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

knew that such a diet had been proffered, on and off, ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when it was popularized by a retired London undertaker named William Banting. Banting, who lost some fifty pounds on the regimen, had published a pamphlet, On Corpulence, that had eventually caught the eye of late-nineteenth-century Americans. In the intervening century, the Banting "scheme," as it was inevitably called, had popped up with astounding regularity about

    WHO LET THE CALORIES IN
    every twenty-five years. At one point it was even listed as a "cure" for obesity in the Merck Manual, the prestigious physician's handbook.
    The nutritionally savvy knew something else about the Banting-Atkins scheme: It was full of medical mumbo jumbo and fraught with potential peril for anyone who followed it for a sustained period of time. It was true that the body stored excess carbohydrates as fat, for example, but it was not so clear that depriving the body of carbohydrates induced the revved-up, fat-burning state that Atkins claimed. It was also unclear what medical consequences flowed from consuming enormous amounts of fat and protein. Gout — something long considered erased in modern times — was an ongoing concern.
    But perhaps the biggest objection to the diet was that in the early 1970s the great mass of people simply could not afford to substitute meat for the bulkier — and stomach-filling — meal components like bread and potatoes.
    As the 1980s dawned in the major New York houses, two forces colluded to erase the old editors' reluctance to promote "all the meat you want." For one, meat prices were now increasingly within the reach of the average Joe. Butz's revolution in commodity prices had seen to that. Eating a giant hamburger patty and cheese three times a day, or "all the bacon and pork rinds you can," was actually economically viable.
    The other factor was publishing itself. The older, medically attuned editors were either retiring or, worse, facing increased pressure to come up with hot new diet books. If they didn't, they were told, someone else would. Calories in, calories out — that was not only boring, but the franchise for it had also been virtually sewed up by Weight Watchers. It was time to offer a bold new category of diet books — or risk losing the opportunity to the newly competitive alternative diet publishers like Atkins and his imitators.
    The result was not only an outpouring of Atkins-like low-carb diets, but a like-style gusher of other "all you can eat" diets.

    FAT LAND
    In 1989 W. W. Norton published The T-Factor Diet, inverting Atkins's claim and instead focusing on fat as the villain. The book promised that one could "Lose Weight Safely and Quickly Without Cutting Calories — or Even Counting Them!" The key, author Martin Katahn wrote, was something called the "thermogenic effect," the ability of certain foods, in this case not protein as in Atkins but instead carbohydrates, to "rev up" one's fat-burning engine. Although the idea of a thermogenic effect had been hotly debated by scientists and diet pill makers for decades, Katahn and his editors decided to render it as fact. "It is primarily fat in your diet that determines your body fat, and protein and carbohydrate calories don't really matter very much," Katahn wrote. "Once you start replacing some of that fat with carbohydrates you will unlock your body's hidden fat-burning potential: that's the T-factor at work!"
    In 1993 Dean Ornish, a California heart specialist who had reported remarkable results reversing heart disease by having patients follow a very low fat diet, joined the all-you-can-eat bandwagon. Now, instead of prescribing his extremely low fat diet for medical patients, he enlarged its prescriptions to a larger audience. As his book jacket described it: "Dr. Ornish's program takes a new approach, one scientifically based on the type of food rather than the amount of food. Abundance rather than hunger and deprivation — so you