them. Several NHL teams sponsor girls’ ice-hockey clinics and camps. In December, the NFL announced it was developing a professional flag-football league for women.   

[From the April 2025 issue: Why aren’t women allowed to play baseball?]

Evelyn’s team lost its fall championship in double overtime. But in December, the players were back on the field at a Washington, D.C., middle school. When the game began, Emi, a 13-year-old wide receiver, tumbled toward my feet at the sideline after having her flag pulled. She bounced up and returned to the huddle. Her father explained to me that Emi is naturally very shy, but since starting flag, she’s become more self-assured and comfortable meeting new people.

Later, Emi ran a route, broke free from the defensive back, and caught the ball for a touchdown. Her teammates swarmed her so thoroughly that I couldn’t see her buried under the heap in the end zone.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/03/girls-sports-physical-football-wrestling/686416/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Jacob Stern

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/lightning-strike-survivors-body-mind/686057/?utm_source=feed

Photographs by Stacy Kranitz

Updated at 11:04 p.m. ET on March 23, 2026

What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?

There is no easy analogue. A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000. A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people black out instantly upon being struck. Others recall the moment vividly, as if in slow motion: the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. “It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,” one survivor reported. “I felt an incredible pulsing,” another said, “a burning sensation from head to toe.”

The severity of the resulting injury depends on, among countless other variables, how the electricity enters the body, and where, and the path the current takes through it. Direct strikes are the deadliest, but most strikes are indirect—a side flash coming off a tree, a current running through the ground, a streamer rising up from below—and most people survive these.

In some cases, the damage is immediately apparent. Lightning, in addition to being very bright and very loud, is very hot—the air around it can hit temperatures about five times hotter than the surface of the sun—and so it can singe or burn people. The shock wave from the strike can fling victims a great distance, breaking bones or causing concussions as they land. The current inscribes some victims’ skin with mysterious scarlike patterns called Lichtenberg figures, which resemble the limbs of a barren tree—or the branching structure of lightning itself.

Just as often, though, survivors manifest no burns, bruises, or scars. Even Lichtenberg figures generally vanish within a few days; no one knows exactly why. On the outside, survivors look normal. Which doesn’t mean they feel that way.

Many of the body’s essential systems—the heart, the brain, the nervous system—depend on electrical signals, and lightning can throw these thoroughly out of whack. Forgetfulness, sleep problems, sexual dysfunction, and headaches that manifest as intense pressure—like “my eyeballs are just popping out,” one person told me—are common. Some people become hypersensitive to noise; others lose their hearing entirely. A few, almost miraculously, are freed of a prior ailment: a bad leg healed; vision, once impaired, restored. Pretty much all of them feel permanently off balance. Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life—how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.

Phantom sensations are prevalent. One woman told me she often feels as though water is running down her limbs. Another, in a Facebook group for survivors, said she feels “an indescribable itching” coming from inside the back of her head. Inexplicable odors can emerge; food can taste like cardboard or glue. The symptoms can last for decades. Yet standard neurological imaging, such as MRI scans, almost never detects abnormalities, and most physicians, who understand the symptoms’ basis in only the most rudimentary sense, can offer little useful counsel. Faith in survivors’ stories—among friends, colleagues, even loved ones—can waver.

The most fundamental consequences of being struck by lightning are often metaphysical, and not easily communicable. How does falling victim to one of the most notoriously unlikely of all misfortunes reorient your sense of chance, of fate? How does it feel, when you’re trying to describe the most transformative experience of your life, to be met, routinely, with disbelief?

Last May, I attended a conference of Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International. It was held, as it often is, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a smallish town on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains best known as the home of Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s Appalachia-themed amusement park. The town’s main drag resembles a sort of family-friendly version of the Las Vegas strip. Instead of casinos, there are dinner-show theaters, go-kart tracks, and a sprawling Margarita­ville megacomplex, its central fountain inhabited by giant animatronic Brachiosaurus that roar from time to time.

The conference was staged at a Staybridge Suites just off the strip. About 30 people were there, mostly men who looked to be over the age of 60, many of them conference regulars who’d been struck long ago, though there were some women and younger attendees too. Most had brought their spouse and were making a weekend of it. They were there primarily to connect with other people who understood what they had been through.

