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HIGH-WAISTED TROUSER

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ROMPER

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Suede bag, Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière, $1,955, collection at Barneys New York

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So you can imagine my delight this past year when vegan and plant-based diet books began landing on my desk with astounding frequency. Kris Carr’s Crazy Sexy Diet and Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman, MD, made the New York Times best-seller list. There’s Alicia Silverstone’s The Kind Diet and Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s The 30-Day Vegan Challenge. The president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Neal Barnard, MD, released 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart, based on his PBS show, and spiritual wellness guru Kathy Freston published Veganist.

The China Study, a formerly obscure nutrition book by T. Colin Campbell, PhD, a Cornell University researcher, has, over the past six years, stealthily sold half a million copies, becoming one of the country’s best-selling nutrition books. Campbell, with his son Thomas as coauthor, advocates a plant-based diet, drawing on a giant epidemiological study in China that found that cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and many other modern ailments are linked to meat and dairy. Campbell got a shout-out from Bill Clinton last fall when the former prez discussed his weight loss and efforts to reverse heart disease through diet. And Clinton isn’t the only A-lister hitting the carbs: Freston persuaded Oprah to try going vegan, and Russell Simmons, Ellen DeGeneres, and Natalie Portman have all talked repeatedly about their veganism recently.

At the same time, the high-protein craze has reached a fever pitch of extremity (the hallmark of played-out health fads and military regimes, I’d say). New York Times journalist Gary Taubes’ pro-protein-and-fat manifesto Why We Get Fat advocates the complete exclusion of even whole grains for weight loss—and preposterously suggests that a vegan who cut out grains and lived on mostly leafy greens would still be at increased risk for obesity because of glycemic load. The Dukan Diet, made famous by the Middletons before the royal wedding, prescribes fasts that include nothing but lean protein and oat bran for a week and then every Thursday in perpetuity. And the Paleo Diet, based on our history as hunter-gatherers, recommends pork chops as a healthy snack and excludes beans, starchy vegetables, grains, and dairy—forever.

You’d think I’d be waist-deep in a vat of kasha varnishkes and tempeh by now, reveling in the new vegan uprising, but I find myself, after so many years of protein indoctrination, strangely afraid to reduce protein and increase carbs. There was a time when I’d glibly follow any fad diet—cabbage soup, lemonade, Slim-Fast—in an effort to simply lose weight. But now I’m more conscious that changing my habits means changing my health. Over the years, I’ve upped my meat and protein consumption under the hegemony of the protein pushers—almost unconsciously—and, the truth is, I’ve never felt healthier.

And yet, the science presented by Campbell, Barnard, and others that meat and dairy can damage our cells, arteries, and immune system is convincing. Then there are the ethical and environmental benefits of a plantcentric diet. Two University of Chicago geophysicists showed that going vegan reduces your carbon footprint by nine tons a year: the carbon equivalent of trading an SUV for a Toyota Camry or giving up your air conditioner, refrigerator, and clothes dryer.

The dueling indoctrinations have left me protein paralyzed. How much protein do women really need, and what form is best? For starters, the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of protein set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is the equivalent of 0.36 grams per pound of body weight. That works out to roughly 60 grams for the average 165-pound American woman and represents about 10 percent of calories in the average diet. It’s a snap to meet (a cup of oatmeal has 6 grams, a cup of Greek yogurt 16 grams, 4 ounces of tofu 18 grams, and 4 ounces of beef 30), and most Americans get more than enough. The high-protein diets generally advise doubling or even quadrupling the RDA protein level, but the plant-based crowd, unsurprisingly, argues that the RDA is more than adequate, unless you’re an athlete or highly active.

