Leith, William (12 page)

`This is Dr Atkins,' she says.

`Oh,' I say.

We shake hands.

`Oh,' I say.

Atkins is a 72-year-old man, very pleasant-looking, the sort of old guy who would be the decent grandfather in a heartwarming mov
ie.
He does not look at all slick or bombastic or over-confident; he does not look like a diet guru. For a man who has sold several million copies of his latest book, he is not expensively dressed; he is not wearing the celebrityarmour of Armam or Prada. His cream shirt does not look like a rich man's shirt made from sumptuous sea-island cotton. He wears a black tie and a stiff dark tweed jacket with long, broad lapels and a single button at the waist, the style popular a dozen years ago. His shoes are spiffy tasselled loafers made from very fine leather, with thin leather soles like pork rinds. He looks to be just under 6 feet tall and around 200 lbs not skinny, not thin, but definitely not fat. The jowls around his neck and chin are fairly minimal, signs of age rather than excess weight.

The doctor points me towards the lift, and tells me we'll do the interview in his office upstairs. We walk across the 1970s-looking room, which reminds me that Dr Atkins, as a diet guru, was originally a phenomenon of the early 1970s, the era when people wanted to believe in hedonism without consequences Atkins' original 'no hunger' Diet Revolution was a counterpart to Erica Jong's `zipless fuck', hippies openly smoking dope in front of the cops at Woodstock, and Timothy Leary saying that LSD was good for us. What Atkins said was that, if you avoided carbohydrates, you could eat more or less what you wanted.

No hunger!

No cravings!

No need for restraint!

Since then, he's fallen into disrepute, and been reincarnated. Over the years, the Atkins diet has been radical, trendy, wildly popular, disapproved of, reviled, buried, resurrected, again radical, and again trendy. Now it's wildly popular again. According to history, a backlash is imminent.

Right now, though, as Atkins presses the elevator button,

his diet has good ratings in some parts of the science community. The New York Times has recently run an article in praise of fat, entitled 'What if it's all a Big Fat Lie?', quoting Richard Veech, a prominent scientist who studied under the Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs, who formulated the Krebs Cycle, a scientific account of how energy is metabolized. Veech says that ketosis, the state in which the body burns fat when starved of carbohydrate, ' . . . is a normal physiologic state. I would argue it's the normal state of man.'

And Walter Willett, the eminent Harvard epidemiologist, having studied the consistent failure of low-fat diets, says, `The emphasis on fat reduction has been a serious distraction in efforts to control obesity and improve health in general.'

Atkins has been enjoying a boom time in the boom-andbust cycle of the media, too. 'Welcome to a city in the throes of Carb Panic,' declared a recent edition of New York magazine. 'Socialite psychiatrist' Samantha Boardman says, `The moment the waiter comes to the table with bread, everyone is like, NO! before he can even put it on the plate. It's almost hostile to serve pasta these days because everyone is on Atkins.' Kim France, editor-in-chief of Lucky magazine, tells us, 'My younger brother is always going on and off Atkins. He refers to Wheat Thins and bread as the white devil.'

How long will this mood last? Perhaps the backlash is already beginning. Some people are starting to say that going on a lowcarb diet, which dieters refer to as 'doing Atkins', is a fad that it will come and go, like it came and went before, to be replaced by something else, possibly the avoidance of another food group. Nobody will be surprised when a newdiet guru tells us that potatoes are the answer, or that eating fish is the answer, or that you'll get slim if you eat lots of fruit, or nuts, or beans. One day, somebody will say that all food must be consumed on the move, and before long a company will invent a tray you can hang around your neck, and everybody will be walking around the park with trays around their necks. One day, the Cabbage Soup diet will make a comeback.

Naturally, Atkins himself does not think that Atkins is a fad. On the contrary, he thinks that low-fat diets the diets that buried him in the 1970s, and presided through the 1980s and 1990s were the fad. His scientific reasoning is that low-fat diets don't work it was during the low-fat decades that we got so very fat. 'Nowadays,' he writes in the new edition of his book, 'the tide is flowing strongly in my favour.'

