Eating
Disorders
The Diet Carousel
Slowing the ride will require a sea change of American habits
Have you struggled repeatedly to lose weight, only to
fail miserably or end up
heavier than before? If so, look no further!
The secret to effortless weight loss lies with eating papayas, pineapples and
watermelons in the correct sequence and combination.
It lies with apple cider vinegar, nature's miracle fat-burner.
It lies with piling one's plate with a pyramid of bacon but banishing all
bread; with slashing fat, swimming in cabbage soup, eating like a caveman or
carefully picking a diet that matches your blood type or astrological sign.
Dieting has consumed Americans for more than a century, even as the
collective girth of the nation has increased and a steady stream of dieting
books has rolled off the presses: Scarsdale, Beverly Hills, Zone, South Beach,
and on and on. Like a circle in a spiral, diet fads have come and gone, then
come back again -- sometimes with new frills and usually with more sophisticated
marketing, but often barely changed.
The high-protein diet (currently incarnated as the Atkins diet) has risen
phoenix-like from the ashes at least half a dozen times. Restricted-food diets
have had endless reiterations, be they focused on lollipops, grapes, Brussels
sprouts or beef.
And the importance of proper food combining has often been stressed: Proteins
and carbohydrates should never be eaten together; melons should always be eaten
alone; lamb chops should be paired with pineapples for powerful, pound-burning
potency.
Only recently have scientists begun trying to figure out which diets actually
work. Low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets are receiving much of the attention,
along with the low-fat diet espoused by such mainstream organizations as the
American Heart Association.
The need to determine the effectiveness of the diets has become more pressing
as American obesity rates rise, and type 2 diabetes -- once an
obesity-associated disease of adulthood -- is increasingly being diagnosed
in children.
There is no dark mystery behind the endless carousel of quick-fix solutions,
experts say -- just a list of mundane causes.
Americans live in a land bursting with food, inside bodies biologically
designed to pack on pounds in times of plenty and conserve energy in times of
want (i.e., when we're dieting). Weight gain has never been easier.
Dieting is hard. Obesity treatments usually yield only modest weight loss --
perhaps 5 percent of a person's starting weight.
Keeping weight off is harder still. So it's easy to see why there will always
be an appetite for more books, more plans, more promises.
Some scientists even believe that the very act of repeated dieting
contributes directly to a lifetime of weight problems, by molding the mind to be
fixated with food.
It is far trickier to figure out how to stop the diet carousel.
"Every single time, people have felt, 'Finally, this is the answer, this is
the diet that's going to solve the problem.' And none ever do," said James Hill,
director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health
Sciences Center in Denver.
Sporadic, documented cases of dieting stretch back 1,000 years or more. But
in America, dieting only took off with a vengeance at the end of the 19th
century.
The stage was set by the early 1800s. Americans were bolting their food in
great quantities. (As a consequence of all this new nutrition they were several
inches taller than Europeans. Foreigners were apt to exclaim at the size,
frequency and speed of American meals; one Russian visitor likened Americans'
eating habits to those of sharks.)
Health reformers began railing against gluttony and the endless, immoral
procession of pies, cakes and meats. They wrote treatises lashing out at Sunday
lunches and groaning Thanksgiving tables.
Chief among these was the Rev. Sylvester Graham, creator of the famous Graham
cracker. He preached that gluttony not only led to sinful sexual practices, but
also to such maladies as constipation and indigestion (or "dyspepsia," as people
then termed it). Americans flocked to water cures, mercury-based laxatives and
Graham's pure-food, brown-bread diet in order to settle their stomachs.
The goal of Graham's earliest followers was not shedding pounds. In those
days, plumper bodies were fashionable -- indeed, even a symbol of success.
Businessmen proudly joined the Fat Men's Club of Connecticut.
"Thin girls" wrote tearful letters to the Ladies' Home Journal for weight
gain advice. Women would pad their clothing to look
more like the well-rounded, 200-pound stage actress Lillian Russell.
As the century bore on, the interest in weight loss grew. A succession of
figures proffered their surefire solutions with confidence and authority.
British undertaker William Banting instructed his many adherents to abandon
starch and fat for lean meat and a
daily dose of alcohol.
Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey proclaimed the answer to weight loss was his "No
Breakfast Plan." He noted that "Mrs. P.," a 220-pound farmer's wife, had shed 45
pounds on his regimen.
Businessman Horace Fletcher vowed that the real answer lay with slow and
thorough chewing.
