Our appetite for dieting

Rosie Mestel, Los Angeles Times

Mar. 16, 2004 12:00 AM

http://www.azcentral.com/health/fit...iethistory.html

Have you struggled repeatedly to lose weight, only to fail miserably or end up heavier than before? If so, look no further.

The secret to effortless weight loss lies with eating papayas, pineapples and watermelons in the correct sequence and combination.

It lies with apple cider vinegar, nature's miracle fat-burner.

It lies with piling one's plate with a pyramid of bacon but banishing all bread; with slashing fat, swimming in cabbage soup, eating like a caveman or carefully picking a diet that matches your blood type or astrological sign.

Dieting has consumed Americans for more than a century, even as the collective girth of the nation has increased and a steady stream of dieting books has rolled off the presses: Scarsdale, Beverly Hills, Zone, South Beach, and on and on. Like a circle in a spiral, diet fads have come and gone, then come back again - sometimes with new frills and usually with more sophisticated marketing, but often barely changed.

The high-protein diet (currently incarnated as the Atkins diet) has risen phoenixlike from the ashes at least half a dozen times. Restricted-food diets have had endless reiterations, be they focused on lollipops, grapes, brussels sprouts or beef.

And the importance of proper food combining has often been stressed: Proteins and carbohydrates should never be eaten together; melons should always be eaten alone; lamb chops should be paired with pineapples for powerful, pound-burning potency.

Only recently have scientists begun trying to figure out which diets actually work. Low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets are receiving much of the attention, along with the low-fat diet espoused by such mainstream organizations as the American Heart Association.

The need to determine the effectiveness of the diets has become more pressing as American obesity rates rise, and Type 2 diabetes - once an obesity-associated disease of adulthood - is increasingly being diagnosed in children.

Too much food

There is no dark mystery behind the endless carousel of quick-fix solutions, experts say - just a list of mundane causes.

Americans live in a land bursting with food, inside bodies biologically designed to pack on pounds in times of plenty and conserve energy in times of want (i.e., when we're dieting). Weight gain has never been easier.

Dieting is hard. Obesity treatments usually yield only modest weight loss - perhaps 5 percent of a person's starting weight.

Keeping weight off is harder still. So it's easy to see why there will always be an appetite for more books, more plans, more promises.

Some scientists even believe that the very act of repeated dieting contributes directly to a lifetime of weight problems, by molding the mind to be fixated with food.

It is far trickier to figure out how to stop the carousel.

"Every single time, people have felt, 'Finally, this is the answer, this is the diet that's going to solve the problem.' And none ever do," says James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.

Sporadic, documented cases of dieting stretch back 1,000 years or more. But in America, dieting took off with a vengeance only at the end of the 19th century.

The stage was set by the early 1800s. Americans were bolting their food in great quantities.

Health reformers began railing against gluttony and the endless, immoral procession of pies, cakes and meats.

Chief among these was the Rev. Sylvester Graham, creator of the famous Graham cracker. He preached that gluttony not only led to sinful sexual practices but also to such maladies as constipation and indigestion (or "dyspepsia," as people then termed it). Americans flocked to water cures, mercury-based laxatives and Graham's pure-food, brown-bread diet in order to settle their stomachs.

The goal of Graham's earliest followers was not shedding pounds. In those days, plumper bodies were fashionable - indeed, even a symbol of success. Businessmen proudly joined the Fat Men's Club of Connecticut. "Thin girls" wrote tearful letters to the Ladies' Home Journal for weight gain advice.

As the century bore on, the interest in weight loss grew. A succession of figures proffered their sure-fire solutions with confidence and authority.

Then came the explosive sea change. Dieting became a widespread national preoccupation - and no one knows quite why, says historian Peter N. Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University and author of Fat History (New York University Press, 1997).

"You could say that, well, people started getting increasingly concerned about dieting right around the time they should have," he says. Food was abundant. Public transportation and sedentary jobs were on the rise.

Yet there is little evidence to suggest people were getting much fatter at that time, he adds.

Slim patriots

Fashion played its part in the dieting phenomenon. Corsets became unstylish, and natural slenderness gained ascendance. The life insurance industry contributed, too. Early actuarial tables revealed that fat people, on average, lived shorter lives than slimmer people.

By 1903, plumpness was so out of favor that the Fat Men's Club of Connecticut shut its doors forever.

By World War I, being fat was deemed more than unattractive; it was downright unpatriotic.

The carousel was picking up speed.

As the years rolled on, new products and discoveries sharpened America's focus on body weight and shaped the recommendations of diet mavens. Weight monitoring became central in the 1920s, with the rise of Health-O-Meter and Detecto private bathroom scales.

Studies on the calorie content of foods were smoothly incorporated into a long succession of books, starting with the 1918 blockbuster Diet and Health With a Key to the Calories, by Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, who counseled her adherents to worship their kitchen scales and forever forget about "slices" of bread, and think only of calories of bread.

If the past century's diet themes appear surprisingly repetitive, there are good - even rational - reasons why.

Any diet that limits calorie intake, by whatever means, will help promote weight loss, provided someone sticks to that diet.

Any diet that forces people to eat limited types of foodstuffs is likely to make them eat less, because human appetites thrive on variety. We can engulf astounding quantities of food, lickety-split, at a buffet. A body can bear only so many lamb chops and pineapples.

Any diet that focuses primarily on limiting food intake, as most diets do, is likely to work better than one centered on exercise.

"It's a matter of magnitude," Hill says. "You could reduce your energy intake easily by 1,000 calories a day. You couldn't do 1,000 a day with exercise."

There are also reasons why low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets have repeatedly sprung to the fore. Protein is satiating; it satisfies the appetite - hence the long-standing popularity of such diets (although that could decline if mad-cow hysteria takes hold).

Also, some scientists think avoiding carbohydrates can help curb the appetite, because this practice avoids spikes in insulin and crashes in blood sugar that may get people feeling hungrier sooner.

In other words, while some fad diets are silly and others nutritionally inadequate and downright irresponsible, a lot of them could work, nutrition scientists say. But there is no reason to proclaim one vastly superior or possessed of any magical power - especially given the dearth of proper, scientific tests of diets.