Chapter 6 - Diet Fads And Fakes

Hawkers of "Health Foods" | Your Body Weight and Your Scale Weight | There Are No Wonder Diets | There Are No Wonder Foods | Stay Away from Reducing Drugs

The diet quacks are out in force. You and your pocket-book are the targets. These bogus scientists thrive on the overweight problem. They are expert in playing on your fears.

Quacks exist because large numbers of food faddists exist. Unlike you, who are taking the time to read the facts about food before reducing safely and surely, the fa' dist seeks a miracle prescription for eternal youth, beauty, and slimness. He thrives on half-truths, misinformation, ad superstition that would make an aborigine blush. In the process, food quacks are only too happy to relieve him of his cash.

Hawkers Of "Health Foods"

The hawker of health foods and wonder diets  is not very much different from the snake oil peddler who sold his cure-all from the back of a wagon. Today's quack just happens to be a more sophisticated propagandist, as comfortable in the salons of society as he is in the hustings. Sad to say, he has obtained access to mass communications.

He may be the author of a best-selling book or a syndicated newspaper column. His persuasive voice may be on the air, recommending peculiar foods in which he has less than a peculiar financial interest. Within the past few years no less than four books have been published by food faddists who, at one time or another, have been arrested for practicing medicine without a license, or had the labeling of their products branded as dishonest by the Food and Drug Administration  of the Federal government, or had false advertising claims blasted by the Federal Trade Commission .

Oddly enough, one of the quacks' recurrent false charges is that the American food industry, which has provided us with the most nutritious edibles in the history of the world, has debased its products.

Your Body Weight And Your Scale Weight

The neighborhood reducing salons  operate on a smaller scale. They take advantage of the difference between body weight and scale weight  to ply their trades. Your body weight consists of the weight of your bony structure, internal organs, muscles—in fact, of everything but your free water. Your scale weight includes this free water, which makes quite a difference since it can account for as much as 10 per cent of your body weight. Thus a 150-pounder may contain 15 pounds of water. This is passed off in urine and perspiration. If your neighborhood reducing "expert" gives you a steam or paraffin bath or urges you to flounder around in rubber clothing while the sweat oozes from every pore, she is suggesting a useless inconvenience. The pounds you lose will consist of surplus water. For every two glasses of water you drink, you will regain 1 pound of this liquid weight. Your fatty tissue, the real root of the evil, will continue to quiver undisturbed.

Like most of the misguided stabs at reducing, this dehydration can be dangerous. Your body requires free water. Without it, your blood may thicken, increasing the burden on your heart. In addition, your kidneys may retain poisons normally excreted in urine.

Vibrators and various methods of massage are equally ineffective for weight loss. Kneading the muscles may improve their tone, but excessive massage and "pounding away of fat" may traumatize the tissue and cause small fatty tumors beneath the skin. Of course the masseuse may be benefited in her own weight reduction, since she is doing the work and expending the calories while you lie there in agonized bliss.

There Are No Wonder Diets

There are two basic fallacies to those special six-, seven-, or nine-day diets you read about in the newspapers. As we learned on pages 17 to 20, your daily calorie requirements depend on your age, height, weight, sex, and work output. Therefore no single diet, no matter how carefully prepared, could apply to everyone. In the second place, a balanced diet, containing the essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals , is as necessary for the person attempting to reduce as it is for her slim sister. Any diet which concentrates on one nutrient cannot meet this requirement. The high-protein or high-fat  (yes, there is even one of those) or salt-free diets all have vital weaknesses and dangers.

The high-protein  diet is based on the sound medical fact that protein (meat, eggs, milk, and cheese) builds and repairs body tissue and fights infection. Protein is absolutely essential to nutrition, but so are fruits  and vegetables. When you concentrate on protein you exclude some vitamins and minerals which play vital roles in good health and good nutrition.

As for that high-fat diet, that's designed for the very obese on the theory that fat satisfies the appetite best. If you kill the appetite, the theory goes, you help the person to reduce. This is carrying coals to Newcastle with a vengeance. Since this book is not written for the grossly obese, it will be sufficient to say that the resultant diet contains so many calories that it would undoubtedly add weight to the moderately overweight.

Salt-free  diets fool some people because the less salt you consume the more quickly your body rids itself of water. This results in a loss of scale weight, not of body weight. Under quack reducing systems, the victim exercises in conditions of artificial heat, and the loss of salt through sweat may approach the danger point, especially when coupled with a salt-free diet. Weakness, muscle cramps, disturbances in vision, and unconsciousness may result. In addition, the large water loss prevents the kidneys from working efficiently. These hazards are intensified by reducing regimes which include physics and cathartics , for then there is a large loss of salt through liquid stools. Thus the milk of magnesia several times a week prescribed as a cathartic by some of the charm schools is not really so charming.

