With more than six million copies sold, Barry Sears’ book, Enter the Zone, seems to have struck a resonant chord with Americans. It’s no wonder, considering the Zone’s promises: permanent weight toss, increased energy, and improved athletic performance. These can be yours by eating more protein and fat, and, miraculously, without calorie restriction! Are these promises realistic? Does the Zone diet really deliver? Or, is this just another joyride on the Great American Diet Rollercoaster?

According to Sears, Americans have experienced an explosive weight gain in the past ten years, and he blames this on the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets that have been promoted by nutrition experts during this time. ‘The message, from top scientists, nutritionists, and the government, was simple,’ says Sears. “Americans were told to eat less fat and more carbohydrates … We’re now fifteen years into the experiment, and one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that it isn’t working … the country has experienced an epidemic rise in obesity .. people are eating less fat and getting fatter!’

Sears is certainty correct that Americans are getting fatter. Statistics show that in 1980, 25 percent of the population was overweight. By 1990 that number had risen to 33 percent, or one out of every three Americans. Perhaps even more disturbing is that these statistics are true for children as well as for adults.

‘If we’re eating supposedly ‘healthy’ diets that supply less fat and less choLesterol,’ Sears asks, ‘[then] why in the world are we gaining weight”‘ His answer, and the theme of the Zone, is that ‘we’re getting fatter because many of our dietary laws are wrong … a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet may be dangerous to your health … Eating fat does not make you fat. It!s your body’s response to excess carbohydrates in your diet that make you fat.’

Are Americans really eating less fat? Sears claims that Americans are coning just 15 percent of their calories from fat. Yet nationally recognized food surveys like the Nationwide Food Consumption Survey and the National Health and Nutrition Survey indicate that fat consumption is actually between 37 and 38 percent of calories. In other words, the diet that Sears condemns for making Americans fatter is not the diet that most Americans follow.

Furthermore, the claim that Americans’ increased obesity is the result of eating less fat and more carbohydrate flies in the face of all scientific evidence. Countless studies, both clinical and epidemiological, have shown that diets low in fat and high in complex carbohydrate and fiber are positively correlated with maintenance of desirable weights. In an extensive study of diet and health conducted in the People’s Republic of China, T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., a nutritional biochemist from Cornell University, clearly illustrated the link between consumption of high-fat diets and increased incidence of obesity .Those individuals eating the most fat had the highest rates of obesity, as well as heart disease, certain cancers, and adult-onset diabetes.

It is important to emphasize that the diets which consistently promote good health are based on complex carbohydrates, which are found primarily in unrefined foods, such as legumes, whole grains, vegetables, and fruits. It is these foods that are basic to a healthful, low-fat diet. By contrast, over consumption of simple and refined carbohydrates such as sugar and refined flour can lead to unwanted weight gain. Sears is correct when he criticizes low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets that are based on high-sugar and refined flour foods such as fat free cookies, chips, bagels, and frozen yogurt. Americans have been stuffing themselves on these, and as a result, fat-free has become just another failed diet for many people. However, contrary to Sears’ assertions, the increase in obesity among Americans is not due to any insidious quality of carbohydrate.

The simple fact is that weight has increased because total calorie consumption has increased. In 1980, Americans were consuming 2000 ca tories per day. By 1990 that figure had increased to 2200 calories per day, a jump of ten percent! Think about it: a ‘Quarter Pounder” used to be a BIG burger. Now it’s the norm and fast food chains are touting their ‘Half Pounders’ and “FUll Pounders.” Consider the gigantic size of soft drinks and popcorn at the movies, or the fact that many people think of a pint of Hagen-Daaz as a single serving!

The fact remains that excess calorie consumption (whether from protein, carbohydrate, or fat) leads to weight gain. Like it or not, in order to lose weight and keep it off, calories must be limited to a reasonable number each day. This is not the message that most people want to hear, which is why they continue trying different diets, hoping that one of them will hold the key to guilt-free gluttony.

