Grain on the Brain
495 – Inches of snow this winter? Points gained by the Dow? People who will fit in a subway train? Nope ! If you guessed number of NEW diet books published in 2013 you would be correct.
Several weeks ago while working the customer service desk at the bookstore, I noticed that about one out of every three inquiries we had was for a diet book, usually one that had just been promoted on Dr. Oz. Subsequently, I also noticed that our new arrivals table had no fewer than 3 diet books at any given time. The best seller display always had at least two on the list and I could count on at least one out of every 10 customers in the checkout line having a diet book in their hand. I needed to confirm my suspicions . Google provided me with the answer. There were 495 new diet books published in 2013. This is in addition to the hundreds already crowding the shelves! Diet books have become the new “fiction”……in more ways than one.
What do I mean by that? Fiction used to outsell every other type of book in bookstores. Today sales of diet books have soared. And like fiction most diet books are based on something other than reality. If losing weight was easy or a matter of eliminating ONE food from your diet as many of these books promote, we would all be a size 6. Truth is there is NO MAGIC BULLET.
I titled this blog grain on the brain for a reason. Several of the biggest sellers from the endless parade of diet books this year say grain (specifically wheat) is equivalent to the demon rum. Get rid of wheat (per the title) and your troubles will be over- digestion improved, excess weight gone, and you will want for nothing. Not so, say nutrition experts. Avoiding healthy carbs (wheat, brown rice, other grains) is the last thing you want to do ESPECIALLY if you are diabetic, need to lose weight, have heart disease or Alzheimer’s. Before I go on to talk more about what we do need to eat I want to add some words of caution about the diet books of today. If you look at the titles most of them talk about eliminating ONE TYPE of food from our diet. There is always a bad guy (just like in fiction books….). In reality when you open the book and start to read there is NEVER just one bad guy – all of a sudden the author has you eliminating this food and that food and by the way you can’t have such and such after 2PM and every 5th day you need to eliminate something else, and so on. It’s never as simple as it sounds. Which is why most of my customers at the book store are back in about 2 months looking for the next best selling diet book that has just been advertised on TV or some magazine. ( I just read about the “werewolf diet” a couple of days ago that is the new fad in Hollywood…..you eat NOTHING for 24 hours and lose up to 6 pounds….) Anyway, my point is to lose weight AND KEEP IT OFF you have to find a diet you can live with that is well balanced, TASTES GOOD, and is easy to follow. I actually saw a diet book last week that was a “gluten free, fat free, low carb diet.” Just shoot me or turn me into a cow and let me graze….I didn’t bother to look at the recipes. It was too depressing to think about and I knew, at least for me, NOT a diet I would ever be able to live with. I like food.
Here is the other caveat that is true for ANY and ALL diets you may choose. You MUST USE more calories than you take in each day to lose weight. It’s as simple as that in theory. The body must take in less than it uses to lose weight, no matter what diet you are following.
I am NOT saying dieting is simple. I would never say that. My lifelong struggle to lose/maintain a healthy weight has been anything but simple. I’m just saying we don’t need 495 new books to tell us how to do it.
About this grain thing and “gluten-free” the other new buzz word …… Only about 1 % of the population has Celiac’s disease ( real reason for “gluten-free” diet) – an intolerance of gluten ( found in grain). These people actually produce an antibody that make gluten a no-no of life threatening proportion. An additional 6% may have a gluten sensitivity that causes some digestive symptoms. This means that more than 90% of us have no reaction to gluten AT ALL therefore a “gluten-free” diet has no effect on us at all except to increase the cost of our diets and make us hyper-vigilant over nothing !
There are two other diet crazes from the past year I want to mention – the “Paleo” and the Mediterranean diets. Paleo diets encourage increasing our meat intake based on the theory our caveman ancestors were hunters whose diets consisted of MEAT. They were strong and healthy (Were they? Even if they weren’t eaten by a Saber Tooth tiger I don’t think their life span was more than 3 or 4 decades….) Along with an increase in meat intake we are to shun grains and plants if we follow the Paleo diet. Is there a fallacy here? Our diet, ancestrally speaking, was originally plant based and our bodies, according to some scientists, have never totally adapted to a large intake of protein through meat. Have you ever seen a picture of a skinny caveman?
On the other hand the Mediterranean diet decreases the emphasis on animal derived food and puts it on adding more olive oil (good fat) pasta, chickpeas (protein source) beans and fresh fruit. Both of these diets – the supporters of the Paleo and the Mediterranean diets say their system works. And they probably do- as long as they are rigidly adhered to – not because of the emphasis on a particular food but due to decreased caloric intake. The Mediterranean is most likely the easiest to adhere to as it is the least restrictive however is this a diet you and your family can follow for a life time?
Where do we go from here? As a nation we need to lose weight. Obesity has become an epidemic, especially in our children. They need to learn good eating habits at a very early age. Being overweight leads to serious, chronic health problems that can alter our quality (as well as quantity) of life. Good carbs? Bad carbs? Good fats? Bad fats? Pasta? No pasta? Grain? No grain? Tomorrow we will jump into healthier eating, dieting as painlessly as possible, and how to kick your diet up a notch. Hint – go to an antique store. Find a dinner plate from 1950 -Fiesta ware will do. Compare the size of that plate to the dinner plates in YOUR kitchen cupboard………Think about it.