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The latest South Beach Diet book—The South Beach Wake-Up Call—says too few Americans are changing the unhealthy way they eat, and this is lurching us towards the “sickest generation” yet, with younger people “achier and more tired than ever.” In the book, subtitled Why America Is Still Getting Fatter And Sicker, Plus 7 Simple Strategies For Reversing Our Toxic Lifestyle, author and cardiologist Arthur Agatston warns that those between 30 and 45 years old “should be very worried” about how being the first generation born into the “fast-food, sedentary, screen-obsessed culture” will affect them as they age (presumably those younger will learn from their elders?).
If the book sounds harsh, consider this: Agatston has been studying the effects of the modern, standard western diet since for more than 25 years. He was working with diabetes patients and warning against refined carbs and sugars in the early 1980s. It has to be kind of frustrating to be standing there going, here!, right here is an answer to this obesity problem we all hear so much about, and then seeing less people take this advice over time—even as popular knowledge of the principles behind the diet spread.
The South Beach Diet is based on the kinds of nutrition advice we take for granted today: That heavily refined sugars and grains (high-glycemic carbs) digest quickly, cause blood sugar spikes and then crashes, and don’t fill us up for long. That while eliminating trans and saturated fats is good, we’re wise to eat unsaturated fats and omega-3 fatty acids. That constant spikes and plummets of blood sugar can lead to hunger cycles and diabetes. But none of this was common knowledge when Agatston began studying insulin resistance and the glycemic index.
Agatston, director of the Mount Sinai Cardiac Prevention Center in Miami Beach, designed the program as a diet for preventing heart disease, though it’s since become popular as a weight-loss plan. He suggested that people on low-fat diets were compensating for fat with sugars and simple carbs, and that’s why they failed and gained more weight. And yet he was skeptical of the low-carb Atkins diet, which he thought contained too much saturated fat and too litter fiber. Hence, the South Beach Diet was born, with the aim of replacing “bad carbs” and “bad fats” with “good carbs” and “good fats.”
Following all this advice, the South Beach Diet suggests getting carbs from whole grains, beans and vegetables; to exclude fatty read meats and poultry and replace them with lean meats, nuts and fish. Unlike Atkins or other low-carb diets, the South Beach Diet doesn’t encourage cutting back or even measuring carbs in general; rather, it’s about choosing the “right carbs.” But “South Beach dieters must say goodbye to potatoes, fruit, bread, cereal, rice, pasta, beets, carrots, and corn for the first two weeks. After that, most of these foods remain strongly discouraged,” Web MD notes.
None of this has changed in the South Beach Diet Wake-Up Call (the only big change is the addition of a chapter on gluten). But Agatston says he wrote Wake-Up Call as, well, just that: An alarm. It’s “not a diet book” but a “lifestyle book that provides a holistic view of America’s unhealthy habits” and inspiration to overcome them.
“I don’t think that people realize that we as a society are in critical condition,” he says in a Q&A section of the South Beach Diet website. “If we don’t ‘wake up’ now and commit to leading a healthier, more active lifestyle, we will find ourselves old before our time and many of us, including our children, will end up debilitated by chronic health problems.”
The cynic in me can’t help thinking that diet doctors like Agatston have a vested interest in pushing this Americans in ‘critical condition’ narrative. Then I think of the IHOP I went to while visiting friends in Chicago last weekend—the piles and piles of pancakes, biscuits, refined carbs. Who cares why he’s pushing it—someone has to.
Photo: USA Today
