The low-fat movement - motivated by health or motivated by morals?
 

For awhile now I've had this theory about the low-fat movement, and I'm sure I can't be alone. I strongly feel that the big push towards getting rich countries to give up fat/red meat/animal products, and instead adopt a grain rich diet was motivated primarily by personal philosophical and political beliefs. I think that those behind the movement had an agenda to push that they then secondarily sought to back up with scientific data. In fact, I believe actual scientific reality or health concerns don't figure in the equasion.

Fat, meat, and general dietary abundance symbolizes wealth. A full plate rich with dairy and red meat symbolizes prosperity and enjoying bounty. The dark side of this means western diets also symbolize ruthless exploitation of weaker people, squandering of resources, and complacency.

In the 70s and 80s we "suddenly discovered" these foods would kill us and make us fat. Therefore, in response were told by People Who Know Best to "cut the fat" out of our diets, we were warned of the dangers of red meats and dairy, we were told a starch rich diet was the healthiest. Ignore all the yo-yo dieters who starve on such a plan, ignore all the people that get fatter. We were promised by impressively educated, socially prominent people that such a diet is the path to eternal life. 80s diet gurus posing as scientists and doctors - many of whom were also devotees to eastern religion, eastern religious gurus, vegans, and/or held other questionable beliefs - were at the pr head of the low-fat movement.
The extolled virtues of trimming excess weren't limited to diet alone; at a time when american prosperity seemed to really start to peak, more frequently left-leaning college educated "intellectuals" took up a new favored hobby: chastising the american public for squandering of resources and their insensitive indifference to the plight of the weak. Eastern collectivist religions became in vogue, the insanity of vegetarianism took foothold and spread. The popularity of low fat bare sustenance diets, and I completely believe this, are nothing more than another manifestation of this "poor little rich boy" complex.

Now there is nothing wrong with trying to make the world a better place, and there is nothing wrong with having an unconventional set of morals. Do whatever makes you feel good, heck promote it if you like. Spread the gospel.
The problem is, people posing as doctors feigning interest in our health were knowingly trying to dupe us into adopting their personal religious-like subjective moral beliefs. We were told all these lies about how healthy it is to avoid animal products, the many benefits of decreasing fat, and how beautiful a grain and legume rich diet is. They were all lies. Such a diet is one of bare-sustenance, certainly not an ideal thriving environment at all.

We were duped into changing our way of life for reasons totally unrelated to the ones that we were given.

Of course, I see the same ascetic streak in many low-carb dieters as well, in their attitudes toward dairy, nuts, frankenfoods, artificial sweeteners, and even eating over 20g per day. KISS gets lots of good press on this board, and it's about as restrictive as a low-carb diet can get -- no BUTTER, for pete's sake, let alone Splenda or dairy. As another example, the collective wisdom of the board is that desserts or sweets of any kind should be completely off-limits during Induction, although DANDR as written permits things like whipped cream with AS, diet soda floats, and sugar-free jello.. I've seen a lot of recipes where people talk about cutting back on things like onions and spices to pare carb counts down to the bone, and I'd bet you that at least 50% of us are on "permanent induction". We love to talk about how frankenfoods are evil, and how wonderful whole foods are, ignoring the fact that there are plenty of natural, unprocessed foods that aren't particularly good for us and that most frankenfoods won't do much harm if consumed in *moderation*. Is this really all that different in nature from the Ornishes and the Pritikins?

Really, I wonder why we (i.e. people in general, not LCers specifically) are so eager to make a virtue out of what we eat or don't eat. It's one of the unhealthiest mental habits I personally have, seeing myself as a good or bad person according to how my eating measures up to a certain set of rules. I'd like to be able to think of food purely as fuel, and evaluate my eating choices based purely on their effectiveness at keeping me healthy and meeting my energy needs instead of using them as variables in some big moral calculus. I used to have the idea that that's how "normal" people thought about food, and that equating food with self-worth was the holdover from years of being overweight and struggling with body-image issues. I'm not so sure any more that that's the case; sometimes it seems like we've got a national obsession with the virtues and vices of food and weight management issues, and I find it disturbing.

