Death By Supermarket (25 page)

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the conventional wisdom of the day was “it’s the fat, not the sugar” that makes you fat. The low fat craze morphed into the fat-free craze, which encouraged food manufacturers to remove all fat from their products and replace it with sugar. With the public becoming more confused about what to eat and what not to eat, along with the rampant rise of unnatural hunger and the resultant binge eating, factory-food makers understood that the market was ripe to hawk any product they could dream up. Americans went along as food makers issued their siren call with the introduction of thousands of factory-food products into our marketplace—products tagged with food-industry-speak pronouncements of good health, beauty, and satisfaction. The problem was that these products contained substances that were foreign and mostly toxic to human physiology—and, of course, all that sugar.

Then came the blame game. As we grew fatter and type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer were skyrocketing, the medical establishment came to the conclusion that we were not compliant enough. They hammered harder on the “no saturated fats and cholesterol” message, encouraged us to eat more carbohydrates (sugar) and frantically advised us to lose
weight. But Americans could not hear any warnings about their out-of-control eating because they were crazed on carbs. The medical community beat the drum harder about our weight. But how do you break through to people you’ve turned into carb-addicted, binge-eaters to get them to stop at one bowl of Kellogg’s “heartsmart” Special K, when they have already eaten an entire box of SnackWell’s low fat cookies?

Then there are actually people who can maintain—through superhuman willpower—a starvation diet of hot water with lemon peel and oatmeal with berries for breakfast, dry salad for lunch, and one cup of pasta with marinara sauce for dinner, accompanied by one half cup of steamed broccoli and a small salad with a twist of lemon. These are typically the women Tom Wolfe described in his novel
Bonfire of the Vanities
as “social X rays… They keep themselves so thin, they look like X-ray pictures… You can see lamplight through their bones… ” Those who heroically restrained themselves from binging were disappointed to realize the low fat diet did not produce beautiful bodies. That’s because low fat diets are typically devoid of the cholesterol necessary to make hormones and proteins that are the building materials necessary to rebuild or create new cells that compose skin, muscles, organs, nails, hair, brain cells, and bones. Without incoming supplies, the body is forced to cannibalize its own bones and muscles to obtain the proteins necessary to keep up the rebuilding processes. (Carbs are fuel; they don’t supply building materials for your body to rebuild or replace cells.) If you happen to have the defiant willpower necessary to fight the biological drive to eat the food necessary for survival, you will see outward and inward manifestations of malnutrition sooner or later. In addition to developing a tubbier midsection, you may notice more cellulite taking over, along with saggy skin, thinning hair (the “male pattern balding” syndrome in women), brittleness and dryness, more wrinkles, dry eyes, ridged and shredding nails, as well as heartburn, insomnia, cravings and bingeing, infertility, type 2 diabetes, and coronary artery plaque.

A contributing factor to the wasted-away-with-a-fat-midsection look is that a diet low in protein results in diminished glucagon production,
which is your body’s fat-burning hormone. When you eat, two hormones, glucagon and insulin, are released from your pancreas. When you eat a balanced diet of real food these hormones are balanced. Glucagon is responsible for releasing fats from your cells to be used as fuel and building blocks within your body. Glucagon is released when you eat protein. Insulin is the fat-and nutrient-storing hormone that is released when you eat carbs. The ratio between these two hormones determines whether food will be used as building materials or fuel or stored as fat. If you eat only carbs, your insulin-to-glucagon ratio will be too high and those carbs will likely be stored as fat.

Human beings are made out of dynamic tissues that are constantly undergoing change and being replaced. This breaking-down process is essential for clearing out the old cells and cellular material (enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters) to make room for new. The regeneration process is made possible by the fact that we eat the very same biochemicals that our bodies are inherently composed of: proteins and fats.

