Ding-dong, the craze is dead
At the height of the fad, 9.1% of Americans were on a low-carb diet. Today the numberis 4.4%. If you're one of the millions embracing good things again, have we got some recipes for you.
While Janice Gray was following the Atkins diet, visions of apple pie danced in her head, and in her dreams it was always a la mode. Andre Girouard's verboten fantasy food was fettuccine with shrimp. Hard to blame him, since he's Italian, and pasta -- or starch, at least -- runs in his blood.
Nonetheless, during much of 2004, each one held firm to a low-carb regimen. And it worked. Gray lost 12 pounds in a year; Girouard dropped 35 in six months.
Gray is more than twice Girouard's age, and they don't know each other, but besides weight loss, they have another thing in common: Both ditched the low-carb lifestyle when stress or sandwiches got the best of them.
They're not alone. When low-carb mania peaked in February 2004, about 27 million Americans (or 9.1 percent) were following Atkins, South Beach, or another regimen that shuns potatoes, pasta, bread, and rice, according to the NPD Group, a market-research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y. Then the number started slipping throughout the year, plummeting to 2.4 percent by December, understandable during a holiday season not known for dietary discipline, and has edged up to 4.4 percent, still only half what it was a year ago.
The food industry jumped on the low-carb bandwagon with astounding speed, introducing scores of new products -- many of which ended up stockpiled in warehouses. Atkins Nutritionals Inc.'s partnerships with
''I think dieters have an attention span of about a year," said Marcia Mogelonsky, research analyst at Mintel. ''Who ever thought it was going to last?"
That's not to say that interest in carbohydrate control has vanished altogether. While fewer people, at least according to NPD and Mintel, say they are on a low-carb diet, a quarter of the population still reports being ''carb-aware," Mogelonsky said, and that means there will remain a market for products aimed at them. ''They'll probably buy some low-carb stuff to balance the high-carb stuff," she said.
Indeed, Atkins' Advantage nutrition bars are the top sellers in the category, and
Harry Balzer, NPD vice president and author of its annual ''Eating Patterns in America" report, was always skeptical about the longevity of the low-carb craze, while also being amazed at how quickly the food industry tried to capitalize on it. Last year, NPD found that 13 percent of Americans expressed concern about their carbohydrate intake, compared to 30 percent who were worried about fat, down from 51 percent in 1994. Even in 2004, he said, 22 percent of all American dinners included potatoes, and almost a quarter included bread.
''It's easy to get caught up in thinking that the next new thing we're trying is a trend, but really, its a fad," Balzer said. ''For something to be a trend it has to cause a fundamental change in the way we behave -- it has to change the amount of time we spend, or the amount of money. And this did neither. What did the low-carb fad teach us America wants in its food? The latest thing."
Some researchers haven't found the same drop-off in low-carb dieting that NPD and Mintel have, though. Opinion Dynamics of Cambridge, for one, found in February that 12 percent of people were on a low-carb diet, about the same level as most of last year. That's up considerably from the pre-holiday dip to 6 percent, and down from the peak this past January of 15 percent.
Matt Wiant, senior vice president of Atkins, thinks the trend is solid, and he likens what happened last year to the dot-com boom and bust. ''There was a time when people thought if they weren't invested in an Internet start-up, they were an idiot," he said. ''The low-carb movement was a trend interrupted by a hype -- a rising tide interrupted by a tidal wave. ''
Trend or not, any diet has its defectors, especially when they come face to face with the daily challenges of sticking to the plan and can't get their minds off the enemy: in this case, their favorite carb-heavy foods.
Both Gray and Girouard succumbed. Gray, 57, started losing her low-carb resolve partly because of the complaints from her husband, Dan Silverman. He didn't like their frequent focus on meat and encouraged her to eat lots of vegetables. ''It became very difficult to sort out," she said. ''Can I really have the asparagus, or do I need to stick to broccoli all the time?"
She was OK giving up bread, she loved having eggs at breakfast, and she has ''never been a pasta or potatoes person." But key lime coconut squares from Florida were another story, as were sweetened apples baked into a flaky crust, particularly with ice cream -- real ice cream -- melting against the warm pie. ''I'm a fanatic about ice cream," says Gray, a financial adviser who lives in Wellfleet. ''And I had to switch to this sort of airy but lumpy, I don't know, just weird ice cream. Have you had the Atkins Endulge? It really wasn't doing it for me. I wanted that creamy sensation."
Girouard fantasized about fettuccine, but his real undoing was the irresistible combination of workplace stress and office lunches, as in ever-handy sandwiches or pizza. Girouard, 23, was working in human resources at State Street Research while it was being acquired by BlackRock last fall, and things were ''hectic," to say the least. ''When I had a stressful day and someone brought in sandwiches, I just didn't have the willpower to eat just the filling, so I went ahead and ate the bread and so forth," he said. Down the slippery slope he went, gaining back 30 of the 35 pounds.
These days, he makes pasta at home in Milbury at least once a week, and he eats plenty of bread and scores of flour tortillas with Mexican food and in wraps.
But perhaps not for long. Girouard is ready to give Atkins another go, ''because it was just amazing how quickly the weight came off the first time, and with the summer coming around I'd really like to take it off again."
Gray, meanwhile, is onto the next thing: a diet based on ''The pH Miracle" by Robert and Shelley Young, who advocate ''caring for your inner terrain," as Gray puts it. ''They're very into raw vegetables and whole grains."
''I started going in that direction, and now I can't get off having the brown rice," she said. Then she chuckled. ''You know, I get these whims."
Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com. 