Bray would routinely equate the carbohydrate-restricted diet to every fad diet that came along—the grapefruit diet, the banana diet, the ice-cream diet. But when he testified before McGovern’s subcommittee in 1977 and described McGovern’s Dietary Goals of a carbohydrate-rich diet for the entire nation as “highly commendable,” he also submitted as part of his testimony a two-hundred-page report by the British Medical Research Council entitled Research on Obesity, apparently ignoring the fact that the report contradicted his own testimony. Published the same year, it referred to carbohydrate restriction as the diet “commonly prescribed by general practitioners” and considered it more effective and certainly more worthy of discussion than the prescription of diets that depended on restricting calories. The report also noted that the best weight-reduction results on record were those reported by Robert Kemp and Denis Craddock, both British practitioners who prescribed carbohydrate-restricted diets to their patients and published their results, Kemp in the medical journals and Craddock in Obesity and Its Management.

When a new diet book was published every few years touting yet another physician’s variation on carbohydrate restriction, it was treated by Bray and his colleagues as the ultimate evidence that the diet itself didn’t work. “If such diets are truly successful,” asked Van Itallie in his AMA denunciation of Atkins, “why then, do they fade into obscurity within a relatively short period of time only to be resurrected some years later in slightly different guise and under new sponsorship. Moreover, despite the claims of universal and painless success for such diets, no nationwide decrease in obesity has been reported.” Of course, the efficacy of the diet could explain the continued popularity of such books. The diet had survived more or less continuously for over a century and had certainly thrived since the end of World War II. That the medical and nutrition establishments refused to take it seriously, and had even taken to advocating carbohydrate-rich diets instead, could explain the continued high prevalence of obesity.

This nihilistic argument became a mantra. “The evergrowing list of diets are an affirmation of the fact that no diet yet described is by itself a solution to the problem of obesity,” Bray said in his 1977 testimony to McGovern’s Senate committee. When Hirsch gave the review talk on obesity treatments at the Fourth International Congress on Obesity in 1981, he said: “The proliferation and seemingly endless concern with diets for the treatment of obesity suggests that this search is more motivated by financial rewards for the promoters rather than by an earnest desire to provide healthy and safe diets.”