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In the movie Julie & Julia, there's a scene that was played in all the previews where Julia and her husband are in a restaurant and Julia says she might take up hat making while they live in Paris. At that point her husband says, "But Julia, what do you really like to do?" And, of course, Julia says, in only the way Julia could say, "EAT!"
I really like to eat too. Over the years I've known people who see food as solely a source of fuel, but they are few and far between, and not a lot of fun to go to dinner with. I also believe, despite the obesity epidemic, most people want to eat healthfully. In other words, people buy in to the idea that you are what you eat, and if you eat unhealthy foods, you'll be unhealthy.
The challenge is what does eating healthfully mean? If you follow conventional wisdom you would eat a low fat, high carb diet. That is the diet that the majority of nutrition professionals say is the healthy way to eat. However, Americans trying to follow those guidelines have found themselves getting fatter, and fatter, and fatter, with more and more people being diagnosed with diabetes.
Then there are those that say carbohydrates are the real cause of the obesity problem and if you just cut out carbs you can stop counting calories and maintain a healthy weight. Opponents will tell you those who follow a low carb diet are eating their way straight to a heart attack.
To listen to the two sides debate, you would think that each side was trying to kill the American population.
Like many 58-year-old women I battle my weight. Like many, I have toyed with low-carb diets, Weight Watchers, calorie counting and the majority of the time I have tried to follow the recommendations of the food pyramid. Like many, when my efforts to lose weight invariably failed, I comforted myself with the fact that I did eat a healthy diet, and if that meant carrying an extra 30 pounds, so be it.
Two years ago I happened to catch Author Gary Taubes on Larry King Live. He was promoting his book Good Calories, Bad Calories. In many ways the book was a follow-up to a piece he had written for The New York Times Magazine in 2002 called What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie? Taubes says, "The reaction to the article was dramatic."
Because of the powerful reaction to the magazine article in 2002, Taubes says he believed the public would have a similar reaction to the publication of his book. They did not. According to Taubes, the problem with his 500-page book is that it "basically says everything that you've been told about nutrition is wrong and here is journalist who is going to tell you what is right." Taubes is the first to say the book is definitely not beach reading.
Even so, he was very surprised and disappointed about the lack of reaction to this book. While he did have that Larry King Live appearance, the book was not taken seriously by the professional community. It was not reviewed in any of the
major medical publications and most major news outlets also skipped reviewing the book.
"I thought there would be a debate," he said. The debate he expected was between the forces who support the idea of low fat /high carb eating, and those who say eating a low carb/higher fat diet is the healthy way to eat.
Taubes traces our obesity epidemic to 1977 when a bipartisan, non-legislative committee headed by Senator George McGovern, published, " Dietary Goals For The United States." It represented a significant change in the types of food Americans thought of as healthy. Prior to the McGovern report, The food pyramid consisted of the four basic food groups: milk, meat, fruits and vegetables, and grains.
Americans began adopting this new approach to eating. The food industry responded by creating low fat foods. That's where things got dicey because when the food industry had to take out the fat from their products they had to replace it with something else. The something they replaced it with was sugar.
For the previous decade the Sugar Industry had been marketing itself as a way to control your appetite. This ad appeared in Good Housekeeping in 1968.
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The American Heart Association recently issued new recommendations for sugar consumption. Taubes says
