The AF L-C Diet - CHAPTER THREE: HOW THIS DIET WORKS – AND WHY
From our school days on, we have all been made thoroughly familiar with certain basic facts about food. It is that which can be taken into the body, digested, and used for growth, repair, and energy. Most of us can close our eyes and see, tacked up on the classroom wall, that familiar, many-colored chart which was designed to imprint on our memories the “Basic Seven,” the nutritional categories from which our daily food supply must be composed if we were to grow up strong, straight-spined and brainy . . . leafy green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits, other fruits and vegetables, milk and its products, the meat group, breads and cereals, butter or fortified margarine.
On this diet (with extras like an occasional chocolate bar or a dry Martini) most Americans do manage very well. They grow taller than their forefathers, live longer, and have consistently produced athletes who commanded front-rank places in the international picture. Only recently have American athletes had to struggle for pre-eminence as other nations, benefiting from diets and living standards improved since World War II, have begun to offer powerful challenges.
But some people – as you know because you are reading this book – do not manage quite so well. They get fat.
Sometimes, of course, this happens because the occasional chocolate bar has snowballed into an addiction to sweets and pastries. Sometimes it can be traced to simple overeating of everything in sight; sometimes to a “need” to relax with five beers a night and all the pretzels you can get hold of. Sometimes, however, an individual accumulates fat on a reasonably balanced diet on which he can prove to his doctor and to his own conscience that he has not overindulged.
Overweight, of course – unless it amounts to obesity, about which there can be no two opinions – can be a somewhat elastic concept. William Banting was certainly obese, and even in his day, before the succeeding years of research which established the connection between obesity and certain diseases, both he and his doctor knew something had to be done about it. Bit if he had been merely a portly man, of well-fed appearance, he would have been considered exceedingly odd to be disturbed about his weight. A noted politician of that day was widely quoted as having declared that he never could put his trust in a man who didn’t have to lean backward just a bit to support his own weight. Indeed, until around the time of World War I, the popular concept of a truly solid citizen decreed that his waistline must reflect his bank account – both must be substantial. Slenderness in youth was acceptable, but as a man grew older it was expected that both he and his family would display, in their measurements, how well he was able to feed them.
Proved by a London hospital study
Other times, other ways. A glance at the weight chart included in the back of this book will indicate what very different standards we hold today about desirable, healthful weight. As a mater of fact, most women will confess to everyone except their doctors, that they consider even these widely accepted weight allowances to be excessive. “If I weighed that much I’d be a mountain!” many a five-foot-two lady has been heard to exclaim upon checking the “normal” weight range for her size – somewhere between 110 and 125. Possibly she has not taken her build into consideration, possibly her age. But possibly she is right. The life-insurance companies which compile most of these tables know that year by year the desirable-weight range tends to come down.
But, of course, the modern estimate of what constitutes overweight and how important it is to control it is not influenced solely by the desire to possess a slender, well-knit body that can show off one’s clothes to the greatest advantage. Expanding research and an increasing weight of statistical evidence have alerted us to the relationship between excess eight and good health and life expectancy. If you are over thirty-five and have shown a recent tendency to expand more than a bit, your doctor has already reminded you that every pound you put on increase your vulnerability to hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, and a frightening list of cardiovascular and kidney diseases. Nor are the surgeons overly cheerful when an overweight patient requires an operation, for even relatively common procedures like hernia corrections and appendectomies can be complicated by layers of excess fat. Further, corpulent patients require a much longer convalescence, not only from surgery but from illness as well.
Insurance tables also supply the portmanteau statistic in which all the other risks are summed up: after 45, with every ten pounds of excess weight you put on your increase by roughly 10 per cent your chances of early death.
We will take it, therefore, as read that you have a weight problem and that for social, sartorial, and health reasons, as well as a dozen other reasons best known to yourself, you are determined to solve it by going on a diet.
For many years the standard approach to correction has been to start watching calories. Accepted by doctor and layman alike has been the dictum that if you put on weight it was because you were feeding your body more calories than it required for a day of normal operation. It frugally deposited the oversupply I the liver and in other tissues, to be drawn on as needed. But if the oversupply continued to be too lavish, or if not enough of it was needed – in other words if you consistently overate and did not take enough exercise – you were in trouble.
“Calorie” – a dirty word
If you will approach the calorie as though it were neither a trapped tiger, a dram of arsenic, nor a dirty word, you will doubtless remember that technically it is simply a measurement. Specifically, it is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water 4 degrees F. Nutritionally, it refers to the units of heat, or energy, which the body gets from its food.