According to Sears, the Zone is ‘that mysterious but very real state in which your body and mind work together at their ultimate best … the mind is relaxed, yet alert and exquisitely focused … the body is fluid, strong, and apparently indefatigable. It is almost euphoric. There are no distractions, and time seems to slow down to a graceful waltz”.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? But how do you get there? According to Sears, its easy. ‘That’s what I want to deliver in this book: a newer, simpler, and better way to eat … Why make life more difficult than it has to be? Life is much more enjoyable in the Zone.”

In explaining his simpler, better way to eat,’ Sears says that “…you must treat food as if it were a drug. You must eat food in a controlled fashion and in the proper proportions – as if it were an intravenous drip.” According to Sears, ‘Food is far more important than just something you eat for pleasure or to appease your hunger. Rather, it is a potent drug that you’ll take at least three times a day for the rest of your life … In essence, you’re treating food as if it were a prescription drug: delivering a controlled amount of protein and carbohydrate at every meal…” This is a simper, better way to eat,’ one which makes life more enjoyable?

It is probably safe to say that if your stomach isn’t growling.then you are NOT in the Zone!

According to Sears, the key to entering the Zone is determining one’s proper protein level. He explains that the “amount of protein that you require wilt be genetically unique to you and you alone.” Through a complicated series of mathematical computations (for which he offers no scientific basis), Sears provides a method for determining one’s individual protein requirement. He says that the correct amount of protein is dependent upon one’s weight, percentage of body fat, and level of physical activity. After calculating the protein level, corresponding fat and carbohydrate levels can be determined using guidelines proposed by Sears: ‘Maintain a beneficial ratio of protein to carbohydrate every time you eat … The ideal is about .75 which equals 3 grams of protein for each 4 grams of carbohydrate … for every gram of protein you eat, you’d be eating slightly more than 0.4 of a gram of fat…” Another way to express this “ideal’ proportion of protein to fat and carbohydrate is the now familiar 30/30/40 ratio.

This ratio – thirty percent of calories from protein, thirty percent from fat, and forty percent from carbohydrate has Americans salivating all the way to the meat counter, because it appears to eliminate restrictions on fat and protein, and open the door to increased consumption of meat, dairy, and other animal products. But hold on to your shopping cart, because the actual amount of protein permitted on a Zone diet is not as high as it might initially appear. Although Zone protein levels do tend to be somewhat higher than the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA), they are actually lower than the amount of protein current[y consumed by most Americans on typical meat-based diets! In other words, to enter the Zone, many people will have to actually decrease their consumption of high-protein foods!

Another aspect of the Zone diet which many find appealing is Sears’ discussion of the need for fat in the diet, and his condemnation of very low fat diets. He is absolutely correct that some fat is essential. In addition to supplying fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids, fat plays a role in the production of eicosanoids, hormone-like substances which affect everything from blood clotting and blood pressure, to bronchial constriction and inflammation. However, contrary to Sear’s assertions, most Americans are in little danger of becoming fat-deprived. As mentioned earlier, Americans currently get 37 to 38 percent of their calories from fat, an amount substantially higher than Sears’ thirty percent! To really get into the Zone, most Americans will have to significantly reduce their fat consumption.

Throughout his book, Sears paints the link between carbohydrate and insulin as the villainous cause of Americans’ unwanted weight gain. He says that “Insulin is essentially a storage hormone which converts excess carbohydrates to fat and aggressively promotes the accumulation of body fat … Not only do increased insulin levels tell the body to store carbohydrates as fat, they also tell it not to release any stored fat. This makes it impossible for you to use your own stored body fat for energy. So the excess carbohydrates in your diet not only make you fat, they make sure you stay fat.”

Carbohydrate consumption does indeed raise blood glucose, and it causes the body to produce insulin. However, this is only part of the picture. The regulation of blood sugar levels is accomplished not only by insulin, but also by glucagon, epinephrine, glucocorticoids, thyroxine, and growth hormone. It is an incredibly complex process which has been vastly oversimplified by Sears.