Wooo, as regards your theory, I've noticed that refined sugar and particularly HFCS is starting to show up as a "demon food" in the media along with dairy and red meat. While I happen to agree with this on a factual basis, I also think this indicates that the currently sanctioned dietary thinking definitely shows a conscious or unconscious bias toward self-denial. You don't mention attitudes toward sodium, which are also backed by dubious scientific evidence, but I'd consider it another example of the same phenomenon.

This is so true. I'm surprised sometimes at the animosity toward these foods, which for some of us mean the difference between succeeding with low-carb and dropping out. If I couldn't have dairy, nuts, artificial sweeteners, etc., I doubt I would stick to this WOE. If it's KISS or nothing, I'd probably give up and stay fat.



I would add: I'd also like to be able to think of food as one of the most reliable, ready pleasures in life -- there is nothing wrong with eating something for the sheer enjoyment of it. (Preferably something low-carb, of course.)



Yes! I got into a grumpy little discussion on another board with some folks who were railing against vanilla extract that had "EVIL" corn syrup in it. I pointed out that a teaspoon of vanilla extract with "evil" corn syrup adds about half a gram of carb to a recipe--and that in my homemade ice cream recipes, I probably get more carbs from the egg yolks than from the 2 teaspoons of vanilla! But a couple of people replied and basically told me that they chose not to defile their bodies with any amount of corn syrup. As if there's something malevolent about those corn syrup molecules... 1 gram's worth in a quart of ice cream. (If these folks want something to worry about, why not the 12 grams of carb in the 2 cups of whipping cream?)

For a long time I avoided the LC boards and hung out at a foodie board because I wanted to see posts that glorified food instead of demonizing it (or praising it with such backhanded compliments as "sinfully good"!). Lately I've recommitted myself to LC, and I'm trying to just avoid threads that bug me. This one caught my eye--I thought your post was really articulate and wise. I think the best thing to do as a low-carber is take a fresh look at what food is for (whichever way you define that) and try not to fall into the old habits of turning each bite into a moral issue.

What was it Dana Carpender said--something along the lines of: OK, you ate some sugar, but that doesn't mean you're bad. If you ate the neighbor's baby, you were bad. If you just ate a donut, you were unwise. There's a difference.

Oh yeah, this ties in nicely with that Traube article someone sited up in the Media forum. Basically the whole vegetarian initiave was a reaction to conspicuous consumption and environmentalism. Anyone remember "Diet for a Small Planet"?

Read the Taubes article, sounds a lot like what you're talking about: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front...iet/interviews/

But yes people get so invested in their agendas sometimes it makes their beliefs virtually indistinguishable from religion. They're both taking a lot on "faith".



Totally agree! There's so much mythology mixed in with dieting. People are convinced anything that tastes good must be bad for them or responsible for their weight gain or stall. But you're right. There's the Hair-shirt Atkins dieters, there's the Reformed Atkins dieters who relabel cheating as a "refeed" and there's probably Orthodox Atkins followers who never get off induction. Then there's the "Our Lady of Water" dieter that believe consuming gallons of water is the key to success.

I think I fall into the skeptical dieter. I don't take any diet doctor's book as 100% gospel truth. I adapt the diet to fit my personality and life.

Oh, another thing I've thought about since my earlier post: the surge in popularity of various types of fasting and "cleanses". These REALLY bother me, because they're what I consider borderline disordered eating behavior, and they definitely have a lot more to do with food moralizing than nutritional science. Of course, this may not be just a modern American phenomenon -- I recall a fairly well-known book a couple years back, whose title escapes me now, making the claim that a lot of the medieval saints were actually anorexics.

