Bring back the carbs!
Admit it, you love them. Slandered by diet extremists, these wholesome, starchy staples deserve a revival, declares JOHN ALLEMANG. And not just for their genuine health benefits, but because life ought to be a pleasure
By JOHN ALLEMANG
Saturday, February 28, 2004 - Page F1
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet...VER28/TPHealth/
How bad are things getting in this diet-crazed, carb-avoiding world? On the red-soil Maritime island that's inseparable from the humble and now increasingly humiliated spud, the former dietary staple is fast becoming a forgotten food.
"We just want people to rediscover the potato," says Ivan Noonan of the PEI Potato Board, as if all the New World voyages of discovery five centuries ago had been in vain.
But with PEI potato shipments down 23 per cent in Canada and 27 per cent in the United States, it's hard not to think that basic carbohydrates like the starchy tuber are in trouble. The high-protein, high-fat frenzy surrounding diets such as Atkins and South Beach and the Zone have demonized the potato and other members of the beleaguered carb family. Foods that used to be praised almost beyond endurance for their vitamins, minerals and fibre are now blithely ignored in the rush to easy weight loss.
It's not just the good-for-you qualities of carbohydrates that are being sacrificed. Dieters following the straight-and-narrowing path to skinniness are giving up on some of life's most basic and powerful pleasures -- the crisp, nutty crust of a stone-ground, whole-wheat bread; the tickle of a pasta shape as it carries its twists of tomato sauce through the mouth; the creamy taste of an oven-roasted potato scented with rosemary and gently flecked with the time-immemorial taste of sea salt.
In the dieter's devotion to sensory deprivation, all these simple joys are being sacrificed to a seemingly unstoppable force.
"We're not trying to beat the hell out of Atkins," says Mr. Noonan, well aware of the powers he is up against. "We just want to remind people that potatoes are healthy."
That desperate need to catch the attention of distracted diners is now commonplace.
Traditionally, nutritionists have made a clear distinction between more complex good carbs (plain potatoes, whole-wheat bread, lightly processed rice, yellow pasta made with high-protein durum wheat, nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables, low-fat milk) and simple bad carbs, encompassing the sweeter end of the junk-food industry -- calories without nutrients, as they're known.
In the middle ground, not-so-good or not-too-bad depending on who you listened to, were fattier foods such as cheese, or more-refined products such as white bread, precooked rice and fruit juice.
But with low-carb-diet mania taking command, the fine distinctions are being lost -- even the nutrients of the good carbs aren't seen to be worth the calories that are an essential part of the package. As Whoppers and Quarter Pounders shed their buns, brewers talk up low-carb beer, and supermarkets such as Loblaws roll out Atkins-endorsed products, producers and manufacturers in the carbohydrates world must now look for ways to fight back.
And so the United States Potato Board recently created its "Get the skinny on America's favourite vegetable" campaign that points out a potato's benefits -- rich in vitamin C, high in fibre, an excellent source of potassium, fat-free and only 100 calories (before you deep-fry it or add the sour cream).
Meanwhile, a consortium of pasta producers sponsored a conference held in Rome last week to confirm the healthy status of pasta as a good carbohydrate. "We've got to stop this low-carb foolishness and get back to traditional patterns of eating," says Dun Gifford, founder of the Boston-based Oldways Preservation Trust, which organized the conference.
At Pusateri's, an upscale supermarket in Toronto, the current bout of anti-carb mania happens to coincide with the store's annual pasta festival. John Mastroianni, Pusateri's general manager, says pasta sales have flattened out after years of 5 to 7 per cent growth. The store's response? A new line of ultra-thin noodles. "We'll get the volume up so they fill a plate with half the carbs," he says.
Following suit, the PEI Potato Board has doubled its marketing budget, so that it can launch a radio and billboard campaign this week in Toronto and Montreal.
But if carb-avoiding city sophisticates can't be persuaded to make room for the simple baked potato, there's a fallback market -- the starving North Koreans. "They know potatoes," Mr. Noonan says. And even better, they've never heard of Atkins.
