Lean times for models and a feast for the diet industry

Models, if indeed they wish to prosper, are servants to fashion. Those who most closely match the current ideal may themselves realise a proportion of their immense value in selling magazines and in advertising products. Our existence is driven by reproduction, reproduction by sexual attraction, and sexually desirable traits are usually defined by models. If lean is beautiful, and calories are universally abundant, then maintaining a thin figure becomes a constant war whose social champions are models. So models live under the microscope of public expectation, where every roll of fat or significant blemish is exposed for social comment or criticism. It should perhaps not come as a surprise that so many models develop eating disorders.

So what exactly is the size and the extent of the diet industry? Estimates vary, but most value the global diet industry at somewhere between $38 and $100 billion a year. So before models even begin to use their faces and their bodies to sell clothes, men’s magazines, cosmetics, accessories, adult entertainment or cars, they are at the forefront of a massive global market for physical and sexual health. Perhaps it is again unsurprising that models feel under so much pressure to maintain an ‘ideal’ body weight. Muscle may be toned at the gym, and breasts may be enlarged at the clinic, but body fat is very much the domain of the diet and the pharmaceutical industries.

Models are the epicentre of a massive diet industry and this industry influences what we eat, how we live, and how we look. So what are the current trends and fashions in the diet industry, and how will these affect you in the near future? Which diets are in fashion, and which ones are on their way out? What are the health concerns of models in dieting? Are there safer and more effective ways to go about losing and maintaining a healthy body weight? Is there any truth to some commercial diets, or are they just passing fashions designed to skim cash from a lucrative market?

Is dieting good for your sex life?

Behind the curtains and underneath the foundation, the immense social pressure is telling upon the elite of the modelling community. If hourglass figures sell more movies, then more models and movie stars diet and undergo cosmetic surgery - a simple demand and supply curve in a competitive industry. Many models simply leave the industry under the pressure of physical perfection, and a few go on to tell their tales in tears. Fashion model and actress Carre Otis certainly related all to Newsweek, filling the glossy pages with stories of starvation, diet pills and bulimia in her attempts to keep her weight down. At the age of 30 the resulting damage to her health led to heart surgery, seizures and jaw implants. Many models however prefer to suffer in silence as they trade their physical beauty for lucrative pay checks.

Perhaps the most famous sufferer of eating disorders was Jane Fonda, who eventually came clean about a Hollywood lifetime of diet pills, bulimia and anorexia. Of course Jane Fonda is not alone, and other leading icons who have confessed to them include Courtney Thorne-Smith, Victoria Beckham and Whitney-Houston. They are of course only the tip of a pyramid that bears the immense weight of social expectation. Whether it is the social and professional pressure of conforming to an almost unattainable ideal, low self esteem or self-detestation, psychological factors are certainly crucial in the development of anorexia. Perhaps it is through emaciation that the model seeks to cleanse her socially impure self?

Just how true is the concept that weight loss makes a woman more sexually attractive to a male? Is this a false ideal, created by the social media, or does an ‘ultra’ lean figure really make men’s heads turn in awe? It may not come as a surprise that a great deal of study has been performed on the subject, and such research has consistently shown that a low waist-to-hip ratio (the ideal is around 0.7) and a curvaceous shape is preferred by men because it ‘indicates an ideal fat distribution’ which is thought to reveal reproductive potential and health. This simply means that high levels of female sex hormones (estrogens) favour the deposition of body fat around the thighs, hips, breasts, and buttocks rather than around the waist. Extreme dieting in actual fact lowers body fat in these regions, and in doing so actually increases the waist-to-hip ratio towards a value of 1 (the masculine ideal).

Although the saturation of the mass media with ultra-thin models and high cheek bones may have influenced social ideals, the principles of sexual attraction remain deeply engrained. This explains why so many men’s magazines that are full of images of more curvaceous models such as Danielle Gamba (right) and Aria Giovanni are so successful. Indeed many of the physical extremes achieved by leading fashion models are actually an anathema to the rules of sexual attraction. In such a state of health they are less fertile and are less likely to conceive children than their glamour counterparts who possess fuller figures. The biological eye perceives this as being ‘less attractive’, as reproduction is the queen on the chess board that is the mating game. An alternative view is that these fashion models may represent an advanced state of human evolution, displaying attractive characteristics together with the signal that the model is either unready or unavailable for reproduction.

