Sophie Haigney spent months reporting on what a friend of hers called dark nutrition. The term covers a lot of fringe diets you may have seen promoted by MAHA influencers on TikTok: raw meat/milk, organ meat, cane sugar, no seed oils, no vegetables at all.
What ties them together is a distrust of doctors, public health officials, food companies, and pharma. A lot of the people Haigney met turned to their diets after medication failed to fix a chronic illness.
But what’s really interesting is what the scene calls the “n of one”. In Haigney’s words, it is the idea that “the only way to learn what is good for you is by ignoring broad samples and experimenting on your unique self.” And while it might not sound very scientific, it originates in clinical research. An N-of-1 trial is a multiple-crossover trial with a single patient. The patient switches between treatment and control several times, in random order and ideally without knowing which is which, with a washout between each switch.
What the dark nutritionists practice, though, is one change, followed only by a feeling. There is no control phase, so a vacation or a good month at work gets credited to the diet too. Nobody switches to raw liver on a good day, either. People start when they feel worst, and from there, symptoms often drift back toward normal on their own. Run like this, the “experiment” can only confirm what you hoped for in the first place.