Protein is made up of amino acids, 10 of which are essential for humans—meaning you must consume them because your body can’t manufacture them. Animal proteins contain all the essential acids; plant proteins don’t. Years ago, “complementary proteins” were a big concept for vegetarians—nutritionists counseled carefully mixing plant proteins at each meal so all essential amino acids were consumed at once. Meat advocates still point to this to inveigh against plant-based eating, but the American Dietetic Association now says “that an assortment of plant foods eaten over the course of a day can provide all essential amino acids…. Complementary proteins do not need to be consumed at the same meal.” The plantists fire back at the meatists that human flesh is the best protein food—since it contains the perfect ratio of essential amino acids all in one bite—but that doesn’t mean we should become cannibals. Ah, vegan humor!

One of my most immediate concerns about backing off on protein and meat is muscle maintenance. Women start losing muscle mass in their thirties—contributing to the appearance of aging and, later, falls and fractures—with the effects accelerating each year, says University of Texas’ Elena Volpi, MD, a protein researcher and geriatrician. For the average woman under age 65, she says, there’s no evidence that eating protein in excess of the RDA slows that. For this group, she says, the key is weight-bearing exercise. “That’s what I’d harp on for younger women, not protein.

There is evidence, however, that folks older than 65 don’t absorb or utilize protein as well as the younger set, Volpi says. For them, she recommends getting a bit fussier about protein intake: 20 to 30 grams at each meal, but no more; greater amounts can’t be used by the body and will be either burned for energy or stored as fat.

A study by Volpi’s colleague Douglas Paddon-Jones, PhD, a physical therapy professor, demonstrated that timing a high-protein meal for the hour or two after exercise can give older people maximum resources as their muscles recover and rebuild. But he says that, again, young women don’t have to worry about protein timing or source as long as their diet is varied.
BY RACHAEL COMBE

So what’s the message for women ­trying to lose weight?” asks ­Marcelle Pick, nurse practitioner and author of The Core Balance Diet. “That you’re doomed, and—good luck?” Pick thinks the story is more nuanced and not as grim as all that, but she’s not surprised when ­people are disheartened, particularly in the wake of a study published last ­October in The New England Journal of ­Medicine, the ­latest and most telling blow against the ­notion that American women in their ­twenties, whose average weight climbed about 30 pounds from 1960 to 2000, could slim back down with just a little more will­power. In that study, conducted at the Univer­sity of Melbourne in Australia, subjects who lost more than 10 percent of their body weight experienced a corresponding change in ­crucial appetite-regulating ­hormones such as leptin—and they ­never returned to normal levels during the remainder of the yearlong research period.

Why is that such a big deal? Produced by fat cells, leptin tells your brain’s hypo­thalamus whether your body’s energy reserves are sufficient. Low leptin signals that you need to build up your fat stores, and your brain orchestrates a response—“I’m hungry!”—to compel you to regain weight, even if that’s the last thing your conscious mind wants as you endeavor to maintain post-diet weight loss.

Or consider a study that will likely come out later this year. Eric Ravussin, PhD, a leading weight researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, measured the contestants on TV’s The Biggest Loser and found their leptin levels to be in the tank (six had levels that didn’t even register on the standard measurement test)—which means the odds are their hunger pangs will be so intense that they’ll qualify for The Biggest Regainer in a few years.

The physiological affront is actually a one-two punch. After significant weight loss, not only does our hunger increase but our metabolism slows, so we hold on that much more tightly to each calorie we consume. Researchers at Columbia University have found that people who, like those in the Melbourne study, lose at least 10 percent of total body weight burn 300 fewer calories a day on average than they did before the weight came off. (No one has looked at the metabolic effects of milder weight loss.) So at the same time that your brain is ordering you to eat more, you must eat less to maintain that slimmed-down physique. The woman who goes from 170 to 130 pounds through assiduous dieting and exercise may look just like her friend who’s always weighed 130—same shape, same percentage of body fat—but inside, her “fat brain” is still doing everything in its power to send her body back to Fatville. Hence the dirty not-so-little secret of weight loss: It’s not that hard to lose weight—motivated dieters do it all the time—but maintaining that loss is a bitch, with success rates as low as 2 percent or as “high” as 20 percent, depending on which studies you choose to believe.