Perhaps most absurdly, over the course of its 13 seasons, Oz featured a handful of episodes about anorexia, women “dying to be thin” and interviews with famous people about their disordered eating. It’s hard to imagine why women feel so much social pressure to be thin when they watch episodes of “How to Eat Your Fat” or “Fasting in Real Life: Can a Mini Fast Help You Lose Unwanted Fat?” While Oprah definitely focused on weight loss and tips ‘n’ tricks to get slimmer, The show of Dr. Oz often highlighted the supposedly easy but really impossible ways to lose weight. “This miracle pill can burn fat fast,” Oz said in one segment. In another, he promoted “the missing piece of the weight loss puzzle” in the form of supplements: sage leaf tea at breakfast, alpha-lipoic acid at lunch, maitake mushroom extract with your snack, and the “satiety supplement” known as glucomannan. at dinner. (That last one, to be clear, is just fiber.) By 2014, Oz’s flippant recommendations turned him from just another TV doctor to a Senate subcommittee target. Oz was called to testify at a hearing on “protecting consumers from false and misleading advertisements for weight loss products,” and Oz, while not the only proponent of dubious fixes, was certainly a symbolic figure for the Senate’s criticism. “People want to believe they can pop a pill to get the fat off their bodies,” Senator Claire McCaskill told Oz. “I know you know how much power you have. I know you do. You are very powerful and with power comes great responsibility.”
