Loading ...Low Carb Back from the Dead?
Every other day it seems there’s another low-carb food company going out of business. The low-carb critics are rejoicing with their “proof” that low-carb is dead. The mainstream media picks up on these claims because these are the self-proclaimed experts, and hey, if something has appeared to decline in popularity, it is no longer worthy of coverage, and so must be officially declared dead, right?
I’ve written before about this before, but basically I think that the huge explosion in popularity of low-carb is somewhat akin to the internet “bubble” of the late 90’s. It was the hot new thing. People were throwing money at you if you had the most idiotic business plan as long as you talked the lingo, could hype things up to grandiose levels, etc. Companies were becoming valued overnight in the billions while having made absolutely no money. Low-carb really began to build steam in 2003 with a number of studies indicating that not only was it not harmful, but it seemed more effective for losing weight and shockingly actually improved cholesterol numbers despite critics claims that it would cause massive coronaries overnight. The beginning of 2004 was when things really exploded. For the last part of 2003, much of the U.S. had been ignoring diet news and dieting itself as it stuffed itself during the annual tradition known as the exteneded holiday season!. Now that the time of reconning had come, guess which diet was the new trendy one to be on? A new book called The South Beach Diet took advantage of the growing interest and was eaten up by the masses of seasonal dieters. Of course the old stalwart Atkins New Diet Revolution was as well.
The big food manufacturers started coming out with low-carb versions of many different products, from candy to yoghurt. Even those foods that had been around for years started carrying “low-carb” labels if they happened to be low-carb. It was all eerily similar to the low-fat frenzy of the early to mid-90’s, which was now largely defunct. But low-fat took a long time to go away, and never really did completely. There are still lots of big low-fat advocates out there. It was rather a steady decline as people realized that the losses were often temporary because eating low-fat meant they were constantly hungry and needing to eat more, thus making maintaining their weight difficult. Likewise health issues sometimes went along with low-fat, like hypoglycemia, low LDL cholesterol, and high triglicerides. With the low-carb movement, it all happened much faster - the bubble began to burst as early as the summer of 2004. Because many new companies had cropped up in 2004 and even started retail establishments specializing in low-carb fair, the assumption was that this big market that had developed overnight would be around for a long time. Unfortunately, this was not to be.
I have my own thoughts on what happened and why, but it seems that the professional low-carb community is trying to make sense of this and sharing their thoughts with the public. This Friday at 3pm, at the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, California, Low Carb Luxury, a popular online store for low-carb products, is sponsoring a press conference entitled Low Carb Lives, featuring some big names, including my personal favorites, Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades (authors of Protein Power and many other books), Dana Carpender, and Fred Pescatore, and others. Andrew DiMino, owner of another low-carb online (and bricks and morter) store, Carbsmart, is also on the panel and told me that he is hoping to publish an audio version of the conference via a podcast he will be starting up soon. I’ll post more details when I get them. I’m very hopeful that this conference will provide a lot of great insight from those on the front lines as to what happened during the bubble and it’s aftermath.
In addition to the conference, much of the panel will be autographing books at Andrew’s retail outlet in Huntington, CA, the next day, Saturday March 19.
My sense is that just like the Internet bubble, after all the dust has settled, the reactionaries will lose credibility and the valuable lessons will be learned in order to move on. People didn’t just stop using the Internet once the bubble burst, rather people use it more every day. Companies like Google, Yahoo, and Mozilla are making headlines in the mainstream press, and it’s not about hype. Likewise we are seeing the stirrings of things that might seem unlikely at best given the supposed condition of the low-carb industry. I still see low-carb products I haven’t seen previously.
Even more surprisingly, The Eades are not only coming out with a new book about staying on your low-carb diet for the long-haul, but they are actually going to have their own low-carb cooking show on PBS. I have long thought that their measured, sensible message of eating a diet rich in natural and organic whole foods that are low in carbs is one that the media has ignored because it isn’t “exciting” enough. PBS, with their lack of a need to sensationalize everything in order to keep massive audience shares that attract advertizers, may be the perfect place for this kind of message. The Eades approach is also very scientifically based. It delves into our genetic, anthropological and evolutionary history as a species. I believe it appeals more to those who are willing to do a lot of reading themselves and not just accept the dogma foisted upon us by the American Dietetic Association and their minions of registered dieticians spouting the party line of low-fat, despite real proof that that approach results in long-term weight and health gains, while they criticize low-carb for not having similar proof and also for a slew of potential risks which are mere theories and have never been proven or indicated by real-world data. With the ability to explain their compelling experiences as doctors as well as some of the real scientific underpinnings of low-carb in a relaxed time-frame (rather than having to give scintillating sound bytes or doing some high-pressure promotion), it might finally sink into some that this approach deserves some attention.