Years of research, of course, have standardized what science considers a desirable range of caloric intake for the average person. The daily amount recommended by nutritionists for a healthy adult woman in a moderately active way of life is 2500, for a man, 3000 – adjusted to height and build. He caloric approach to weight reduction often requires a cutback to 1000 to 1200 calories a day. Clearly this cannot be accomplished without hardship.
For some dieters, the prize is worth the game. Embarking upon a low calorie diet, they find their weight coming down; they avoid nervous collapse, and with luck and exceeding care manage not to damage their vital functions. A sharp calorie cut, of course, cannot be sustained for more than a short period. Having lost a few pounds, the dieter gratefully returns – as his body signals, that he must – to a fuller diet. What generally happens, as survivors of “crash” diets know, is that in reaction to the days, or weeks, of near-starvation they start stuffing themselves with less control than ever. Before they know it the wheel comes full circle and they are once again looking for the newest, quickest way to shave off their reacquired adipose tissue.
Nevertheless, there are people who can reduce on low calorie diets without becoming caught in this cycle. By cutting down their over-all food intake by a sensible percentage they can get down to a good weight – and most adults know, by the way they feel and look, more or less to a pound what their best weight is – and stabilize there merely at the cost of maintaining a constant watchfulness over how much they eat. The low carbohydrate diet was not designed for those who have been truly successful with low calorie diets.
The older, the less weight
What is significant about this “new” approach – whi8ch has been shown to be far from a Johnny-come-lately into weight control theory – is that it will reduce those who have trimmed down their calories until they couldn’t stand it any more, only to find that their waistlines haven’t trimmed down at all. For these people, carbohydrate control can be not merely a way of taking off a few pounds, but the foundation of a whole new philosophy of eating which may make it easy for them to maintain their own best weight, a well-nourished body, for the rest of their lives.
Again, remember: in extreme cases the answer to overweight may be metabolic or glandular, and should be discovered and handled by your doctor. But if your metabolism registers within normal range, and no glandular imbalance shows up, current nutritional thinking offers you this hope; it is possible that your body does not utilize its food – specifically, its carbohydrates – in the “normal” manner.
Food is accepted into the body as protein, fat or carbohydrate. Protein, which derives its name from a Green word meaning “of first importance, “ is literally that – the fundamental nutrient without which no animal can survive. It is involved in the structure of every cell of the body. It builds and maintains body tissues, contributes to the formation of antibodies that resist infection, and performs other complex functions, some of which have only lately come under investigation. Protein varies in quality. We derive most of our prime protein supply from animal foods, like meat, fish, poultry and eggs, and milk and milk products. Certain beans and nuts supply it, as to a lesser degree do vegetables. As more of the world opens up for study, there appears to be growing evidence that where protein is derived more from plants than from animals, people tend to be smaller than they are in places where good quality protein is plentiful. For example, Orientals, who must satisfy their food needs largely with grains and cereals are, as a group, far smaller than Australians and New Zealanders, who consume a quantity of meat enormous even by American standards. Whatever other factors may be involved, it is certain that diet to some extent accounts for such physical differences.
The significance of the new approach
In terms of fuel, 1 gram of protein supplies 4 calories. (A gram equals about ¼ teaspoon.) But the biochemical process by which the body breaks down protein for its various uses are so complex that the fuel value of the protein is not quickly available.
Fats supply vitamins and essential fatty acids, which so far as we presently know, the body cannot obtain from other substances. Fats are present in both plant and animal foods, but again the meat group (including milk products) supplies about 60 per cent to the vegetable group’s 40 per cent. Like protein, fat digests slowly, which contributes to what is called its “satiety value”: when fat is present in your diet you tend to feel less hungry than you do on a fat-free regimen. Remember this is the high caloric count of fat starts you wondering all over again how you can possibly lose weight on a diet that allows you butter and cheese! One gram of fat supplies 9 calories – more than twice as much energy per unit than an equal weight of carbohydrates, which are popularly thought to be the body’s chief source of fuel.
Now, the average person metabolizes his food efficiently. His body grows, keeps itself in good repair, burns what is requires for energy, and, as has been indicated, stores up the rest to be used as needed, some in the liver, and some as body fat. It is important to remember that fats and carbohydrates are stored in this way. (It is an interesting sidelight on the activity in nutritional research that until very recently science considered it established that protein was used or excreted by the body, and never stored. Current investigation, however, may show that certain forms of protein may be stored in some manner or quantity as yet unknown.) When our average person feels that he is “storing” a bit too much, he cuts down his total food intake and the excess, very likely, comes off.
