Dieting qualifies as a major mystery in American culture. Most individuals worried about their weight know, at some level of consciousness, that diets almost never work well. Yet many of those same individuals spend money on diet books, pay to attend diet centers and hope against hope that they are the exception.
In her new book, “Rethinking Thin,” New York Times science journalist Gina Kolata reaches conclusions quite likely to make enemies of every diet marketer alive. The diet marketers will probably find allies in the millions of thin Americans who find overweight Americans disgusting.
The first conclusion is straightforward: Diets almost never lead to better health for those who try them. Not the Atkins diet or the South Beach diet or Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. In fact, most diets fail to permanently reduce the poundage of most users.
The second conclusion is less straightforward, because the human body is an extremely complicated mechanism. But here it is: Overweight women and men are rarely that way because they lack will power near the home refrigerator and in restaurants. Instead, they are overweight primarily because of the genes they inherited. Phrased differently, so that condemnatory thin people can understand, thin women and men are rarely that way because they possess will power near the home refrigerator and in restaurants. Instead, they are thin primarily because of the genes they inherited.
The research is overwhelming, Kolata says: Fat people find it difficult to lose lots of weight permanently, just as thin people find it difficult to gain lots of weight permanently. In a way, weight is like height. A girl baby with her parents’ genes who is well fed as an infant might end up 5-feet-6 tall rather than the 5-feet-4 of her mother. But it would be extremely unusual for that girl baby to end up at 6-feet. Even if she wants to end up at 6 feet, there is nothing practical she can do to reach even 5-feet-7.
Because feelings about diets and obesity inextricably are linked to the body image of the individual doing the thinking, it is significant to know Kolata is thin and always has been. She is not interpreting the scientific evidence to rationalize her obesity. It is nearly as significant to know physical data about the reviewer. At age 30, I had reached 6 feet in height and weighed about 150 pounds. Thin. Now, almost 60, I am the same height, but weigh about 250 pounds. Overweight. Obese, even, by many measures.
Yet I play tennis and baseball regularly, ride my bicycle or walk everywhere I go week after week, climb up and down steps all day and much of the night without getting winded, score well in my check-ups at the medical clinic, function fine on five hours of sleep, and generally feel healthy.
I dislike the way I look, to be sure, so Kolata’s book is balm to me.
Readers prone to like or dislike the book’s conclusions should find it easy to digest, because Kolata is a first-rate author. She constructs the narrative along two alternating tracks. One track, consisting of eight chapters, covers the research of scientists across the United States and, to some extent, across the globe. Some of those scientists are studying fat cells. Some of those scientists are studying brain cells. Some of those scientists are mounting statistically significant, long-term research studies, as they compare, for example, individuals on the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet against individuals on a less gimmicky count-your-calories-every meal diet.
The second track in the narrative, consisting of seven interludes, follows the individuals who agree to participate in a carefully controlled weight loss study at the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers will randomly place half of the volunteers on the Atkins diet, the other half on the count-your-calories diet.
It is those individuals whose sagas are most likely to remain seared in readers’ brains at the end of Kolata’s book, individuals like Carmen J. Pirollo, a Philadelphia-area schoolteacher. At the beginning of the two-year study, he stands 5 feet 11 inches and weighs 265 pounds. During the two years, he loses significant weight.
Does he regain that weight? Readers who care about the searing obesity debate being carried on every day across the United States will want to read Kolata’s book to find out.
Steve Weinberg is a freelance writer in Columbia, Mo.
NONFICTION
Rethinking Thin
The New Science of Weight Loss and the Myths and Realities of Dieting
Gina Kolata
$24