Such seeds of social expectation are sown at a very young age. Young girls are very vulnerable to peer pressures which encourage ever more exercise and weight loss. In a fast living society, where there is so little time to pause to reflect amidst the rush of media images, work, and play, image is simply everything, and young people know that they are accepted or rejected based upon a glance. In a culture of winner-takes-all where first impressions and looks are everything, most young women feel that they fall far short of physical perfection as they are constantly exposed to images of supermodels with tiny waists and large, perfect breasts. The attainment of these almost impossible physical ideals often becomes a psychological barrier to the attainment of social goals such as wealth, sex, marriage and ‘success’. As one leading lady of the 1990s succinctly put it, ‘there are three billion women in the world and only eight are supermodels’.

Theories abound as to why seemingly unattainable physical ideals are imposed upon a mass market of women. Most women will never be six feet tall with a 34D-23-34 figure no matter how much weight they lose or surgery they undergo. Some suggest that the creation of a near impossible ideal drives the trillion dollar diet, sex and cosmetic industries. Women who are insecure about their physical attractiveness may be more likely to buy cosmetics, clothes, or diet supplements in an attempt to improve their sex lives and physical attractiveness. Psychologists point towards research that suggests that constant exposure to images of digitally enhanced and cosmetically augmented young female bodies is linked to depression, a loss of self-esteem and eating disorders amongst older women and young girls. Some claim that one in four American college girls presently suffer from eating disorders, which may even start in girls as young as nine. So compelling is the power of the digital image that as many as 35% of girls aged between 6 and 12 have been on at least one diet, and that as many as 70% of girls of normal body weight are convinced that they are overweight.

Idealised female icons of the digital age such as Lara Croft are not only unattainable, they are also unhealthy. A computerised model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions was found to have a back too weak to support the weight of her breasts, and her waist was too narrow to comfortably accommodate her liver or her bowels. This explains many of the medical symptoms of the age of corsetry, when women often fainted and suffered displacement of their internal organs and deformation of the rib cage. Women’s magazines contain more than ten times the number of adverts and articles relating to weight loss than do men’s magazines, and are saturated with methods for physical self-improvement from cover to cover. Nowhere is this culture more apparent than in the medium of television where the vast majority of female characters, even in TV sitcoms, are underweight. In contrast only one in twenty are considered to be overweight, and are often deliberately placed to serve as the butt of stereotypical jokes about ideal weight. Yet the sales figures for men’s magazines which promote the full or voluptuous female figure such as Gent, D-cup or Score are booming. Many plus size models such as Chloe Vevrier and Linsey Dawn MacKensie have become sexual icons in their own right, and the hourglass figures of Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welsh remain sexual icons to this day. Perhaps there is more money to be made in promoting a less attainable physical ideal?

Women compete for social ranking and for sexual attention just as men do, and if the feminine majority are conditioned to believe that thin women are more socially acceptable and desirable than full figured ones, then this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. If female fashion models weigh on average 25% less than the average woman, then is it really surprising that the vast majority of American women are dissatisfied with their physical form, or that 80% of teenage girls report that they are dieting? Socially fat has become synonymous with laziness, ugliness, self-indulgence, poverty and indiscipline. Fat people presently occupy a lower ‘asexual’ social class, whilst thin people are perceived to be elite, attractive, disciplined, virtuous and more successful. As ‘successful society’ becomes increasing elitist and exclusionary, fitting in with its entry standards demands personal sacrifice to the alter of physical perfection, and any personal rejection of such ideals is in effect a rejection of society itself, a rebellion of form.