To begin with, his condemnation of insulin seriously downplays its essential rote in maintaining blood glucose levels within normal ranges. He blames carbohydrate for raising insulin levels, but fails to mention that dietary protein also causes insulin levels to rise. He explains that excess carbohydrates are ruthlessly turned to fat by insulin, but fails to mention that dietary protein and fat will also be tuned to fat if excess calories are consumed. In fact, the body is much more efficient at converting dietary fat to body fat than it is at converting carbohydrate to fat. Several steps are required in the conversion of carbohydrate to fat, and up to 23 percent of the ingested calories are burned in the process. By contrast, conversion of dietary fat to body fat is quite efficient and uses only three percent of the ingested calories. In other words, more calories are burned and fewer are stored when excess calories come from carbohydrate than when they come from fat.

According to Sears, the real key to excess weight gain is the speed at which carbohydrates enter the blood-stream. ‘Before 1980,” he says, ‘no one bothered to ask about the entry rates into the bloodstream of various types of carbohydrates. When this question was finally studied, the implications should have turned the nutritional community on its head. Somehow supposedly ‘simple’ sugars like fructose were entering the bloodstream at far slower rates than supposedly ‘complex’ carbohydrates like pasta. This fact has major consequences if you ever hope to reach the Zone. The entry rate of a carbohydrate into the bloodstream is known as its glycemic index.”

Sears touches on something important when he states that the glycemic index “should have turned the nutritional community on its head [italics mine].” Although it was originally hailed as a breakthrough for the management of diabetes, the glycemic index has not proven to be a reliable predictor of the effect of various foods on blood glucose Levels, and its use is not advocated by the American Diabetic Association or other nutrition professionals. The problem is that a host of other factors also affect the body’s glycemic response to a food, including whether the food is eaten alone or in combination with other foods, whether it is cooked or raw, and whether it is fresh or canned. Additionally, the presence of anti nutrients such as phytates, tannins, and lectins, as well as the amount and type of fiber (e.g., soluble versus insoluble) also effect the glycemic response to a food. Even the addition of salt to a meal affects its glycemic response. The glycemic index is not a reliable tool, yet it is a cornerstone of Sears’ Zone theory.

Scientific evidence indicates that the presence or lack of fiber is much more reliable for predicting the gtycemic response to a food. According to Krause’s Food Nutrition & Diet Therapy, one of the foremost clinical nutrition textbooks in the United States, “Fiber,especially soluble fiber found in fruits, vegetables, barley, oats, and legumes, has been shown to be extremely effective in controlling blood glucose.” Fiber is at the heart of the successful treatment of diabetes and obesity. It is essential for maintaining a healthy digestive tract, and helps the body regulate blood cholesterol levels. Yet Sears pays little attention to the importance of fiber, and in fact, because fiber may interfere with the absorption of some amino acids, recommends the use of “isolated protein powders, in which the fiber has been stripped away by chemical processing.”

To illustrate a ‘real-life’ example of the Zone, Sears shares with us that he is 6’5″ , and that his unique protein requirement is 100 grams. Based on his 30/30/40 ratio, his Zone-favorabLe diet looks Like this:

To borrow a phrase used by Sears, “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist” to see that this is a dangerously low calorie intake for a man who is 6’5″. (We used to call them ‘starvation diets.’) Such calorie restriction flies in the face of Sears’ assertion that “On a Zone-favorable diet you restrict excess calories from carbohydrates, not total calories and certainly not nutrition.” [italics mine]. It is painfully clear, in spite of Sears’ statements to the contrary, that the foundation of the Zone is extreme calorie restriction. In the short term, such a very low calorie diet will indeed lead to weight loss, but most of it is water toss. In the long term, it will cause nutritional deficiencies and a decreased metabolic rate, making it even harder to maintain a healthy weight. Finally, it should be obvious that such severe calorie restriction will cause ravenous hunger. It is probably safe to say that if your stomach isn’t growling, then you are not in the Zone!

