The New Math of Good Eating

Squares, triangles, circles…the U.S. government (specifically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture) has worked its way through the major geometric shapes in the past few decades while trying to convince a reluctant American public to eat better.  There was the Four Food Group model of the mid-twentieth-century (that’s the square), the Food Pyramid of 1992 (triangle), and now, coming soon, the Dinner Plate of the new millennium (circle). Yet somehow, we’re fatter and less healthy than we were even 20 years ago. Why does practically nothing the government says about good eating seem to get any traction?

1950s eating: oh-so-simple?

One thing is sure: none of the visual constructions dreamed up so far have been very coherent, and each raises almost more questions than it answers. For instance, in the Four Food Groups model, why does Dairy appear to account for a full one-quarter of the diet, seemingly equivalent to the entire universe of fruits and vegetables?  The answer to that may perhaps be found in the fact that the USDA has a duel mandate—to promote agriculture and to promote public health—and the dairy industry has some very skilled lobbyists when it comes to “promoting” the purported health benefits of milk.

And the Pyramid had an oddly counter-intuitive structure, in which the “good” stuff like grains, fruits, and vegetables were grouped at the (big, wide) bottom of the triangle, while the “bad” things one was to “limit” one’s intake of (like sweets and fats) were up at the tiny tippy-top.  Talk about over-thinking something: you can picture the creative types at the USDA coming up with that one, and disregarding the fact that the “top” of anything is almost always superior (“You’re the top/You’re the Coliseum,” sang Cole Porter).

Climbing the pyramid...wrong by wrong

Then there is just the utter failure of the Pyramid to teach us much of anything worth knowing.  We were told to gorge on those bottom-dwellers—the grains and cereals.  As my former shrink liked to say, “And how’s that workin’ for ya?”  Since 20 years of Pyramid eating have brought our collective national weight gain to an all-time high, I think we’d have to respond at this point: Not so well.  Only now are we figuring out that too many carbs, like too much of anything, are bad for your health and your waistline.

Enter the new, improved USDA Healthy Eating paradigm: the Food Circle, or Plate, soon to be unveiled by the USDA.  The Agency is currently coyly leaking details about the plan, hoping to drum up interest from a nutrition-news-numbed public.  What they’ll spill so far: The plate’s first distinguishing characteristic is that one-half of it should be filled with fruits and vegetables.  So at least fruits and veggies have moved up in the world, from one-quarter of the diet in the 1950s, to one-half now.

That is all well, good—and improbable.  When was the last time you saw a plate of food from any kind of American food outlet—fast food, middle-American cuisine (the Applebee’s/Olive Garden ilk), or even haute cuisine—that was half vegetable matter?  The word “salad” is so cavalierly applied these days that a recent study found that “healthy eaters” (aka dieters) ended up consuming more calories than carefree burger-guzzlers because they consciously ordered entrees with healthy-sounding names.  The problem: items like the Tortilla-Bowl Salad or the Caesar with Chicken often ended up being more caloric than the decadent-sounding pastas and red-meat choices.

Not to sound defeatist, but I don’t think a square, triangle, or circle is going to solve our health and obesity conundrums. Perhaps that’s because “eating right” is both too simple and too complicated to be boiled down to a mathematical formula.  It’s simple like this: foods that grow in the earth are good for you, as are foods bought fresh (not packaged in boxes and plastic bags to be popped into the microwave) and then cooked with a modicum of good sense and reasonable amounts of oil.  It’s complicated like this: hardly anyone even knows how to cook anymore (or is willing to devote the time and effort to it), and our entire culture is now geared to convenience and speed when it comes to eating.  It certainly doesn’t help that we have a gang-busters food industry, both in grocery stores in restaurant chains, working nonstop to increase our consumption of those “bad” goodies at the tip of the triangle.

My advice: in honor of the new USDA Plate, make a vow to spend an entire week eating only fresh and homemade foods, with a particular eye towards fruits and vegetables (summer makes that easy).  Weigh yourself before and after the week.  See what happens.  (Oh, and get out there and move your body--but that's another story...)  Let me know how it goes!

No Free Skinny

Of course it was too good to be true, like something from a futuristic Neverland.  The narrative went like this: You don’t like that pocket of pudge that won’t budge no matter how much you diet or work out?  Those saddlebags—just like Mom’s!—or that tummy, or the infamous batwings—paging Mrs. Sterling, your sixth grade math teacher…It’s astonishing the level of vitriol and loathing that has been directed towards these innocent targets.  So, zap them away, simply sculpt a new body, Pygmalion-like.  Presto, bags/pooch/wings disappear, courtesy of your friendly plastic surgeon and his/her cannula—a word that has made me shudder since I first heard it.  A cannula is a thin metal tube that liposuction surgeons insert under your skin and then move back and forth, breaking up fat tissue and sucking it out.  Liquid fat.  As Miss Clavel would say, “Something is not right!”

But liposuction has been insanely popular—despite the yuck factor, the painful recovery, the chance of “ripples,” and the small-but-present risk of death from complications.  Last year it was the second most common cosmetic—or “aesthetic,” as the docs like to call it—surgery, coming in at almost 300,000 procedures and nestled between boob jobs at #1 and eyelid lifts at #3.  Last week the other shoe dropped, thanks to researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.  They conducted the first randomized, controlled trial of lipo in humans, and documented the tragic flaw that many doctors and patients have already observed first-hand: The fat comes back.

Food and Sex (Finally)

 As an antidote to Friday’s serious-minded treatise about the economics of obesity, I offer this friendly little tidbit, which was leaked from a forthcoming book on internet porn titled A Billion Wicked Thoughts: Three times more men search for “overweight women” than “underweight women” when seeking out porn images on the Web.  I know, I know: “underweight women” doesn’t sound like a phrase that pops into guys’ heads as they’re googling for fantasy material (“slender women with unusually large breasts” seems more likely, though probably using a few choice words I won't get into here), but still…the comparison gives a bit of credence to the very logical notion that men don’t consider a bag-o’-bones to be a sexy bedmate.  When choosing between skinny and heavy, they’d much rather grab something cuddly.  This goes out to every woman who ever felt self-conscious before, during, or after the deed.