The Only Diet We Knew

Anyway, why should a lowcarb diet be a fad? After all, it wasn't a fad for our ancestors, from the Neanderthal era to the Stone Age. For tens of thousands of years, humans ate a lowcarb diet. We hunted animals and gathered fruit and some root vegetables, such as sweet potatoes. With an opposable thumb, an upright posture, and a panoramic field of vision, we were designed for walking long distances, throwing projectiles, and reaching up into thorny bushes for berries.

Early humans walked several hours every day, ran and jogged when their prey was in view, and carried animal

carcasses on their backs for long distances. To survive, they needed to eat a lot of meat, and a lot of fruit three or four times as much as we need to eat today. When they didn't die of infectious diseases or trauma, or in childbirth, they lived into their sixties and seventies, and the few senile Stone Age bodies we've found preserved in peat bogs don't show signs of the modern diseases that afflict us diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer, arthritis, and heart disease.

Ray Audette, author of NeanderThin: Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body, tells us that, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you should do what he does, which is to 'eat only those foods that would be available to me if I were naked of all technology save that of a convenient sharp stick or stone'. His Neanderthal-style diet, not unlike Atkins in principle, is, he says, what we have evolved to eat. 'For the majority (at least 99.5 per cent) of human history,' writes Audette, 'it was the only diet we knew.'

There has never been any evidence to suggest that Stone Age people ever needed to lose weight. Sure, they ate a lot of food. Sure, they would gorge themselves after a successful hunt. And, of course, they had evolved big appetites and ,thrifty genes' a love of food and an ability to store fat, in order to survive lean times. They ate a lot, they exercised a lot, their diet was very low in carbohydrates, and they didn't suffer from obesity.

`The NeanderThin rule concerning snacking is very simple,' writes Audette. `If you are hungry, eat. Just be sure that your snack foods are within the dietary guidelines could I eat this if I were naked with a sharp stick on the savanna?'

Fries no.

Bagels no.

Steak yes.

Fish yes.

Vegetables yes.

Atkins, of course, is thoroughly pro-Stone Age. He writes about Stone Age man 'eating the fish and animals that scampered and swam around him, and the fruits and vegetables and berries that grew nearby'. There is no mention of being naked, or sharp sticks.

The elevator arrives and the doors glide open. Atkins steps inside. I step inside. My stomach magazines are safely inside a bag. Atkins presses the button for the top floor. The doors glide shut.

The Seeds of Trouble

Standing in the elevator, I'm thinking about how the seeds of trouble, the trouble with carbohydrates, were sown, quite literally, around 10,000 years ago, when humans started to farm. There we were, hunting and gathering, effectively doing Atkins, and then we started to plant and harvest crops, particularly wheat. We became what anthropologists call `food producers'.

Why did we do this? The answer is not at all obvious. As the evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond tells us, 'Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world's actual food producers, aren't necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers.'

Studies, as Diamond points out, have shown that primitive food producers spent more time planting and tilling and harvesting than hunter-gatherers spent hunting and gathering the food for their primitive version of the Atkins diet; archaeologists, furthermore, 'have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced.'

Anthropologists disagree about the origins of farming there are, according to the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, 'thirty-eight distinct and competing explanations of how farming came about'. But the smart money is on the most sinister explanation of all: farming might not be good nutritionally, but it's great if your tribe wants to kill people and take their territory.

Farming facilitates war. You can imagine an ambitious Stone Age leader putting it together in his mind. Farming leads to a greater density of human population, because it enables a tribe to settle in one place. Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers don't have to carry their children around with them, so they can have twice as many. Farming enables members of a tribe to have separate jobs some men produce the food, while others are free, as Jared Diamond puts it, to 'engage full-time in political activities'. Farming enables food to be stored, so that fighting men can radiate outwards from their original settlements and concentrate on fighting, while their hunter-gatherer opponents must hunt and gather as well as fight.

And farming is, of course, addictive. Farming creates what anthropologists call a 'ratchet effect'. Once you start, youcan't stop. Your tribe grows. Wheat creates a need for wheat. Also, if you belong to a hunter-gatherer community, and your neighbours start to farm, you have two options run away, or become farmers yourselves.