The truth about reducing your intake of salt? Simply this. When dieting, try to limit your consumption to about one teaspoonful a day. If your reducing diet is well balanced, the foods you eat will contain sufficient inherent salt which, when added to the teaspoonful, will satisfy your body's requirements. Together with this, drink plenty of water, for it will combat acidosis and help your body to rid itself of poisons.

The public has been swamped by so-called Hollywood diets, diets named after celebrities, and others whose magical powers are ascribed to exotic places or people. The names vary, but the contents are usually the same.

Now and then a new wrinkle appears and rumples the surface of American obesity, without ever removing the bulges. Today some people are advocating the taking of sugar and sugared drinks between meals to depress the appetite. They reason that excessive appetite is caused by a lowering of the concentration of sugar in the blood between meals.
This reasoning cannot be applied to everybody. For some people the taking of sugar between meals  may start a vicious cycle. The cycle begins by a rise in blood sugar but ends with its ultimate lowering and renewed appetite. This is explained more fully in Chapter 11, When Illness Causes Overweight.

There is a further disadvantage to this ingestion of sugar between meals. Sugar calories are unaccompanied by vitamins or minerals. In view of the limited number of calories available to a person on a reducing diet, each calorie must do double duty. It must not merely add to his total consumption of calories, it must have value in his balanced, nutritious diet.

There Are No Wonder Foods

We have always had ballyhooed diets which became momentary vogues, resulted in some startling "before" and "after" pictures, then faded into obscurity. We have also had a variety of faddists who have advocated "miracle foods" capable of ending the world's ills.

Let's dip into one of these modern Fountains of Youth. This one happens to contain blackstrap  molasses , yoghurt , wheat germ , brewer's yeast , and powdered skim  milk .

There's nothing new about exaggerated claims for blackstrap. Crude molasses has always been the subject of folk myths. Long before its recent ballyhoo, occult practitioners had pronounced it a cure for cancer, tuberculosis, heart trouble, constipation, paralytic strokes, and other afflictions.

Blackstrap, the dark, thick sirup that remains as the end product of sugar refining, is described by men  who know molasses best as "the dregs of sugar making." The Encyclopedia of Foods defines it with more dignity as "Blackstrap molasses: The poorest is the final or exhausted molasses of raw sugar manufacture."

Far from being worthless, blackstrap has specific uses —in cattle feed and in the production of alcohol and yeast. In Great Britain this "wonder food" is considered unfit for human consumption, and its sale is outside the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Food. Instead, it is allocated by the Molasses Controller to manufacturers of cattle feed and similar users.

Food faddists point to blackstrap as a "natural" food, rich in iron and copper, unsullied by machine and chemical processing. They may be embarrassed to learn that a good part of its iron and copper content results from its contamination by factory machinery. Part of this iron is, in fact, insoluble rust.
Blackstrap does have twice as much calcium as would normally be expected, but not because of nature. It's just the limewater used by chemists in processing sugar.

According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study, blackstrap and other products made from sugar cane juice "were found to be devoid of demonstrable quantities of vitamin B."

Another analyzer of blackstrap put it in more human terms. He found that an individual would have to consume about a gallon a day to obtain his minimum requirement of three essential B vitamins. Fortunately, enriched white bread , the favorite target of the food faddists, contains these ingredients in sufficient quantity to prevent a dietary deficiency.

Advocates for blackstrap claim that it is effective in the prevention and treatment of menopausal difficulties and menstrual abnormalities, in inducing sleep, preventing and correcting nervousness, correcting baldness and restoring gray hair to its natural color, promoting better digestion, healthy nerves, healthy heart, preventing changes due to old age, and promoting normal functioning of the glands.

The Federal Food and Drug Administration has noted simply that these "statements" are false and misleading since the article (blackstrap) is not capable of fulfilling the promises of benefit made for it. . . ."

Second of the "wonder foods" is yoghurt . This, basically, is concentrated whole milk, fermented at high temperatures by a process involving several kinds of bacteria. The result is a white, custard like preparation that has a nutritional value no greater than the milk from which it was made. It has just about the same content of calories, vitamins, and calcium as milk, but what with the bacteria and the complications it costs about three times as much. Thus there is a danger that children in yoghurt-dominated households are likely to be given less than the required quart a day. In that case their diets may be deficient in calcium.

Yoghurt is the traditional drink of Bulgarians and various Balkan tribesmen, and because some of these folk live to ripe old ages the food faddists link the drinking of yoghurt with longevity. It is never linked to the fact that few Balkan tribesmen have refrigerators for the storage of ordinary milk.

