http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/16/com...stler/index.htm


Of carbs and fads

Bunless burgers and starch-stripped chips may be time and money misspent.
January 16, 2004: 11:27 AM EST


The low-carb thing is getting pretty silly.

Sure, watching how much starch you pump into your diet is probably a good thing. But Corporate America is going overboard catering to the fad. And when the meat-ain't-so-good-after-all backlash comes, it'll turn out to be time and money misspent.

I mean, c'mon, a low-carb Dorito chip? What's the point? I can't find one, but Frito-Lay is test marketing the concept anyway.

Burger King is coming out with a bunless burger, which will be served in a bowl. Huh? That's a bowl of ground beef with some vegetable matter thrown in, right? Kinda sounds like chili ... a vapid, boring chili. If it catches on, the restaurant will eventually have to rename itself "Bowl of Beef Patty" King.

The Carl's Jr. restaurant chain is wrapping the burger in lettuce instead of a bun. I'm not sure if that is better or worse than the Burger King version.

Subway has added a couple of low-carb wraps to its menu. Actually, they are pretty tasty. Probably the cheese and bacon in them. I'm not sure what that is doing for my cholesterol or arteries, but it's low carbohydrates and good on the tongue.

Personal tastes aside, are these gambles on the Atkins diet craze -- where you load up your diet with protein and phase out carbohydrates -- going to pay off?

Looking at what's happened to beef, it seems like a safe bet. Wholesale beef prices took off last fall, climbing to about $120 per 100 pounds. Some of that 50 percent increase was due to imports being cut off from Canada, which account for about 7 percent of US beef consumption. But most of it was a surge in domestic demand. And the recent mad cow scare didn't dent it much.

But the Atkins craze won't last forever. Not because the diet is good or bad -- arguments go both ways. No, it's just the nature of fad diets.

"People hope for semi-miraculous help, which leads to fad diets," says Peter N. Stearns, a professor at George Mason University and author of the book "Fat History." "It usually leads to disappointment, which then leads to new products and then new enthusiasm."

So people, sick of eating nothing but meat and vegetables, will run screaming into the streets, demanding potatoes, pasta and bread. But Frito-Lay will be hawking cardboard disguised as Dorito chips, Burger King will be short on buns, and Subway will be making up bacon and cheese subs.

So was all that menu shuffling worth it? After all, beef prices were down about six years prior to the fall surge.


Stearns, who has traced diets throughout American history, thinks the menu additions might ultimately pay off. After all, it's just deepening the bench on your menu, so that your rabbit-food oriented date can munch on something while you wolf saturated fat.

"It's a much less faddish approach (this time)," Stearns said. "Whether it will ultimately succeed is an open question."

Open indeed. But by the time these new products and menus roll out full force, there'll probably be some new diet pushing pasta and baked bread.

Me? Well, when I want to have a burger, I go to a burger joint. And put a bun around those patties. My Doritos better be fully leaded. And my steak needs to come with a baked potato loaded with sour cream and butter.

Carbs for everyone.

Poor Allen Wastler (the author of this lovely piece). So young, and yet, so doomed to die early from stupidity-induced heart-disease.

Perhaps we should create the "Allen Wastler Award", given periodically to those writers whose grasp of emerging trends is so dizzyingly and dismally wrong.

Can a diet that has been popular for 30 years be called a fad any longer?

Only if "low-fat" is a fad, too, because low-fat is a much younger "fad".

Fad = "a pursuit or interest followed usually widely but briefly and capriciously with exaggerated zeal and devotion" - from Webster's Third New International Dictionary.