Free Fat land : how Americans became the fattest people in the world by Greg Crister

product to sell at fund-raising events. And in return for making the company's carbonated beverages available during all hours, Coke would provide additional "marketing" tools — banners, posters, etc. — to aid still more

    WHO LET THE CALORIES IN
    school fund-raising events. In a time of tight funds and rising expectations, such contracts proved enormously popular. In Los Angeles, sports-minded parents became some of the biggest advocates of pouring contracts. It is doubtful, however, that those same parents had any clue about what soft drinks were doing to their children's overall diets, not to mention health.
    Between 1989 and 1994 consumption of soft drinks by kids soared. The USDA estimated that the proportion of adolescent boys and girls consuming soft drinks on any given day increased by 74 percent and 65 percent, respectively. In many ways the pattern reflected the adult population, where, between 1989 and 1994, soda consumption jumped from 34.7 to 40.3 gallons a year. But the kids were doing something with the soda that few people initially understood: They were drinking it in place of milk and other important nutrient-rich foods.
    Worse, they were not compensating for those extra empty calories when they sat down for regular meals. A joint study by Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital researchers in February 2001 concluded that such excess liquid calories inhibited the ability of older children to compensate at mealtime, leading to caloric imbalance and, in time, obesity. "Compensation for energy consumed in liquid form, which can be observed in very young children (4-5 years)," reviewers of the study concluded, "is lost rapidly in the following years."
    When it came to food — and particularly when it came to setting boundaries on its consumption — family and school were hardly alone as they drifted through the 1980s. That other great arbiter of modern life, the media, was also at sea.
    For most of the postwar period, the publishers of American diet books were a somewhat predictable lot. While editors might occasionally publish a celebrity diet or a quirky new fitness regimen, the general approach of diet books to weight loss mirrored what physicians, scientists, and nutritionists had always advised: to maintain weight one had to balance calories in with calories

    FAT LAND
    out. To lose it, one had to consume fewer and expend more. The lone dissenter was a Cornell University-trained physician named Robert C. Atkins. In 1972 Atkins published a small book that turned conventional wisdom on its head. Instead of counting calories, and always thinking about what one couldn't have, a person who really wanted to lose weight had to find a way to do so pleasantly. And Atkins had found the way.
    The way, in fact, was simple — and, as Atkins never failed to note, very scientific. Human beings, he would begin, need three basic nutrients — proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Once inside the body, proteins were broken down to replenish muscles and tissues, fats were burned or stored for future energy use, and carbohydrates were burned for immediate energy needs. The carbohydrates that didn't get used — and this was key to the Atkins diet — were stored by the liver as glycogen, which was then stored as fat. If the body did not get enough carbohydrates during the day, it would eventually begin to "burn" its fat stores. It was that last bit of information that could make all the difference for the frustrated dieter, Atkins said. If one deprived the body of carbohydrates — sugars — one could "trick" the body into burning its own fat stores. The added bonus of such a system was that one could consume all the fats and proteins one wanted, since the revved-up Atkinized body would either use them for muscle or burn them away.
    Not surprisingly, the book, Dr. Atkins'Diet Revolution, went to the top of the charts.
    Yet much of mainstream publishing remained wary of Atkins. Some old-time editors and critics