Like most "wonder foods," yoghurt has legitimate uses entirely apart from its role in faddism. Its principal value is as a source of milk for people who cannot consume it in other forms. Nutritionists agree that it has no greater value than milk—it just costs more.
Wheat germ , third of the "wonder foods," is perhaps the most appealing of the five to those who like a scientific tone to their faddism. It is rich in many of the B vitamins, but a normal diet will contain adequate quantities of these vitamins, especially in whole-wheat or enriched white bread. Besides, people eat wheat germ in such small quantities that its value as a source of vitamins is negligible.

The last of the so-called "wonder foods," brewer's yeast and powdered skim milk, are prescribed by physicians for specific purposes. They, too, are not necessary in the average diet. Brewer's yeast, whose flavor and texture are unpleasant to most people, is used as a B-vitamin supplement and, like any supplement, is effective only when there is a real need for it. It is not a miracle food. One tablespoonful, the usual dose, contains about half as much protein as an egg and about one-tenth of the daily requirement of iron.

Powdered skim milk is also a legitimate food and is excellent for those who must limit their intake of fat. It has all the protein, calcium, and B-vitamin values of whole fluid milk. Yet it contains only half the calories of whole milk. For that reason physicians often recommend it for reducing diets, but it is not a "wonder food" and its value in the diet depends on the other foods used with it.

To sum up, the Federal Food and Drug Administration points out that the five "wonders" would contribute nothing to the well-being of an individual who consumed a normal diet of milk, fruit, vegetables , meat, cereals , and other common foods.

Stay Away From Reducing Drugs

Just as there are no wonder foods, there are no wonder drugs for reducing. Diet drugs fall into four classifications. They include the appetite  depressants, metabolism stimulators , cathartics , and dehydrators .

There are three kinds of appetite depressants —the Benzedrine type , the filler type , and milk-powder pellets . The Benzedrine type acts on the central nervous system, imparting to some users a sense of exhilaration and mental stimulation. Presumably this enables them to forget about their hunger. Obviously this is just a temporary crutch, and once its use is discontinued its value ends. It is an unreal method of solving anyone's problem, and besides, some people are allergic to Benzedrine.

The filler type of appetite depressant is illustrated by methyl cellulose. This swells up in the gastrointestinal tract and is supposed to give a sense of fullness which will discourage orgies of pie a la mode. The trouble is that it has to be taken in such large quantities that it acts as a cathartic. Then the filler becomes an emptier, depleting the body of its water-soluble vitamins. Your good health can be affected adversely, while your body weight remains exactly the same.

Milk-powder pellets neutralize the gastric juices to some extent and provide some feeling of fullness. They are not harmful, but I know of no instance where they were successful in helping to bring about a permanent change in an overweight person.

The metabolism  stimulators present a very real danger. As you would suspect, they stimulate increased metabolism so that the body burns more food. Thyroid, the most commonly used, acts on the heart and glands and can produce very toxic effects. This drug can be a menace, yet it is sold without prescription.

The dinitrophenol type of metabolism stimulator is banned from legitimate sale, but some people still seek it out in the black market. Perhaps they are aware that this drug was widely accepted in the 1930s but are unaware that a sizable percentage of consumers developed permanent or temporary blindness.

The cathartics offer the consumer a veritable Garden of Eden—eat all you like, they urge, forget about diet rules and food values and common sense—just keep taking cathartics. The principle is that the food is forced out of your system before it can be absorbed. Also forced out in the process (though this is not advertised) are vital water-soluble vitamins and minerals . The result can be somewhat different from Paradise—dehydration and disease localized in the stomach and intestines.

The dehydrators (that word keeps cropping up) include ammonium chloride and mercurial preparations; saline cathartics like epsom salts; and a new sulfa type.

Ammonium chloride acidifies the body, and if you take it for a long enough period it will perform an unexpected function for you. It will help to demineralize your body, removing limestone from your bones. This is the sort of bonus you can decline. You may be anxious to lose weight, but no doubt you'd prefer to retain your bony structure.

The mercurial preparations act directly on your kidneys. It's the same old story of losing water which registers as scale weight but doesn't change your body weight.

There are other drugs touted to perform miracles, but these are the basic favorites. Realizing that none of them will do the job may shatter your illusions, but it will save your money and spare your false hopes.
For your own and your family's safety, be suspicious of every new drug introduced in this money-making specialty. Be particularly skeptical about locally produced pharmaceu-ticals, because the Federal Food and Drug Administration can act only to halt interstate commerce in falsely labeled drugs.

This chapter will have done its job if you have now reached this conclusion—there are no miracle diets, foods, or drugs which will maintain my nutrition while I go about the business of losing surplus fat.

There is only one safe, sure way to weight reduction. That is to consume fewer calories in food per day than you expend in the energy of work, play, and ordinary living. To do this you must know some basic facts about the calorie, vitamin, and mineral content of foods.

That happens to be the very next item on our menu.

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