Diet Fads: Supermarket Sheep

Eighteen or twenty years ago, I was into high protein, high
fat, low carbohydrate diets, courtesy of the original Atkins
Diet Revolution and, to an even greater extent, Stillman’s Quick
Weight Loss Diet (which I must admit I still prefer to Atkins
but that’s merely personal taste). At the time, every aisle was
loaded with labels proclaiming Low Fat or Reduced Fat. I didn’t
care about fat and sought much different information.
Unfortunately, low fat was “in” and I felt alone and abandoned.

With a certain sense of resentment, I tracked down the
carbohydrate costs of a wide variety of food, keeping a sharp
eye on ingredients, calorie levels, and nutritional values.
Certain items were strangely emblazoned with banners announcing
low fat: pasta sauce, potato chips, candy bars, and ice cream. I
was puzzled: how could certain foods, full of fat to their very
core, be low fat? How could all the fat be removed and there be
anything left?

I became fascinated with certain labels. Have you ever, for
example, read the labels on those flavored coffee creamers? Zero
fat. Zero carbohydrates. Zero protein. Zero calories. How can
anything we put in our mouths have zero calories? A negligible
amount, maybe, but absolute zero? What is in that stuff? Or is
it virtual food, existing only in our mind’s eye as a kind of
edible hologram?

Mercifully, the low fat craze died its natural death. Atkins and
similar regimens took over and the low fat labels were reprinted
(corporate recycling at its finest) to read Low Carb. Suddenly,
everywhere you looked, there were foods recast as low carb -
again with the pasta sauce, the potato chips, the candy bars,
and the ice cream.

I was curious. Had the manufacturers taken out all those carbs
and put the fat back in? Where did those carbs go? Are there
vast dumpsites in the desert where unwanted carbs are buried -
next to worn tires, plastic bags, and nuclear waste?

Once more, I wonder: what is left in those boxes, cans, and
jars? Why am I paying $1.19 per ounce for something that really
isn’t anything?

Then I started to figure it out (sometimes I’m a little slow).
The food hadn’t really changed at all, just the packaging. Food
labels are like those ubiquitous Internet sales letters. They
trumpet headlines that catch our interest because they are in
synch with our desires and goals. Is that accidental? Of course
not. Highly paid copywriters choose their headlines with great
care, buying into the national “obsession o’ the day”, floating
on the coattails of the latest fad.

Many of us are so desperate to control our weight that we buy
into the promises like the unaware followers we are: bleating
sheep heading for a precipice with no thought of questioning our
leaders or striking out in a different direction.

The unspoken secret is that the label doesn’t matter. If we want
to lose weight, we don’t eat pasta sauce, potato chips, candy
bars, or ice cream. Period. No matter what the package says.
Deep in our psyche, we know what we can eat (very little) and
what we can’t (a whole bunch). Allowing ourselves to be misled
is only a fashionably acceptable way to fool ourselves, and we
know it. We buy into the hype because we want, so badly, to
believe. We want to think that we are doing the right thing,
that we’re really trying, that our motivation is pure.

Our weaknesses are being exploited by the packagers and the
super store con men. Our ambivalence, and the overwhelming need
to avoid the very real discomfort of effective dieting, invests
the misguidance of food labels with an illusion of truth.

Like our dimwitted ovine cousins, we, too, are eventually
fleeced.

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