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A History of Diet
After the binge of the holidays, many stumble into January with a hangover, some fragile resolutions and a desire to shed a few pounds. Alas, few will benefit from rigid calorie-counting or cabbage-soup slurping. In a recent study of 31 long-term diet plans, the American Psychological Association found that up to two-thirds of participants ended up heavier than before they started. Some diets are more sensible than others, but any regimen that promises swift and dramatic results will doom most followers to failure. Weight-loss pills and surgery are similarly ineffective—and sometimes dangerous—over time. Yet girth-management is big business, full of charismatic hucksters and fake science, earning $40 billion a year in America alone.
“The diet industry is all about exploitation and profit,” writes Louise Foxcroft in “Calories and Corsets”, her slim new book about the history of dieting. Less a banquet than a tasting menu (the tone is breezy, opinionated and occasionally rushed), she chronicles more than 2,000 years of movers, shakers and tummy-tuckers, highlighting both the wise and the wacky.
The word diet comes from the Greek diaita, an approach to health that linked the mental with the physical. Classical physicians saw being too fat or thin as a sign of an imbalance. Man “cannot live healthily on food without a certain amount of exercise”, observed Hippocrates, who believed in breakfast, long walks and prudent vomiting. Philosophers such as Socrates saw a relationship between food and ethics, as a taste for luxury often leads to greed and unjust behavior.
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