However physical self-sacrifice is nothing new to human society. In ancient China women’s feet were deformed by binding to make them more attractive, as were the torsos of Western women in the late 20th century. There was an era when women who abstained from sex were more desirable than those who did not, and the innocence of virgins was revered. However within our present digital era, this age of the adult film star, having more sexual partners has not diminished the desirability of the 21st century siren, indeed far from it. Although generous proportions were attractive right up until the mid-20th Century, more slender forms became the new fashion, perhaps because the availability of food was no longer such a selective factor in survival and reproduction. However, within our new Millennium being thin is no longer sufficient. The curvaceous figures of contemporary female icons are no longer determined by estrogens and the distribution of body fat, they are formed by the toning of muscles and the surgeon's knife, attributes that would take a young woman many years in the gym and many thousands of dollars at the clinic to achieve. There are those who believe that losing body fat becomes a symbol of an inner struggle for power, success, and control within a social ideal which takes no prisoners. The power of idealised social images cannot be underestimated, and this is made apparent with the high incidence of eating disorders amongst ballerinas, models and gymnasts.

The fat and healthy diet industry

The fast food industry has done a great deal to make the diet industry fat. By mixing together sugars, fats, carbohydrates, and flavour enhancers, fast food chains have increased the public’s appetite for its products and have helped to fuel an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. The current health crisis equates to almost a million New Yorkers, in of itself an epidemic, creating a trillion dollar market for the weight loss, dietetic and pharmaceutical companies.

Just considering the $36.5 billion (2002 figures) which were spent privately in treating diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol and obesity in the United States is a sobering thought, an enormous 11.6% of total health care spending. This of course is only the tip of the iceberg and does not take into consideration the estimated $100 billion spent annually by individuals with a modest roll of fat around their waists who are simply trying to get slimmer for a variety of personal, sexual and social reasons. The rapidly expanding waist lines of Americans are now believed to be the primary impetus behind rising U.S. health care costs. Corporate money can scent big business at a mile, and venture capital firms are said to be investing in ‘obesity’ start-up companies at a level unseen since the dotcom days.

Globally the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than a billion people are ‘overweight’ - a truly gargantuan world market. One in three Americans are considered to be obese, with many more tipping the scales as merely ‘fat’. Competing for this lucrative market are a vast and bewildering range of diet pills, weight loss programs, diets and health specialists. The problem is that the experts rarely seem to agree, and many of those who disagree have lucrative interests in various products. There are even those who believe that the diet industry is at best a great white elephant and at worst a hoax, but then it wouldn't be America if the vocal minority who are able to walk through a mall and not see all the overhanging waistlines couldn't also have their say.

More philosophically, there are those who argue that fat is not all bad. Professor Eric Oliver of the University of Chicago disputes that there is any scientific evidence to support the notion that the health of those who are currently deemed to be ‘overweight' is threatened by their body weight. The CDC and AMA beg to differ. In a sense Professor Oliver has a point, given that Shaquille O’Neal and Ben Roethlisberger are technically overweight, and yet by most peoples’ standards they are extremely fit and healthy. Perhaps this is due to the human condition of oversimplifying and generalising, the process of condensing a medical textbook into a political sound bite for easy digestion on the six o'clock news. It isn't just the journalists who are responsible for this - some medical specialists are just as guilty. The inventors of the Body Mass Index, or BMI, are responsible for perhaps the greatest oversimplification in medical history, as their index simply correlates body mass to height and fails to identify such considerations as bone size, bone density or the percentage of the body which is lean muscle mass (fat is less dense than muscle). Many individuals may for instance possess an ‘average’ BMI rating but have a much higher than average body fat percentage, and many clinicians find that the simple waist-to-hip ratio is a much better predictor of cardiovascular health and well being. Certainly from a psychosexual perspective we know that people select their sexual partners using the much more visible hip-to-waist ratio as a guide to health and vitality.