These are critical times for carbohydrates -- a statement that would sound almost comic were it not for the power of a brand-name diet to turn appetites and industries upside-down. The overthrow of traditional nutritional principles promised in Dr. Robert Atkins's 1972 book The Diet Revolution is set to come true as more and more people embrace a high-fat, low-carb way of eating that many health associations consider hazardous.
"Fat satiates the appetite," Dr. Atkins wrote. "Fat stops carbohydrate craving. And fat, in the absence of carbohydrates, accelerates the burning of stored fat."
All health authorities agree that carbohydrates are a key component in the modern diet -- recommendations range from 45 to 60 per cent of our total consumption, versus 25 to 30 per cent for fat and 15 to 20 per cent for protein.
"There are so many good things related to carbohydrates, such as freedom from heart disease, diabetes and colon cancer," says Dr. David Jenkins of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. "It's difficult to get any degree of fibre in your diet if you cut out cereals and have a diet poor in fruits and vegetables."
And yet in a guilt-ridden world where fat has been stigmatized as the cause of heart disease and cancer -- and where, let's face it, our basic foods have been medicalized to an extent that makes it hard to approach them with a hedonistic intent -- the more forgiving Atkins diet has turned into a cry of liberation.
Indeed, its success is due to an essential flaw in the previous, aggressive low-fat campaign: When dietary fat was replaced by high-calorie, refined carbohydrates, as often happened, people's weight went up. With Atkins, where satiety and fat go together in a rigidly restricted regimen, dieters lose weight far more rapidly than they did with more balanced programs.
Of course they do, carb supporters say -- with a meat-based diet, you fill up faster and get bored sooner. But the Atkins devotees reach a completely different conclusion: Carbohydrates are tainted.
"The diet basically appeals to those who want instant results," nutritionist Rosemary Stanton says. "I think many people believe that if they can get a sudden drop in weight, that will start them on a happy path, then they will start to eat sensibly. Sadly, any sudden weight loss in a healthy person is followed by a regaining of most of the lost weight. This regaining coincides with the period of sensible eating, which they then blame. Then they look for another diet."
And they don't go back to carbs. "Maybe people need to be obsessive to change their ways," says Naomi Duguid, the lean co-author of such carbohydrate-friendly books as Seductions of Rice and Flatbreads and Flavours. "Such an absolute rule of thumb -- 'You must not' -- makes things much simpler. It's easier to demonize, since you don't have to make a judgment about moderation."
Absolutism is characteristic of the modern approach to food, where a sound three-course traditional dinner is nothing compared with a 10-course tasting menu of guaranteed-original creations.
Nonetheless, it may seem strange that a basic source of energy in our diet can be discarded so easily, especially when a carbohydrate-free diet brings with it dire consequences for one's physical comfort and social standing -- constipation and bad breath caused by a metabolic condition known as ketosis, in which the body gets its energy by consuming itself, damaging the liver and producing foul-smelling byproducts.
The things people will do to lose weight. But what makes it more amazing to the defenders of good carbohydrates is what else the zealots lose in the process. "It's just nutty that these diets eliminate a whole category of food," says Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of the highly influential Mediterranean Diet Cookbooks as well as two studies of traditional Italian eating, Flavours of Tuscany and Flavours of Puglia.
"In Italy, people eat plenty of pasta, rice, potatoes and huge amounts of bread, and when you see how happy they are at the table eating this very healthy food, you have to say, 'Why not?' "
Ms. Jenkins's books offer an extraordinary picture of the less demented world that existed before Atkins, where carbs ruled and pleasure could more easily co-exist with health. In her Tuscan cookbook, bread is a fundamental ingredient, used as the base for bruschetta or crostini, and still valued in its leftover state as a soup or salad mainstay.
Farther south, the recipes from Puglia glorify potato salad with octopus, potato, mussel and zucchini casserole, chickpeas and handmade pasta, pounded whole-wheat berries with greens, penne pasta with cauliflower (a good example of how carbohydrates often serve as vehicles for other good foods) and double-crusted onion calzone.
Bread made from rougher durum wheat is supreme in Puglia -- a bag for a crusty Pugliese loaf from an old-style bakery goes so far as to quote a hymn to bread: "Glory of the field, fragrance of the land, feast of life." This is starch culture with a vengeance, and it's Ms. Jenkins's vision of paradise.