I was curious to see how the Zone numbers would work out for me: I am 5’7′, weigh 118 pounds, and am moderately active. Based on the formulas in the book, my ideal diet would be:

Just thinking about limiting my total calories to 1000 a day makes me hungry! Even if I wanted to lose weight (which I do not), my calorie intake should never drop below 1200 per day. Is there a way to increase the total calories and thereby make this diet nutritionally adequate? Not really, because the protein requirement is firmly fixed and cannot be increased if I want to stay in the Zone. Increasing the amounts of carbohydrate or fat would throw off the ratio, and I would no longer be eating a 30/30/40 diet. The only other source of calories that I could turn to would be alcohol. Making up my calorie deficit with alcohol would indeed produce a sort of euphoria, but I don’t think this is the ‘Zone’ that Sears is referring to!

Looking at the numbers, it is obvious that the Zone is not an excessively high-protein diet. While the amount of protein is somewhat higher than the RDA, the 30/30/40 ratio is achieved not so much by increasing protein as by stashing the total number of calories. As the total calories decrease, the percentage of calories from protein increases. This gives the Zone the appearance of a high-protein diet, which is what makes it so attractive. However, as mentioned earlier, Americans eating typical meat-based diets would be surprised to discover that the actual amount of protein permitted on a Zone diet is probably less than they currently eat. Along the same lines, contrary to initial appearances, the Zone is not an open invitation to high-fat eating. In fact, the amount of fat allowed in an entire day on a Zone diet is less than many Americans eat in a single meal! Add to this the extreme calorie restriction of the Zone diet, and it suddenly looks a lot less appealing.

Another aspect of the Zone which many people will find daunting are the rather elaborate mathematical gymnastics that are required, first in the calculation of the protein requirement, and then in the determination and maintenance of the proper ratios between protein, carbohydrate and fat. Sears has devised a complicated system of ‘blocks’ (9 grams of carbohydrate equals one carbohydrate block, 7 grams of protein equals one protein block, and 1.5 grams of fat equals one fat block) for maintaining the ratios and staying in the Zone. So much for his ‘simpler way to eat.”

When it comes to losing weight, we will probably never stop looking for a magic answer: a diet that allows us to eat all our favorite foods with no restrictions and no adverse effects. At first glance, the Zone seems to be a dream come true: eat more protein and more fat, and lose weight! However, upon closer examination, it is just another numbers game that will leave you disappointed and very, very hungry.

My favorite quote from the Zone is “…many diets are based on nothing more than cutting down your calorie consumption. In the Zone, your total calorie needs don’t change, but where they come from does. If you can meet a large portion of your calorie needs by more effectively accessing your internal stored body fat, then you don’t have to put as many external calories in your mouth.’

Talk about Double Speak! In the first sentence, he criticizes diets which are based on cutting calorie consumption, Yet, he goes on to say that the Zone diet is based on not putting “as many external calories in your mouth.” Who does he think he’s kidding?

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REFERENCES

Krouse’s Food, Nutrition & Diet Therapy, 8th Edition, Mahan & Arlin, W.B. Saunders Co., 1992.

Textbook of Endocrinology, 7th Edition, Wilson & Foster, W.B. Saunders Co., 1985.

Recommended Dietary Allowances, 10th Edition, National Research Council, 1989.

Human Biochemistry, 10th Edition, Orten & Neuhaus, The C.V. Mosby Co., 1982.

The Dietitian’s Guide to Vegetarian Diets, Messina & Messina, Aspen Publishers, Inc., 1996.

Understanding Nutrition, 7th Edition, Whitney & Rolfes, West Publishing Co., 1996.

The post The Zone Diet appeared first on North American Vegetarian Society.

This was said with a straight face.

