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Diet fads leave me confused, not to mention hungry for answers

Thursday, February 26, 2004

By Myron Kukla, The Grand Rapids Press

http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/i...12101249900.xml

I'm so confused. For a couple of years, when I went on my annual, post-holiday, pre-spring rite of passage known as "dropping a few pounds," I was told to watch my intake of fatty foods, avoid saturated fats and stay away from foods with abnormally high fat content, such as whale blubber.

This was a tough diet to follow, especially if you are not partial to eating shrubbery.

My sole consolation was that I could eat pasta with my shrubbery, sometimes with a little Alfredo sauce.

Last year, when I went on my annual fad diet, I found that vegetable matter and pasta was out because they had bad things called starch and carbohydrates that would encourage my body to store fat instead of lose it.

Diet Books like "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution" told me to dig into steaks and bacon, and eat butter and pork chops to lose weight because they contain the secret good ingredient called protein, which the body runs on like a Hummer burning fossil fuels.

I loved this diet because I could eat huge helpings of things that weren't deciduous and still lose weight.

New diet rules

The other day, I was all ready to start my Atkins two-week flab-burning spring diet again when I noticed a newspaper article that said my high-protein diet probably was killing me, or at least clogging my arteries, by leaving carbohydrates out of my body.

I pushed aside my Atkins-friendly breakfast of pork chops, steak and buttered bacon, and read the article.

It seems the Italian pasta maker, Barillo, claims low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets are unhealthy. The company and a bunch of food scientists last week concluded during a world Pasta Conference in Rome that protein-rich diets reduce secret food ingredients -- I'll call them shrubbery -- that help regulate your body's "glycemic index."

The glycemic index rates food by none of the ordinary measures we have come to know and trust -- tablespoon, cup, bowl, snack pack or family bucket. It determines which are healthy foods based on how quickly they metabolize in your body and raise blood sugar. In dieting terms, metabolize means ... well ... it means ... OK, I don't know what it means. Until just a little while ago, I didn't even know I had a glycemic index to worry about.

A Boston-based nutritional research group at the Pasta Conference announced that good glycemic index can play a key role in preventing such chronic illnesses as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

The nutrition group suggested that spaghetti, linguine and rigatoni should be the "cornerstone foods" of a low glycemic index diet. They are proposing that manufacturer's print the glycemic index quotients on the sides of food packages.

Reading the box

Now, I don't know about you, but when eating fat was bad, I got sucked into reading the tiny print on the side of Oreo bags to see how many ugly grams of fat I would consume along with each sweet and yummy cookie.

And then, just when the food manufacturers got it down to where there was hardly any fat in anything you ate, the world changed and fat was OK, except for trans fats, which will turn you into a frog if you eat too much of it. Diet gurus told me I now could eat all the fat I wanted as long as I checked the side of the Oreo bag to see the how many carbohydrates it contained. So, I checked the tiny print for carbs.

But, you have to draw the line somewhere. And, I'll tell you, there is no way I'm going to read the side of food packages for glycemic indexes to figure out how quickly my body will sop up a bag of potato chips or Doritos.

I don't want to know the metabolism rate should be for an 180-pound man eating the half-ounce creamy center from the Oreo. I'm afraid if I tried to comprehend this information, my brain would explode.

So, I've decided to get off fad diets, and go back to my old ways. I'm going to eat pasta. I'm going to eat ice cream. I'm going to eat low-fat yogurt. I'm going to eat steaks. I'm going to eat bacon and Egg Beaters. I'm going to eat salads with low-calorie Italian dressing. I'm going to eat rolls and butter. And, I'm going to drink milk and eat Oreo cookies late at night.

No more worrying about glycemic-indexed, fat-metabolizing, carbohydrate-laden, protein-measured shrubbery diets for me.

Comments and suggestions can be e-mailed to Myron Kukla at myron~myronkuklabooks.com.