Dieting: The Drinking Man’s Danger

All over the U.S., overweight men and women are indulging in a new diet craze: drink all the martinis and whisky you want, stow away marbled steaks and roast duck, never mind the fats. Forget calorie counting, but avoid sugar and starchy foods as though they were poison. Adherents of the fad take as their battle cry the title of a paperback booklet, The Drinking Man’s Diet (Cameron & Co.; $1). The book’s contents are a cocktail of wishful thinking, a jigger of nonsense and a dash of sound advice.

The diet is a derivative of the long-popular, high-protein regimen, and was attributed last year to the medical department of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Air Academy medics deny all knowledge of it on the credible ground that drink is not part of the standard diet of air cadets. But San Francisco’s Robert Cameron and his son Todd heard about it “from an Air Force pilot” and whipped up the book, written by five collaborators under the pseudonyms of Gardner Jameson and Elliott Williams.

Never a Malted. “This really is a very simple diet,” they assert. “It can be summed up in one sentence: EAT LESS THAN SIXTY GRAMS OF CARBOHYDRATE A DAY. That’s all there is to it.” (Sixty grams are about two ounces.) At first, say the authors, the dieter will have to consult the tables to avoid ordering lima beans (15 gm. of carbohydrate to an average serving) instead of green beans (a mere 3 gm.). Afterward, they claim, it will be easy to run down the menu and pick poached filet of sole, champagne sauce—”perhaps one gram for the flour in the sauce; highly recommended”—or filet mignon, béarnaise sauce—”one gram for the eggs; no danger here.” But as for a chocolate malted and mocha layer cake, “150 grams!—jamais de la vie!” The “grisly alternative” of a reducing diet is listed in terms of defatted French dressing, vegetable-burger (“a dry, scratchy mass of grated carrots, soybeans, daisy petals, etc.”), skim milk and dry toast.

Cameron & Co. point out accurately enough that distilled liquors and unfortified wines contain negligible amounts of carbohydrates. Alcohol’s calories, they argue, just don’t count—they somehow disappear in a mysterious metabolic process. The truth is that soon after alcohol gets out of the bottle and into a healthy liver, it goes through a series of complex processes, one product of which is a sugar (a carbohydrate). And if it is just used for energy, much of this may be turned into fat.

The drinking man’s diet also proclaims that protein is not especially fattening. And it goes on to assert that a man can eat almost as much fat as he wants to without worrying about weight, which is untrue and, the authors admit, can be dangerous for people who may be developing heart-artery disease.

The fact is that the drinking man’s diet will work in some cases, but not for many of the reasons given by its advocates. A bon vivant executive who is ordered to take off 20 or 30 Ibs. is made instantly miserable and tense by being denied most of his drinks and rich meats. Told that he can go on drinking, he stays relaxed, which reduces the temptation to nibble between meals. Also, despite a popular misconception, two or more cocktails actually depress the appetite. The drinking man feels satisfied after a filet mignon, and the little bit of fat that he gets with it will do him no harm.

Water Balance. The main thing is that a man who sticks to the drinker’s diet will cut down drastically on his calorie intake by avoiding not only bread, potatoes and even innocent strawberries but, far more important, the butter and cream or sour cream that usually go with them. If he loses weight, it is because of a reduced calorie intake.

Says Dr. Philip L. White, the A.M.A.’s top nutrition expert: “The drinking man’s diet is utter nonsense, has no scientific basis, and is chock-full of errors. Some individuals on these low-carbohydrate diets may at first undergo a change in water balance, which might account for a loss of a few pounds. Even the authors of the book make the interesting admission that if a man eats and drinks heavily, he is going to gain weight and get drunk.”