The Next Big Thing For the New Year

I

got excited today when I saw this headline on PRNewswire.

Fad Diets Are Out - Healthy Weight Loss and Management is the New Trend

A new approach to weight-loss is gaining momentum because of its sustainable benefits. This approach uses the Glycemic Index to make good dietary choices to maintain weight and improve health. Soy, which has a low GI, can be part of an effective weight-loss diet.

Of course, I thought the timing for this press release was brilliant. Three days into the new year—the time when 90% of the population has just resolved to finally develop those hourglass waists and six pack abs—along come some un-named folks to tell us that they're going to restore sanity to the weight loss game. Not quite.

This press release turns out to be something that one of my college professors used to call "a mystery story." That is to say, rather than giving us the main point up front, the writer has lured us into the document with some irrefutable—and perhaps irrelevant—facts and statistics before getting to the real message. And that simply turns out to be a sales pitch for some kind of soy product that makes everything from pasta to smoothies.

Along the way, the writer extolls the virtue of something called the glycemic index. This turns out to be a measure—represented by numbers from 1 to 100—of the effect various foods have on blood sugar.

Nevertheless, I became interested enough to do some fishing around on Google, and, with almost no effort, found The Glycemic Index dot com. And while the index has been developed by an apparently well-respected biomedical researcher in Australia, the foods in the GI database come primarily from outside the U.S.

In defense of the glycemic index, it turns out to be a very useful tool for helping diabetics take more control of their blood sugar levels. It's been endorsed for that purpose as early as 1997 by Walter Willet of Harvard School of Public Health, who happens to be an extremely heavy hitter in the nutrition dodge. But as a tool for dieters, not so good, according to this source.

So as we begin the new year, it looks, alas, like we're still waiting for the pundits to decide the best way for us to lose those love handles and beer bellies while we sleep or watch TV. I'm not going to wait for the pundits, though; I've made the same new year's resolution I've been making for twenty-five or thirty years. I'm going to eat more pasta.

Technorati tags: Glycemic Index, Soy Products,Skip Lombardi