Of the low fat diet, Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades write in
The Protein Power Lifeplan
, “Clearly the low fat diet hasn’t been the panacea that many had hoped for; in fact, it has turned out to be a dismal failure, a fact admitted publicly in 1996 by most of the world’s experts in nutritional research.” At the Second International Symposium on Dietary Fats and Oil Consumption in Health and Disease in April 1996, Drs. Eades listened to nutritional researchers from numerous countries talk about the effects of fat in the human diet. They were not talking about the low fat diet preventing heart disease but exactly the opposite. The major consensus was that the low fat diet is a failure.
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In
The Cholesterol Myth: Exposing the Fallacy That Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease
, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., analyzed 300 scientific references to disprove the nine main myths of the lipid hypothesis that had generated the low fat diet, which are: (1) High fat foods cause heart disease; (2) high cholesterol causes heart disease; (3) high fat foods raise blood cholesterol; (4) cholesterol blocks arteries; (5) animal studies
prove the diet-heart theory; (6) lowering your cholesterol will lengthen your life; (7) polyunsaturated oils are good for you; (8) the anti-cholesterol campaign is based on good science; and (9) all scientists support the diet-heart theory.
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Dr. Ravnskov, the author of more than eighty papers and letters critical of the cholesterol hypothesis, told me, “An almost endless number of scientific studies have shown that animal fat and high cholesterol are not causing heart disease. Unfortunately, these studies are ignored by the proponents of the cholesterol campaign.”
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Science writer Gary Taubes’s
New York Times Magazine
article “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” hit the newsstands on July 7, 2002, sending shock waves through Americans’ collective consciousness by questioning the validity of the low fat diet. In December 10, 2003, when asked in an interview what made him go after the topic of the low fat diet, Taubes, an award-winning journalist who often focuses on exposing poor and deficient science, replied, “I’d been reporting on salt and blood pressure, which is a huge controversy, and some of the people involved in that were involved in the advice to tell Americans to eat low fat diets, and they were terrible scientists. These were some of the worst scientists I’d ever come across in my 20-odd year career of writing about controversial science.”
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The mother of all hormones is cholesterol. Cholesterol is needed to make vitamin D from sunshine, and without vitamin D the body can’t utilize calcium. Brain function depends on cholesterol. Cholesterol creates a healthy immune system, decreases the risk of cancer, and decelerates aging. The low fat, low cholesterol diet made us fat, depressed, impotent, and sick. As the low fat diet took hold, drug industry profits soared with the sales of impotence drugs, antidepressants, osteoporosis drugs, chemotherapy drugs, and so on. Bafflingly, the low fat diet continued to garner support from the American Heart Association, the Centers for Disease Control, the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Cancer Institute, the American Medical Association, the American Diabetes Association, and so on.

Less than one year after this study, a $415-million, eight-year study published in the February 2006 issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association
found that the subjects who ate a low fat diet had exactly the same rates of colon cancer, breast cancer, heart attacks and strokes as the subjects who ate whatever they felt like eating. It was deemed the “Rolls Royce” of studies and the “final word” on the low fat diet. In response, David A. Freedman, a statistician at the University of California who writes on the design and analysis of clinical trials said, “We, in the scientific community, often give strong advice based on flimsy evidence.”
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In the decade prior to this “final word,” and despite the medical community’s wholehearted embrace of the low fat diet, many Americans rebelled and decided to look elsewhere for weight-loss solutions.

When cardiologist Robert Atkins published his first book,
Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution
, in 1972, he was attacked by the AMA, which labeled his diet approach “potentially dangerous.” This resulted in Congress summoning him to Washington to defend his diet. Thirty-one years and 15 million books later, “Atkins” was synonymous with low carb dieting.