Once again, no one is arguing with Atkins that short-term weight loss can’t be achieved by eating his prescribed ratio of protein, fat, and carbs; but it’s funny how many people seem to find the need to re-use the diet – meaning that in the interim, for whatever reason, they’ve gained the weight back for whatever reason.

This yo-yo pattern over time is not something that would strike the average person as intrinsically safe or healthy, yet Taubes insists Atkins’s plan is both. He does so by equivocating on the term “diet” – one meaning (e.g. Atkins) being something you do as a project for a given period of time, and another (e.g. vegetarianism) being an overall, lifelong approach to eating. “Big Fat Lie” tries to leave readers with the impression that if Atkins’s plan succeeds in the first sense, it must also in the second.

But that’s quite a stretch. As soon as you look at effects across a life span, seemingly benign issues like saturated fat and cholesterol begin to grow more malignant. And while your odds of getting a burger laced with E.coli, salmonella, listeria, or Mad Cow are comfortably small for each individual serving, they mount steadily when you make “bacon cheeseburgers” a staple food. Additionally, the fact that antibiotics, growth hormones, dioxin, mercury and other contaminants inevitably build up in animal fat becomes a concern as you ingest this material over time. Especially since it builds up in your own fat as well, is very difficult to get rid of, and is, in one way or another, dangerous. It’s no wonder that there’s a proven correlation between low-carb animal products and cancers of the gastro-intestinal system – another variable that Taubes doesn’t see fit to factor into his equation in touting animal fat’s health profile.

He also doesn’t look at the flip side of strictly limiting carbohydrates – that it means limiting many of the nutrient- and antioxidant-rich plant foods which are constantly being shown to be protective against cancer, high blood pressure, and other ailments.

But he knows he does have to address one liability, because most people have already heard about it in relation to overloading protein – and that’s ketosis. Parroting Atkins’s longstanding defense, Taubes suggests that perhaps “the medical community and the media confuse ketosis with ketoacidosis, a variant of ketosis that occurs in untreated diabetics and can be fatal.”

It’s true that ketoacidosis is a very serious condition, requiring emergency-room treatment. But the fact that we know many people have gone on the Atkins plan without any emergency-room visits suggests that Taubes is once again whistling Dixie: Are we really to believe that all the medical professionals who list high-protein diets’ health risks simply “can’t tell the difference” between long-term kidney/liver strain, and a condition that’s immediately life-threatening?

Suzanne Havala-Hobbs, a registered dietitian and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health, points out that “ketosis is a natural physiological state at times, such as during a short-term weight-loss diet.” But, she stresses, “it’s certainly not healthy if sustained indefinitely. In other words, no one should strive for a state of ketosis as being a way of life.”

This is not to say, of course, that it’s impossible for Atkins-style diets to do immediate and dangerous damage to the body: The news last October may have given some “low-carb” proponents pause, especially coming so soon after Atkins’s own heart troubles: A teenager died from heart complications her doctors say were directly related to a high-protein diet she had recently adopted. One woman who worked at a hospital told me that their staff had been warning patients for decades about the unstable electrolyte balances high-protein diets can produce (and which seemingly brought on this teenager’s death).
But the occasional death or lifesaving operation overshadows what’s a basic problem with Atkins: Even if you do okay on it for a couple of weeks or months, or you don’t have any complications, then what? For most, the answer seems to be, ease off the diet, and watch the weight skyrocket back up. But if you don’t, and continue ingesting huge amounts of proven carcinogens and saturated fat over the years, you’re likely to learn about none-too-healthful “accretion.”

Neither of these is a prescription for health – by its nature something that must work over the long term – “short-term health” is not something any rational person would seek. The basic mechanism behind Atkins-style diets is tricking your body into putting in extra effort towards appetite reduction – in other words, playing games with metabolism. And, making games your day-to-day lifestyle is both dubious and dangerous – as more than one unfortunate dieter has found out.

