The Real Skinny: Dieting Is Baloney

Some foods are so dangerously delicious that we must be protected from them and from ourselves -- or so the thinking goes among certain trial lawyers, legislators, special-interest groups and the Health and Human Services secretary.

These dietary watchdogs blame the obesity epidemic on fattening foods and the restaurants and food makers who tempt us with them. Fast-food restaurants especially must be stopped because they prey upon the poor and uneducated, duping them into ordering their greasy burgers and fries.

Declaring most of us too fat, they’ve proposed an assortment of punitive taxes, restrictive regulations and lawsuits to keep American appetites in check. But behind these ideas is an intrinsic prejudice against fat people as irresponsible, stupid gluttons who eat too much, especially too much of the “wrong” foods. Fat people are also seen as lazy slugs who do little exercise other than lifting the food from their plates to their mouths.

In our thin-obsessed culture, such beliefs about the obese and manufactured foods abound, but these myths don’t hold up to the evidence.

Fast-food meals, for example, contain fewer calories from fat today than they did in the 1970s. And, in spite of their convenience, we still eat 75% of our meals at home, where portion sizes are even larger than those at fast-food restaurants, according to a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce report.

In actuality, there is no scientific evidence that any specific food causes obesity.

A bill just introduced in the Senate could protect the food industry from predatory class-action lawsuits holding them liable for people’s obesity.

But it’s doubtful that fat people will get off so easily. The truths about them are harder to accept.

The biggest myth about fat people is that they’re gluttons. Yet in repeated clinical studies, researchers have found no meaningful difference in how many calories or the types of foods fat people eat compared with thinner people. That’s counterintuitive, but true.

The Healthy Eating Index -- the report card on how Americans eat, compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture -- found in 1998 that those with ideal Hollywood figures ate a similar number of calories as those considered obese.

In fact, multiple studies have found that women who dutifully watch what they eat and are dainty eaters, or who diet, actually weigh more than those who don’t restrict their food intake. In a 1990 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, women controlling their eating had slowed their metabolisms down to where they were eating 620 fewer calories a day than their more slender but unrestrained eating friends.

The adage “diets don’t work” is more accurately “diets make you fatter.” The overwhelming body of scientific research has shown with striking consistency that less than 3% of weight loss is maintained over the long term.

That fact has played out on a national scale. Obesity rates soared throughout the mid-1960s to 1990, while we were eating steadily fewer calories and less fat, according to the Center for Nutrition Policy.

Centers for Disease Control data also show that through the 1990s, exercise activity remained unchanged and, by some studies, increased.

That shatters the next myth: that fat people are necessarily sloths. Even the American Heart Assn. admitted in 1996 that studies looking at sedentary activity, particularly watching television, had found no differences between fat and slim youth.

What did grow during those decades was our national preoccupation with thinness and the number of us dieting. Obesity is far too complicated and serious to look for lucrative food targets to blame.

Before we get behind policies and regulations to “fix” the obesity problem, we need to be sure they’re based on sound science rather than intuition. Our favorite creme brulee may be at stake.

Sandy Szwarc is author of “The Truth About Obesity,” a series on www.techcentralstation.com.