Then came the explosive sea change. Dieting became a widespread national
preoccupation -- and no one knows quite why, said historian Peter Stearns,
provost and professor of history at George Mason University and author of "Fat
History."
"You could say that, well, people started getting increasingly concerned
about dieting right around the time they should have," he said.
Food was abundant. Public transportation and sedentary jobs were on the rise.
Yet there is little evidence to suggest people were getting much fatter at
that time, he said.
Fashion played its part in the dieting phenomenon. Corsets became unstylish,
and natural slenderness gained ascendance. The life insurance industry
contributed too. Early actuarial tables revealed that fat people, on average,
lived shorter lives than slimmer people.
In addition, distaste for obesity had slowly, and inexplicably, been growing,
and a list of derogatory words had been invented to describe it: "porky" in the
1860s, "jumbo" in the 1880s, "butterball" in the 1890s.
By 1903, plumpness was so out of favor that the Fat Men's Club of Connecticut
shut its doors forever.
By World War I, being fat was deemed more than unattractive; it was downright
unpatriotic.
The carousel was picking up speed.
As the years rolled on, new products and discoveries sharpened America's
focus on body weight and shaped the recommendations of diet mavens. Weight
monitoring became central in the 1920s, with the rise of Health-O-Meter and
Detecto private bathroom scales.
Studies on the calorie content of foods were smoothly incorporated into a
long succession of books, starting with the 1918 blockbuster bestseller "Diet
and Health With a Key to the Calories," by Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, who counseled
her adherents to worship their kitchen scales and forever forget about "slices"
of bread, and think only of calories of bread.
If the past century's diet themes appear surprisingly repetitive, there are
good -- even rational -- reasons why.
Any diet that limits calorie intake, by whatever means, will help promote
weight loss, provided someone sticks to that diet.
Any diet that forces people to eat limited types of foodstuffs is likely to
make them eat less, because human appetites thrive on variety. We can engulf
astounding quantities of food, lickety-split, at a buffet. A body can bear only
so many lamb chops and pineapples.
Any diet that focuses primarily on limiting food intake, as most diets do, is
likely to work better than one centered on exercise.
"It's a matter of magnitude," Hill said. "You could reduce your energy intake
easily by 1,000 calories a day. You couldn't do 1,000 a day with exercise."
There are also reasons why low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets have
repeatedly sprung to the fore, although they aren't the reasons originally
espoused: Doctors at one time believed that proteins could not be converted into
fat. (Not true!)
Protein is satiating; it satisfies the appetite -- hence the long-standing
popularity of such diets (although that could decline if mad cow hysteria takes
hold). Eating a lot of protein can lead to water loss, because the body flushes
out the waste left over from protein digestion in the form of urine.
Also, some scientists think avoiding carbohydrates can help curb the
appetite, because this practice avoids spikes in insulin and crashes in blood
sugar that may get people feeling hungrier sooner.
In other words, while some fad diets are silly and others nutritionally
inadequate and downright irresponsible, a lot of them could work, nutrition
scientists say. But there is no reason to proclaim one vastly superior or
possessed of any magical power -- especially given the dearth of proper,
scientific tests of diets.
"If you lined up all the diets in the world in a multimillion-dollar clinical
trial and fired the starting gun, and lots of people started each of these
diets, my prediction is early on there might be some separation, with some of
these diets showing bigger weight loss than others," said Kelly Brownell,
director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders in New Haven, Conn.
"But in the long term, they'd probably work the same overall."
Thus obesity researchers say that part of the key to successful weight loss
lies with individuals picking diets they are most likely to stick with.
It also lies with lowering expectations and not trying to diet down to
unrealistic thinness.
Even more important is figuring out how to sustain weight loss long term,
since most people who lose weight eventually gain it back.
Most experts are convinced that stopping the long, mad procession of diet
books will require a slew of changes: health insurance coverage for weight loss
programs, more scientific studies of different diets, altered attitudes toward
norms of weight, and attempts to clean up an environment that is awash in
high-calorie snacks and drinks and encouragements to sample them often and
plentifully.
Dieting through the ages
1087: William the Conqueror tries a liquid diet for weight loss, taking to
his bed and consuming nothing but alcohol.
1600s to early 1700: Scotsman Dr. George Cheyne, author of popular books "An
Essay of Health and Long Life" and "The English Malady," uses liquids of a
different stripe, writing that a milk diet renders him "lank, fleet and nimble."
1811: The Romantic poet Lord Byron drenches his food in vinegar to lose
weight, dropping his heft from 194 pounds to less than 130.
