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Low-Carbohydrate Dieting in Popular CultureIf you need a list of low carbohydrate foodsby Samuel Thorne Zimmerman found at crstudent.com
“If you would only stop eating when you feel full, you wouldn’t gain so much weight”; that well-meant, but arrogant-sounding statement is likely to seem familiar to anyone who has ever been grossly obese (so overweight that one’s lifestyle suffers). “Tell me what feeling full feels like and I’ll let you know if I’ve ever experienced it”; that sincerely meant, but facetious-sounding reply may seem familiar to anyone who has meant well but sounded arrogant one time too many. Let Feeling full may be an unfamiliar fresh sensation to anyone who has ever been morbidly obese (so overweight that life-threatening health problems occur). Such a person may already know that if he ever did feel full, he would indeed stop eating. Meanwhile, he feels just as surely as any other person who feels hungry, that he must eat. A low-carbohydrate diet may address an obese person’s need to feel full even though every other diet he has tried has failed to do so. For this reason, low-carbohydrate dieting has recently become a more popular part of our culture. Is it the solution? We need a solution and we need it quickly! As long as people continue to feel hungry when they should feel full, obesity will continue to spread. According to science journalist Gary Taubes in his article What if it’s all been a Big Fat Lie?, an epidemic of obesity and Type 2 Diabetes has coincided perfectly with the United States Government’s glorious triumph over dietary fat. The most potent weapons in this victory have been their Food Guide Pyramid and Daily Recommended Allowances. Further, both Taubes and Dr. Richard Bernstein, author of Richard Bernstein’s Diabetic Solution point out that it is also during this triumph that Type 2 Diabetes, or Adult Onset Diabetes has begun to appear in morbidly obese children for the first time in history. The coincidence of this epidemic with the triumph over dietary fat implies a contradiction that demands an explanation.
When Dr. Bernstein describes a diet rich in carbohydrates, he groups fruits together with grains due to naturally occurring fructose, which is a purer form of carbohydrate than the finest flour. The vegetables displayed on the Pyramid are harder to classify since some root vegetables are just as rich in carbohydrate as some grain products are, but leafy vegetables have very little, with countless variations between those extremes. Even so, these two Food Groups are largely carbohydrates. Near its top, the Food Guide Pyramid allowed a couple servings each from the Dairy and Meat Groups. The Meat Group was at least as complicated as the Vegetable Group due to the inclusion of nuts and dry beans. About a third of the nutrition in nuts and two thirds in dry beans is carbohydrate. The very tip of the Pyramid combined sweets, the purest of carbohydrates; with fats and told us to use them “sparingly” – what ever that meant to anyone reading it. Taking the entirety in combination, the Food Guide Pyramid probably had us eating carbohydrates for about five out of seven servings in order to do away with dietary fats. The U.S. Government’s Daily Recommended Allowances are even less helpful; they recommend enormous amounts of carbohydrate without any hint that we shouldn’t consume all of them in the form of French Fries, for example. We would do well to wonder what effects eating such unbalanced diets might have on a person. David Ludwig, an Endocrinologist and Director of the Obesity Program at Harvard Medical School says that after even a healthy person eats a high glycemic index meal (rich in carbohydrates), insulin depletes the blood of glucose and fatty acids, and "the body effectively runs low on fuel, leading to excessive hunger and overeating". Gary Taubes explains, “The result is hunger and a craving for more carbohydrates. It's another vicious circle, and another situation ripe for obesity.” Therefore, we might wonder why several Federal agencies and countless dieticians and health experts didn’t know better than to promote such an unbalanced diet and why they depict low-carbohydrate diets as new and dangerous fads. Taubes cites food authorities from as far back as 1825 and explains:
In other words, when a Senate Committee lead by George McGovern composed guidelines that the U.S. Government then used to design the Food Guide Pyramid and Daily Recommended Allowances, they adopted popular culture’s latest fad diet and gave it government sanction. McGovern’s own experience with the upstart, very-low-fat Pritikin Diet had been a failure, yet McGovern apparently still believed in its premise. Nathan Pritikin first published the diet in 1979, seven years after Robert Atkins published the Atkins Diet. Dr. Robert Levy, who was the director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), warned McGovern’s committee that until NHLBI finished studying the proposal there was too little evidence to support eating less fat, and that recommending such a diet to the American public would have the effect of conducting a nutritional experiment on them. As he recalled later, "the good senators came out with the guidelines and then called us in to get advice”. Dr. Levy wasn’t alone. Among others was Phil Handler, the President of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1980 