As Havala-Hobbs concludes, “it should be self-evident that any effective weight-loss diet is one that can be sustained for the long haul. The Atkins Diet and others of its ilk can’t be without harming health, so I think they’re of little value.”

Vance Lehmkuhl is a writer and political cartoonist for the Philadelphia City Paper. A collection of his vegetarian cartoons is published as a book, “The Joy of Soy.” Vance is featured as a speaker and entertainer at Vegetarian Summerfest.

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The post Atkins Diet: A Smorgasbord of Risks appeared first on North American Vegetarian Society.

In “Big Fat Lie,” Taubes gleefully trashed decades of nutrition advice from various experts to prove that “Atkins was right all along.” Robert Atkins, who died in March of a slip on the ice, was of course the most famous proponent of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, author of the best-selling “Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution.” The fact that Gary Taubes, an Atkins devotee, was assigned by the Times to write a seemingly objective analysis of the good doctor’s theories is just one of many questions raised by “Big Fat Lie.”

A close look finds Taubes misquoting, misrepresenting, equivocating and running logical loop-the-loops to persuade us that Atkins had the answer, before finally revealing that he’s on the diet himself and doesn’t really care whether it shortens his life. Doubtless most readers are unaware of the CNN report in which scientists quoted by Taubes backed away from the concepts attributed to them. And few probably saw the Washington Post article citing all the peer-reviewed scientific studies that directly contradict Taubes’ “low-fat diets don’t work” mantra.

Even on its face, “Big Fat Lie” isn’t what it appears. Taubes, the daring iconoclast, “exposes” the fact that fat can be good for you and that low-carb diets can cause weight loss, then tries to put these together to form an endorsement of the healthfulness of Atkins’ program. But wait: Nutritionists never said NO fat was healthy; and it’s not whether they cause temporary weight loss that concerns people about Atkins-style diets – it’s whether they’re harmful to your overall, long-term health. In other words, Taubes’ great achievement in 7,700 words is to knock down two obvious “straw man” arguments that no one ever made.

What he fails to prove, though, is their converse – that SATURATED fat is good for you, or that Atkins’ diet ISN’T dangerous over the long term – exactly where the argument has been all along. So he slams the establishment for vilifying “fats,” Taubes means “saturated fats,” but when he cites positive health effects of “fats” he cites studies on monounsaturated fats.
Similarly, when he warns of the dangers of “high carb” intake, he means sugar, corn syrup, and some starches, not the fruits, beans, and whole grains that make up such a large part of a healthful, plant-based diet. Now, it’s true that the USDA Food Pyramid does probably err in presenting grains as an undifferentiated, eat-all-you-want base for our diet, but Taubes wildly overstates the effect this has had on American eating patterns. In his thinking, we’ve become more obese because we’re eating exactly as the Food Pyramid tells us to, so the pyramid must be completely wrong. He conveniently avoids any mention of how few Americans actually eat according to the guidelines (fewer than a third, according to the Department of Health and Human Services), and ridicules the notion that our food choices may be more influenced by our ad-saturated instant-gratification culture than by the opinions of scientists.

Shortly after this piece appeared, an American Dietetic Association survey showed that most of us get our nutrition advice from commercial television. But in Taubes’ world, that’s irrelevant: We eat junk food because of USDA “low fat” guidelines. We guzzle soft drinks, he says, because “they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy.” That’s right: Soft drinks “appear intrinsically healthy!” Have you ever heard ANYONE make a health claim for Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Mountain Dew because they’re “fat free?” It’s no secret that these things are heavily branded sugar water, or that sugar makes you fat. But it’s more important to be cool, to be refreshed, to obey your thirst, to get that jolt of caffeine and sugar right now.
Taubes finds it inconceivable “that the copious negative reinforcement that accompanies obesity – both socially and physically – is easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of a supersize bargain meal.” In other words, being obese is so punishing that people who continue to live on fast food must be doing so because they consider it healthy. This disingenuousness underlies much of Taubes’ analysis, which seeks to tie a decades-long rise in obesity to recent recommendations to lower our fat intake.