1830s: America's the Rev. Sylvester Graham, nicknamed "Dr. Sawdust," rails
against the sin of gluttony, which he says leads to lust, indigestion and the
rearing of unhealthy children. Graham's answer: a Spartan diet of coarse,
yeast-free brown bread (including the famous Graham cracker), vegetables and
water.
1860s: Rise of the low-carbohydrate diet. London undertaker William Banting
loses 50 pounds on a high-protein regimen that consists of lean meat, dry toast,
soft-boiled eggs and vegetables. His 1864 book "Letter on Corpulence" becomes a
bestseller; by 1880s "banting" is America's foremost weight-loss strategy.
Another high-protein proponent, Dr. James Salisbury, promotes a diet of hot
water and minced meat patties (the famous Salisbury steak) for improved health
and weight loss.
1876: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg becomes staff physician of the Battle Creek
Sanatorium in Michigan. A leading diet guru, he crusades over the years for
vegetarianism, pure foods, slow chewing, calorie counting, colon cleansing and
individualized diets. He invents granola and toasted flakes.
Late 1800s: Milk diets, earlier prescribed for indigestion and weight gain,
become popular for weight loss.
1890s: Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey promotes a moderate fast, the "no-breakfast
plan," as a weight-loss strategy. Other doctors widely recommend limiting
alcohol and substituting carbohydrates with proteins.
1898: The slow-chewing movement is founded by businessman Horace Fletcher.
After he is denied life insurance because of his weight, Fletcher drops 40
pounds through a strategy of chewing each mouthful of food to liquid before
swallowing it. "Fletcherism" takes off, rah-rahed by diet guru Kellogg, who
invents a slow-chewing song for his patients.
1910 onward: Food scales, developed for diabetics, and calories become
central to diet plans. "Without scales, no cure," writes Viennese doctor and
food scale inventor Gustave Gaertner, author of "Reducing Weight Comfortably."
1918: Calorie counting enters the stage. Dieters gobble up the bestseller
"Diet and Health With a Key to the Calories" by Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, the
"best-known and best-loved woman physician in America." Peters' diet kicks off
with a fast, then transitions to Fletcherism and calorie-counting, with a
1,200-calorie daily limit. It is a lifelong prescription.
1928: Very-low-calorie diets of 600 to 750 calories daily are introduced by
doctors for severely obese patients.
1920s: Dr. William Howard Hay promotes a food-combining diet. His "medical
millennium" plan (which also called for daily enemas and slow chewing) holds
that correct body pH is key and, to achieve it, dieters must not combine
starches, fruits and proteins in the same meal.
The very-low-calorie Hollywood 18-day diet allows 585 calories daily, mostly
grapefruit, with oranges, eggs and melba toast.
The era sees the lamb chop and pineapple diets, two of a dizzying array of
food-limiting regimens.
1932: Dr. Stoll's Diet Aid meal substitute slimming powder goes on sale in
beauty parlors.
1938: Very-low-calorie diets of 400 calories daily are used by doctors for
severely obese patients.
1948: Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS), the first national group-dieting
organization, is formed by Esther Manz in Milwaukee, with prescriptions of
calories, scales, food diaries and mutual support.
1950: Reducer's Cookbook, the first dieter's cookbook from commercial
publishers, is published.
1960: National advertising promotes Mead Johnson's diet formula Metrecal; its
success spawns a host of imitators. Dieting support groups expand; Overeaters
Anonymous is founded.
1961: Best-selling "Calories Don't Count" by Herman Taller espouses a
high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet. Taller is eventually found guilty of mail
fraud for selling worthless safflower capsules.
Dr. Irwin Stillman publishes "The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet," a
low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet rich in meat and cheese. Stillman believes
proteins take more energy for the body to digest.
1961-63: Weight Watchers is formed.
1960s: Era of alcohol-friendly low-carb regimens sees publication of "The
Drinking Man's Diet" by Gardner Jameson and Elliott Williams, and Sidney
Petrie's "Martinis and Whipped Cream."
1972: "Diet Revolution" by Robert Atkins advocates plenty of meat and fat;
carbohydrates are banned.
1970s: Astronaut's diet, which mimics studies being done on liquid meals for
astronauts, is espoused.
1976: "The Last Chance Diet" by osteopath Robert Linn relies on a mixture of
fasting and liquid-protein drinks made from animal tendons and hides.
Fifty-eight deaths are eventually associated with these and similar diet drinks,
which lack essential nutrients.
