If fat isn't responsible for our shape, what is?

by Beth Teitell
Thursday, July 11, 2002

By 8 a.m. Sunday I'd gotten so many calls my message machine had filled up. I knew why people were trying to reach me, but I wasn't ready to talk yet. The news had been so stunning I needed time alone to regroup.

I went back into the living room and picked up The New York Times magazine section I'd flung aside. I looked at the picture on the cover, a close-up of a juicy steak topped with melting butter, and re-read the headline: ``What if Fat Doesn't Make You Fat?'' it asked.

I spat out the fat-free bagel with fat-free cream cheese I'd just bitten into and read on. ``Influential researchers are beginning to embrace the medical heresy that maybe Dr. Atkins was right,'' a little blurb said.

I turned to the story inside. ``Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along,'' it reported. . . . ``It's not the fat that makes us fat, but the carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live longer.''

The phone rang again and I saw from the caller ID that it was a friend who'd abandoned Atkins' bacon cheeseburgers years ago and had answered the carbo call. ``Are you OK?'' she asked, which was generous of her, because I knew she wasn't. ``My world has been rocked,'' she said.

I wasn't really in a place where I could help someone else, but she was worse off than I was, so I tried to be nice. ``Don't worry,'' I said, ``just eat a little less pasta.''

She gasped when I mentioned the word. ``I'm too scared of pasta now,'' she said. ``And bread, and rice.''

As if trying to fight a plague of meal moths, she'd emptied her cabinets moments after looking at the magazine section.

``I don't know what I'm going to eat,'' she said.

Her dilemma was one I would hear about repeatedly as word of the article circulated among hard-core dieters.

``You think this is the news you've been waiting for all these years,'' a low-fat fiend said. ``I feel like I should be happy, but I'm not. After all this time I can't let myself have bacon and eggs for breakfast. It's too late for me. I'm nowhere.''

She paused and then said, almost to the word, what my other friend had: ``I don't know what to eat.''

In addition to scaring readers, the Times report also made people angry.

``I've been following the (Agriculture Department's) food pyramid religiously and now they're telling me that's what's making me obese,'' a non-obese friend said.

``Everyone's so focused on those Enron and WorldCom executives,'' she added, ``but what about the American Medical Association, and the Agriculture Department? They're even worse.''

I was feeling down and kind of unsettled, so I forced myself to recall a happier time, a time before fat-free peanut butter yogurt and low-fat brownies, a time when Woody Allen was still making good movies.

Remember his 1973 film ``Sleeper''? Allen plays a health-food salesman who comes out of suspended animation in the year 2173 and calls for wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk. His puzzled doctor asks a colleague why people had once preferred such foods to steak, cream pies, hot fudge and deep fat.

``Those were thought to be unhealthy,'' the colleague replies, ``precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.''

Hmm. Steak, cream pies, hot fudge, deep fat. I guess a girl could get used to that. If only they could do something about those exercise recommendations we'd be all set.