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Into Our Stomachs and Out of Our Minds

The Post's opinion and commentary section runs every Sunday.

By Sally Squires
Sunday, July 28, 2002; Page B03

Oh, how our ancestors must be laughing. Here we are in the 21st century, surrounded by more cheap and plentiful food than has been available since the Garden of Eden, and Americans are still struggling to learn how to eat. The latest national nutritional drumbeat -- the essentially laughable idea that limitless Porterhouse steaks, giant dollops of butter and carefree portions of other saturated fats will make us slim and healthy -- shows just how far off course we have gone. We may be aging, but we're still playing with our food.

How did we get so out of touch with this basic part of life? What happened to the simple joy of eating? And why do so many smart people, bombarded with information, feel so helpless and befuddled about food?

As ridiculous as this seems in an era of far scarier health threats, it's not a problem we can afford to ignore. While heads may be spinning lately about the dangers of hormone replacement therapy, the truth is that obesity will cause more heart disease and cancer than a little extra estrogen. Expanding waistlines are linked to nearly 300,000 deaths a year in the United States.

Americans today live in a culture of excess in a nation firmly committed to a large and powerful agribusiness complex. Inundated by nonstop food -- and diet -- advertising, we overindulge and then turn to self-help books or the latest weight loss fad -- anything to avoid facing the fact that we seem to have lost the ability to think realistically about what we eat and what it does to us.

Taught as children to clean everything from our plates, we grow into adults who chow down gigantic portions that pack more than a day's worth of fat and calories in a single meal. And we don't stop with meals. Food is so readily available, such an instant and affordable comfort, that we can mindlessly graze 24/7. Weight loss experts Kelly Brownell at Yale and David Ludwig at Children's Hospital in Boston, say we live in a "toxic environment," where food is too accessible while physical activity -- even a reasonable amount of walking -- is difficult or awkward or impractical to do. We sit at our desks all day -- and eat at them. We eat in our cars, often a super-sized meal bought in the drive-through lane. When we do actually walk somewhere, we munch as we trundle down the street. We snack at sporting events, at movies and in front of the television. We seem to eat everywhere except with our families at dinner (a fact that has prompted Oprah Winfrey's personal chef to pen a new book called "Back to the Table"). And then, simultaneously conditioned to covet the near-anorexic look of "Friends," we attribute our failure to achieve a healthy weight to big bones, extra muscle or glandular problems.

Heaven forbid that we should ever feel a pang of actual hunger! Or stop eating when we feel sated. We have become so disconnected from reality that many people are incapable of recognizing those physiological cues when they occur. We've trained ourselves out of the habit: We use food to soothe our nerves, calm our stress, pick us up when we feel down, celebrate when we're happy and give us energy when we're tired. We chronically over-indulge, finding room for one more bite, one more guilty pleasure, one more tantalizing morsel, so that we no longer have an accurate sense of when we really are full. In doing that we lose touch with the simple act of nourishment for nourishment's sake and override important physiological messages between the stomach and the brain, according to Penn State nutrition researcher Barbara Rolls. That conversation between brain and stomach is a key biological communication that has kept our bodies fueled and well oiled for thousands of years.

It is no wonder, then, that one in every three adults in this country is trying to lose weight, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which estimates that Americans spend more than $30 billion dollars annually on weight loss programs. Yet let's face it: Whether you shell out $24.95 for a diet book or $100 a month for a weight-loss program, this is not exactly rocket science. "There is no mystery about it," wrote Donald G. Cooley in "The New Way To Eat to Get Slim." "Nothing makes fat except food. The unfailing law of reducing is to eat fewer food calories each day than you burn up."

He wrote that in 1941.

Americans made "Calories Don't Count," by physician Herman Taller, the No. 1 best-seller in 1962. In 1968, the public clamored for three other diet-related books -- "The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet" by Irwin M. Stillman and Samm Sinclair Baker, "The Weight Watcher's Cook Book" by Jean Nidetch and "Better Homes and Gardens Eat and Stay Slim," -- pushing them to the best-sellers list, too. One diet book or another has made the list regularly ever since.

So why are record numbers of Americans still acting as if they can't figure it out? It's too easy to say we're just lazy. Or that we don't care enough. Americans are known for going the extra mile when they want to make better lives for their kids or provide good homes for their families. Yet when it comes to weight loss, we seem to have notoriously short attention spans, want instant gratification and are easily seduced by the promise of a quick fix.

A prime example: Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls." This '60s best-seller (and later popular movie) about pill-popping women featured a weight-loss program where participants were put in a semi-comatose sleep for two weeks and miraculously woke up pounds lighter. Of course, the novel never mentioned that the weight loss would likely be from muscle and bone -- not from fat. But why let scientific facts get in the way?

Which brings us to the buzz generated by the recent New York Times magazine piece on the virtues of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, such as the one promoted by physician Robert Atkins. Accompanied by a photo of a juicy steak topped with a large pat of butter, the article by freelancer Gary Taubes suggested that such high-fat foods might be the key to weight loss. Gleeful gluttons gloated. Taubes got a book contract. Talk-show hosts talked. Was that great news, or what?

Get real. The Atkins diet, like the Stillman program developed 40 years ago, gives fruit and vegetables short shrift and considers all carbohydrates undesirable. USDA studies show that such diets lead to constipation in the short run. While long-term studies on the Atkins diet have not been conducted, worldwide research shows that populations that eat a diet high in meat and saturated fat have a significantly increased risk of colorectal cancer. And it is hard to argue with Dean Ornish's 25 years of research that indicates putting people on a very low-fat diet helps reverse blocked arteries.

By the way, Atkins himself suffered cardiac arrest a few months back. Still, we cling to our delusions. It seems that we just can't resist hoping again and again that life will resemble the fantasy world of the 1973 movie "Sleeper," where Woody Allen is the owner of a health food store who is frozen and then reawakened in the 22nd century. In this brave new world, doctors are appalled at his 200-year-old concept of a "healthy" diet of organic vegetables, fruit and bean sprouts. "You mean no deep fat?" they ask in horror. "Cream pies? Hot fudge?" We laughed then, and we should be laughing now.

What we shouldn't be doing is losing the plain and simple joy of eating well. That doesn't just mean resisting the excesses of binging and dieting, it means avoiding the other extreme and "medicalizing" food. Savor that hunk of grilled salmon because it is tasty -- don't down it obediently because it contains heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Those extremes fly in the face of common sense, scientific research and the adage that you are what you eat.

Sally Squires writes "The Lean Plate Club" column in The Post's Health section.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company