Sorting Out an Eating Plan in a Nation Filled With Dietary Confusion

A couple months ago, I met Dr. Robert Atkins in a green room for "New York Close-Up," the talk show on NY1. Dr. Atkins and I both had new books to talk about. His will sell a million copies. Mine won't. Dr. Atkins looked fit and lean, if a little worn from a busy interview schedule. I was a little worn too, but not so fit and lean. "So how's your cholesterol?" I wanted to ask him, but didn't, because he probably knew what his was and I didn't know my own. He also had a plan for losing weight, and I didn't. Like many Americans when it comes to thinking about health, I have lived, until recently, not in passive denial but in active avoidance.

Meeting Dr. Atkins, who died last month after slipping on an icy sidewalk, was like meeting the conundrum of the American diet in the flesh. Americans are overweight in record numbers, by record amounts, and at improbably young ages as well. Obesity is no longer a personal problem in this country; it's an epidemiological problem. We are maladapted, in an evolutionary sense, to the most abundant foods around us. We live in a wilderness of dangerous fats and highly refined carbohydrates, suitable perhaps for some other kind of creature but not for us. And what makes that wilderness of foods all the more dangerous is the feeling that somehow we're entitled to eat them. They're convenient, cheap and brightly packaged, symbols of the American way of life. We give ourselves permission to eat them. We feel we deserve to eat them. It was a hard day, after all.

Full article: New York Times [registration required]