Nonsense for the Diet Season

Nonsense for the Diet Season
By Sandy Szwarc
Published 01/26/2005
TCS

After ringing in the New Year, the party's over. The diet season has begun and so do our resolutions to diet and exercise, quit smoking and begin a new life. "Yup, it'll be All Bran all the time in 2005," said food writer Gwyneth Doland.

Just in time to accompany the weight loss advertisements that beset us every year at this time, a new report claims to provide the evidence that dieting and attaining a trim figure are imperative. Women must be "toned and trim," we're told, because no amount of exercise can offset the risks of dying prematurely when overweight. The bearers of those gloomy tidings are researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, in a report published in the New England Journal Medicine. They claim to have studied 116,564 women for 24 years and found that even exercising 3 1/2 hours a week, fat women have a 91% greater risk of premature death as compared to lean women.

This veritable death threat left women feeling angry and hopeless that their fat was going to kill them regardless of what they did. The latest comprehensive review of the nation's top ten diets by University of Pennsylvania researchers confirmed, yet again, that there is no diet that offers "more than glossy ads and dramatic testimonials when it comes to promising long-term results."

But despite this Harvard study's claim we must shed body fat or else, closer examination reveals that it deserves nothing more than a good belly laugh and to be tossed out with all the fad diets.

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