Like senior prom, the conference always has a theme, and this year’s was Hawaii. Survivors wore leis, and pineapples adorned with sunglasses sat on every table in the Staybridge’s modest meeting room. A folding table converted into a makeshift tiki bar dispensed virgin piña coladas and hurricanes. Against this backdrop, specialists gave presentations on trauma therapies. Attendees compared notes on which treatments have worked for them and which haven’t.

In one session, a man I’ll call Matt, a young, redheaded survivor who for a year and a half after his strike could hardly feel pain, temperature, or most other sensations on much of his skin, said laser therapy had eventually restored his nerves. Having a massage therapist work on his vagus nerve had helped too. For a while, he’d slept inside a Faraday cage, to protect him from static electricity during storms. Today, to cope with intrusive thoughts about lightning, he dumps a packet of salt in his mouth because when you do that, he said, “that’s all you can think about.”

A woman I’ll call Caroline, who’d been struck on the job two years earlier, used that same strategy, she said, only with Warheads candies instead of salt. One problem she had not solved was that no matter how hot she gets, no matter how hard she exerts herself, she can’t sweat anymore. Matt said he’d had the same problem for a while. What fixed it for him was spending significant time in a sauna—up to 90 minutes three times a day.

If the discussion had a certain DIY quality to it, that reflects the paucity of medical literature on what lightning does to the body. Few systematic studies have been conducted, and most physicians have never treated a strike victim. Many survivors’ experiences defy medical explanation, so doctors have little to say.

Given the limited counsel that the medical establishment can offer them, survivors tend to be open to alternative therapies, but they’re also wary of being taken advantage of. At the conference, several attendees reminisced about the year when two “hippies” had shown up and started hawking New Age–type products. “They said they were linked in voodoo,” one survivor recalled.

Much of the group conversation focused on Caroline, whose injury was the freshest. She used to cook her family elaborate meals, but “after the accident,” she said, “I left the oven on so many times that I even ended up burning the element out.” For a while she refused to get a new one, because she worried she’d burn the house down. She leaves sticky notes everywhere to remind her of what she needs to do, but even so, she rarely has the energy to do all of it. She has to ask for help, which makes her feel bossy. She worries that others think she’s lazy.

Gary Reynolds’s experiences after he was struck in the summer of 2007 were similar. He was grabbing sodas from his family’s extra fridge, he’d told me earlier, when lightning hit him through the open garage door. For months, he could barely get out of bed. His whole body hurt constantly. He had trouble concentrating, and simple tasks that had once been second nature now seemed complex. On warm afternoons, he watched the sky warily. A therapist diagnosed him with PTSD, which by some estimates afflicts more than 25 percent of lightning-strike survivors. In 2009, just a few months shy of their 20th anniversary, Reynolds and his wife divorced. Initially she’d been sympathetic, he said, but over time she lost patience. “You’re not over this yet?” Reynolds recalled her saying. “It can’t be that bad.”

“I just keep thinking, I want to wake up the next day and it’s going to be normal,” Caroline said at one point during the session. But she wasn’t even two years out from her strike. She had not yet come to the conclusion that the veteran survivors at the conference had reached long ago: that no matter what you do, no matter how many therapies you try, you still have to accept that you’ll never be the person you were before. “You still look the same and everything else, but it’s like a different person inside,” Reynolds said. “It’s a different soul.”

The odds of being struck by lightning in the United States in a given year are roughly one in 1.2 million, according to a 2019 analysis by the National Weather Service—about the same as flipping a coin and landing on heads 20 times in a row. But this is only a generic estimate. The likelihood of being struck in San Francisco is not the same as the likelihood of being struck in Orlando, last year’s urban lightning capital of America, according to Vaisala Xweather, a provider of local weather data. The likelihood of being struck for lawyers is not the same as the likelihood of being struck for roofers.

The majority of people killed by lightning—about 20 each year in the U.S.—are struck while engaging in some sort of outdoor leisure or labor. But in truth, almost anyone can be struck almost anytime. People have been struck while talking on landlines, while using computers, even while sitting on the toilet, according to the National Weather Service, because current can travel through telephone wires, electrical connections, and metal pipes. When lightning survivors insist, as many do, on unplugging their appliances in preparation for a storm, this is not tinfoil-hat mania. And the old advice about not showering during a thunderstorm? Sensible.

