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from the pages of
January 2004
Ode to Carbohydrates
by Michael Ballon
At the dawn of a new century, many Americans are on guard against
attack from what they regard as one of their most virulent enemies. No,
I'm not referring to international terrorists, but rather those evil
carbohydrates lurking around at every meal, and trying to infiltrate
their bodies. We live in a culture preoccupied with food fads, and the
latest and perhaps most widespread is the Atkins regime of eliminating
carbs from our diet. By their very nature and definition, fads come and
go. We have seen a variety come in and out of fashion, from low fat and
raw food and vegetarian, but the Fear of Carbohydrates has become
widespread among many in our culture.
The data is controversial and by no means conclusive, but it is
clear that many people manage to lose significant amounts of weight by
vastly reducing the carbohydrates in their diet. Whether the
substitution of and reliance on increased amounts of animal fat, which
is one feature of the Atkins regime, is a healthy alternative is another
question. I do not pretend to be a medical doctor, and the implications
of these radical swings in diet may not be clear for some time, and are
best left to nutritionists and cardiologists. That we are a culture
significantly overweight is undeniable.
Nonetheless there is something profoundly disturbing about the whole
notion that basic food groups are "the enemy". So many people have
adopted a kind of Cold War mentality to their eating habits, with the
food world being divided between Good and Evil foods. For millennia homo
sapiens have relied on a variety of grains and carbohydrates as the
foundation of their diet, and their elimination from our diet really
represents a fundamental shift in the way we eat.
From the dawn of time the cultivation of wheat and rice has been
central to human activity. Far more than a category of food, they have
served to define entire cultures. Wheat has been the Staff of Life and
Our Daily Bread, and to completely eliminate them form our diet is
indeed a great loss. The breaking of and sharing of bread is a key
element in most Western religious traditions, and one we ought not to
abandon lightly. The real tragedy is that in most parts of this country,
it is virtually impossible to buy anything remotely resembling "real"
bread today. The bleached and highly refined air bread that line the
shelves of most supermarkets is so far removed from whole grain and
naturally leavened breads as to require a different name. In the
Berkshires we are fortunate to have a variety of local and regional
artisan bread makers whose products are widely available in natural
foods markets and coops, but that is far less true in most of the rest
of the country.
If reducing or eliminating carbohydrates is a radical notion in the
West, it is even more so in the Orient. The overwhelming majority of the
world are rice eaters, and the elimination of this foundation from their
diet would be tantamount to starvation. Obesity is not a widespread
problem in most of the rice eating cultures of the world, where tiny
amounts of protein are consumed, compared to developed Western
countries. Nor do the rice eating cultures of the world suffer from
heightened cholesterol and heart disease the way that Western countries
do. In many developing and impoverished countries, there is simply no
alternative to eating rice. The capacity to freely change and adjust
diets is a luxury available to only a small percent of
those of us in the wealthy developed countries.
It is counter intuitive, but for some reason extreme measures appeal
to many of us more than moderate ones. A diversified diet which includes
moderate quantities of less highly refined carbohydrates, like whole
grain breads and rice, somehow seems like a more difficult diet to
follow than the extreme measures which almost completely eliminate
consumption of carbohydrates. As it is in the investment world, balance
and diversity are the foundation of a healthy diet, and the pursuit of
extreme measures is unsustainable and unhealthy in the log run.
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