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.

Food, Sex, and Money--or Why "Progress" Can Be, Well, a Bitch

Now here's an economic analysis of body-weight issues I can wrap my head around (in contrast to the specious plus-size-models-will-make-us-fat theory floated last week by the dim bulbs at the London School of Economics). In a book coming out next month titled The Changing Body, a team of economists traces what they describe as the most rapid transformation in the size, shape, and longevity of the human body to occur in millennia--if not in all of human history. And much of the change has occurred in the past century and a half; a time frame, they write, that is "minutely short by the standards of Darwinian evolution."

This transformation is essentially a triumph of technology and medicine. The result: the average American man in 1850 was 5 foot 7 and weighed about 146 pounds. By the 1980s he was 5 foot 10 and weighed 174.  And if you stop right there, you're just fine: we humans got big and strong because we were so damn smart. We mastered our environment.  Success writ large.

But if you do stop there you miss the huge, tragicomic twist in the story—the disastrous denouement. In the years since that nice trim ‘80s man was measured, people have ballooned. You know this, of course, because one would have to live on Mars not to have heard ad infinitum about the obesity epidemic, our current scourge. Nineteenth-century melancholics wasted away from consumption. Having conquered bacteria, twenty-first-century mankind, it seems, is sinking into the grave from sheer poundage. 

The sad truth is that today’s average man is the same height as the 1980s man, but he now weighs 191—at the upper end of what the National Institutes of Health considers “overweight,” nearing the precipice of “obese.”  The average woman is currently 5 foot 4 and

A New Model

The varied lovelies of the plus-size agency IPM, which "believes beauty has no size, age, and race."

I suppose after living through the economic debacle of the past two years I shouldn’t be surprised by the ability of an economist (or worse, two economists) to become totally divorced from reality. But a recent report out of the London School of Economics on the effect of plus-size models on public health and obesity rates (yes, economists writing about body weight; what’s next, Donald Trump writing about Obama’s citizenship?) sets a new bar for wonkiness—and pure wrong-headedness.

The study authors’ basic premise is this: presenting a more realistic “body ideal”—for instance, by using so-called plus-size models in some fashion spreads and insisting on a minimum healthy weight for runway models (as some European countries are now doing)—is likely to backfire and “foster the obesity epidemic.” They appear to think that they have proven this hypothesis through a string of unintelligible economic “models,” complete with abstruse equations that reminded me unpleasantly of the calculus I failed in high school (where F stands for food and c to the first power is food consumption…).  Excuse me: No. That is not how eating and body weight works. That is not

The Self-Deception That Believes the Lie

Breaking news: You're more likely to be normal about food--including losing weight if you have to--if you're not going hungry.  This staggering development was revealed recently in a rather odd study, published in the journal Obesity, that looked at both diet composition (high-protein versus low) and meal timing (six small meals a day versus three "squares").  I'll say right up front that my BS detector started pinging when I saw that the study was funded in part by the National Pork Board and the American Egg Board--and yes, a good portion of the protein being served up to participants was in the form of pork and eggs. 

However. In the spirit of not throwing the baby out with the bath-water, I have to admit the study had a few thought-provoking hypotheses, boiling down to this: people who ate a moderately high-protein diet (not insanely high: 25% protein, 26% fat, 49% carb) and ate three reasonably satisfying (but still dietetic) meals daily felt fuller throughout the day, were less tempted to snack at night, and wasted less time obsessing about food.

The contrarian in me is attracted to this conclusion, because it flies in the face of yet another weight-loss "technique" that actually has very little science backing it up: the Frequent-Meal Theory,

The Last Photo of My Body I Really Loved...

...was taken at age 9. I was pre-pubescent, just beginning to sense my body in a distinct way--sense it as being something other than simply hands that could grasp, legs that could kick, eyes that could see. By which I mean, I suppose, sense it as it appeared in the world. And I liked it: both my body, which was lanky and trouble-free, and its effect on others.

I think now that I may have liked it largely for its conformity to the slender ideal that had come in with Twiggy--because not too long after this picture was taken, with 110 film at my grandmother's pool, I stopped liking it. That happened when I started growing hips, and a booty (decades before J-Lo made them acceptable again), and cellulite, that ugly word created by (who else?) the French. (Did you know that six-month-old babies have cellulite?? But i digress...) Suddenly I wasn't a bony girl, I was a curvy, still-somewhat-awkward young woman, and the curves were in places that weren't at all chic. I felt lumbering, heavy, ugly. By seventh grade I felt compelled to scrawl in my photo album, next to my school picture: "Don't I look AWFUL?" I still have that album, and it still makes me sad to see that sentence.

Decades later, after chubby college years, aerobicized 20s, two children, followed by more aerobics, that easy self-approval of my childhood remains, if not entirely elusive, certainly not easy. But it's a fight worth waging--and I don't mean the aerobics. I mean the aspiration to love.