Diets are meant to make us thin. But do they really only make things worse, asks Nadine O'Regan
When Dr Atkins' Diet Revolution was published, in the 1970s, it was news. When celebrities began endorsing the high-protein, low-carbohydrate methodology Dr Atkins espoused, this, too, was big news. But this month's revelation that experts believe the diet to be dangerous? Hardly.
If anything, the surprise is that anyone considered the diet healthy in the first place. People don't go on the Atkins plan because they want to be healthy; they go on it because they want to be thin. That's also why they try the grapefruit diet, the Zone diet, the Pritikin diet, the Jenny Craig diet, the cabbage-soup diet and the Scarsdale diet. A 1997 survey found that 15 per cent of women and 11 per cent of men would cheerfully lose five years of their lives just to be skinny.
Americans spend a startling $55 billion on diets every year. Books, courses, television programmes and websites are all conceived to help people slim. With such a glut of information available, you would think that the way to lose weight would be clear. But the diet industry appears to thrive on contradicting itself. Some foods are first targeted as the roots of all weight-gaining evil, then revealed as the answers to all our problems. Others are touted as the fast track to slimline success, then exposed as items we should never have put in our shopping baskets.
The diet-food and diet-drink industry serves as a good example. According to Betty Martini, a leading US food safety campaigner, the aspartame in many diet drinks and foods makes you crave carbohydrates and so leaves you likely to gain weight. Aspartame has also been linked to headaches, skin problems, poor vision, depression, panic attacks, irregular heart rhythms, behavioural problems, seizures and brain tumours. Hardly what we were hoping for, then.
At the other end of the spectrum are the foods we would love to eat but dare not for fear of the consequences. The humble avocado is a case in point. Named and shamed as having the fat content of your average quarter-pounder, the fruit has long been denounced by dieticians and banished from the homes of conscientious dieters. But nutritionists have now discovered that the kind of fat contained in an avocado lowers cholesterol and promotes health. The US government has subsequently revised its nutrition guidelines, to urge consumers to eat more avocados. Such turnarounds are part and parcel of the diet industry. As soon as you think you know what to eat, you discover you are completely wrong.
Perhaps the biggest myth of all, though, is the notion that diets work. Most surveys find that between 90 and 95 per cent of diets fail. According to Jason Vale, author of Slim 4 Life, diets can have a negative effect on your figure.
"Diets starve the body and make you fatter," he writes, because "your body slows down to conserve energy and stores even more of what you do eat as fat". Then, when you junk the diet and begin eating your normal amounts again, you put on weight even more quickly.
So what's the solution? The only tried and true method appears to be the one your mother has already told you about: eat less and exercise more, and not just on Monday mornings.
There is no quick-fix remedy, no magic cure. But try telling that to the fad dieters. So far, the Atkins diet book has chalked up more than 10 million sales. Since its publication in Ireland for the first time, in January, it has consistently bounced around the higher regions of the best-seller charts. Now that's what I'd call a diet success.