[Read: Almost no Americans die from lightning strikes anymore—why?]

Steve Marshburn Sr., who founded Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International in 1989, told me that he was struck at age 25 on a seemingly clear November morning in 1969. He was working as a teller at First Citizens Bank in Swansboro, North Carolina, sitting at the drive-through window, and he thinks the bolt must have passed through an ungrounded speaker. For years, he struggled not only with debilitating headaches and back problems, but also with the sheer improbability of the event that had produced them. Many of the doctors he visited didn’t believe his story. For a long time, even his parents wondered whether he was making the whole thing up.

And to some extent, Marshburn understands why. “It’s so unbelievable that it’s hard to talk about,” he said. Eventually, a doctor introduced him to another patient who had survived an electrical injury, and that experience led Marshburn to start his survivors’ group. Membership now numbers about 2,000, and in September the organization hosted its first-ever West Coast conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona. For years, most people found their way to the group via their local weather station, or after seeing it featured in news outlets or on TV. Now more find it through Facebook.

That’s how Gary Reynolds did. His second wife, Lisa, discovered the group while searching online for other people who’d been struck, people who could understand him. Doctors never had. When he first went to the emergency room, they ran a battery of tests, but the results all came back normal. After he’d been at the hospital for about nine hours, a doctor said, “I’m not really sure what to tell you,” and sent him home. Roughly the same thing happened when he visited his primary-care physician. Other doctors told him to his face that he was making the whole thing up.

Not until his first conference did he meet people who could truly empathize with him. He’d never spoken with a fellow lightning-strike survivor in person before, and he was nervous on the drive up, but when he arrived he felt almost like he was at a reunion. “You walk into that room and it’s like we’re family,” he said. After he joined the group, he felt normal for the first time in years. “It was validating,” he said. “Like, Okay, I’m not crazy.”

In June 2008, Reynolds told me, he was struck by lightning a second time. It was 11 months after his first strike, and he’d woken up at 2 a.m. with an awful headache. Ever since the initial incident, his head had throbbed in exactly the same spot when he sensed a storm coming. As he lay beside his open bedroom window, he felt a shock go through his hand. “Not again,” he thought. Half of his hand turned bright red, he said, but he hadn’t yet paid off the previous year’s hospital bills, and this strike seemed less serious than the last, so he decided not to seek care. In the following months, though, his lingering symptoms from the first strike all worsened. He was often dizzy, and he couldn’t grip well. Reynolds ran a tree service at the time, one he’d started a few years after high school, and these were serious problems for someone whose vocation involved wielding a chainsaw. The divorce came about six months later.

In the years that followed, Reynolds pieced his life back together: He remarried, moved his family to western North Carolina, began working at a lumberyard, started attending survivors’ conferences. Then, while standing in the kitchen of his mountainside home on a June afternoon in 2016, he was struck a third time. And six years after that, a fourth, he said, this time while sitting in a leather recliner watching TV with his grandchildren. Must’ve been a streamer, he told me. Came up through the floor and hit him square in the back.

If the likelihood of getting struck once in your lifetime is one in 15,300, as the National Weather Service estimated in 2019, then statistically, the number of people in the United States today whom you’d expect to have been struck multiple times is … one. One single person. And yet the National Weather Service’s collection of about 50 lightning-survivor stories on its website includes two from people who say they’ve been struck twice and another from someone who says she’s been struck three times. Andy Upshaw, a North Carolina landscaper, says that he, too, has been hit three times. Charles Winlake, struck four times before the age of 30, added rubber soles to all of his shoes and began to wear only plastic-rimmed glasses. Linda Cooper, a former South Carolina schoolteacher, says she’s been struck six times, and so does Carl Mize, a former Oklahoma rodeo rider. One member of the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors Support Facebook group says she’s been struck nine times, and another says she stopped counting after 13. Media reports document more multistrike cases. In all, my far-from-exhaustive search turned up more than two dozen.

All of this, to state the obvious, is incredibly improbable. Extrapolating from the National Weather Service estimates, the likelihood of being struck six times is roughly one in 13 septillion—that’s a 13 followed by 24 zeros. If you multiplied the number of people who have ever existed on Earth by about 100 trillion, you’d expect one person among them to have been struck six times.