Professor Oliver does have some strong arguments. In our eugenic society bodyweight is now associated with poverty and laziness rather than with wealth and vitality, a far cry from the Victorian era. Dr.Oliver also argues that there is a financial conflict of interest, given that many health practitioners stand to make financial gain from weight loss, claiming that they are constantly seeking endorsements from the American Obesity Association and lobbying for tax deductions. Professor Oliver would argue that it is healthier to eat well and to exercise if you are a little overweight, than it is to smoke, starve, snort cocaine and remain thin. Although such self-serving extremes are easy to find, his argument that millions of Americans are endangering their health with fad diets, drugs and surgery is not easily lost. Again, the threshold of what does and does not constitute being overweight is as much a divide of financial politics and social fashions as it is an objective line drawn in the sand.

Trends and fashions within the diet industry

It is sometimes difficult to conceive that a generous waistline once indicated wealth and good health in Victorian times. Those at the other end of the social scale were thin and had pale complexions, and were frequently described as being in ‘poor’ health. In this day and age even a modest layer of fat has become 'socially unacceptable', and dieting has become a most lucrative national obsession.

In the 1970s "calories" was the buzzword and the subject of thermodynamics was on the menu at the dinner table in place of all the missing food. The widely held belief that weight loss was as simple as ensuring that the number of calories consumed was lower than the quantity expended had turned the UK and the USA into nations of obsessive calorie counters. Calorific values were added to every box and jar sold in supermarkets, and products such as Diet Coke, Weight Watchers and saccharin became institutions in their own right.

The 1980s saw a new public enemy number one – fat. Fat, and its cousin cholesterol, were demonised in all their forms. Fat and cholesterol were responsible for obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and most any condition that researchers could find the time to demonstrate a link to. The new sales pitch was ‘low-fat’, a label which appeared on everything from yoghurt to bread. Health clubs sprang up everywhere and fitness gurus such as Jane Fonda and Arnold Schwarzenegger became national health icons as sales of fitness videos boomed.

By the 1990s we had learnt that some fats were better than others, and that some were even essential to good health. Monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and omega 3 and 6 entered the language as did evening primrose oil, and we learnt that cod liver oil was more than simply a cruel and unusual Victorian punishment. Suddenly there was a dark side and a ‘lighter’ side to fats, there was good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, there were monounsaturated and saturated fatty acids, low density lipoproteins and high density lipoproteins. Researchers noted that many of those who lived in the Mediterranean regions had a diet that was quite high in fat and yet they suffered low rates of Western afflictions such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity. Whether this was because of their genetic ancestry, the types of fats they ate, a more relaxed lifestyle, their agreeable climate, or more fresh fruits and vegetables is a cake that is impossible to unbake, but it spawned the famous Mediterranean Diet. Of course, it is equally possible to draw a correlation between the number of cars or televisions per person and the incidence of coronary heart disease, but this certainly does not prove that cars or televisions cause heart attacks. However the Mediterranean Diet became a popular panacea, a mystical spring of good health for those to whom middle and prosperity had brought the diseases of affluence.

At the turn of the Millennium fats had become an evil that the West had learnt to deal with, Osama Bin Laden had not yet materialised, and a new public enemy was needed. For more than a generation Dr.Atkins had wandered the political wilderness demonising carbohydrates from his pulpit, even denouncing the US Federal government as ‘bread pushers’. It was into this vacuum that Dr.Atkins emerged from his exile to preach his gospel that it was carbohydrates and not fats which were the demons spreading the Western contagion of obesity and diabetes. Suddenly an increased fat intake was a small price to pay for the benefits of a high protein, low carbohydrate diet. Low carbohydrate and related ketogenic diets such as the Atkins, South Beach and Zone diets suddenly abounded, modern descendants of William Banting’s original 19th Century diet. Indeed the Swedish verb ‘to diet’ (‘bantning’) owes its origins to this forgotten pioneer of dietetics. However, no matter how effective low carbohydrate diets may be in promoting weight loss, they are also associated with poor health. Such ‘low carb’ diets may lead to ketosis, constipation, dehydration, heart disease, bad breath and even diabetes. Dr.Atkins encouraged an increased intake of high-fat, high-protein foods such as eggs, meat, cheese, and nuts, and less consumption of cheaper foods such as bread, pasta and potatoes. An estimated 25 million Americans have tried the Atkins diet alone, not including its spin offs such as the Zone or South Beach Diets.