he asked, "What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?" However, Committee Mentality took precedence; the appropriate time to amend the guidelines was before passing the motion, not afterward. They had laid the foundation for the popular cultural icons known as the Food Guide Pyramid and Daily Recommended Allowances, and any motion to amend it was out of order. Due to its popularity, other groups such as the National Reading Panel try to raise support for their own projects by patterning and naming projects such as The Reading Guide Pyramid after the Food Guide Pyramid. Ironically, comparing their project to the Food Guide Pyramid opens it to comparison with the Food Guide Pyramid’s failure as well as its popularity, as Jerry Zimmermann and Carolyn Brown do in their article, Let Them Eat More Than Phonics. They use the Food Guide Pyramid as an illustration of the effects of poorly researched policy on the public: Scientific, social, and economic interests took over, leading to the acceptance (and promotion by government and industry) of the low-fat, high-carbohydrate dietary recommendations reflected in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food guide pyramid. The low-fat doctrine reigned; market forces popularized low-fat, high-carbohydrate food products; and the nation got fatter and fatter. By the end of the 1980s, nearly one-fourth of Americans were obese; the number of overweight children had nearly tripled; and, for the first time, physicians began diagnosing Type 2 diabetes in adolescents. While a number of studies found that fat consumption decreased along with cholesterol levels, there was no decrease in heart disease.
We should not take any of this to say that the carbohydrate-heavy government recommendations are wrong for everyone. Many people eating according to it are healthy. However, many others are not. There is evidence that genetics play a role in deciding how we react to different dietary guidelines. For example, Dr. Bernstein notes that some people such as those of Native American descent particularly suffer from obesity; for decades even before the carbohydrate-heavy government recommendations, the food provided for them by the Bureau of Indian Affairs implied dietary mandates. Now that the Food Guide Pyramid and Daily Recommended Allowances have added their burden to their lives, Diabetes afflicts as much as 60% of the membership of tribes such as the Pima and Hopi in the American southwest. Bernstein also reports that native populations that straddle the Mexican border display an almost magical transformation across the border. Because they retain much of their historical lands instead of small reservations, many people of Native Mexican descent still work to produce traditional foods, so they retain the physical appearance of the stereotypical cultural icon of the lean, mean, fighting machine that Native Americans also had in the 19th century. Meanwhile, the U.S. Government has forced Native Americans to subsist largely upon cheap carbohydrates via the Bureau of Indian Affairs, transforming many of them into a newer stereotypical cultural icon of gross and morbid obesity. However, popular culture plays an even bigger role than genetics in deciding who may become obese; its promotion of a slender body as a critical ideal of health and beauty is what motivates most dieters. As we realize that the Food Guide Pyramid and Daily Recommended Allowances have at best failed some of us and at worst caused many of our problems to begin with, many of us react by switching to low-carbohydrate diets. It’s only human nature to react to a dangerous extreme with an opposite extreme that is also potentially dangerous. It may even solve the problem of obesity for some people. However, low-carbohydrate dieting may not even be financially practical for a majority of people suffering from obesity. Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington asserts that “There is no question that the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in the United States follow a socioeconomic gradient, such that the burden of disease falls disproportionately on people with limited resources, racial-ethnic minorities, and the poor.” He also reports, “Although obesity rates have continued to increase steadily in both sexes, at all ages, in all races, and at all educational levels, the highest rates occur among the most disadvantaged groups”. Drewnowski explains:
He notes, “Obese patients were accordingly advised to replace fats and sweets with a more prudent dietary pattern characterized by a high intake of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, poultry, and fish”. However, “Given the differential in energy costs between energy-dense and energy-dilute foods, the advice to replace fats and sweets with fresh vegetables and fruit may have unintended economic consequences for the consumer”. His conclusion is that “There is substantial evidence that food purchases are influenced by food costs. Several studies have mentioned diet costs as a barrier to dietary change, especially among low-income respondents.” This cultural phenomenon is not purely American. In 1997, the National Food Alliance in London found it necessary to publish Myths about Food and Low Income, a document created specifically to debunk popular cultural myths about nutrition such as:
