It may be counterintuitive, but I think that the best way to beat obesity is to put more fat in our food.
That's crazy, you say? More fat means bigger waistlines? Wrong, I say.
Nutritionists and health groups forced MacDonald's to put lower calorie foods on their menus but North Americans still got fatter.
Public pressure on the pork industry reduced the average amount of fat in pork products by nearly half in the span of a decade, but our weight still went up.
Atkins. South Beach. Blood Type. The Zone. Cabbage soup, grapefruit, Ornish and Pritkin. Diet fads came and went sweeping millions in their paths. Obesity became an epidemic.
Now comes Sanyo with a hot new brainchild that is sure to burst its way into the calorie-conscious kitchens of the nation.
It's a fat-busting microwave oven called the AX-HC1.
"The AX-HC1", says a Sharp media release, "enables low-calorie cooking by roasting foods using water. It uses a Superheated Steam Generator to produce superheated steam at a temperature of approximately 300°C .... This superheated steam is sprayed onto the food ... causing excessive fat to quickly melt and drop away."
Cook with our oven and your waistline will quickly melt away is the hidden message here. In fact, it is the only message that most people will hear as they rush out to buy this new oven when it gets here in 2005.
But as millions of them fly off the shelves next year and become the new every-kitchen-should-have-one thing, obesity in our society will not diminish.
|
It will continue to grow because this latest gadget will only exacerbate one of the problems at the root of our dietary problems -- an absence of taste.
Let's be honest. Food with less fat is food with less taste.
Ample cows make better steaks. Fatter pigs are tastier pigs.
At the same time, today's fruits and vegetables -- carefully managed from the garden to the supermarket with an eye to appearance and cleanliness -- are tasteless shadows of their former selves.
And so we compensate. To fatless, flavourless meats we add marinades, rubs and bottled sauces.
To watery salads of pale lettuce and perfect, tasteless tomatoes we add gloops and globs of tasty dressings. Then we pour on the croutons and bacon bits.
I swear that nearly a quarter of everything sold in supermarkets today is an add-on intended to give flavour to the flavourless products sold in the meat and produce aisles.
How sad, therefore, that Julia Child passed away at precisely the moment of our greatest need. She understood the root of the obesity problem in North America.
Americans, she pointed out in an interview with the Free Press in Ann Arbor, Michigan just 5 years before her death, are afraid of food. "They're afraid of it nutritionally. They're afraid of fat. And they're afraid of germs."
And so we push meat producers to make leaner meats and butchers to trim the fat even further. We push orchards to send us fruits and juices with fewer carbs. And we insist that our vegetables be nearly spotless (and therefore tasteless) when we get them to the kitchen sink.
|
Then we sit and wonder, just an hour after dinner, why we are so bloody hungry.
As primetime television commercials blast our visual cortex with images of juicy burgers and deliciously layered sandwiches our stomachs begin to
rumble.
Then come the sugary sights and crunchy sounds of sweetened breakfast cereals and our mouths begin to water.
And by the time Wendy's "unofficial" spokesman strolls into our living rooms to remind us that flavour-on-demand is available well into the night, we are deep into our "unofficial" second dinner or sitting on the couch with milk running down our chins.
But as Julia Child knew full well it doesn't have to be this way.
Fight the fear. Cook with flavour. Eat slowly. Make mealtime Meal Time -- not a few minutes spent stuffing food in your face -- and fill that time with whole foods reeking of natural flavours.
Do this and you won't need the AX-HC1. Do this and you will not succumb to the wiles of primetime food ads.
Do this, enjoy it and then go do something that makes you sweat.
The best way to put Sanyo's new fat-busting microwave to use is to strap it to your back and go climb some stairs -- an hour or so after a good dinner full of satisfying flavours and textures.
© Brent Johner. Unpublished, August 2004. Rights available.
|