The impact of the food pyramid, which replaced the “Four Food Groups” in 1992, was apparently so great that it caused us to gain weight a full ten years before the pyramid appeared!: “The percentage of obese Americans,” Taubes reports, “stayed relatively constant through the 1960’s and 1970’s at 13 percent to 14 percent and then shot up by 8 percentage points in the 1980’s.” Taubes feigns mystification at the fact that during this rise, we’ve been eating less fat as a percentage of calories. Yet a few sentences later he mentions that we’re also eating 400 more calories every day. As it happens, we’re NOT eating less fat now, we’re eating slightly more – something he never finds room to mention – but we’re definitely eating way more food, way more calories – you know, the thing that makes you fat? So what’s the best way to avoid excess calories and still get good nutrition? Easy: Nutritious foods that are low in calories – a description that befits most unprocessed plant foods. Remember that gram for gram, fat has twice the calories that carbs do, without providing twice the vitamins.

But that’s OK, because Atkins’ plan is for you to get vitamins elsewhere – namely, from the Atkins Center, which sells “Atkins” brand vitamins at phenomenal prices. The “Diet-Pak,” for instance, containing “a month’s supply of all the nutritional support your body needs to survive and thrive during controlled carb weight loss,” is on sale for $53.96 (marked down from $63.96). That word “survive” is a little jarring – the implication is, if you want to be sure this diet doesn’t kill you, fork over $640 a year (assuming that sale price holds) to get the nutrients missing in your “nutrient-dense” food supply. Taubes doesn’t bring any of this up, of course, but he tacitly admits that the diet is dependent on vitamin supplements to deliver adequate nutrition. In his prime example of a clinically successful Atkins-style diet, he reports that “the diet was ‘lean meat, fish and fowl’ supplemented by vitamins and minerals.” Note that even the meat is lower-fat. This is a big fat endorsement? There are other interesting omissions in this very long article, not least the many non-vitamin-related health liabilities associated with a high-animal-protein diet (see sidebar). Nor does Taubes seem to want to discuss the charge that Atkins-style diets cause constipation. After all, what’s a little discomfort here and there when you’re improving your health through the power of saturated fat?

As if weak logic, straw-man arguments, and careful selection of factoids was not enough to drive his point home, Taubes apparently stooped to misrepresenting his sources and to denying the existence of data that didn’t fit.
Some would be surprised that in his thorough examination of the relationship of high- or low-carb diets to heart disease, Taubes conveniently forgot to consider the peer-reviewed successes of, say, Dean Ornish, but it’s much more than that: his summary of what science has found out about these issues is so skewed as to border on outright fraud.
Scripps Howard columnist Michael Fumento quotes Stanford University cardiologist Dr. John Farquhar as saying “I was greatly offended by how Gary Taubes tricked us all into coming across as supporters of the Atkins Diet. I’m sorry I ever talked to him.”

And, CNN Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen (7/8/02) spoke to three of the Harvard researchers spotlighted in Taubes’ piece – the ones representing a major shift in thinking about Atkins – and heard from them that Taubes had misrepresented their positions on the matter of fats vs. carbs. They all explained that there are good fats and bad fats, and good carbs and bad carbs, making the categorical distinctions that Taubes had worked so hard to elide. And “…cheeseburgers, pork chops, butter and bacon,” Cohen says, “the folks who I talked to said: ‘You know what? We don’t like that kind of fat. We don’t think that’s good for people.”

One Harvard researcher Taubes cited is Walter Willett, who has long been a critic of the prevalence of starchy grains in USDA recommendations, among other things. Taubes seems to elicit phrases from Willett supporting his cheeseburger-based regimen. Yet Willett told Time Magazine (12/24/90): “The less red meat, the better. At most, it should be eaten only occasionally. And it may be maximally effective not to eat red meat at all.”

