Free Death By Supermarket by Nancy Deville Page B

high—we’ve rolled that same boulder up the hill many times—like Sisyphus, we get up and do it again… even though 95 percent of diets fail 237 and the vast majority of dieters understand that low-calorie dieting doesn’t produce results. The truth is that dieting is a modern aberration that perpetuates malnutrition.
    Current conventional wisdom points at the volume of food people consume as the reason people are overweight and sick. If only we had better portion control. In 1960, a serving of McDonald’s fries contained 200 calories; in the early 2000s, a super-sized portion contained 610 calories. Then Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary
Super Size Me
, which brought worldwide attention to the deleterious effects of eating an exclusive diet of McDonald’s, shamed McDonald’s into phasing out their super-size products. Has it made a difference in our collective weight? Not really. Today diet experts urge people to eat lessfast food, fewer fries, and smaller portions of factory foods. Even Dr. Phil said in his book
The Ultimate Weight Solution
, “Another way to decrease your exposure to foods you buy for your kids is to purchase these foods in smaller packages. Rather than get a jumbo sack of chips that you’re likely to scarf down in one sitting, why not buy smaller, single-serving sizes? With this approach, you’ve got automatic portion control.” 238
    Are we really to believe that Americans could reduce body fat and maintain a healthy weight by simply, as Dr. Phil suggests, eating smaller bags of chips?
    Low-calorie dieting has been around the longest, and it makes sense intuitively. Most physicians firmly believe in the calorie in/calorie out theory. We are told that you must restrict 3,600 calories, or 515 calories per day to lose one pound per week. Despite recent low fat and low carb tangents, Americans will always return to counting calories. That’s why
The South Beach Diet
, which is billed as a low carb diet but is really a low calorie diet, has sold 22 million copies to date.
    One hundred years ago, a hardworking man ate 6,000 to 6,500 calories and a hardworking woman ate 4,000 to 4,500 calories per day. Today an average woman needs 2,000 to 2,500 calories and an average man needs 2,500 to 2,800 calories. On the first day of the South Beach Diet, by my calculation, you’re allowed 1,167 calories, which is 800 to 1,333 calories less per day than an average woman needs, and 1,333 to 1,163 less calories than the average man needs for optimal metabolic function. Still, you may be convinced that a low-calorie diet is the way to weight loss, because you have heard people say, “I lost thirty pounds on the South Beach Diet!” But losing weight is not the end of the story. It’s what happens next that you need to consider.
    There are five reasons why a low-calorie diet is counterproductive to weight management. The first reason is that human beings in the twenty-first century have the same physiology as our Paleolithic ancestors. In prehistoric times food was not always plentiful. People gorged when they had food, then went without eating when food was scarce. Prehistoric humanphysiology evolved an “insulin-directed” fat-storage system enabling them to survive to this “feast and famine” lifestyle. The hormone insulin, which is secreted from the pancreas when food is eaten, directs nutrients into the cells. In times of famine, prehistoric humans’ pancreases adjusted, so the next time they gorged during a plentiful season, their insulin secretions were higher and more food could be stored as fat.
    Twenty-first-century humans have this exact same fat-storage system. That means if you deprive your body of food it will perceive this deprivation as a time of famine and will adjust your insulin output so that, when you break your diet, more insulin will be secreted and more of what you eat will be stored as fat.
    The second reason low-calorie dieting fails is