1978: Herman Tarnower publishes the high-protein Scarsdale diet, 700 calories
daily. He is killed by his lover in 1980.
1979: Very-low-fat diets burst onto the stage with the publication of Nathan
Pritikin's "Pritikin Program for Diet & Exercise."
1981: Diet counselor and avid dieter Judy Mazel publishes "The Beverly Hills
Diet," a fruit-heavy food-combining regimen. Mazel claims that no weight will be
gained if foods are properly digested with the help of abundant quantities of
pineapples, mangoes and papayas consumed on a rotating schedule.
The Cambridge diet, run by Jack Feather and endorsed by a Cambridge
University doctor, peddles very-low-calorie liquid-protein drinks sold through a
pyramid scheme. Thirty people die of heart attacks before the nutritionally
inadequate drinks are banned.
1983: Jenny Craig weight-loss company is formed.
1992: Atkins publishes a new book espousing his low-carb, high-fat,
high-protein approach, "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution."
1993: Low-fat diets re-emerge: "Eat More, Weigh Less" by Dean Ornish is a
low-fat vegetarian diet.
1995: Low-carb, high-protein diets return with the publication of Barry
Sears' "The Zone," which soon shares the stage with a host of other low-carb
books, including "Sugar Busters!" "Protein Power" and "The Carbohydrate Addict's
Diet."
1996: Mazel's "The New Beverly Hills Diet" is a revised version of the old
fruit-rich favorite.
1998: One of many resurfacings of Lord Byron's strategy, "Lose Weight With
Apple Vinegar," claims that vinegar consumption burns body fat.
1999: Atkins publishes a revised version of his book. His high-protein, low-carb
diet has grown steadily more popular.
2003: "The South Beach Diet" is published by Miami doctor Arthur Agatston;
the moderate diet falls midway between the low-fat, high-carb recommendations of
mainstream nutritionists and the low-carb, high-protein Atkins diet.
Sources: "Never Satisfied," by Hillel Schwartz; "Losing It," by Laura Fraser;
"Fat History," by Peter Stearns; UCLA Center for Human Nutrition; Los Angeles
Times staff research.
Los Angeles Times
Dieting duhs
Today's lard-melting body belts, creams, subliminal tapes, pills and teas are
just the latest in more than a century's worth of wishful thinking, bad advice
and chicanery.
Yesterday's would-be pound shedders were barraged with ads for a host of
products with names such as "Densmore's Corpulency Cure," "Dr. Gordon's Elegant
Pills," "Kellogg's Safe Fat Reducer," "Allan's Anti-Fat" and "The Slenmar
Reducing Brush." Other examples from this dubious, if entrepreneurial, past:
1844: Oliver Halsted's patented Exercising Machine consisted of a pair of
mechanical horses that marched in circles, aimed at relieving the rider's
dyspepsia.
1892: George Burwell's Boston bon-contour obesity belt delivered zaps of
electricity to the belly.
1900: Dr. Jean Alban Bergonie's "passive ergotherapy" chair applied
electricity to clients' muscles, contracting them 100 times a minute -
supposedly expending energy while the patient sat back and relaxed.
1900: Ladies' Home Journal touted two mineral waters - Kissingen and Vichy -
to be drunk before meals on alternate days. By balancing acid and alkaline, the
adherent would shed 2 pounds per week.
1905: The "La Grecque Corset" promised not only to shape the hips and belly
but to permanently slenderize the wearer.
1910: Phytoline weight-loss tablets contained arsenic, strychnine, caffeine
and pokeberries. Arsenic speeds up the digestive tract; pokeberries act as a
laxative.
1914: Gardner Reducing Machines pummeled the user between two rollers,
delivering a supposed fat-shedding massage.
1920s: Lucky Strike promoted its cigarettes as diet aids: "Reach for a Lucky
instead of a sweet."
1935: An estimated 100,000 Americans tried diet pills containing
dinitrophenol, a chemical used in the manufacture of dyes, insecticides and
explosives. The regimen was inspired by the observation that workers in World
War I munitions factories lost weight. Use fell off by 1938, after several cases
of death or temporary blindness.
1943: Diet guru Marion White, author of "Diet Without Despair," advised use
of mineral oil as a fat source in meals.
1957: Human chorionic gonadotropin (a pregnancy hormone) became popular as a
weight-loss aid. In 1974, the government required labels to warn against its use
for dieting. It was never proven effective.
Sources: "Never Satisfied," by Hillel Schwartz; "Fat History," by Peter
Stearns; "Losing It," by Laura Fraser.
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