Sorting Out an Eating Plan in a Nation Filled With Dietary Confusion
From: TODAY'S HEADLINES
The New York Times on the Web
Monday, May 5, 2003
Compiled 2 AM ET
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
A couple months ago, I met Dr. Robert Atkins in a green room for "New York Close-Up," the talk show on NY1. Dr. Atkins and I both had new books to talk about. His will sell a million copies. Mine won't. Dr. Atkins looked fit and lean, if a little worn from a busy interview schedule. I was a little worn too, but not so fit and lean. "So how's your cholesterol?" I wanted to ask him, but didn't, because he probably knew what his was and I didn't know my own. He also had a plan for losing weight, and I didn't. Like many Americans when it comes to thinking about health, I have lived, until recently, not in passive denial but in active avoidance.
Meeting Dr. Atkins, who died last month after slipping on an icy sidewalk, was like meeting the conundrum of the American diet in the flesh. Americans are overweight in record numbers, by record amounts, and at improbably young ages as well. Obesity is no longer a personal problem in this country; it's an epidemiological problem. We are maladapted, in an evolutionary sense, to the most abundant foods around us. We live in a wilderness of dangerous fats and highly refined carbohydrates, suitable perhaps for some other kind of creature but not for us. And what makes that wilderness of foods all the more dangerous is the feeling that somehow we're entitled to eat them. They're convenient, cheap and brightly packaged, symbols of the American way of life. We give ourselves permission to eat them. We feel we deserve to eat them. It was a hard day, after all.
Clearly, the only weight-loss program Americans are likely to embrace wholeheartedly is a counterintuitive one that lets us eat anything we want, whenever we want, supersized, and still lose weight. That's impossible, of course. But the Atkins diet comes close. It says, and I paraphrase, eat all the steak you want but leave the bread behind. This has had me puzzled for a long time. Like most Americans, I'm more than a few pounds over my ideal weight. I want to lose those pounds, and yet I don't want all those steak-driven indicators of incipient ill health, like bad cholesterol, to go skyrocketing. On the surface, there is hardly a more contentious subject in American life than dieting and nutrition. The good thing about the ongoing public controversy over losing weight is that it offers an excuse not to lose weight at all. You can just throw up your hands in confusion — to the shelf with the potato chips.
Recently, I decided to do something serious about the way I eat. I rejected Dr. Atkins and the various versions of his diet because they just seemed fundamentally absurd to me. The idea of decreasing weight by increasing your intake of fats seemed dangerous.
There may be an enormous disparity of nutritional and weight-loss advice out there, including the notorious carbohydrate-based food pyramid we all grew up with. But it seemed to me that most of the advice that arises from serious broad-based scientific studies tends to run in the same direction. Thin people live longer than fat people. The way to get thin is to get most of your calories from the most nutritious foods, which means leafy green vegetables, fresh fruit, beans and whole grains. As it happens, most of these foods are low in calories, so you can eat a lot of them, virtually all you want in fact.
To see what I eat these days would break my heart if I weren't losing weight so fast. One of the first things I realized is that fast food isn't just fast to get. It's also fast to eat. A half-dozen bites does in a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese. It takes a very long time to chew a dinner salad that's supposed to be a meal in itself. I also realized that I have truly never learned to love my vegetables. Suddenly gardening makes a lot more sense. Until now, I never understood what you were supposed to do with things like bok choy and spinach and kale and chard. I don't imagine I'll every be able to say of vegetables, as the Beach Boys once did, "If you brought a big brown bag of them home, I'd jump up and down and hope you'd toss me a carrot." But I've come to a truce with them. I eat them willingly and patiently so that someday, when I'm closer to my ideal weight, I can eat, in limited quantities, some of the other things my wife and I grow on our small farm — pork and eggs.
For me, at least, this is the end of a long evolutionary argument. My inner carnivore has come to terms with my inner herbivore, since both would like to live a little longer. Perhaps in another 25 million years the human race will have evolved to live on trans fats and refined carbohydrates. But a lot of us will have to die first before that happens. It's the price that evolution demands.
|
Hybrid Mode