Has Willett changed his viewpoint, or has he been misrepresented? If we’re to believe the Washington Post, it’s the latter. In “Experts Declare Story Low on Saturated Facts” (8/27/02), Sally Squires spoke to Willett regarding Taubes’ remarkable advice to “eat lard straight out of the can” to “reduce your risk of heart disease.”

Willett recalled speaking to Taubes about lard, but stressed that “I don’t think that lard is part of a healthy diet.” Instead, he told Squires, the idea is to “‘replace unhealthy fats with healthy fats,’ such as those found in fish, nuts, olives and avocados.” After explaining at some length why those fats, unlike lard, have a positive impact on your cholesterol, Willett added: “And I have gone over this a number of times with Gary, but he barely mentioned it in the article.”

That’s not the only discrepancy Squires found in Taubes’ reporting. As the author contends throughout “Big Fat Lie” that low-fat diets have proven to be “dismal failures,” Squires found dozens of peer-reviewed studies that proved exactly the opposite and asked Taubes why he ignored these reams of data – especially when they came from his own sources. A researcher named Arne Astrup, for instance, whom Taubes interviewed for a half-hour, said he provided Taubes with “all the evidence suggesting that low-fat diets are the best documented diets and was extremely surprised to see that he didn’t use any of that information in his article.”

Taubes’ excuses for these omissions – ranging from an opinion that one prominent scientist “didn’t strike me as a scientist,” to an assessment that another didn’t cause quite enough weight loss, to his own “gut feeling” that the head of one peer-reviewed study “made the data up,” to a breezy dismissal of the entire science of epidemiology – come off as comically bogus. Squires may have been giving Taubes a taste of his own selective-quote medicine, especially by concluding her article with his quote “I know, I sound like if somebody finds something I believe in, then I don’t question it.”

Well, yeah, that’s just it. Taubes launches his “Big Fat Lie” broadside by explicitly linking the conventional, low-fat wisdom to religious zealotry. In his introductory paragraphs, he stresses this is something “we’ve been told with almost religious certainty … and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty.” But after a careful examination of the article’s construction and its history (at least according to the other people involved in it), it becomes clear that Taubes, an Atkins disciple, is projecting his own zealotry onto those he disagrees with.

While some manipulations in his writing seem very carefully calculated – e.g., waiting until the next-to-last paragraph to include three major bombshells (that he is on the diet himself, that over consumption of saturated fat can indeed shorten lifespan, and that “Atkins had suffered with heart troubles of his own”) – it would seem that Taubes was not exactly trying to deceive his readers. Instead, he just wants us to believe as fervently as he does; his judgment of what’s relevant and what’s not, what’s logical and what’s not, is somewhat skewed by his faith in the animal-fat credo.

All in all, the article is not without some merit: It encouraged more discussion of the role of different fats, and the possibility that different levels of fat and carbs may work differently for different people. Since “Big Fat Lie” appeared, some studies have confirmed, once again, that Atkins-style diets can indeed cause weight loss, and without any short-term health effects. On the other hand, a massive Stanford University survey of low-carb trials confirmed that the key to the diet’s success is simple calorie restriction rather than any “magical” metabolic process. And, in one of the “success story” studies (New England Journal of Medicine, May 2003), people on the low-carb program gained twice as much weight back after a year than did the low-fat participants, leading the Washington Post to call the “long-term benefits negligible.” And in June, another New York Times writer, Jason Epstein, penned a public apology to readers for his earlier Atkins evangelizing.
Who knows? Maybe a new scientific study will indeed find the perfect combination of body type and fat/protein mix to validate Atkins’ theories. On the other hand, maybe the answer will be: It worked for some people because, like Taubes, they really, truly believed it would.

Vance Lehmkuhl is a writer and political cartoonist for the Philadelphia City Paper. A collection of his vegetarian cartoons is published as a book, “The Joy of Soy.” Vance is featured as a speaker and entertainer at Vegetarian Summerfest.

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