By Richard Tardif
Eat less, move more you couch potato. Ever wonder where that oxymoron phrase comes from? Harvard nutrition professor and a staunch crusader against world hunger, Jean Mayer,promoting his research through his nationally syndicated column on nutrition, in 1965, referred to the low-carbohydrate diet as “mass murder” and was considered an authority on nutrition, perhaps thanks to a 1959 New York Times article crediting him with having “debunked [the] popular theories” that exercise played little role in weight control.
Mayer is often quoted in today’s literature, like other researchers of that era, for believing that the obese often eat no more than the lean, and sometimes even less. So, “being an obese person” didn’t mean you overate. “The food wasn’t the problem,” he wrote in his columns and papers. “The next logical presumption? These people had to be less physically active.”
Mayer also wrote hundreds of papers about “getting off the couch” as a means to weight loss. Mayer, you should note, according to his biography, never carried out studies with actual obese humans, none that could be found, but with rats, yet somehow, he is known as the creator of the hypothesis that exercising is the key to fat loss.
In fairness, of equal concern to Mayer was the problem of a lack of food leading to world hunger, malnutrition, and poverty. He studied ways to alleviate famine and its consequences on Harvard missions to India in 1955 and to Ghana in 196. Mayer was also a member of United Nations FAOWHO (World Health Organization) advisory missions to Ghana in 1959 and to the Ivory Coast and West Africa in 1960; and in 1969 he went to Biafra, Nigeria.
He still may have triggered a trillion-dollar fitness and health industry, and the fallacy of such an industry was, in part, based on the doomed “Diet-Heart” theory, and Mayer’s “don’t be a couch potato” push.
Solution: get off the couch. Eat less, move more. Boom.
We began to move more. We ran greater distances. We cycled longer and faster. We went to the gym. Prior to the We reduced saturated fat consumption, replacing it with the increasingly produced low-fat foods padded with sugar and trans fats. Mayer wasn’t the only columnist holding such beliefs.
New York Times columnist Jane Brodybecame one of the greatest promoters of the diet-heart hypothesis. Brody is quoted in many books on media and nutrition, and wrote what seems like an endless number of her own books on nutrition. Brody was like a back-seat driver in the 1980s prepared to take over the wheel when it came any new studies linking fat and cholesterol to heart disease. She rarely put the brakes on any new research. If was academically published, she wrote in its favour.
In, America Leans to a Healthier Diet, written by Brody in 1985,she famously quotes Jimmy Johnson, a Minnesota father of two boys, to, “Waking up to the smell of bacon in the pan,” while his wife remembered saving the bacon grease to then fry the eggs; now, said Mr. Johnson, “just a bit ruefully: ‘the smells are gone from breakfast, but we’re all a lot better off for it.”
Fast forward, we know that exercise plays a very little role in weight loss, and new research is showing that completely replacing fat with carbohydrates leads to obesity. Exercise has 101 benefits for the body. Fat isn’t the bogeyman it was made out to be. Eat well, and of course, move.
And…Just. Eat. Right.
Richard Tardif is a personal fitness trainer, health & fitness author, speaker and an award-winning journalist. Richard’s first book Stop the Denial: A Case for Embracing the Truth About Fitness, challenges, surprises, and inspires you to embrace a fitness lifestyle that will work in achieving your individual goals.
