The Macy’s Diet
So, lately I’ve been thinking about my diet at Macy’s… as opposed to my diet post-Macy’s. Oddly enough, my body seems to think that doing less requires more fuel. I mean, to be fair, I’m not typically overeating, but the weight loss that was happening has definitely slowed down.
It’s just little things. At Macy’s, my dinner was always one container of food (chili, stew, etc.) and an apple. That’s it. Home, I will have that same portion of food… but then add a salad, and perhaps a side dish. And, although I was bored to tears at Macy’s, it was still physical activity (pacing around an empty retail floor for 7.5 hours), whereas now I’m typically in front of my computer or just out running errands, which doesn’t require additional food. So, starting tomorrow, it is back on the Macy’s Diet for me. Portion control reigns supreme.
Of course, the big diet news is the "landmark study" that has been talked about everywhere today. Sadly, this news will enable people to avoid decisions that will benefit their health by providing them with "proof" that their choices are valid. In a nutshell, the study says that people on a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes as people who were not on a low-fat diet.
Now, that’s the stuff you will hear everywhere. And the study is getting a lot of attention because it was following 49,000 women over a period of eight years, so as far as epidemiological research, huge sample, good period of time.
The problem? The low-fat study group was NOT on a low-fat diet, at least not by any metric I’ve ever seen by people who advocate a low-fat diet. At the START of the study, these women were getting 24 percent of their daily calories from fat, and at the END of the study, they were up to 29 percent of their daily calories from fat (so, basically, at no period of time did the low-fat group even hit the target of 20 percent). The control group started at 35 percent and ramped up to 37 percent.
This is the classic example of people who think they are watching their intake and are deluded, not to mention people making temporary changes hoping for permanent results.
REAL low-fat diets, like the McDougall Plan (which I follow, with a slight Weight Watchers twist to it), Pritikin, and the Ornish plan (the three major players in the low fat world) all recommend diets with about only 10 percent calories from fat.
The real health benefits come from getting it down to that level, which will largely include reducing intake of animal-based products, which is where a lot of the cancer-promoting stuff comes from. Just reading The China Study gives you a clear picture of how animal protein fuels the growth of cancer cells in the body (and this is all based on the study that The New York Times referred to as the “Grand Prix of epidemiology” and the “most comprehensive large
study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of
developing disease.")
So, what we have then is a study whereby people barely reduced their fat intake and what little they did reduce it by was done through modified foods known to have cancer-promoting qualities (if one is to believe the images accompanying the news stories on TV, they reduced it through skim milk, leaner meats, and such).
Even the spokesperson for the study on the morning program I saw at the gym did mention the abhorrently high fat consumption of the "low-fat" group, but the media has its soundbyte, and it is sticking to it.
As Dr. McDougall often says, "People love to hear good news about their bad habits."