It can seem cruel to suggest that some lightning-strike survivors may be lying, especially when disbelief causes so much hardship for those who are not. But because relatively few lightning strikes are documented, the question often lingers. People lie for all kinds of reasons, and there can be financial incentives to claiming you’ve been struck: workers’ compensation, disability benefits. Mary Ann Cooper was an emergency-medicine faculty member at the University of Louisville when she published the first systematic study of lightning injury in 1980—instantly becoming the leading authority on the subject in doing so. Cooper served for years as an expert witness in workers’-comp cases, brought in to assess whether the claimant really had been struck. She told me that she’s encountered some frauds, identifiable because they reported inconsistent or physiologically impossible symptoms.

But the people trying to cheat their way into benefits, Cooper said, are largely not the ones attending survivors’ conferences. She believes that the overwhelming majority of the people she has met at those conferences are telling the truth about being struck, and about all the calamities that followed, at least as they understand them. Which is not to say that every statement should be taken at face value.

Like several doctors and scientists I spoke with, Cooper thinks that most people who say they’ve been struck multiple times genuinely believe that, even if they haven’t. Many survivors have flashbacks as a result of PTSD, just as combat veterans and wildfire survivors do. But when a combat veteran or a wildfire survivor resurfaces from a flashback, their surroundings verify to them that they are not, in fact, caught in the middle of a war zone or a fire. A lightning-strike flashback prompted by a storm involves no such assurance. A lightning bolt is there and gone in an instant.

What’s more, because lightning leaves the nervous system damaged, it can make people feel bursts of pain—real, excruciating, and unconnected to any physical stimulus. Together, PTSD and nervous-system damage may explain many reports of second or third or fourth strikes.

Not so long ago, that explanation might have sounded far-fetched, just as some of the chronic symptoms of a lightning strike still do, to some. But the idea that trauma can alter the way people perceive the world and interpret their experience is ubiquitous now. And the emergence of long COVID, along with increased awareness of other difficult-to-diagnose chronic conditions, has created a greater respect for individual testimony, and a greater appreciation for how much the medical profession does not know. In this sense, society is finally catching up to what lightning survivors and the people who study them have long understood.

The most grinding suspicions encountered by many survivors—about whether they were ever really struck at all—may in any case be mooted in the coming years. On a recent trip to France, Cooper met with a physician who told her he’d identified a biological marker for lightning injury, which may enable doctors to determine, with a simple urine test, whether someone really has been struck. Nothing has been published on it yet, Cooper said, and no such test seems imminent, so for the moment she isn’t getting too excited. But she has an open mind to the possibility.

All of this, of course, is mostly to the good. Yet the lightning-survivor community has always defined itself by a sort of oppositional faith: There, you are doubted; here, you are believed. There, you are strange; here, you are normal. When I asked Reynolds what he made of the trauma-plus-nervous-system-damage theory of why there are so many multistrike survivors, I felt as though I was doing something almost sacrilegious, as though I was violating that ethos of mutual faith. I worried that he’d react with indignation. The notion that he might hang up on me and refuse to speak with me again did not seem unlikely. Instead, he said he thought the theory made a lot of sense.

Might then it explain his multiple strikes? I asked.

Well, he answered, not his.

What does one make of a life so fundamentally altered by an event as unlikely as a lightning strike? In Pigeon Forge, when I asked survivors whether on balance they felt lucky (for having survived a lightning strike) or unlucky (for having been struck in the first place), the question didn’t register. “I don’t think luck has anything to do with it,” Susan Deatrick told me. She doesn’t like the word providential either, she said, “but at the same time, God is in control over everything down to the minutest detail.”

This response, and others like it, initially surprised me. If lightning is a manifestation of the divine, I thought, how do people explain why it struck them? How do you make sense of a miracle that comes at your expense?

[From the July 1875 issue: Lightning and lightning-rods]

Jim Segneri, who moderated the conference’s final and most intense group discussion, has a succinct answer, one more focused on his having been spared than his having been struck. “I firmly believe that whether you worship Allah or Buddha or God or Jesus or whoever put us here, the reason we’re still here is so that we can help other people”—those who are doubted, those who are struggling.