The advent of farming it's the most important, not to say the most destructive, revolution in the history of mankind. Early farmers in northern Europe seemed to sense this; they regarded the ploughing of fields and the sowing of seeds as an infernal act. Before ploughing, farmers invoked the mercy of Odin, god of gods, and planted the skulls of their slain enemies along with the corn. Farming, they believed, was unnatural, a rape of the earth, something they might have to pay for in the end. When the wheat was harvested, the last sheaf was treated like an evil spirit; people jeered it and mocked it, rather like inmates of fat camps putting a hex on pizzas and hot dogs and tubs of ice cream.

Farming led to dense populations, which led to diverse occupations, which led to people having time on their hands, which led to inventions ploughs and millstones and knives, and, much later, forks, and the combine-harvester, and the Lamb Water Gun Knife, which shoots potatoes along a tube into a Criss-cross network of blades, turning them into perfect French fries. Farming led to the breeding of wild grasses such as emmer and einkorn, which developed into the high-yield wheat we know today, which can be separated from its husk, milled into fine powder, mixed with water, yeast, salt, sugar, chemical oxidants, fat crystals derived from frozen palm oil and emulsifiers made from petrochemicals, fermented at high speed in mechanical mixers, heated, frozen, trucked for hundreds of miles, and baked in a matter of minutes in a

supermarket, after which the resulting fluffy and slightly clammy white bread will raise the blood glucose level of anybody who eats it almost as much as a mouthful of sugar. Which will, over time, cause the pancreas of this person to produce too much insulin, which will cause a blood sugar crash and subsequent cravings for more white bread. Which is one of the reasons why white bread, from the manufacturer's point of view, is such a good product. According to Atkins, it's addictive.

Farming was the impetus that caused human beings to settle down in communities, which became the first cities, which spawned roads and rising land values and, eventually, urban angst and skyscrapers and elevators and fat people riding in elevators at the expense of no calories.

A Bias

The elevator glides upwards. I am holding my stomach in. I catch Atkins' eye, and he smiles at me. He is calm, benign, possibly a little frail. His white hair forms a fluffy halo around the top of his head; he's one of those older men who are mostly bald, but who, somehow, do not give off the air of baldness. He is a former ladies' man; when he smiles, the flesh around his eyes crinkles attractively. Atkins is, it occurs to me, one of the most controversial people alive. He is trying to tell the world to stop eating refined carbohydrates. And the production of refined carbohydrates is, economically speaking, the biggest enterprise on earth.

Were diet gurus always so controversial? Almost certainlynot. When ancient Greeks such as Galen and Aristotle advocated moderation in everything, they were not damned as faddists. People did not assume, as a matter of course, that their diets their world views did not work. Dionysiacs such as Alcibiades might have argued that the moderate man is spiritually lacking, or doesn't have enough fun, but he knew that, if you didn't eat too much, you stayed slim. (We still know this, of course moderation will keep you slim. It's just not a message anybody in the modern world wants to hear.)

The big thing about early diet gurus, the guys who gave dietary advice before, say, the nineteenth century, was that they preached moderation. When Luigi Cornaro, arguably the first modern diet guru, wrote his bestselling book Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life, which was published in 1558, he wasn't saying anything scientifically controversial. As Sander Gilman tells us in his academic study Fat Boys, Cornaro's book starts in the classic manner, with the author telling us how fat he got, and how dangerous and unpleasant it is to get fat. Gluttony, he said, 'kills every year ... as great a number as would perish during the time of a most dreadful pestilence, or by the sword or fire of many bloody wars.'

Cornaro's answer: do not eat 'a greater quantity than can be digested'. In other words, don't eat too much. Cornaro ate sparingly and lost weight. Another thing he discovered: food tastes better when you don't eat too much of it. 'I now find more true relish in the simple food I eat, wheresoever I may chance to be,' Cornaro wrote, 'than I formerly found in the most delicate dishes at the time of my intemperate life.' He lived to the age of 98.