Leith, William (13 page)

For centuries, moderation was the main message of the diet

guru. In order to lose weight, you had to stop stuffing your face, and never go back to stuffing your face again. Until the twentieth century, a diet was a diet for ever, and was based on firm principles that applied to life in general. Cornaro believed that being greedy was bad for the soul. Erasmus preached moderation because it fitted in with his reading of the Bible. Leonard Lessius, the early Belgian diet guru, wrote in 1613 that 'Lust knows not where Necessitie ends', paraphrasing St Augustine. For centuries, the message was the same. Be moderate. Don't stop being moderate. Even the glutton Dr Johnson believed that losing weight was a simple science. 'Whatever be the quantity that a man eats,' he said, 'it is plain that if he is too fat, he has eaten more than he should have done.'

We all know what happened next. People began to have trouble with moderation. The Industrial Revolution brought mass production, steam-powered transport, the mechanized milling of flour, food preservatives, canning, and an increased level of carbohydrate in the diet. Meat was expensive. Carbs were cheap. Being fat, now no longer the exclusive preserve of the wealthy, became more and more unfashionable. One guy who knew this from personal experience was the Victorian undertaker William Banting, who, at 5 foot 5 inches and 202 lbs, had become quite desperate about his ballooning weight.

`No man labouring under obesity,' wrote Banting, a Londoner, 'can be quite insensible to the sneers and remarks of the cruel and injudicious.' It was the same trauma that Shelley Bovey described just over a century later.

Banting had tried various methods of losing weight. He took up rowing, which gave him a big appetite. He travelledto Harrogate to drink the sulphur waters in the hope that the purgative effect of the foul-tasting drink would reduce his weight. He took Turkish baths, hoping to steam his way to slimness. None of this worked. Then he consulted William Harvey, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Harvey told Banting to go lowcarb. Having studied diabetes, Harvey had come to the conclusion that eating too much starch and sugar made people fat, and sometimes led to diabetes. Thus instructed, Banting stopped eating bread, milk, sugar, and potatoes, and feasted on beef, mutton, kidneys, bacon, and 'any vegetable except potatoes'. Over the course of a year, he lost 46 lbs, wrote a treatise, the 'letter on corpulence', and became the most famous diet guru of his time. At the age of 65, he told his readers, 'I have not felt so well as now for the last twenty years.'

For a few years, people lost weight on Banting's diet, and even referred to the act of losing weight as 'banting'. But then something happened, a fate that would befall Atkins a century later. Banting's diet was buried. In the late-nineteenth century, as now, lowcarb diets had a crucial problem: it's hard to manufacture lowcarb products to support them. When diet gurus such as John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham, on the other hand, advocated their rival high-carb, low-protein diets, they produced products Kellogg's cereal and Graham Crackers to go along with the diets, thus creating a network of corporate allies. But Banting, like Atkins in the 1970s, had nothing to sell, except a message that might hurt food manufacturers.

If you advocate a low-fat diet, the food manufacturers don't mind. People who produce sarbs are fine about it.

People who produce dairy products might sell less full-fat milk, but they'll make up for it by selling more low-fat milk; butchers sell lean meat at a premium price to make up for the money they lose on fatty meat.

But if you advocate a lowcarb diet, the food industry sees you as a problem. Millers and potato farmers work in high-bulk, low-margin industries. If their sales drop by just a few per cent, they have to lay off thousands of workers. Lowcarb, in other words, potentially harms the food industry in a way that low-fat does not. So if you work in the food industry, or you're a nutritionist, and you say bad things about lowcarb diets, or good things about low-fat diets, you'll make a lot of friends.

Atkins himself underlined this point in 1973, when he was interrogated by the Senate Nutrition Committee on Obesity and Fad Diets. When Dr Frederick Stare, founder of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard's School of Public Health, condemned the Atkins diet, Atkins said, 'I think the Harvard School of Nutrition depends on outside funds and this could produce a bias.'

Stare's department, it turned out, had received grants from Kellogg's, Carnation, and the Sugar Association.

Two Words that Would Make Us All a Lot Healthier

As the elevator rises, I'm thinking about what always happens to lowcarb diets. Eventually, they get buried under a ton of carbohydrates. So far, from the Stone Age to the present day, this has always happened. Carbs are powerful. Carbs have influential friends. Mess with Carbs at your peril.

