DAVE BARRY: Long ago, no one counted carbs
March 28, 2004
BY DAVE BARRY
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
I probably shouldn't admit this to you younger
readers, but when my generation was your age, we did
some pretty stupid things. I'm talking about taking
crazy risks. We drank water right from the tap. We
used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with
your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not
festooned with helpful safety warnings such as "Do not
bathe with this toaster."
But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was
-- prepare to be shocked -- we deliberately ingested
carbohydrates.
I know, I know. It was wrong. But we were young and
foolish, and there was a lot of peer pressure. You'd
be at a party, and there would be a lava lamp blooping
away, and a Jimi Hendrix record playing (a "record"
was a primitive compact disc that operated by static
electricity).
And then, when the mood was right, somebody would say:
"You wanna do some 'drates?"
And the next thing you know, there'd be a bowl of
pretzels going around, or crackers, or even potato
chips, and we'd put these things into our mouths and
just . . . eat them.
I'm not proud of this. My only excuse was that we were
ignorant. It's not like now, when everybody knows how
bad carbohydrates are, and virtually every product is
advertised as being "low-carb," including beer,
denture adhesives, floor wax, tires, life insurance
and Viagra. Back then, we had no idea. Nobody did! Our
own mothers gave us bread!
Today, of course, nobody eats bread. People are
terrified of all carbohydrates, as evidenced by the
recent mass robbery at a midtown Manhattan restaurant,
where 87 patrons turned their wallets over to a man
armed only with a strand of No. 8 spaghetti. ("Do what
he says! He has pasta!") The city of Beverly Hills has
been evacuated twice this month because of reports --
false, thank heavens -- that terrorists had put a
bagel in the water supply.
But as I say, in the old days we didn't recognize the
danger of carbohydrates. We believed that the reason
you got fat was from eating so-called "calories,"
which are tiny units of measurement that cause food to
taste good. When we wanted to lose weight, we went on
low-calorie diets in which we ate only inedible foods
such as celery, which is actually a building material,
and grapefruit, which is nutritious but offers the
same level of culinary satisfaction as chewing on an
Odor Eater.
The problem with the low-calorie diet was that a
normal human could stick to it for, at most, four
hours, at which point he or she would have no
biological choice but to sneak out to the garage and
snork down an entire bag of Snickers, sometimes
without removing the wrappers. So nobody lost weight,
and everybody felt guilty all the time. Many people,
in desperation, turned to disco.
But then along came the bold food pioneer who invented
the Atkins Diet: Dr. Something Atkins. After decades
of research on nutrition and weight gain -- including
the now-famous Hostess Ding Dong Diet Experiment,
which resulted in a laboratory rat the size of a
Plymouth Voyager -- Dr. Atkins discovered an amazing
thing: Calories don't matter! What matter are
carbohydrates, which result when a carbo molecule and
a hydrate molecule collide at high speeds and form
tiny invisible doughnuts.
Dr. Atkins' discovery meant that -- incredible though
it seemed -- as long as you avoided carbohydrates, you
could, without guilt, eat high-fat, high-calorie foods
such as cheese, bacon, lard, pork rinds and whale. You
could eat an entire pig, as long as the pig had not
recently been exposed to bread.
At first, like other groundbreaking pioneers such as
Galileo and Eminem, Dr. Atkins met with skepticism,
even hostility. The low-calorie foods industry went
after him big time. The Celery Growers Association
hired a detective to -- yes -- stalk him. His car
tires were repeatedly slashed by what police
determined to be shards of Melba toast.
But Dr. Atkins persisted, because he had a dream -- a
dream that, someday, he would help the human race by
selling it 427 million diet books. And he did,
achieving vindication for his diet before his tragic
demise in an incident that the autopsy report listed
as "totally unrelated to the undigested 28-pound bacon
cheeseburger found in his stomach."
But the Atkins Diet lives on, helping millions of
Americans lose weight. The irony is, you can't tell
this by looking at actual Americans, who have, as a
group, become so heavy that North America will soon be
underwater as far inland as Denver. Which can only
mean one thing: You people are still sneaking
Snickers. You should be ashamed of yourselves! Got any
more?
