16 PART I: INTRODUCTION
The Modern Diet
Today, nearly a century and a half after Banting’s diet recommendations,
Amazon.com lists nearly 20,000 books available for purchase on diets.
As of this writing, 681 books have been released in the past 30 days, with
another 112 coming soon. In the rst six months of 2011, more than 2,000
books on weight-loss were released.
We know beyond any scientic doubt that being fat kills. For more than
a century and a half, the medical community has known that sugars and
carbohydrates make us fat. But we keep eating, despite all of the information
and transparency—from this month’s 681 diet books, to the nutritional
labels on every item in the grocery store, to chains of Weight Watchers and
Jenny Craigs across the country.
Food’s scrumptious properties aside, perhaps the diet books have something
to do with our obesity problem. It certainly seems as though the number
of diet books available to the public correlates to obesity rates. While any
economist would predict that the number of books to help people be less
fat would grow with the number of fat people in the market, at what point
does causation ow the other way around? Maybe all these diet books
are making us fat by making it harder to gure out what a healthy diet
is. At the very least, the modern obsession with weight over diet brings us
a signicant health issue. Imagery of being perfectly shaped and skinny
trumps being healthy and happy, and as a result, scores of people suffer—
and die—from eating disorders.
No matter which way you turn, abundant information makes it easy to
distort our relationship with food into something unhealthy. If you’re
looking to surf through a land of false promises, spend a few minutes in
the diet aisle of your local bookstore. You can lose weight by thinking like
either a caveman or a French woman, or by eating only food that’s cooked
slowly. You can lose it, says the updated 2012 edition of Eat This Not That!
(Rodale Books), by simply swapping in a Big Mac® for a Whopper-with-
cheese®.
In the diet aisle, our relationship to food can take on social, political, and
environmental signicance. A healthy diet mustn’t just include the right
number of calories and the right interaction of nutritional elements. It must
also produce the least amount of carbon, and be as natural as possible. It’s
no longer good enough to eat reasonable portions of lean meat; the meat
must come from a cow that could roam free and eat grass.
If time is of the essence, you can get top-selling weight loss books promising
change based on your lifestyle: just spend 8 minutes (Eight Minutes in the
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