Learn the food & fitness basics that schools never covered

Dear Human,

Wondering who starts a letter like that? I suppose those who think what they have to say is relevant to everyone.

This is not a newsletter that will tell you how to lose weight or get abs or make guacamole. This is a labour of love that goes beyond the how, into the what, and the why.

Health & fitness is a USD 1.5 trillion industry, about ten times the size of the movie business and growing at 2x the global GDP. And yet, the pertinent health markers of the world are worsening: 2 in 5 adults are overweight, obesity has tripled since 1975 & diabetes has jumped four-fold since just 1980.

My startling realization about this paradox: The health and fitness industry doesn’t deliver because it doesn’t intend to.

People who sell health don’t want you to become healthy and stay healthy because you might stop needing them. Oh, and since there is no one definition of what healthy means, everyone gets to define it at their convenience!

Food, and food journalism, are broken. What you see around is churnalism: resource-crunched newsrooms hiring inexperienced reporters to manufacture raw material for Google. They are forced to pump out insufficiently researched reports because articles serve the singular objective of grabbing eyeballs. Food, fitness & nutrition aren’t considered serious journalism.

We started Truth Be Told to fix this problem.

We publish only one long story a week. That’s enough: new things don’t happen every day in the food and fitness world. Our bodies are 5000-year-old machines that don’t change in decades, forget days.

We found experts who can take facts, mix them with everyday examples, address the hard questions, identify the big picture, and weave it all into a story you love reading. A story you love learning from. You will find articles from a clinical nutritionist, a certified diabetes educator, a professional running coach, a food researcher and an experimental biohacker. And these are just the first set of contributors. Each of them is either professionally educated in food and fitness, or has a deeply personal experience — we value that as much — or both.

We have an independent consulting editor who acts as your – the reader’s – representative at Truth Be Told. Samarth Bansal, our fierce editor, is an independent journalist who specializes in deep, long-form, investigative reporting. He comes with seven years of journalistic experience, reporting across politics, policy and technology. His writing has appeared in leading national and international publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Hindu, the Hindustan Times, the Times of India, and Livemint, among others.

Samarth ensures that we prioritise truth-seeking above all else in this journey. And we depend on our writers, and you, our reader, to hold us accountable to the highest standards of integrity, clarity and expertise.

Together, we aim to fix the food & fitness journalism in India. That’s the why, what and how, Truth Be Told.

Sincerely,
Shashank Mehta
Fat Kid, Fit Adult, Fully Human