Large numbers of survivors hold some version of this belief. Marshburn, the group’s founder, often speaks of the number of survivors—more than 20—whom he has talked out of suicide, reciting in vivid detail the conversations he’s had with people on the brink. Over her many years speaking with lightning-strike victims, Mary Ann Cooper said, “I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I should have been dead. God must have kept me alive for a reason.’”

And yet for those survivors who hold it, the belief in destiny can cut both ways. Reynolds says that after his third strike, he felt doomed. He’d left his career, gotten divorced, gotten remarried, started a new job, moved more than 600 miles away—and still the lightning had found him. “It’s like it’s looking for me,” he told his therapist. “It’s like it’s a living, breathing creature.”

She assured him that it wasn’t, and part of him knew she was right, but he couldn’t stop thinking that he was fated to be struck again. She told him that she doesn’t believe in destiny. That there is no providence, only circumstance. That sometimes you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d believed that once. But now he can’t shake the feeling that she’s wrong.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “Struck.” It has been updated to clarify the source of the data used to determine the urban lightning capital of the U.S. last year. The data was provided by Vaisala Xweather.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/lightning-strike-survivors-body-mind/686057/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Michaeleen Doucleff

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/03/dieting-myth-eating-disorders-milkshake/686361/?utm_source=feed

Back in the early 1970s, psychologists at Northwestern University performed an experiment that, on the surface, looked like a child’s fantasy. The researchers gathered 45 college women and asked some of them to drink a milkshake—or two. Then they placed three pints of ice cream in front of each woman and asked her to taste each one. Afterward, they told each participant to “help herself to any of the remaining ice cream, as she wished,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of Personality. Finally—and this was key—each woman completed a survey meant to measure how much she dieted or “restrained” her eating, outside of the treats she had just consumed.

The findings were dramatic. On average, the women who said they didn’t diet or have weight concerns ate less ice cream if they drank at least one milkshake. The first sweet treat satiated their hunger. But for the women who dieted and felt worried about their weight, the milkshake appeared to unleash a hidden hunger. On average, they ate 66 percent more ice cream after the milkshake than they did without it.

From these data, the researchers devised a bold new theory: Dieting and weight concerns make people overeat and gain weight. Dieting remains pervasive in American culture, but the milkshake study, and similar ones that followed, nonetheless reshaped many Americans’ views of dieting and obesity. Experts concluded that all types of eating disorders—including anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia—can be brought on by intentionally trying to reduce the number of calories that you eat. Some scientists believe that dietary restraint causes obesity too.

This line of research inspired treatments for eating disorders, helped launch an anti-diet movement, fueled the trend of so-called intuitive eating, and shifted how many parents raised their kids to think about food. But more recent evidence suggests that attempting to restrict one’s food intake typically doesn’t have such dire consequences after all.

The notion that trying to diet causes eating disorders and obesity makes some sense. “There’s the idea that if you’re finding yourself thinking about food, trying to restrict what you eat or trying not to overeat, then you’re developing an eating-disorder mentality,” Michael Lowe, a psychologist at Drexel University, told me. The theory is also inherently appealing, in that most people don’t like avoiding tasty food; they can easily believe that doing so would be harmful. No wonder, then, that the idea spread far among clinicians and everyday Americans. Social media supercharged the theory, enough that many people now believe that placing any limits on your diet could be dangerous or harmful, Ashley Gearhardt, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, told me. Many parents share the belief that letting kids follow their own appetites will create healthy attitudes toward food; taken to its logical extreme, that way of thinking means that “in a lot of circles now, if you don’t let your kids have unlimited access to ultra-processed foods, it’s a bad thing,” Katherine Balantekin, a registered dietitian at the University at Buffalo, told me.

Such ideas spread even as researchers were uncovering major flaws in early studies on the link between dietary restrictions and eating disorders. Those experiments didn’t use a consistent definition of dietary restraint, and never tested whether it actually caused eating disorders or overeating; they could say only that those behaviors occurred together. Plus, many studies lumped together several types of eating disorders, or didn’t separate participants with obesity from those with low body weights.

[From the May 2023 issue: Nutrition science’s most preposterous result]

Scientists, including the ones who ran the 1975 milkshake study, also relied on self-reports or surveys to quantify how much a participant dieted, assuming that people who said that they greatly restricted their consumption really did take in fewer calories. But decades later, when scientists gave the same surveys to new participants and measured their calorie intake, they found that the surveys simply didn’t correlate with calorie restriction, Eric Stice, a psychologist at Stanford who led some of these measurement studies, told me. People whom such surveys would label “high dieters” may not have been dieting at all, Stice found. In one of his studies, a so-called high dieter ate, on average, 23 calories fewer a day than a low dieter. “That’s like not eating four peanuts each day and saying you’re on a diet,” he said.

