It’s easy to imagine why dieters might be swayed—both then and now—by the idea of trying something radically different. Millions of Americans are on diets. Food manufacturers and marketers flood the marketplace with foods designed to help us lose weight and keep it off. Television features a steady stream of infomercials touting new gadgets, exercise routines, pills, and powders that can help us shed those unsightly pounds. And, apparently, none of it is working.
For a shocking visual, compare these two slides, taken from a CDC presentation. The first slide shows data from 1990 and is far from ideal:
Forty-six of the fifty-two states and other U.S. jurisdictions report adult obesity rates between 10 and 20 percent, with obesity defined as a Body Mass Index (BMI) greater than 30. No state has an obesity rate above 20 percent.
Now look at the data from 2010:
Just twenty years later, the thinnest states—with obesity rates under 25 percent—are all heavier than the heaviest states in 1990. And twelve states have cracked the 30-percent-plus mark.
The 2011 data, which haven’t made it into the slideshow yet, include a new category: 35 percent or greater adult obesity rate. While it wasn’t strictly necessary to add that category (Alabama came closest, with a 34.9 percent rate), the CDC were obviously planning ahead.3
Given the huge diet industry and its stunning lack of effectiveness, it’s only natural that alternative approaches would gain popularity. Low-carb was the alternative that gained the largest amount of public acceptance and hence the greatest market share. But why did low-carb beat out the other nontraditional approaches?
One of the main answers is marketing rhetoric. On this point, I have to take my hat off to Robert Atkins. One of the major themes of my new book on nutritional science, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition (2013), is that paradigms, or entrenched ways of seeing the world, are devilishly hard to change. But Atkins and his supporters turned a century of nutritional wisdom on its head, framing dietary fat and cholesterol as nutritional heroes and attacking anyone who pointed to research showing otherwise. They gave Americans permission to eat huge amounts of some of the unhealthiest foods on the planet, and to do so not only without guilt, but with feelings of pride and superiority. The most impressive legacy of the Atkins craze is a linguistic achievement: coining the phrase “low-carb” and thereby turning most plant foods—which were previously considered the healthiest dietary choices—into dangerous and fattening no-nos.
The appeal of this was immediate, for obvious reasons. After decades of believing that losing weight was possible only by subsisting on salads, depressing lunches of grapefruit halves and fat-free cottage cheese, and diet sodas that taste like battery acid, people were told to eat as much as they wanted of their favorite foods: steak, bacon, butter, lard, cream cheese, olive oil, mayonnaise, and eggs. Eating was fun again!
And lo and behold, people found that—in the initial stages of this diet—they did lose weight. It seemed like the very foods that doctors and public officials had been warning against all those years actually promoted weight loss more effectively than the tasteless zero-fat processed foods that took all the joy from eating.
Not only could the Atkins followers sate their fat- and protein-cravings without guilt, they could even feel superior to the poor fools who were still eating salads, going to weight-loss meetings, and counting calories.
The Atkins Diet didn’t just appeal to dieters; it was a boon to the meat, dairy, and egg industries as well. Not only could these companies now fend off public criticism of their products with low-carb “science,” but they also saw greater sales.
THE LOW-CARB LANDSCAPE
Not all low-carb diets are created equal, of course. The low-carb universe Atkins brought into being has grown to encompass many different diets and eating philosophies. But these are distinguished more by marketing than by substance—they all share the same fear and loathing of carbohydrates and recommend getting most of one’s calories from protein and fat.
Atkins
While Robert Atkins is the father of the modern low-carb movement, he didn’t come up with the low-carb concept, something he freely admits in his books. The first person on record as having used this type of diet was William Banting, a British undertaker, in the 1860s. Banting, at the age of sixty-six, tried a low-carb diet at the recommendation of his physician, Dr. William Harvey. He lost body weight in the first few weeks and commented that he might like to continue the diet—though the longer-term results of Banting’s alteration in diet, to my knowledge, were never clear. A few other medical practitioners experimented with low-carb diets with their patients over the next century, but the idea didn’t enter mass public consciousness until the 1972 publication of Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution.
Riding the wave of the low-carb diet’s near-term success, Atkins authored many additional books before his passing in 2003. His professional career morphed into an empire; as of this writing in 2013, the 1988 Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution has sold more than 15 million copies, and Atkins Nutritionals, Inc., which produces and licenses Atkins-approved products, achieves annual sales in the millions of dollars. The Atkins Foundation funds research on the low-carb diet as it relates to obesity, Alzheimer’s, prostate cancer, and other diseases. And the Atkins empire perseveres, despite its founder’s death and a descent into bankruptcy following company mismanagement in 2004–2005; its present-day business still claims a big piece of the weight-loss market.
Low-Carb Spinoffs
Smelling profits, many other doctors and authors put their own spin on the low-carb phenomenon and created their own books, diets, and products. Most prominent among them are Mary Dan and Michael Eades’ Protein Power (1995), Barry Sears’ Enter the Zone (1995), Peter D’Adamo’s Eat Right 4 Your Type (1997), Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet (2002), Arthur Agatson’s South Beach Diet (2005), and Eric Westman’s The New Atkins for a New You (2010). Like younger siblings struggling to stand out, these various authors and their supporters go to great lengths to distinguish their “correct” diet from the others. The South Beach Diet prefers olive oil to butter and emphasizes leaner cuts of meat. Protein Power adds lots of water and nutritional supplementation to compensate for the low-carb diet’s inadequacies. Enter the Zone seemingly dismisses the low-carb idea by recommending “only” 30 percent protein but still relegates carbs to less than half your total calories. (That’s still low carb!) Even The Paleo Diet, despite its positive emphasis on whole foods, is just another version of the same low-carb, high-protein, high-fat idea (see Appendix). These spinoffs all occupy the same very thin slice of the human diet continuum.
In addition to their carbophobia, these authors have two other things in common: no experience in scientific research and a vast fortune generated by the sales of their shakes, powders, extracts, oils, bars, and even chocolates, along with a second fortune amassed through licensing their trademarked seal of approval.
The net effect of all this differentiation and marketing has been the normalization of low carb on a cultural level. Restaurants routinely offer low-carb menu options. It’s expected that someone watching their weight will bypass the dinner rolls. And whereas twenty years ago you would have raised an eyebrow (and a few concerns for your sanity) were you to sit down to a meal of bacon, butter, and beef for the purpose of shedding pounds, these days that’s a perfectly normal approach to weight loss. When absurdities get repeated often enough, they start sounding like truth.
THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT LOW-CARB DIETS
As I mentioned, low-carb diets are often pretty good at bringing about short-term weight loss. But that benefit comes with huge downsides. Low-carb diets target excess weight without paying attention to the