Dieting is Dumb

Earlier today I noticed a banner ad about "Oprah's New Acai Berry Diet!" or something like that. Are acai berries even something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll go look it up. Stupid Internet. Here you go, I found it at some site that I don't feel like referencing -

"Nature's Energy Fruit: Acai Berry as seen on Oprah's Show! You've likely never even heard of Acai Berry but Oprah has just featured it on her show and it is one of the 10 superfoods promoted by Dr Perricone. Studies have shown that this little berry is one of the most nutritious and powerful foods in the world! Açaí (ah-sigh-ee) berries are the high-energy berry of a special Amazon palm tree. Harvested in the rainforests of Brazil, açaí berry tastes like a vibrant and yummy blend of berries and chocolate. Açaí berry is packed full of antioxidants, amino acids and essential fatty acids. Although açaí berry may not yet be available in your local supermarket, you can find it in several health food and gourmet stores."

At least I know how to pronounce it now. I read it as "a-kai". Boy would my face have been red if I happened to run into the big O at an Art Basel party or something.

The whole reason I am writing this is not to promote acai berries, but rather to point out how utterly ridiculous it is for women to follow Oprah's nutrition advice. Does it merit an explanation? Why would you take advice from someone whose weight fluctuates so dramatically? She obviously has no handle on how to take care of her body. It's a good thing she's so rich, because it must be really expensive to keep buying clothes every month to keep up with the different sizes she requires.

I guess it's kind of like how I'm getting so super jacked that my t-shirts get tighter and tighter, except that I don't buy larger sizes. So I guess it's not the same thing after all.

As I write this I am coming to the realization that it is likely that women like the fact that someone else who has so much trouble is trying to show them the way, and they therefore think that Oprah feels their pain, so that somehow makes her a better person to advise them. But that's like taking financial advice from Dick Fuld or getting help with your drug addiction from Robert Downey, Jr.

I'm assuming that there's a website that has photos of Oprah at all different weights, and I can also assume that she will have hilarious, varying hair styles (cough, wigs), kind of like you can look up all the different faces of Michael Jackson or Mickey Rourke (I put Rourke in there since this paragraph had taken a potentially dangerous turn towards a "race" thing).

It's taking too long, but I'm pretty sure that site exists or will exist in the near future.

My original reason for this post is not Oprah, rather it is an article in the New York Times about how Americans are the most informed people on the planet when it comes to nutrition and yet somehow manage to be the heaviest. Part of that phenomenon can be attributed to the "health halo". In New York City, Benevolent Dictator Michael Bloomberg long ago got the ban on trans fats through and now people think everything is healthier.

Here's some interesting information as well as some classic French condescension. You have to love that. If you read it with a silly French accent it's really funny. I now have to make sure I have the correct alternation of double and single quotation marks lest my brother Brendan berate me for bad grammar. I hope he appreciates that alliteration.

"'People who eat at McDonald’s know their sins,' Dr. Chandon said, 'but people at Subway think that a 1,000-calorie sandwich has only 500 calories.' His advice is not for people to avoid Subway or low-fat snacks, but to take health halos into account.

"'People need to look up calorie information, and this information needs to be clearly available on the menu or on the front of packages,' Dr. Chandon said. 'If no information is available, people should say to themselves: "This restaurant or this brand claims to be healthy in general. Let’s see if I can come up with two reasons why this claim would not apply to this particular food." When we asked people to follow this "consider the opposite" strategy, it completely eliminated health halos.'

"More generally, Dr. Chandon advises American consumers, food companies and public officials to spend less time obsessing about 'good' versus 'bad' food.

"'Being French, I don’t have any problem with people enjoying lots of foods,' he said. 'Europeans obsess less about nutrition but know what a reasonable portion size is and when they have had too much food, so they’re not as biased by food and diet fads and are healthier. Too many Americans believe that to lose weight, what you eat matters more than how much you eat. It’s the country where people are the best informed about food and enjoy it the least.'"