It's time to curb the low-carb craze

05:13 PM CDT on Thursday, May 6, 2004

By STEVE DAVIS / The Dallas Morning News

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcon...tguy.63384.html

It's official. When the Big Bear goes all low-carb crazy, America has collectively lost its marbles.

Actually, I take that back. Americans wouldn't dare misplace their marbles – not if you told them marbles were invaluably low in carbohydrates.

I noticed the other day that the Klondike Bear and his ice-creamy pals have crashed the low-carb party and confirmed once and for all that it has spun hopelessly out of control.

Americans are getting their low-carb on – in a big, ugly and frighteningly compulsive way.

The carb-counting revolution has us storming South Beach and worshiping Atkins with a powerful verve. It's like we're trying to hide our excess pounds behind the mounds of products and marketing matter now landing in grocery stores, restaurants and bookstores.

I have no delusions that the carb craze has crested. And yet the crushing level of carb-consciousness has already settled into that sad place where presidential campaigns often bottom out – at some point, you just want them to be over with.

Quick disclaimer: Any regimen that increases dietary awareness, especially one that blockades processed foods, has merit. And I have no desire to engage in the unwieldy carbohydrate debate.

But I'm awed by the country's collective obsession.

A quick trip to the local bookstore tells all: I found 31 books in the diet and nutrition section devoted to or related to low-carb eating, low-carb cooking or low-carb lifestyles, whatever those are.

There were probably more volumes still – but I got distracted when I glanced up and noticed something called Suzanne Somers: The Sexy Years .

The curiosity was freakishly overwhelming.

Anyway, the 31 that I counted included only titles with clear evidence of low- or no-carb leaning. I'm sure there were some naughty masqueraders in there: Against the Grain, The Starch Busters Diet, Protein Power and others sounded suspiciously as if they prowled the same low-carb alley.

The creeping vines of the carb craze are similarly enveloping America's grocery stores. Low-carb cereal. Low-carb juices. Low-carb condiments. Some breads and tortillas are going with the low-carb flow – which I really can't understand.

Bread and tortillas are built on carbs. That's like a low-maintenance supermodel.

It just can't be, I tell you.

There are some other confusing links on the low-carb chain. I found a low-carb dairy-based coffee creamer. But isn't dairy all about the protein?

Low-carb creamer should be redundant, like low-dirt soap.

So riddle me this: The International Delights low-carb creamer has 3 grams of carbohydrates per tablespoon.

But the same tablespoon of old-fashioned half-and-half (high ground around Heart Attack Hill) has less than 1 carb gram.

Anybody? Anybody?

And don't get us started on low-carb beer, which Michelob conspicuously markets. Beer is naturally low-carb, relatively speaking.

A 12-ounce bottle of Michelob Ultra has 2.6 happy little grams of carbs. Miller Lite has 3.2 grams of equally contented carbs.

These cousins may not live under the same roof, but they sure dwell in the same neighborhood.

Even if most light brews fall into the 5- to 6-gram carbohydrate range, that makes low-carb beer the worst idea since Joe Millionaire 2 (where Fox wasted tons of green only to learn that we got it the first time).

(Aside: The same amount of Coca-Cola currently sets you back more than 40 grams of carbs. Don't expect the soft drink execs to miss their at-bat in Low Carb Park.)

(Aside No. 2: While scrutinizing the grocery store aisles, I still saw plenty of holdovers from the "low-fat," "no-fat" and "reduced fat" brigade. That's so 1998. I see pink slips if some marketing mavens don't pick up the pace.)

The crowning moment in a carb-counting kingdom is still to come. Two words:

Krispy Kreme.

That's right, the head of the doughnut state is developing a low-sugar, low-carb delicacy – a gambit that threatens to set new standards in carbohydrate silliness.

It's all more evidence that Americans will buy into anything if there's a chance, just a chance, that they can join the ranks of the thin or thinnish without any of that icky old exercising.

Steve Davis is a thirtysomething sportswriter for The Dallas Morning News who hovers perpetually on the edge of fitness.

E-mail stevedavis~dallasnews.com

Amen to this.

>>"But I'm awed by the country's collective obsession."

I'd have to correct him on this. It's not the country's obsession, it's Big Business' obsession. As soon as LC became something that might be successfully marketable, EVERYONE started scrambling for a piece of the pie. Sure, some sugar free barbecue sauce is a nice thing, but a lot of these products are just absurd. They want to you casually forget that your plan probably discourages empty calories and trans fats. And, like the author mentioned, they all want to reinvent the wheel. Low carb cream? Gimme a break!

Now comes the wave of people who don't care enough to buy a book or register at a website to learn, they just figure they should cut carbs because everyone else is.

It won't hurt my feelings one bit if the low carb marketing trend, as it's progressing now, comes to a rapid end.

Once I read this, I decided to read the whole article. He's not actually bashing low-carb, he's bashing the commercialization craze surrounding low-carb. At least that's my take.

