A year-end fixture from the newsmagazines is The Year in Pictures, a roundup of the past 12 months' worth of photojournalism. Playboy, I'm told, used to run a feature called The Year in Sex. Maybe they still do. So here is my annual contribution: The Year in Fat.
2007 was another banner year for misinformation, swamp remedies, idiocy, and plain outright lies about diet and weight, subjects that obsess Americans far more than the future of Iraq or the solvency of Social Security. If only Oprah could promise New Hampshire voters that they would lose seven pounds - overnight! - by voting for Barack Obama, then Mike Huckabee would have to fold up his revival tent and go home.
Where to begin?
This spring, word arrived that Victoria Beckham, the former Spice Girl now married to underperforming soccer star David Beckham, had put her husband on a "daughter diet," in the hopes that she might conceive a female child. Supposedly Ms. Beckham insisted that David cut back on dairy products, red meat, and coffee, and instead chow down on steamed vegetables, salads, asparagus, avocado, peppers, and fish.
Of course you laugh at the intellectual mendacity of a pseudo-diet that purports to link eating habits to your chances of conceiving. But when you are talking intellectual mendacity, don't forget the Harvard School of Public Health! Without apparent irony, two of its docs, Jorge Chavarro and the ubiquitous Walter Willett, are hawking "The Fertility Diet," which says "10 simple changes in diet and activity can have profound effects on fertility."
Here is an excerpt: "The plan described in the Fertility Diet doesn't guarantee a pregnancy." Posh Spice isn't offering any guarantees either, but at least she's not charging $25 for her charlatanry.
The Main Event of The Year in Fat was the publication of Gary Taubes's title-heavy, 600-page treatise "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease." Let's not pretend that either of us has read this book. But one of Taubes's widely bruited, heretical conclusions is that Big Medicine has oversold the terrors of fat consumption and undersold the virtues eating fewer carbohydrates.
But wait. Didn't the late Dr. Robert Atkins preach precisely that, only to be greeted by catcalls, howls of derision, and brickbats from the selfsame medical "establishment"? Maybe it's time to revisit the Zone Diet. The quacks are back!
Later in the year,
Hungry for a second opinion, I consulted Eileen Kennedy, dean of Tufts's Friedman School of Nutrition, who confirmed that "weight loss is unlikely to occur simply from physical activity by itself." I haven't risen from the couch since.
Where to end? In October, my colleague Judy Foreman wrote a column headlined "Let the Post-Diet Era Begin." Judy posed the question, "Is permanent, significant weight loss really possible?" Her answer, in a word: no.
Shortly after that column appeared, I received a press release from "renowned physician, author, and weight loss expert Dr. Sanford Siegal" touting his "hunger-controlling Cookie Diet." Perhaps this is worth trying. I have been self-prescribing cookie diets from Dr. Famous Amos and Nurse Fields, with equivocal results.
Next came a missive from Dr. Constantino Mendieta, a Florida-based plastic surgeon who boasts of graduating "Magna Cum Laud," possibly from a medical school. Dr. Mendieta claims to be the "pioneer of 'The Triple Threat,' a buttock enhancement, waist minimizer, and lower back sculpting" procedure that requires patients to gain weight "so that [Mendieta] can harvest the fat through liposuction on the flanks, outer legs, and upper/outer buttocks." Aha. "He then adds an antibiotic, injects the fat into the trouble zones, and starts to craft the shape," a procedure deemed to be "not only efficacious, but safe as well."
It sounds extremely safe, very simple, and costs a mere $13,000. I only hope that Carl Hiaasen, author of the brilliant parody of plastic surgeons "Skin Tight," isn't reading this column. Dr. Mendieta might become even more famous than he would like.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