March 28, 2004
BY DAVE BARRY
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
I probably shouldn't admit this to you younger
readers, but when my generation was your age, we did
some pretty stupid things. I'm talking about taking
crazy risks. We drank water right from the tap. We
used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with
your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not
festooned with helpful safety warnings such as "Do not
bathe with this toaster."
But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was
-- prepare to be shocked -- we deliberately ingested
carbohydrates.
I know, I know. It was wrong. But we were young and
foolish, and there was a lot of peer pressure. You'd
be at a party, and there would be a lava lamp blooping
away, and a Jimi Hendrix record playing (a "record"
was a primitive compact disc that operated by static
electricity).
And then, when the mood was right, somebody would say:
"You wanna do some 'drates?"
And the next thing you know, there'd be a bowl of
pretzels going around, or crackers, or even potato
chips, and we'd put these things into our mouths and
just . . . eat them.
I'm not proud of this. My only excuse was that we were
ignorant. It's not like now, when everybody knows how
bad carbohydrates are, and virtually every product is
advertised as being "low-carb," including beer,
denture adhesives, floor wax, tires, life insurance
and Viagra. Back then, we had no idea. Nobody did! Our
own mothers gave us bread!
Today, of course, nobody eats bread. People are
terrified of all carbohydrates, as evidenced by the
recent mass robbery at a midtown Manhattan restaurant,
where 87 patrons turned their wallets over to a man
armed only with a strand of No. 8 spaghetti. ("Do what
he says! He has pasta!") The city of Beverly Hills has
been evacuated twice this month because of reports --
false, thank heavens -- that terrorists had put a
bagel in the water supply.
But as I say, in the old days we didn't recognize the
danger of carbohydrates. We believed that the reason
you got fat was from eating so-called "calories,"
which are tiny units of measurement that cause food to
taste good. When we wanted to lose weight, we went on
low-calorie diets in which we ate only inedible foods
such as celery, which is actually a building material,
and grapefruit, which is nutritious but offers the
same level of culinary satisfaction as chewing on an
Odor Eater.
The problem with the low-calorie diet was that a
normal human could stick to it for, at most, four
hours, at which point he or she would have no
biological choice but to sneak out to the garage and
snork down an entire bag of Snickers, sometimes
without removing the wrappers. So nobody lost weight,
and everybody felt guilty all the time. Many people,
in desperation, turned to disco.
But then along came the bold food pioneer who invented
the Atkins Diet: Dr. Something Atkins. After decades
of research on nutrition and weight gain -- including
the now-famous Hostess Ding Dong Diet Experiment,
which resulted in a laboratory rat the size of a
Plymouth Voyager -- Dr. Atkins discovered an amazing
thing: Calories don't matter! What matter are
carbohydrates, which result when a carbo molecule and
a hydrate molecule collide at high speeds and form
tiny invisible doughnuts.
Dr. Atkins' discovery meant that -- incredible though
it seemed -- as long as you avoided carbohydrates, you
could, without guilt, eat high-fat, high-calorie foods
such as cheese, bacon, lard, pork rinds and whale. You
could eat an entire pig, as long as the pig had not
recently been exposed to bread.
At first, like other groundbreaking pioneers such as
Galileo and Eminem, Dr. Atkins met with skepticism,
even hostility. The low-calorie foods industry went
after him big time. The Celery Growers Association
hired a detective to -- yes -- stalk him. His car
tires were repeatedly slashed by what police
determined to be shards of Melba toast.
But Dr. Atkins persisted, because he had a dream -- a
dream that, someday, he would help the human race by
selling it 427 million diet books. And he did,
achieving vindication for his diet before his tragic
demise in an incident that the autopsy report listed
as "totally unrelated to the undigested 28-pound bacon
cheeseburger found in his stomach."
But the Atkins Diet lives on, helping millions of
Americans lose weight. The irony is, you can't tell
this by looking at actual Americans, who have, as a
group, become so heavy that North America will soon be
underwater as far inland as Denver. Which can only
mean one thing: You people are still sneaking
Snickers. You should be ashamed of yourselves! Got any
more?