3 years ago when I started this WOL, I couldn't buy low carb varieties of my favorite foods. So I learned how to prepare healthy, more whole foods. That's why I was successful. Now that there are foods satuarated with sugar alcohols and other additives giving us the taste of the unhealthy foods we were trying to avoid in the first place, the LC woe has been bastardized.

Don't get me wrong, I get a sweet tooth now and again and run for a Zero Carb bar by 'carbolite', but its no wonder that people are jumping on and off the diet without success, they haven't learned how to make better food choices. And how can they, they can still eat overprocessed foods and call it low carb in place of the proper balance of fruits, vegetables and fiber that we ALL should be eating.

Businesses competing in the marketplace have no choice but to jump on the LC bandwagon. They are held accountable to their stockholders for keeping up on the latest trends and capitalizing on whatever niche opens up. The CEO's of these companies have no choice but to do this or their job wouldn't last long.

It's a shame there are not more scruples involved, but I doubt we will see any more concern for the low carbers than for the low fatters on a humane level, when it comes to how the product actually works.

Obviously some of the companies don't even care about the taste. ugh! I've gotten hold of some nasty tasting lc products.

However, I have to ask, when low fat products began bombarding the supermarket shelves, was there this kind of hoopla about them? I don't remember reading these types of articles about low fat products, maybe they were out there and I just didn't see them? It didn't seem like anyone ever said enough is enough about those, that I can remember.

Just as food companies know they can make money by labelling something as "low-carb", newspaper columnists know they can get readers' interest by slagging "low-carb".
It's just fueling the "craze". I look forward to the day when we are all so accustomed to eating low-carb that no one has to even mention it.

There was a fair amount of hoopla, but we didn't have the prevalence of the WWW back then and amazing search engines and such. If you were reading the low fat health magazines, or cooking magazines, then you'd have seen the hoopla.

Low fat products were certainly promoted heavily in their day, but I don't recall lots of news articles bemoaning the fact that the corporations of America had jumped on the low fat bandwagon and that consumers were embracing the low fat dogma with fervor. My take on that is that the low fat dogma sounded more scientific; if you cut fat from your food intake, you'll lose fat from your body, right? 30 some years of that has proven that notion dead wrong.

It was a nice simplistic message. The kind that makes for easy sound bites. Fat makes you fat. Fat packs more calories than carbs. Studies "proved" that fat caused heart diseases. Corporations capitalized on that and suddenly there were low-fat products everywhere.

Now after 25 years of low-fat dogma and USDA food Pyramid, the idea that fat doesn't necessarily make you fat and that carbs aren't all they were cracked up to be has become counter-intuitive. We collectively need to be de-programmed.

Yet, all those years ago, it was well understood that potatoes and bread made you fat. I still have an old Weight Watcher book, back when they used equivalents, which restricted your carbs to 2 equivalents per day. That meant no more than 2 slices of bread or starchy vegetables per day.

Had the low-carb "craze" started then, people would have embraced it as making sense. It's only years of conditioning that made low-carb counterintuitive

I think its because it was the first really big diet craze to hit. Everyone jumped on board because it was touted as being the cure for everything from cancer to heart disease and obesity. All these doctors, like Ornish and the PCRM and vegetarians all jumped on board and pretty much everyone was riding the same train. There weren't many hold-outs from this diet craze and they were called "lunatic fringe" and everyone partied on snackwells.

It wasn't until significant numbers of people started jumping off the band wagon and book sales and speaker salaries of the low-fat guru's started going down, that they started publically bashing the low-carb approach.

I think it's just you're seeing two titans fighting right now. Both of them are driven by big money, book sales, guru status and all. Meanwhile everyone is watching the war over our fat and health and wondering who the hell has the right story. Some of us think we know, but heck, I thought I knew back in the low-fat days too.

Angeline, you're so right about that. Back in 1965 when I was a chubby 4 year old, my pediatrician cautioned my parents not to let me have sugar at all and to very much restrict my intake of bread, rice, potatoes, bananas and watermelon because too much of such things was only going to make me chubbier and instead urge me to eat more vegetables, proteins and fruits like apples and oranges. Obviously, I don't remember that but that is what my mother related to me when I was grown.
I also remember my cousin dieting in the late 60's/early 70's by cutting out bread, rice, pasta and potatoes and intead eating meats, eggs, cottage cheese and salads (hmmm...now what plan does that sound like) because "everyone knew" that if you wanted to lose weight those were the foods you needed to cut out or at least cut way back on.

Back in 1968 I joined a teen version of WW and that's exactly what we were told. If we did eat carbs it was high fiber. I remember eating the baked potato skins while everyone else ate the potatoes!

In 1974 we were able to get the hospital where I went to school (diploma grad RN) to change their cafeteria food because it was all pasta and potatoes. Meals cooked with pasta and potatoes. Cold pasta and potato salads....etc etc etc....we joked that the head cook had stock in pasta and potatoes! LOL

When did the LF craze start anyway?

The silver lining in the low carb craze it get people to notice who are still stuck in low fat gear. Anything we can do to get people to rethink their eating habits.

Some of the new products are a joke. The tortillas are great, some of the sugar alcohol products are a little troublesome, yet delicious.