Fendel: Sure, I'd agree that looking at food as one of life's little pleasures is an even healthier approach than seeing it as morally neutral. LC has turned me into a cook and a foodie, but I still have trouble thinking of things that don't fall into my "acceptable" parameters in terms other than good/bad. I recently bought and have been reading Fran McCullough's The Low-Carb Cookbook, several of whose recipes call for small amounts of sugar and/or flour, and find myself wondering if I could just leave them out. That's just plain stupid and irrational -- I am on maintenance, and a teaspoon of flour now and again isn't going to hurt me -- but it's exactly the kind of knee-jerk "carbs BAD!" thinking you're talking about.

Hi Atlee -- is that book Holy Feast and Holy Fast?

I guess I've always allowed myself small amounts of flour and sugar where necessary. Sugar caramelizes, flour thickens--these are useful food tools. I've never done real by-the-book induction; I've tried to leave myself room for these things. I love McCullough's suggestion about scooping out a baked potato and eating the skin. I don't think I've seen that in any other low-carb book, but it makes perfect sense to me.

"Oh, another thing I've thought about since my earlier post: the surge in popularity of various types of fasting and "cleanses"."

This is something that has been on my mind lately too. We have very strong mental pictures of good/bad, clean/dirty, which are very sensible impulses. But giving them too much power can throw others out of balance.

After all, a meal of bad clams will cause all sorts of nasty things to issue from my body. Does that mean the nasty things were lurking there all along? And bad clams are a good way to "purge" them?

One thing we have to remember is Food is fuel, not a luxury. People tend to eat as a luxury, beack in the days people ate the same thing over and over and over, whether it had real taste or not.

So sticking to a KISS or a natural type LC is the best for me.

Origins of vegetarian movement
 

I think the first 'diets' and 'food science' (I use the term loosely) started before the the turn of the last century (1800's). As people moved into cities during the industrial age, the quality of food available to them was terrible. No fresh produce regularly, everything canned. It led to so many digestive system problems, people started looking for solutions. I think that is when the Kellog Clan started the San (like in the movie Road to Wellville). The Kellog clan had a huge impact on what was considered 'healthy', created breakfast cereals, and advocated vegetarian diets. Given the food available to most people at the time, it probably was a big improvement.

While I was researching the Neanderthin diet, I found out that there was a whole other body of work about high meat/fat and low carb diets that I didn't even know existed. I guess the Kellog Clan and the like had better connections in Washington, D.C. The low fat/high carb diets won the media war, and suppressed and discredited all other research. That really made me angry. (Big Agriculture has a stronger lobby than Big Beef, I suppose :rolleyes: )

Interestingly enough, the origin of the vegetarian, and rabid enviromentalist movement, had it's roots in Nazi Germany. Hitler (and some of his henchmen) was an ethical vegetarian/vegan. It's terrible when people worship 'Nature' to the point they would rather kill a human being than an animal. I think it stems from self-hatred, personally.

(Warning:I am waxing philisophical, be warned. ;) )

I believe as science and technology advances, more and more people lose faith in traditional beliefs, i.e. God, family, community... We have become alienated from the very things that tie people and communities together. In the void left behind, many people have begun to 'worship' Mother Nature, or any other belief they can hang onto, like the Eastern Religions. Couple this with all the Western guilt, from being a rich country among other things, and you have the recipe for the modern Vegetarian movement (and rabid environmentists) It's not rational, it's a religion.

Of course, Big Government Subsidies and Programs didn't help. The Gov't got the farmers started growing soybeans, then had to create a market for the product. That story is the same for numerous other products, I'm sure.

Okay, I'll shut up now. :D

As a city girl married to an old farm boy who just managed to get an education, I think that politics and personal agendas control alot of the information released to us through the media. In my job of writing a newsletter and maintianing our company's website, there are so many compliance issues I face daily, and I think that is true in all media. All we can do is try to be savvy consumers, and find out what works best for our bodies. I believe in moderation, at least for me. I try to avoid frankenfoods because I take so many pharmaceuticals daily just to stay alive, but yet, when the chocolate monster hits, I have Low CArb Chocolate. It makes my life easier, and makes it possible to stick to this WOE. Yet what works for me may make the next person go on a binge.