A battle is being fought in the kitchen and the supermarket. The battle is about what we eat, and some of the heaviest guns are deployed by western governments which bombard us with health warnings, earnest advice and outright rules. Some of them ban unpasteurized dairy products, others refuse to let their citizens eat beef on the bone. If it were up to our governments, we would all live for ever. ‘You are,’ says the old adage, ‘what you eat’, and authority is determined that we should all munch our way into perpetual health.
Our mothers told us to eat up our greens, and that advice now haunts our adulthood. Not just our greens (preferably organic) must be eaten, but wholemeal breads, lentils, fruit and wholesome grains. Government mandates food labelling so we can be sure our diet is low-fat, low-calorie, low-sodium and high-fibre. It is not hard to detect a gender divide in these food wars. Broadly, he likes meat, she believes meat is bad and red meat is worse. Her diet is ‘healthier’, and no one seems to be pointing out how often that word dictates poverty of choice. But so what? Where once we chose our food for enjoyment and taste, now we are made to feel guilty if we do not regard our diet as a lifelong therapy. Eat up your greens, count your calories and beware of fat.
‘We do a lot of vegetables, and a lot of fibre and a lot of fruit,’ says Mrs Hillary Clinton. ‘That includes the President.’1
‘He always eat cheeseburgers,’ says Mrs Lucille Robinson (cook at Doe’s Eat Place, Little Rock, Arkansas) of Bill Clinton. ‘He’s just a burger lover.’2
President Clinton, like many other men, likes red meat, but Hillary Clinton, like many other women, shuns it. The drop in the consumption of red meat began in the late 1960s, and by the mid-80s it had dropped by half among well-educated, high-income American women. Even among low-income women it had dropped by a third.3 The same trend occurred in Britain where, by the health-conscious 90s, 43% of the population were eating less meat and most of those were women.4 A survey by the American government reveals that one woman in seven between the ages of 19 and 50 now avoids eating beef altogether.5 Given the chance, she will also make sure that her man does not eat red meat, and, institutionally at least, women do control men’s menus. The American Dietetic Association says that 97% of its 68,000 members are women, while women make up 98% of the British Dietetic Association.6 No fewer than thirty-two out of every thirty-three practising dieticians are female, so it is hardly suprising that the diet revolution is led by women. Red meat is out, wholegrains are in.
‘Where are these dieticians at?’ asks Anne.
‘A goat feeds and a man dines,’ says Bill. ‘And nutritionists cannot tell the difference.’
So what he likes (red meat) and what she provides (salad) are frequently different, and she usually wins the contest, for women, on the whole, have control of the family diet. It is also women who take a greater interest in the latest advice about nutrition in magazines and newspapers. Men are more sceptical, but a woman wants to keep her man healthy and see that he eats ‘well’. That means he must eat like her, and she justifies the change of his diet on the grounds of his health. Hard to argue with that, unless of course she has misunderstood what is going on. Has she?
It’s entirely possible she has, for there is little published material on the different food needs of the sexes. Texts on nutrition make little or no allowance for sexual dimorphism (dimorphism is the occurrence within a species of two distinct types of individual; ‘sexual dimorphism’ is the current jargon for male–female differences). In fact most of the male–female distinctions in food requirements have only recently become apparent, and very few of them are factored into current dietary recommendations. It is time, then, to distinguish what science has so skilfully detected. Time, perhaps, to rethink his menu, and the catalogue which follows is intended to provoke just such a reappraisal. It is a list of observed differences between the sexes, differences not only in how their bodies deal with ingested food, but why they might need different kinds of food in the first place.
First, though, we have to offer a health warning of our own. This chapter is not a discourse on dietetics or nutrition. It is an analysis of external social change set against what science has discovered about the inner nature of the sexes, especially the male, and the finding that the food he needs is not always the same as the food she needs. Sauce for the goose in not always suitable for the gander, because each has distinct metabolic mechanisms with different implications for diet, and the health police who increasingly hedge our foods with prohibitions do not yet understand the differences.
Men can lose weight by exercise alone
The normal woman cannot lose weight by exercise alone but must also go on a diet; this factor probably makes women much more sensitive than men about their food intake. Men can lose weight by increasing their physical activity even if what they eat remains the same. Research at the Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, found that: ‘Unfortunately, while there is good evidence for such an effect in men, there is little if any evidence for a similar effect in women. Weight loss with exercise does not readily occur in women unless accompanied by caloric restriction.’7
At the University of Limburg at Maastricht in Holland, 16 men and 16 women were put through a five-month endurance training programme and their average daily metabolic rate – the amount of energy they each needed to keep their body functioning – was measured. All 32 of the subjects increased their physical activity by 60%, but the effects on the sexes were quite different. The men’s metabolic rate increased markedly: at the end of the 20 weeks they needed an extra 800 calories of food a day just to maintain their body weight, but no such change was detected in the women. The increased rate of exercise was burning the calories off men, but not off women, whose metabolic rate scarcely changed.8 Life is not fair. A man can jog away the pounds, but a woman cannot. She has to diet too.
It has long been known that men have less fat and more muscle than women. The average male body is one-seventh fat (15%), while fat makes up more than a quarter of the average woman’s body (27%). Weight for weight, she has 80% more body fat than he does. If she tries to get her body fat below 12%, by diet or extreme pysical excercise, normal body functions are impaired. For the male, that lower limit for fat is 3%.9
Equally striking is the sexual difference in musculature. In men 40% of body weight consists of muscle. Women have only about half this amount (23%). In the adolescent female the fat to muscle ratio increases as she adds fat to the pelvic area and breasts (her breasts contributing only four per cent of that total). In puberty the male growth spurt is accompanied by a hormonally stimulated jump in muscular development which typically doubles his physical strength.
Normal exercise increases the male’s metabolic rate. He then needs more energy from food to maintain a constant weight. The Lenox Hill Hospital study found that the female metabolic rate is little affected by exercise, so her exercise regime will not require more food. Nearly every man jack can lose weight by following the Jane Fonda Workout, but Jane can’t. A possible reason for the personal effectiveness of her own regime is found in Ms Fonda’s admission that her weight-reducing efforts had ‘been accompanied by bouts of bulimia’.10
A survey by Cosmopolitan magazine found that a quarter of its readers were perpetually on a diet, and that one-third of those dieters vomited to make themselves lose weight.11 That incidence of bulimia nervosa seems high; in the general population the figure is about one young woman in 33, while the occurrence of this disorder in males is a mere one-tenth of that in females.12
Women are fond of reminding us that food can spend ‘a moment on the lips and a lifetime on the hips’. For them that is true, but for men it is not. They are different.
Men