The value of fat
But what happens when a healthy body plant doesn’t operate in this manner – when the restricted food intake is not followed by a loss of excess weight? What happens in the body to prevent it from responding in a predictable manner?
We must go back to Banting and Harvey, who first indicated by their successful experiment that carbohydrates might be to blame, and follow the line of research and experiment to its latest expression in the low carbohydrate diet to reach the answer. If you cannot lose weight by following orthodox nutritional patterns, you may be the victim of a fairly common biochemical quirk, which keeps your body from burning up its carbohydrate intake at the normal rate, and stores it up instead as fat.
Because controlled-carbohydrate diets get the right results, we know that this happens. But precisely how it happens is not so easily demonstrated. One theory suggests that a hormone or enzyme deficiency may be to blame. Another, and a possibly related one, is concerned with the subtle interactions of body chemistry and metabolism far too complex for the layman really to follow. In every important research center, physiologists, biochemists, and nutritionists are investigating these problems; for our purposes it is enough to know that carbohydrate control works in weight reduction.
If this smacks of the “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like” school of thought, reflect that the science of nutrition itself, as applied to actual food programs, did not get under full sail much before the start of the twentieth century, when researchers established the importance of protein in the animal world. Man, of course, has been interested in the quantity, quality, and taste of his food ever since he has been around to eat it, but until recently his food habits reflected his standard of living, not his understanding of what happened to the food inside him, because this knowledge was not available. The poor and simple have always subsisted on whatever they could catch, kill, or grow most handily. The rich, as far back as pre-Biblical times, were wont to live on rich meats and “the fat of the land.” In more sophisticated civilizations, the truly riotous liver expanded his horizons by combining flavors and adding spices to his viands. Through trial and error they all found out that there were things they could digest and things they couldn’t. It has remained for the laboratories and research teams of this century to start telling us how, and why, this happens.
The imbalance of the balanced diet
Like all other branches of science, nutrition has progressed at an intensified rate since World War II. New machines and methods – particularly the use of radioactive isotopes and “tagging” so that the activities of given substances within the body can be actually traced – together with vastly increased armies of trained investigators, are building up an enormous amount of data never before available. The jet-age opportunity for swift access to hitherto little-known peoples and their alien ways of life has opened up new research roads. From the main highway of the “Basic Seven,” exploratory offshoots are being made, as we learn that people – like the Eskimos and like various tribes in Africa and remote sections of India – have maintained excellent health, physique, and morale on all-meat diets. (According to the Canadian ethnologist Jennes and to others who have lived among the Eskimos, their appearance of rotundity is due largely to their garments, not to a prevalence of excess fat.) And while the Grenfell Mission of 1892 found that scurvy, rickets, and other deficiency diseases were certainly not unknown among the Eskimos of Labrador, later investigations suggested that these problems followed upon the introduction to these groups of the white man’s more agrarian diet.
Obviously these nutritional byways are not conclusive. But they suggest that continued investigation may one day throw new light on our present concept of the “balanced” diet. In the meantime, it has been demonstrated that human beings can manage very well when the proportion of carbohydrate to fat and protein in their diet is taken far below hitherto accepted levels – and that for people who cannot control their overweight problem in other ways, carbohydrate control is the answer.
Carbohydrate control – not elimination. Weight-watchers who have become sensibly skeptical of extremist fads with observe that this diet is not an all-or-nothing crash program. It offers fewer carbohydrates, not no carbohydrates. It offers you a full, satisfying diet. There is no danger of the total collapse of will that so often sends the low-calorie dieter on frantic refrigerator raids, because being well supplied with slowly digested fats and proteins, you never become that hungry. Further, it offers substantial amounts of food that are worth eating, with taste possibilities bounded only by the cook’s time and/or talent. No diet has offered more – or as much.
Skeptics: now hear this
But perhaps most important to the chronic weight-watchers is that this diet works in two ways. It works not only to take weight off, but to keep it off. Once you have trained yourself to recognize high carbohydrate foods (and the only surprises here are in the areas of certain fruits and vegetables which we are not accustomed to thinking of in these terms), and to restrict them so that your diet delivers no more than 70 carbohydrate grams per day, you have adopted a painless, self-propelled eating pattern which will control your weight for good.
Try it. People will soon be saying to you what was said recently to a pretty teen-ager, a veteran of low-calorie diets, which had offered only temporary results, by an envious friend: “Gosh, Emily – this time you’ve retained your weight loss!” |
