We have all seen the familiar face of the great Dr. Atkins grinning at us from the Barnes & Noble display with a reminder to beware of
et carb"" counts. We have also heard the angry responses of food pyramid proponents and dieticians lamenting the massacre of their tidy diet guide's base one too many times.
This battle is no new trend in the nutrition world. Fad diets have been around since the 18th century, encouraging anything from limiting carbs to bulking up on grapefruit.
""Some version of Atkins has been around since the 1970s, the idea of cutting carbohydrates as the key to weight loss,"" said Susan Nitzke, professor of Nutritional Sciences at UW-Madison. ""Low fat has certainly been around for a while also. And then there's the fad diets that I call 'weird combinations,' everything from eating cabbage soup every day to not allowing fruits at the same meal as potatoes.""
Regardless of whether we choose to cringe and disregard them entirely or start diligently counting our breadcrumbs, there's more to these protein-happy, fat-fearing and cabbage-loving claims and the attention they've garnered again and again than simply the beginnings of new weight-loss techniques.
For both consumers and producers, they have thrown curveball after curveball, dramatically changing the way food manufacturers do business and the way dieters respond psychologically to new trends.
More than media puppets
Thankfully, there's more to why people buy into these techniques than just the tendency to succumb to bad advertising. In the face of sensational claims that strike a very sensitive chord with our neverending desires to lose weight, there might also be a solid psychological reason for our attraction to these fads.
""We have a sort of an indigenous nutritional sensing system because of evolution,"" said Ann Kelley, professor of psychiatry and chair of the neuroscience program at UW-Madison. ""It used to be a good thing to binge on sugar or fat because you didn't know where your next food was coming from. The question we ask is 'what brain systems mediate our liking for highly palatable foods?'""
What has been discovered is a strong link between pleasure-inducing drugs and pleasure-inducing foods.
""The receptors in the brain that are activated by certain highly palatable foods are the same as those activated by drugs that are abused like heroine and morphine,"" Kelley said.
This means foods can actually alleviate anxiety or induce feelings of pleasure for some of the same reasons drugs do.
Both fat and carbohydrates can be sources of the brain stimulations that provide these satisfied, pleasurable feelings, which might be a reason for the relative success of certain diets.
With Atkins for example, the fact that carbohydrates--but not fat-are limited could be a reason for much of its appeal.
""At least in the Atkins diet the fat is helping to alleviate food cravings,"" Kelley said. ""If you took away everything that caused pleasure-related chemicals it would be a lot harder. But if you take away 50 percent of these things and you still have half left ... at least you can control that, you can eat some things.""
For many dieters, this seems to hold true.
""Every girl has a pair of skinny jeans and mine were too big for me after like four days,"" said UW-Madison freshman Mary Jane Adkins, who tried the Atkins diet this summer and lost 10 pounds in a week.
The same is then true of a low-fat diet and again points to its relatively long-term success in the 1980s and 1990s. Conversely, it points to reasons why diets hinging on grapefruit or vinegar were more short-lived.
""The problem with diets is usually that people end up hungry,"" Kelley said. If only one energy source is cut out, however, ""they can diet and still not be obsessed with food. It's like a nicotine patch. Instead of going cold turkey, you wear the patch, pump a little nicotine in and gradually wean yourself off it.""
Bathroom scales aren't the only things seeing changes
Thanks in part to these underlying psychological factors of diet success, the effects of some of the more successful fads in the diet world are rippling--and more often than not, straight toward food manufacturers.
For some, the trend provides a low-fat, low-carbohydrate opportunity to be exploited.
According to a 2004 Consumer Reports study, ""an astonishing 930 low-carbohydrate food products have been introduced to U.S. markets in the last five years.""
""You can go to the grocery store and get anything you want Atkins ... they all taste [terrible] but you can do it,"" Adkins said.
For others, however, the results are something closer to devastating.
In 2004, New World Pasta filed for bankruptcy protection, blaming the low-carbohydrate market trend for reducing the demand for pasta. Shortly after, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts faced similar lower-than-predicted earnings.
""Companies have to develop contingency plans to react to what's happening in the marketplace,"" said Linda Gorchels, director of executive marketing education at UW-Madison. ""And with more faddish things, there's an added challenge of having to act more quickly than with long-term changes.
""When Unilever bought Slim Fast in 2000, they were growing at about 20 percent per year, until Atkins came along-and they still haven't entirely gotten Slim Fast back on track ... even though it's a diet, it's not as faddish.""
Beyond the opportunities or roadblocks the Atkins trend has recently given them, the ever-changing diet market keeps food manufacturers constantly on their toes.
""People go off trends and copycat all the time. We have to constantly be doing surveys and [monitoring] sales to try to draw conclusions,"" said Daryl Pope, a customer service representative at Kraft foods. ""It's what allows us to stay ahead of competition.""
