The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [51]
The North American Association for the Study of Obesity is holding a meeting in Milwaukee. Reports of breakthroughs are beginning to appear in the newspapers. I obtain copies of all the abstracts:
• A leading and responsible researcher has announced the invention of an ointment that, applied once a day to the upper legs of women, can shrink the circumference of their thighs by as much as 4.25 centimeters! That’s 1.66 inches. The ointment somehow alters the receptors in the fat cells of the thigh. But the women do not lose weight. The fat goes somewhere else. Their elbows? Their hearts?
• An experimental combination of two commonly used appetite drugs, fenfluramine and phentermine, was shown to produce very impressive weight loss and to lower the subjects’ blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol.
• Drugs are being developed to stimulate beta-3, a receptor in our fatty tissues, in an attempt to burn our body fat more quickly.
• A brain protein called galanin has been identified as the key to our craving for fats. When galanin production is blocked in rats, their weight plummets.
Should I go back to crusty bread and creamy potatoes and wait for the ideal drug? Better stick with Montignac for now.
Day Fourteen. No improvement. This is depressing. But at least my Health O Meter and my Salter are consistent. This means I am a good shopper. Montignac promises that some people lose two to four pounds a week, others a little less. For me, considerably less.
Although I am no fan of nutritional clichés, I am beginning to worry about the amount of animal fat in my new diet. I have experimented with brown basmati rice and other whole grains, good carbohydrates that can be eaten freely on the diet though never with butter, olive oil, or cheese. But without any of these fats, brown rice tastes even worse than it did in the early seventies. And beans without olive oil or butter hardly qualify as food. So I resort to thick and juicy rib steaks and crisply roasted chickens and ducks whenever I do not have much time to think about dinner. I cook them expertly, and they are always delicious, but they ooze saturated fat. When I have time to think about dinner, I prepare fish with beurre blanc.
“Butter, charcuterie, oil, foie gras, fresh cream, cheese, and wine are all part of the French daily diet, and yet the French suffer from neither obesity nor heart disease,” Montignac writes. This is true. It is a phenomenon widely known as the French Paradox.* But if the French do not suffer from obesity and heart disease, then why is everybody in France on the Montignac regime?
When Montignac’s diet first appeared in France, it was attacked by nutritionists there as a “passport to a heart attack.” With each succeeding edition of his books, Montignac put more stress on the difference between bad lipids and good lipids, between saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated fats, not for losing more weight but for keeping your heart healthy. This makes him sound more and more like your typical nutritionist.
I telephone my doctor and schedule a full set of blood tests on Day Twenty-eight of my diet.
But a ray of hope penetrates my dark forebodings. What the surgeon general does not tell you is that a substantial portion of the population is diet insensitive—their cholesterol and other blood lipids are not much affected by what they eat. Public-health programs and pronouncements are aimed at increasing the greater good, not the good of each one of us. If everybody were diet sensitive, there would be no need for cholesterol-lowering drugs. And if my lipids do not fall on a low-fat diet, they may