Dietary fickle-osa Americanosa?

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

The " American dietary paradox " may appropriately

describe the below.

Or dietary fickle-osa Americanosa?

IN THE MAGAZINE

Our National Eating Disorder

By MICHAEL POLLAN

It's not just Atkins mania. Americans have always

been a little crazy on the subject of food.

http://tinyurl.com/6wopr

Tom Schierlitz for The New York Times

Americans: " Guilt. " French: " Pleasure. "

By MICHAEL POLLAN

Published: October 17, 2004

Carbophobia, the most recent in the centurylong

series of food fads to wash over the American

table, seems to have finally crested, though not

before sweeping away entire bakeries and pasta

companies in its path, panicking potato breeders into

redesigning the spud, crumbling whole doughnut

empires and, at least to my way of thinking, ruining

an untold number of meals. America's food

industry, more than happy to get behind any new diet as

long as it doesn't actually involve eating less

food, is still gung-ho on Low Carb, it's true, but

in the last few weeks, I can report some modest

success securing a crust of bread, and even the

occasional noodle, at tables from which such

staples were banned only a few months ago.

Surveying the wreckage of this latest dietary

storm makes you wonder if we won't someday talk

about a food fad that demonized bread, of all things,

in the same breath we talk about the all-grape

diet that Dr. Harvey Kellogg used to

administer to patients at his legendarily nutty sanitarium

at Battle Creek, Mich., or the contemporaneous

vogue for ''Fletcherizing'' -- chewing each bite of

food as many as 100 times -- introduced by Horace

Fletcher (also known as the Great Masticator) at

the turn of the last century. That period marked

the first golden age of American food faddism,

though of course its exponents spoke not in terms

of fashion but of ''scientific eating,'' much as

we do now. Back then, the best nutritional science

maintained that carnivory promoted the growth of

toxic bacteria in the colon; to battle these

critters, Kellogg vilified meat and mounted a

two-fronted assault on his patients' alimentary canals,

introducing quantities of Bulgarian yogurt at

both end

s. It

remains to be seen whether the Atkins-school

theory of ketosis, the metabolic process by which

the body resorts to burning its own fat when

starved of carbohydrates, will someday seem as quaintly

quackish as Kellogg's theory of colonic

autointoxication.

What is striking is just how little it takes to

set off one of these applecart-toppling

nutritional swings in America; a scientific study, a new

government guideline, a lone crackpot with a

medical degree can alter this nation's diet overnight.

As it happened, it was an article in this

magazine two years ago that almost singlehandedly

ushered in today's carbophobia, which itself supplanted

an era of lipophobia dating back to 1977, when a

controversial set of federal nutritional

guidelines (''Dietary Goals for the United States,''

drafted by a Senate committee led by McGovern)

persuaded beef-loving Americans to lay off the

red meat. But the basic pattern was fixed decades

earlier: new scientific research comes along to

challenge the prevailing nutritional orthodoxy;

some nutrient that Americans have been happily

chomping for years is suddenly found to be lethal;

another nutrient is elevated to the status of health

food; the industry throws its marketing weight

behind it

; and

the American way of dietary life undergoes yet

another revolution.

If this volatility strikes you as

unexceptionable, you might be interested to know that there are

other cultures that have been eating more or less

the same way for generations, and there are

peoples who still rely on archaic criteria like, oh,

taste and tradition to guide them in their eating

decisions. You might also be interested to know

that some of the cultures that set their culinary

course by the lights of pleasure and habit rather

than nutritional science are actually healthier

than we are -- that is, suffer a lower incidence

of diet-related health troubles. The ''French

paradox'' is the most famous such case, though it's

worth keeping in mind the French don't regard the

matter as a paradox at all; we Americans resort

to that word simply because the French experience

-- a population of wine-swilling cheese eaters

with lower rates of heart disease and obesity?! --

confounds our orthodoxy about food. Maybe what we

should be talking about is an American paradox:

that is,

a

notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of

eating healthily.

Continued

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Cheers, Alan Pater