Last night on Nightline, obesity “expert” Meme Roth revealed that she eats only 1,300 calories a day — unless she runs four miles and works out. It’s not the first time Roth has intimated she has an eating disorder.
But it is the first time that Roth has revealed the disordered thinking behind her bizarre beliefs about food and health. It turns out that Roth believes that everyone should eat, in calories, ten times their goal weight, in pounds. The idea that there must be some profound, natural relationship between the imperial system of measurements and the human body is patently absurd — and it would be dignifying that looniness with a response to even point out that Roth’s little theory fails to account for differences in sex, height, or build. According to her guide, someone who wanted to weigh 110 lbs should simply eat 1,100 calories a day — never mind that that kind of diet would almost certainly send most adult bodies into ketosis.
No wonder that model Crystal Renn, who knows whereof she speaks, jumps on Roth’s dangerous diet rule. Roth, ever the moving target in an argument, starts quoting longevity studies on caloric restriction in rhesus monkeys to justify her abstemiousness — but rather than send a new rule of thumb for anorexia out into the human hive mind unexamined, where anyone might mistake Roth for the expert on nutrition and obesity she pretends to be on television, I thought I’d do a little digging into her qualifications.
The National Action Against Obesity website, which names Roth its president and founder, is suspiciously silent on the topic of Roth’s qualifications to hold forth on issues of health. While Roth’s bio page refers vaguely to “members of the NAAO community” who are “physicians, nutritionists and sports trainers, in addition to chefs, film-makers and students,” she subsequently admits that, “for the most part, we all consider ourselves concerned citizens.”
Whoever and whatever the “NAAO community” may be, the NAAO itself is a one-woman outfit. All of its press releases quote Roth and are written by her. Roth is the only member of the organization who has ever made a media appearance. If there is an “NAAO community,” we’ve never seen it (or any of the doctors Roth alleges it contains).
It seems like anyone who enters Roth’s orbit, like the film-makers who gave her a platform in the 2008 shock doc Killer At Large, or who just seems like they might agree with some of her goals, Roth writes up as a “supporter.” This results rather unusually — for a professional advocacy organization — in a homepage that prominently quotes both random, anonymous people (“‘It is never too late for our society to rethink and change the way we have been doing things in the past. I applaud your actions.’ — L.W., Millburn, NJ”) and names well-known figures like Dr. Mehmet Oz a “hero.” (One wonders if he’d exactly welcome the endorsement, or if he’s even aware of it.)
There’s no “About” page for the NAAO — just links to Roth’s proclamations against Girl Scout cookies, list of “Lies Women Tell About Their Weight,” and this bizarre description of her wedding, to husband Ben Roth:
“Most women I know commit fraud on their wedding days — they weigh-in for the walk down the aisle with no expectation of maintaining that weight year after year.”
The contact information on all these statements habitually refers to “Writer, Speaker and Anti-Obesity Advocate MeMe Roth.” However, aside from those very releases, it’s not clear what she writes, exactly. She has published no books, and no articles turn up on Lexis/Nexis under her name, as an author.
Her personal blog carries the tag-line “MeMe Roth: Reporting From FATOPOLIS,” but Roth is not a reporter. Though she claims to have a B.A. in journalism from the University of Georgia, she has only ever worked as a publicist (Roth once was a VP at Edelman). A piece from December, 2008, in Elle magazine — in which Roth claimed to eat just 1,600 calories daily, and to run those same four miles — states that Roth has a “certificate” (a certificate in what isn’t specified, but the course apparently lasted six months) from something called the Institute of Integrative Nutrition. She told Elle she now does some “health counseling” work (whatever that is).
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