After Banting, low-fat made a comeback. Diets began to change. They got quicker. Around the turn of the last century, people tried one-day diets and three-day diets and one-week diets and one-month diets. Flappers in the 1920s ate eggs for a day, cabbage for a week, or cut out meat for a month. None of this worked; all of these diets fell foul of the Cannon Conundrum. As people began to understand the concept of calories in the 1950s and 1960s, low-calorie diets became the norm. They didn't work, either. As Geoffrey Cannon says, dieting makes you fat because diets change the way your body works. Diets make your body think you can't find food. If you stay on a low-calorie diet, your body turns muscle tissue into fat, rendering you weak. If you stop the diet, you get fatter than you were before.

And of course, after Atkins' 1972 diet, low-fat made another comeback. Low-fat always makes a comeback. In the seventies and eighties and nineties, low-fat was bigger than ever. There were diets which involved counting 'fat units', and diets where you would grill things instead of frying them, and diets where you cut the fat off the edge of your steak and removed the skin from chicken legs. Aerosols were used to convey tiny amounts of cooking oil to the frying pan; frying pans themselves were designed with ridges, to enable the fat to run off.

Audrey Eyton had a runaway success with her low-fat F-Plan diet. I did the F-Plan. I understood the science behind the F-Plan. The 'F' in the F-Plan stands for fibre. On the F-Plan, you eat a lot of fibre. You become fibre-minded. You develop an interest in husks. You start each day with a bowl of bran. Sometimes you start the day with two or three bowls of bran.

You find yourself discussing your bowels in mixed company. Socially, you gravitate towards other people who are happy to discuss the rhythms of their bowels with you. The thing about fibre is that it's supposed to bulk out your stomach, filling you up, and then bulk out your bowels, getting rid of all the putrefying stuff stuck in the crannies, thus detoxifying your body.

The main selling point of the F-Plan diet is that fibre fills you up and then passes straight through you without making you fat. Your body thinks you've eaten something when, effectively, you've eaten nothing. Unfortunately being bloated doesn't stop you being hungry so you end up eating a lot of things other than fibre, which don't pass straight through you, and which do make you fat.

I did the Hay diet. I understood the science behind the Hay diet. Dr William Howard Hay was an American surgeon who gained a lot of weight around the turn of the last century. By 1904, at the age of 40, he was so bloated he had to give up his practice. Then he discovered his miraculous diet. On the Hay, you 'don't mix foods which fight'. It's a catchy idea. The Hay diet had a brief vogue in 1905 and 1907, and made a comeback in the 1980s, popularised in Harvey and Marilyn Diamond's book Fit For Life. Harvey and Marilyn were needle-nosed and angular, and told us all about the Hay, which they called 'food combining'. On the Hay, you treat carbohydrates and proteins as adversaries. So if you eat, say, bread and cheese at the same time, the bread and the cheese fight they cause a conflict in your stomach. And when foods fight, Hay believed, you get fat.

A woman I knew, a veteran of the F-Plan, and now a food-combiner, put it like this: 'You get fat when you eat protein and carbohydrate together because the enzymes you need to metabolize these foods are different. So you have a bad mix of enzymes in your stomach. Which means you don't digest the food properly.'

`Right ... but why would that make you fat?'

`Well, because . . .'

i mean, surely, if you don't digest your food properly, you get thin.'

`No. You get fat. Because ... because the food hangs around your stomach, making you fat.'

`OK. I sort of see.'

`And then it hangs around your colon. You get all these porky bits in your colon. They can hang around for years.' `No!'

`Yes. Years. And then, of course, everything backs up, like with a blocked drain, and the food stays around, sort of rotting and making you fat. Horrible.'

`Right. Horrible.'

`And if I could just say two words that would make us all a lot healthier?'

`Yes?'

`Colonic irrigation.'

The Hay, I think, works mostly because when you're on the Hay you have to cook, or at least compose, your meals from scratch. So you don't snack as much. Also, not mixing protein and carbs means you eat fewer carbs. Another thing in its favour might be the fact that you can't eat a fat, lazy diet you can't have ham sandwiches, bacon sandwiches, cheese sandwiches, hamburgers in buns, or pizza. On the Hay, it's

harder to watch TV and eat at the same time. You have to look at your food.

