Nice find, Jade!

And the article...

February 02, 2004

Sex Is Out, Carbs Are In

When beer ads start promoting diet, it's a sign of an eating revolution

DONALD COXE

THERE IS HOPE on the American obesity front (and behind). Not because of all those dieticians and academics who've been telling Americans to stop eating at McDonald's and start eating healthy (read broccoli and its ilk). My optimistic outlook came from days of research in the form of watching the National Football League playoffs. That meant sitting through hours of advertising aimed at males, particularly those between the ages of 18 and 35, the demographic the NFL apparently delivers better than almost any other TV programming. The experience confirmed what I had been hearing and reading about a dramatic change in the market for foods and beverages. To the horror of the nutrition establishment, the low-carbohydrate diet -- the Atkins Diet and its imitators -- has suddenly become the regimen for those who want to replace flaccid flab with firm abs.

Meat and eggs are in, bread, potatoes and pasta are out, and other foods and drinks had better be low-carb. Carnivores are running rampant, undeterred by worries about cholesterol or mad cow disease, or about the global warming effects of bovine flatulence. (Yes, Jeremy Rifkin and other leading environmental nags and scaremongers often emit pleas to Americans to give up beef because of those emissions.)

When America's three leading brewers (Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors) switch their football game ads from flavour and sex to bragging about their minimal carbs, and when fast food franchiser Subway, which had for years run ads about losing weight with some of their subs, switches to promoting "Atkins-friendly" wraps with "only" 11 g of carbs, and when Burger King begins promoting Whoppers without the buns, you know something major is happening.

It's not that Americans haven't been interested in dieting before. Check out the covers on the magazines sold at any supermarket checkout, and you'll see new "can't fail" diets promoted monthly. Problem is that the women who buy these magazines have had scant success in getting their husbands or boyfriends to go along with regimens of salads and such. Taking the fat and sugars out meant, particularly for men, taking the flavour out. Result: America has an obesity problem. All studies show that it's correlated to income, but not because people don't have enough resources (food stamps take care of that) to eat. The poorer you are, the worse your eating habits and the fatter you become. That reality doesn't change Democrats' demands for Bush to solve America's "hunger crisis." Most eloquent in the primaries on this topic is Senator John Edwards. Maybe he's researched how John Kennedy defeated Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primary in 1960 by misusing a government study that lamented the plight of millions of Americans who went to bed hungry. In fact, the study said many were hungry because of overdoing dieting.

Naturally, the World Health Organization has become involved in the "obesity crisis." It's furious that Bush won't join its campaign to denounce "bad foods," such as hamburgers. To these old-style nutritional elitists, what's making Americans fat is the meat -- not the bread. They have been fighting Dr. Atkins for a quarter-century. When he died, comments about him in the New York Times, from its stable of establishment nutritionists, ranged from barely polite to scathing.

It may be a coincidence, but the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine didn't publish its research showing the effectiveness of the Atkins Diet until its author was dead. Maybe it was that article, or maybe it was just word-of-mouth from millions of carnivorous mouths, that turned the tide. According to a study published last year by Morgan Stanley, "19 per cent of U.S. adults are either currently on a low-carb diet or have tried one earlier this year, which is three to five times higher than many previous public estimates."

It didn't take the brewers long to realize that a significant segment of the market was no longer satisfied with drinking "light" beer. It wanted certified low-carb beer. First to meet that demand was Anheuser-Busch with Michelob Ultra. By mid-season, the other majors were being specific about their carbs.

As a long-time football watcher, I can attest that never before have the big brewers promoted their beer on a dietary basis. Light beers always cited calories, but emphasized taste and showed men and women drinking together to suggest that men could drink beer with their dates/lovers/wives rather than white wine as long as they drank light. Now light beers are being promoted on the basis of compliance with a long-ridiculed diet regimen.

The bakers are in shock. Overall bread sales, particularly of white bread, are slumping. They're holding industry conferences about what to do. Various varieties of reduced or low-carb bread are struggling to retain toast's traditional place at breakfast, along with the back-in-favour eggs. In Chicago supermarkets, Natural Ovens sells a special low-carb bread at an eye-popping US$5.99 a loaf. When my wife asked a store manager about this seemingly outrageous price, he admitted it was high, but said, "We can't keep it on the shelves."

Wherever you are, Dr. Atkins, you can smile.

Donald Coxe is chairman of Harris Investment Management in Chicago and of Toronto-based Jones Heward Investments.
dcoxe~macleans.ca