"It's not carbohydrates themselves that are at fault," she observes. "It's the huge quantity of processed, commercialized, industrialized food we consume in North America. Anyone who goes on a restricted diet is bound to lose weight, assuming you're paying attention. But we should be paying attention to the wonderful things in the world as well."
Of course, some people think that the Atkins steak is pretty wonderful, a big step up from a simple potato or a bread roll deemed so lowly that it's offered silently and free at the beginning of a restaurant meal. Steaks cost more, and in the addled North American food hierarchy, they are therefore better. Poor people, as an economic rule, eat carbohydrates. And the poor, by and large, get fat. The rich savour protein and the higher class of fats, and generally suffer less from obesity.
It becomes much easier from this collection of random observations to draw the completely erroneous conclusion that carbohydrates make you fat -- which is no more reasonable than thinking that eating bread makes you poor, or that nibbling on a ribeye is the key to a high-paying job on Bay Street.
Yet this is the half-logic that compels people to give up a baked potato with a dollop of tart yogurt and a sprinkling of chives, or triumphantly refuse to nibble on a crusty six-grain farmhouse roll or rule out all fantasies about chopped porcini mushrooms nestled in a bed of whole-wheat noodles -- because they might somehow be connected with the "empty calories" of the frozen fast-food fries or the sliced white bread or the packaged macaroni dinner.
"We've thrown out class in almost every other walk of life," says Harvey Levenstein, emeritus professor of history at McMaster University and author of Paradox of Plenty and Revolution at the Table. "But when it comes to food, class is still significant."
One way of breaking out of those pesky class divisions is to shift the argument to the recipes of a different culture, where our prejudices are more easily revealed as ludicrous.
People inclined to sneer at the dietetic possibilities of the gargantuan pasta dishes served in this country have to think twice when they look at the lean diners tucking into a pappardelle dish in a humble Tuscan trattoria -- though the key point is less the carbohydrate content of the meal than the size of the serving, the nature of the sauce and the fact that the most enthusiastic Tuscan eaters probably don't spend their days sitting in front of a computer.
"Traditional diets accept the virtue of moderation," Dr. Jenkins says. And that doesn't allow much room for a diet that combines pigging out on animal fats with sudden and extreme weight loss.
It's true that the occasional forward-looking Italian has damned Italy's favourite carb in an eagerness to seem modern. In 1930, the futurist poet -- and proto-fascist -- Filippo Marinetti wrote the following condemnation: "Pastasciutta, however grateful to the palate, is an obsolete food; it is heavy, brutalizing and gross; its nutritive qualities are deceptive; it induces skepticism, sloth and pessimism."
When you're a futurist, traditional diets necessarily look dull and unprogressive.
But extremism, and the accompanying hand-wringing, is more often the North American way when it comes to food -- a tendency that goes back well before the current preoccupations of talk TV made miracle diets an overriding cultural obsession.
Prof. Levenstein points out that the tendency to eat less bread was worrying U.S. flour millers as early as the late 1920s. They mounted an "Eat More Wheat" billboard campaign, and followed that up with a promotion that presented refined white bread as the ideal food. "Hollywood stars were recruited," he says, "to give testimonials that they kept their slim figures by eating white bread."
The pasta manufacturers who sponsored the recent Rome conference -- which not surprisingly described carbohydrates as "essential in healthy, balanced diets" while deriding high-fat/low-carb diets as dangerous -- briefly considered finding a celebrity spokesperson to address the current crisis and counteract the Hollywood stars who tout Atkins et al.
But the idea was turned down, says Paul Davis, North American president of Barilla pasta. The companies are now targeting food editors and health professionals behind the scenes, while working with medical organizations to place health endorsements on pasta packages.
And so a basic nutrient and a delicious food, in an act of self-defence, turns itself into a kind of medicine. Is this really the way we want to go in the pro-carb future, nervously reassuring ourselves with medical claims while the other guys are pigging out on steaks and loving it? Isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place?
"If you're going to treat eating as something medical and mechanical," says Ms. Duguid, " you might as well take a pill. But really, it's much more like sex -- you get to have it as a pleasure as well as a necessity."
And with that, she goes off to cook her rice.
John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
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