The Veal Conversation

For a while, I was a vegetarian. Vegetarianism grew in popularity in the 1980s, partly as a result of Peter Singer's bestselling book Animal Liberation, which exposed horrifying details about meat production. When I was a student, a few people read Animal Liberation, but a lot of people had second-and third-hand conversations about it. There was the Veal Conversation, the Factory Farming Conversation, the Abbatoir Conversation, and the Shampoo in Rabbits' Eyes Conversation.

`They keep them in these crates.'

And: 'They can't even turn round.'

And: 'They're only three months old when they're slaughtered.'

And: 'They overfeed them.'

And: 'They're always perspiring. Always too hot. Singer says they must feel nauseous all the time, what was it, like a businessman after a heavy lunch.'

And: 'You know how much space each chicken gets?' And: 'They're bred to be obese.'

And: 'They kill pigs with a metal bolt through the head.' And: 'They know they're going to d
ie.
'

And: 'You know what the biggest scandal is? The way they kill turkeys. See, they don't need to slaughter a lot of turkeys all year round. They just have one big glut around Christmas.

So there's no point, economically, in actually building a slaughterhouse designed for turkeys. So you know what they do? They kill them with the chicken machines. But, see, the turkeys are much bigger. So when they go past the knives that are supposed to cut off the chickens' heads, they just get stabbed in the chest. And so when they get chucked into the vat of boiling water, which makes the feathers easier to pluck ... they're still alive.'

And: 'I'm never eating turkey again.'

And: 'Just think of the karma.'

And: 'I'm glad you don't use animal products. I'd feel weird sleeping with a girl who wasn't aware of stuff like that.'

I was a vegetarian for years, partly because I didn't like the idea of cruelty to animals, and partly because I had read that, if we stopped farming meat, and instead grew more wheat and pulses, nobody in the world need starve, and partly out of habit, and partly because I thought it was more healthy. But it was a pain. I remember watching Rosemary's Baby on TV one night, and being particularly fascinated by the scene in which Mia Farrow eats a steak. She looks so sweet and yet there she is, eating this bloody steak. I began to fantasize about eating a bloody steak. One day, I went to a dinner party with my vegetarian girlfriend, and we hadn't told the hostess we were vegetarians. And the hostess, who had just got to know us, was really embarrassed, and darted into the kitchen and knocked up a cheese salad for my girlfriend.

`Cheese is OK, is it?'

`Fine.'

`I'm so sorry about this.'

`No, it's my fault.'

`I should have known.'

`I should have told you.'

The hostess was stirring a large pot on the stove: beef stew. She looked at me. 'Oh,' she said. 'Are you ...

`Beef stew is fine,' I said.

My girlfriend looked at me.

`I couldn't ask her to make another salad,' I whispered as we walked towards the table.

I ate the beef stew. Afterwards, my girlfriend asked me what it had been like to eat meat again. It had been chewy, and tasted of flesh and blood, and I knew I wanted to eat more flesh and blood, as soon as possible.

`Oh, you know,' I said. 'Pretty horrible. Chewy.' Around that time, in January 2000, I met Peter Singer. He was teaching philosophy at Princeton.

He had become more notorious; Diane Coleman, the Chair of the disabled rights group Not Dead Yet, had called him `the most dangerous man in the world'. By now, he wasn't just saying that we shouldn't kill animals; he believed that it was not wrong to kill people, at least if they were severely disabled. He was in the business, as he put it, of 'dethroning' the human race trying to get us to step down from our pedestal.

With his outdoorsy clothes and shy smile, he looked like a genial middle-aged hiker. We had the Veal Conversation. We had the Factory Farming Conversation. He told me about his childhood in Melbourne, Australia; how he had been called `wog' by some nasty kids at a swimming pool because he was Jewish, how his grandparents had died in the Holocaust, how he'd preferred jazz to rock'n'roll in the early sixties, but hadloved the Beatles even more. He'd grown his hair over the years, more or less in accordance with George Harrison's, and he'd grown a 1969 'Let it Be' style moustache, which he'd only recently shaved off.

We had the Shampoo in Rabbits' Eyes Conversation. We had the Abbatoir Conversation.