IN SHOWTIME’S COMEDY SERIES
Weeds
, newly widowed suburban mom Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) turns to dealing pot to help pay the bills. When she stops in to stock up at her suppliers’ home, the conversation turns to cornbread. “I miss carbs,” Nancy says. A young woman filling Baggies chimes in. ““My friend Heylia tried no carbs. She ate bacon and eggs for a whole month. I’m talkin’ like five dozen eggs and a whole pig a day. She lost eleven pounds. That shit work.”
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It seems like the no carb thing is brand-new, but actually this approach has been around for a long time. The very first low carb diet was made popular in 1825 by French attorney Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in his book
The Physiology of Taste
. In 1863 a London undertaker, William Banting, published
Letter on Corpulence
after losing 50 pounds on a low carb diet. One hundred years later, when I was thirteen, I read about a diet that the military had been using. It was the first time I became aware of a low carb, high protein diet. I was mystified by the instructions to chow down on bacon, beef, and peanut butter but to absolutely avoid fruit and sweets. That was also the first time I ever heard the word “gluten.” Glutens are plant proteins occurring in cereal grains, chiefly corn and wheat—in other words, what we commonly think of as starch. It was also the first time I heard the word “ketosis,” meaning a state of starvation in which your insulin levels fall low enough to burn body fat for energy.

In 1963, a young, porky cardiologist ran across an article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
on low carb dieting (which may have been the same source for the military diet that I read). That cardiologist, Dr. Atkins, went on the program himself, lost weight, and subsequently wrote several bestselling books on low carb dieting. Forty years later, his approach hit the big time, and “low carb” and “no carb” became catchphrases.

Studies have shown that the low carb diet is initially more effective than a low fat diet, but that low carb dieters experience rebound weight gain within one year.
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Our physiology dictates that a diet in which carbs are individually modulated is the only way to reduce body fat without sacrificing your health. But people are not approaching nutrition in an individualized way. People are recklessly eating radically imbalanced, close to zero carb, one-size-fits-all diets that do not provide adequate, well-rounded nutrition. For instance, the Atkins induction phase allows only two to three cups of vegetables every day and minuscule amounts of fruit and dairy. Many low carb dieters decide to take extreme steps and eliminate all carbs, including veggies, fruits, and dairy. Healthy metabolic processes are dependent on adequate macronutrients (proteins, fats, and carbohydrates). But the energy supplied by these macronutrients to fuel healthy metabolic processes is released by micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and enzymes present in plant foods, fruits, and dairy products). This is a perfect example of why you are not going to get the full benefit of any one food without eating it in balance with other foods.

Atkins recommends that people move on to the maintenance diet, which is slightly more balanced. However, Atkins reminds his readers, “Induction not only jump-starts your weight loss, it is also a convenient refuge to which you can retreat whenever you need to get off a weight-loss plateau or to get back on the program after a lapse. So if you’re fallen off your Lifetime Maintenance program for whatever reason, you can return to Induction… ”
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So that means people are going back to a diet of subnutritional value time and time again.

Unless great care is taken to eat grass-fed, pasture-raised animal
products, Atkins followers consume excess amounts of factory-animal products from diseased animals that are permeated with carcinogens. All this without the benefit of the antioxidants found in fruits and vegetables.

And not to forget that zero carb dieters are often not versed in how to choose healthy fats and how to avoid poison fats. And so these dieters often munch on highly toxic fats such as deep-fat-fried pork rinds and the like.

To make matters worse, most people supplement this diet with factory low carb diet products. Before his death Dr. Atkins sold majority shares of Atkins Nutritionals, Inc., to the tune of $500 million.
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In hot pursuit were Atkins wannabees, who unleashed a torrent of low carb substances onto the market. In January 2004, representatives from 450 food companies, including Kraft, ConAgra, and Wal-Mart, gathered for two days to brainstorm how they could take advantage of the predicted $25-billion low carb market.
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While because of the unpalatability of low carb foods, Atkins Nutritionals, Inc., filed for bankruptcy in the summer of 2005, factory low carb products remain on our shelves.

Carbs are reduced in factory-food products by pumping up the volume with soy protein and substituting sugar with sorbitol, maltitol, and lacitol, which are sugar alcohols that are promoted as having little or no impact on blood-sugar levels and insulin secretion. (Some clinical nutritionists question this claim.) Sugar alcohols are molecules, like the weird science fake-fat olestra molecule, that are too big to be digested and that, like olestra, can cause gastrointestinal problems. Chemists are now hard at work trying to solve this problem by creating more science-fiction sugars—like Splenda—in labs.