On the 1st August, 2005 the parent company of the Atkins diet filed for bankruptcy under a wave of litigation, signalling the death of the low carbohydrate diet myth. Other specialists such as the inventor of the more moderate Zone and CSIRO diets suggest a more balanced approach to the low carbohydrate diet. Critics of such low carbohydrate diets argue that this dietary ideology is going the same way as the grapefruit and cabbage-soup diets. In the words of leading dietician Keith Ayoob of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, "The low-carb diet is on life support." Given the wave of health issues surrounding the low carbohydrate diet craze and its attendant health concerns, it is not difficult to understand the current wave of litigation by those who believe that they were misled as to the health risks associated with low carbohydrate diets. The Dairy Industry is also being sued over its weight-loss claims, as recent lawsuits contend that the dairy industry fraudulently claimed that people could shed pounds by consuming more dairy products.

Meanwhile the show goes on. TV ‘reality contests’, such as NBC’s the ‘Biggest Loser’, have turned a nationwide obsession into a national sport complete with instant stardom and big prize money for those who can shed the most pounds in front of the camera. However, as far as the diet industry is concerned, a line has now been drawn in the sand between proponents of more balanced diets such as the HiPaCC diet and the Mediterranean Diet, which favour whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, fish, nuts, olive oil, and only limited amounts of meat and dairy, and those who advocate high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets such as the Atkins, CSIRO, South Beach and Zone diets. There are still of course those promoters of 1980s style low-fat diets such as Dr.Ornish who continue to blame saturated fats. However there is an important trend emerging towards more balanced diets which contain moderate amounts of all the essential food groups. One new diet achieves its impressive results by alternating high and low phases of carbohydrate and protein intake during the course of the week, with weekend treat days to prevent the body from entering into a fat retaining fasting state. This is known as the "HiPaCC diet" (or High Protein and Cycled Carbohydrate Diet, www.hipacc.org), and preliminary trials are returning encouraging results for this balanced diet which is relatively high in calories. Indeed, some users claim to have lost as much as 20% of their body fat in eight weeks on as many as 3,000 kcal per day.

Meanwhile the high/low carbohydrate controversy rages on. Some experts such as Dr.Bonci of the University of Pittsburgh and the American Dietetic Association advocate following a high-carbohydrate diet with a low fat intake, claiming that "body fat loss is no faster on the high-protein diets. There is a little more rapid water weight loss, the loss you see on the scale." Professor Gail Frank of California State University goes further, suggesting that high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets encourage ‘roller-coaster’ patterns of dieting. However proponents of high-protein diets say that controlling carbohydrate intake is the key to success as this ‘switches’ on metabolic pathways that encourage the burning of fat to produce energy. Others are concerned that even short-term deficits in carbohydrates can be bad as the brain depends upon carbohydrates for energy, and that a low carbohydrate diet reduces mood, energy and even brain function.

The future of dietetics

Whether promising new diets such as the HiPaCC diet diet are going to provide a longer term solution to the epidemic of weight related issues remains unclear. However a wave of litigation from those who have lost their money and their health following the doctrine of low carbohydrate diets is increasingly likely, especially as new research continues to associate such diets with heart disease, ketosis and other weighty conditions. Meanwhile the $100 billion diet market will continue to grow along with Western waistlines, and a fresh wave of health clubs, treatments and drugs will soon appear. Fast food companies may still be sued for making products that stimulate appetite to further encourage consumption, a siege that the litigants will most likely lose.

Carbohydrates will remain the battle ground for the immediate future, and major supermarket chains like the UK’s Tesco have even announced that they will begin to label all of their own brands with their glycemic index values, the scale that ranks carbohydrates according to their impact upon blood glucose levels. Other authorities including Dr.Rhodri Walters, co-creator of the HiPaCC diet call for ‘moderation and a return to the sanity of balanced, healthy and sustainable diet programs’. One thing is for sure, the war of the waistline is far from over….