By the 2000s, scientists began to run randomized, controlled trials that could accurately test the model proposed back in the ’70s. In one series of studies, people were prescribed personalized diets aimed at reducing calorie consumption, and taught effective ways to adhere to their eating plans. After six months, those volunteers lost about 10 percent of their body weight, on average, compared with the 1 percent that the control group lost. And the increased dieting didn’t exacerbate participants’ eating-disorder symptoms. In fact, it decreased their binge eating, and they felt less concerned about their body size (perhaps, in part, because their body size decreased). In the past decade, psychologists at Yale School of Medicine have run similar randomized, controlled studies on people who had already been diagnosed with binge-eating disorder and obesity. And again, on average, calorie restriction reduced binge eating; participants’ eating-disorder symptoms worsened only occasionally, and no more so than in the control group. In at least one paper, eating-disorder symptoms improved far more among people in the restricted group than in the control group. In another, weight loss led to remission of binge-eating in nearly three-quarters of the participants.

The scientific consensus that has emerged after these and similar studies is much more nuanced than the one proffered 50 years ago—even though that one still has significant traction in American culture today. “Dietary restriction is not necessarily all good or all bad. But different degrees may be helpful or harming to different people,” Sydney Yurkow, a psychologist at Yale School of Medicine who contributed to the recent trials there, told me in an email. For example, she said, cutting back on food would never be recommended for people diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. And even for people without an eating disorder, “extreme restriction that often coincides with self-directed dieting is largely unhealthy and unhelpful,” Yurkow wrote.

[Read: We have no drugs to treat the deadliest eating disorder]

The new generation of experiments has also uncovered a surprising way to prevent future eating disorders in high-risk adolescents and young women: a small amount of effective dietary restraint. One 2021 meta-analysis found that teaching people about healthy eating habits—including how to curb a tendency to overeat—prevents the future development of eating disorders. Altogether, Stice said, the modern experiments suggest two likely pathways for developing eating disorders. The first involves a person who’s dissatisfied with their body and engages in extreme weight-loss behaviors to change it. “But there’s a whole other pathway that many people have been ignoring,” he said—one in which a person overeats or binges, gains weight, and then becomes dissatisfied with their body as a result.

From this perspective, the milkshake study looks quite different. Fifty years ago, psychologists concluded that dietary restraint caused the women to overeat the pints of ice cream. But the modern interpretation suggests that the reverse was likely true for many of the participants: An underlying tendency to overeat drove the women to try to diet.

In hindsight, the timing of the milkshake study is almost prophetic. Around the late 1970s, the food environment in America began to change rapidly, Lowe, the Drexel psychologist, told me. “The availability of fast food, restaurants and high-sugar, high-fat foods began to explode,” he said. Food became much more difficult to resist, even when Americans weren’t hungry. “People suddenly had to restrain their eating much more in order to maintain their weight.” More people began to gain weight, and by the early ’80s, the country had entered the first stage of the current obesity epidemic. Today, the average American consumes about half their calories from ultra-processed foods. The precise bounds of the category generate debate among some scientists, but they generally agree that such foods are highly refined, manufactured in industrial factories, and calorically dense. Studies have found that diets high in these foods can coax people to consume hundreds of extra calories each day, and when people binge eat, they tend to do so with only ultra-processed foods.

[Read: Coke, Twinkies, Skittles, and … whole-grain bread?]

Recently, scientists and government leaders have begun warning Americans about the potential harms of eating too much ultra-processed food, including an elevated risk of diabetes, certain cancers, and depression. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared war on added sugars, and as of this year, the national dietary guidelines advise against eating highly processed foods. In reality, the study of this kind of food is just getting started. But if Americans are ever to really understand just how such foods affect us, now is the time to abandon the misguided lessons of the milkshake study. Maybe then we can explore how we might develop a truly healthy relationship with the tantalizing food around us.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/03/dieting-myth-eating-disorders-milkshake/686361/?utm_source=feed