Oh, To Be a Koala: Battling Fat & Diets

This week has seen a lot of fat-loss-related news. Now I used to be infatuated with biology in high school and if I weren't going to school for finance, I would've happily done pre-med. So let me share a secret with you that I learned from my favorite teacher Mr. Fenoli. First day of class he hammered in something he hoped would save us girls (he wasn't sexist...it was an all-girls school) a lot of time with: to lose weight, burn more calories than you eat.

I've always wondered about fad diets. The above mantra is so simple and common sense, so what's wrong here? Funny how one of the things that saved us from death in our caveman days is now the sixth leading cause of death according to the Center for Disease Control's latest data (2006). But I guess people know smoking kills/causes sallow skin and acne/reduces sperm count and they do it anyway.

So this new cookie diet is one fad that's as ridiculous as the others and another testament to our national eating disorder (but it's not all our fault-our political leaders started a cheap food farm policy in the 70s and it worked too well: US farmers now can produce 500 more calories per person per day and logically a lot of that went into our guts). To follow this new diet, simply eat six cookies and one meal totaling 1,000 calories every day. How this is better or healthier than just counting calories but eating balanced meals (that's plural) is beyond me.

This week was also when we found a new weight-loss drug, liraglutide, to be more effective than the one we had- orlistat of Alli and Xenical. There's no mention of orlistat's pleasant side effects of leaking oils and suffering from stool incontinence. Rather, with this new wonder drug you might be more likely to vomit. And we all know that's a pretty effective weight loss method itself.

So liraglutide's already been approved in Europe and is being sold as Victoza by Denmark-based big pharma company Novo Nordisk. They seem to be doing pretty well since the drug was approved this April.


While there's no information on how many people used orlistat when they didn't need to (weren't obese nor were diabetes patients), I would guess there were a lot of people using it as a shortcut to get fit for summer. I doubt liraglutide will be any different.

Also consider that it seems plain vanilla diet supplements are not enough when we can get prescription drugs. We still like our diet replacement meals though, according to Euromonitor International. And Americans really like spending money to replace old fashioned self-control.

Why is it this hard? If you want the full answer, read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. To illustrate the "dilemma" Pollan references a thirty-year-old paper written by UPenn researcher Paul Rozin titled "The Selection of Foods by Rats, Humans, and Other Animals," contrasting the koala's choiceless, thought-free approach to what's for dinner (nothing but eucalyptus leaves) with an omnivore's, where possibilities are endless and for which we need large brains to ponder about.

Because we aren't koalas, however, we'll always be tempted with that hot dog, that cheesecake, that steakburger. But because we are also gifted with modern technology that is the iPhone calorie-counting app, please don't turn yourself into a malnourished cookie monster. Just move more than you eat. And another tip: As Pollan puts it in the opening of his second book, In Defense of Food -

Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.