As older low-carbohydrate diets experience revival and newer ones proliferate, they pose a direct threat to industries that have either started or increased production to keep up with an artificially inflated demand for low fat, high-carbohydrate products. They also help others such as the cattle industries, which might otherwise suffer a sales slump due to the Mad Cow Disease Scare. The pendulum of popular opinion only swings so far before it stops and swings the other way. Therefore, in an opposite reaction, some in the adversely affected industries are now starting even newer higher-carbohydrate diets to compensate for their declining businesses. For example, the June 15, 2004 Times-Standard carried an article about Stephen Lanzalotta, a baker in Portland, Maine who lost nearly half of his customers to the current low-carbohydrate dietary fad. He admits that he is neither a nutritionist nor a scholar. However, he reasons that since he has not gained undue weight by eating plenty of carbohydrate, neither should anyone else. Meanwhile, he has plenty of motivation to bring customers back to his business. Therefore, he has started his own diet and named it the Da Vinci Diet in honor of a popular novel by Dan Brown titled The Da Vinci Code. This diet will undoubtedly be healthy for some people, namely the same people who are already healthy while eating according to carbohydrate-heavy government recommendations. However, the very people who suffer from obesity after living by the Food Guide Pyramid for two decades are the same ones who are most likely to benefit Lanzalotta’s business the most because when they eat more carbohydrate they then crave to eat even more carbohydrate. Since different people react differently to different kinds of foods, it is vital for each of us to observe our own food reactions and discern which foods we personally need to avoid and promote in our diets. Only then can we choose which sort of diet might help us. In order to make informed decisions about our diets as individuals, we as a society need trustworthy dietary education. Fortunately, the U.S. Government has seen the need to revise the Food Guide Pyramid, according to a CNN Health article, Dietary panel calls for more fish, fewer refined grains. A Food Guide Pyramid that includes more fish and fewer refined grains will be a step toward a more balanced diet than the Pyramid of the past. The new Pyramid is also to include recommendations for daily exercise. We may hope that the new Food Guide Pyramid will be an asset to our health, rather than the hindrance that the old one was. It would especially help if it explains that different people have different dietary needs. Assuming that the new Pyramid is an improvement, an education campaign that includes replacing the old Pyramid with the new one is in order. Considering the technical jargon and advertising clichés that accompany explanations of most dietary concepts, one priority of dietary education must be to address the public in language that most will understand, with another priority of correctly explaining aspects of diet and metabolism that most people misunderstand because of popular cultural myths. For example:
Those conducting the Food Guide Pyramid experiment forgot to tell the subjects how experimental it was, when to end the experiment, what conclusions they reached, and whether they even gathered any data. That being the case, let’s gather our own data and form our own conclusions. Here are some suggestions:
read also Nine Cold Hard Weight Loss Truths I got for you a ON-LINE DIET GENERATOR that will help you because this new diet is called the IDIOT PROOF DIET Works Cited Bernstein, Richard K., M.D., F.A.C.E., F.A.C.N., C.W.S. "Dr. Richard Bernstein's Diabetes Solution" Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. www.diabetes-normalsugars.com/readit.shtml CNN Health. "Dietary panel calls for more fish, fewer refined grains." 27 May 2004. www.cnn.com/2004/health/diet.fitness/05/27/dietary.guidelines.ap/ Drewnowski, Adam, and SE Specter "Poverty and obesity: the role of energy density and energy costs" American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 79.1 January 2004: 6-16. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/79/1/6 Federal Citizen Information Center. "Food Guide Pyramid" www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/food/food-pyramid/main.htm "Atkins-weary baker offers 'Da Vinci Diet'" Times- Standard 15 June 2004: A9 Levy, Robert M.D. "Framingham Heart Study" National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/framingham/riskabs.htm Ludwig, David. "Eating Less Fat, More of Some Carbs May Make Us Hungrier, Heavier" Harvard Medical School Focus 19 March 1999 http://focus.hms.harvard.edu/1999/mar19_1999/nutrition.html National Food Alliance Food Poverty Project "Myths about Food and Low Income" http://www.sustainweb.org/publications/downloads/pov_myths.pdf New Treatments.org. "What is cholesterol?" http://www.newtreatments.org/cholesterol Diet Information. "Pritikin Diet Review" www.diet-i.com/diets/pritikin-diet.htm Taubes, Gary. "What If it's all been a Big Fat Lie?" 7 July 2002. The New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00E13F7345A0C748CDDAE0894DA404482 Zimmermann, Jerry, and Carolyn Brown. "Let Them Eat More Than Phonics" Phi Delta Kappan www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0304zim.htm | ____________________
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