The Countertop Chronicles posts a link to this story about the baking industry and their reply to the current low-carb fad diets:
Bread, Its What's Good For You
The baking industry strikes back! I think they are also going to be on the Today show this week too!! I used to work for the Baking Lobby here in DC so this sort of excites me! They link to this CNN story:
Bread industry hopes for comeback
New campaign touts benefits of whole-grain bread.
The bread industry, hoping for a comeback after last year's low-carb fad, is telling consumers bread is good for them -- especially whole-grain bread.
Bread makers learned from the low-carb craze that they need to market themselves better. So, three weeks after new government guidelines calling for three one-ounce servings of whole grains a day, the industry is starting a campaign touting health benefits.
Industry officials say the trend is in their favor.
"There was an all-out assault on our industry, but people are coming back to bread and are realizing why they loved it in the first place," said Lee Schwebel of Schwebel Baking Co. in Youngstown, Ohio. "Try making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without bread."
On Tuesday, the industry will launch a low-carb counterattack pointing to benefits of grains as part of an overall diet. The $3.5 million Grains for Life campaign will be announced in New York and Washington with billboards, posters and people dancing in bread costumes.
"The message we're trying to get out is it's the calories, not the carbs," said Lori Sachau of the Wheat Foods Council in Colorado.
Critics contend it was predictable that fickle Americans would eventually tire of the latest diet, but bread industry officials were surprised at how quickly low-carb seemed to fall out of favor. A survey by NPD Group, an independent marketing information company, found the number of American adults on any low-carb diet peaked at 9.1 percent last February and dropped to 3.6 percent by mid-November.
"The path low-carb has taken is not unlike a lot of other stuff except that it burst so fast. It went up very fast. Sometimes when things go up fast, they come down just as fast," said Stan Osman of Interstate Bakeries Corp., maker of Wonder Bread and Twinkies.
Emphases mine -- the low-carb diet only works if you force your body into a state of ketosis. Then, the weight loss is fairly fast and you can transition out of ketosis into a normal metabolism and change your diet to maintain the new weight. As is typical with fad diets, the few people who had the discipline to enter ketosis were held up as examples of the fantastic results of this new diet but they were far and few between. Ketosis (from what I have read) is no joy and it is fairly toxic to your body so staying on it for long periods of time cause other problems.
The other issue is that your body (in or out of ketosis) uses carbs for short-term energy. If you are athletic at all, a low-carb diet will sap your energy. You will hit the wall a lot faster and if you have some carbs for a specific event (big bicycle ride, skiing weekend, etc...) you go off ketosis and have to spend several weeks getting back onto it. Dieting is simply a matter of calories in versus calories out. If you have more calories coming in than are going out, you will accumulate weight. The other way around, you will gradually loose weight. And bread is an excellent food if you get the real thing (not Wonder) -- full of fiber, grain and nutrition...
An excellent diet program can be found here: The Hackers Diet Their home page offers several versions -- use the Web with frames for browsing or you can download and print a PDF copy for offline reference. Good stuff and free...
