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.