Bringing Our Bad Eating To Book
Sun Herald
Sunday January 22, 2006
The Great American Detox Diet, by Alex Jamieson, is published by Pan Macmillan.
Her boyfriend became a star when he tried to live on McDonald's alone, but it's Alex Jamieson, the vegan in the wings, who's having the last laugh, Hannah Pool writes. IF YOU are one of the millions of people who saw Alex Jamieson's boyfriend Morgan Spurlock scoff his way through a mountain of McDonald's in his film Super Size Me, you probably remember her as "the boring vegan girlfriend". While Spurlock goofed around and made us laugh, Jamieson was in the background cooking lentils, munching carrot sticks and telling him eating all that junk could kill him. She was the only one who didn't seem shocked by just how quickly his health deteriorated once he started his McDonald's regime. The day before the McDonald's diet starts, Spurlock sits down to an organic vegan "last supper" of tofu and vegetable filo tart, lovingly made by Jamieson. By the end of day two, he is throwing up and she is less than cheery. Later in the film she is telling him she thinks that meat is as addictive as heroin. Jamieson, 31, has been vegan since her mid-20s. "I have to admit I haven't been 100 per cent vegan for the past six years," she says. "In the last couple, we've travelled to 20 something countries; it's tough to be vegan in Brazil or Iceland but, well, I do my best." Tall, beautiful and with a radiant complexion, Jamieson looks nothing like she does on screen (rather stern and pallid) and nothing like the sickly vegans of popular imagination. She is also much funnier and less pious than viewers worldwide were led to believe. Since it was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 (where Spurlock was awarded best director), Super Size Me has made more than $US35 million ($47 million) and been nominated for an Oscar. Throughout the film, Jamieson comes across as more than a little contemptuous of the whole project. On day 21 of the diet, when Spurlock wakes in the night with severe chest pains, she begs him to stop. Later, when a doctor tells him he has turned his liver into pate, a condition usually associated with long-term alcohol abuse, she is there again, this time on the telephone, telling him she loves him and doesn't want him to hurt himself. One of the most memorable moments of the film is when Jamieson, straight to camera, complains that Spurlock is having trouble in the bedroom department. "Saturated fats are impeding the blood flow to his penis," she says primly. In short, he's having trouble getting an erection, and "when he does", Jamieson adds, "I have to be on top, and he gets tired easily." None of this endears her to the viewer. "They always pick the clips where I'm at my worst," Jamieson says in her own defence. "People were writing into the message boards saying, 'She's a bitch - you should leave her.' Come on. They only put in the parts where I'm complaining. I am such a good girlfriend, you wouldn't even believe it." At the start, Spurlock and Jamieson made a pact. She would go along with his "gastrointestinal form of hara-kiri" if he made her one promise: after the experiment was over, he'd eat whatever she put in front of him, no matter how green and leafy. Almost as soon as he started on his McBinge, she was devising a detox diet for him to follow the instant the madness was over. This has since morphed into a book, The Great American Detox Diet, with a foreword by Spurlock and a promise that following Jamieson's advice will help you "lose weight, increase energy levels and undo the damage to your body - in just eight weeks!" So was the whole thing a bit of a set-up? The vegan chef whose boyfriend goes on a meat fest and just happens to be cured by her "specially devised detox". You've seen the movie, now do the detox. "It was kind of funny that the detox was even in the film," Jamieson says. She was borrowing Spurlock's office to type up the detox and the cameraman, Scott Ambrozy, decided to shoot her at work - a stroke of fortune that meant they could put on the cover of the book "as featured in the hit movie Super Size Me". After the film came out, Jamieson was bombarded by people who wanted to detox "the way Morgan did". "So many people wanted to know. After the movie came out, Morgan said, 'Wow! Maybe you should put some of that in the book I'm writing.' So I started to and then we both realised it had to be its own book - there was just too much," Jamieson said.And so The Great American Detox Diet was born. A few pages in, it becomes clear Jamieson is serious about this stuff. If anything, she's more serious than Spurlock. The film simply gave her a wider platform from which to preach what she had already been practising. While Spurlock attacks the fast-food industry in general and McDonald's in particular, Jamieson has a much trickier target, namely the standard American diet. For a diet book, it's pretty political. The detox is broken down into an eight-week plan because that is how long it took Spurlock's body functions and blood levels to get back to normal after his McDonald's diet. This is not a "cold turkey" detox. It's slow and steady, the emphasis being on changing your lifestyle rather than getting into a party frock. Week one, for example, is dedicated to increasing your water intake to at least 10 glasses a day ("Mild dehydration is one of the great plagues of modern life"), week two is "rethinking our love affair with sugar" and on week three it's caffeine. ("We're addicted to this stuff, and I mean addicted, as caffeine works on the same parts of the brain as amphetamines, cocaine and heroin.") Dairy products, food additives, artificial sweeteners and refined carbohydrates are also considered the devil's work. Jamieson can't quite believe we pump all this "crap" into our bodies and no one has noticed how sick it's making us. "We're miserable," she tells me, over a vegan lunch of sea vegetables, beans and brown rice (a much tastier combination than you'd think). "People are more sick now than they have ever been. Yes, we have a longer lifespan, but we're also taking more and more drugs than ever." . She has a disconcerting habit of pointing to our plates and making grand statements: "These sea veggies are the most nutritious food on the planet. They've got so many minerals and nutrients and stuff in them, it's crazy. If everybody was eating a little bit of this every day, it'd be great - maybe we wouldn't need so many supplements, wouldn't have cravings for all these other foods." It's all pretty sensible stuff, but occasionally Jamieson sounds as if she's practising for a sixth-form debate: "We're all being fed a bunch of bullshit, a bunch of lies about how we should be healthy, and the people who are telling us are the people who are going to make a lot of money out of selling us drugs and stuff that we don't need." Jamieson emails me later to clarify a point she made about those on food assistance. She'd been talking about her recent experience on Spurlock's 30 Days television project, during which they lived on the minimum wage for 30 days: "We went to a few food banks to get food assistance and the quality of the food is terrible. We were given whole cakes, sodas, candy and canned vegetables - that had sugar in them! Yes, I think when you're starving you just want calories and, yes, I'm glad these [food] programs exist - but shouldn't they get better-quality food? Can't this country, supposedly the best and richest in the world, provide for its citizens better?" This argument highlights a few of the problems with detoxing: it's expensive, time-consuming and middle class. You won't find quinoa, buckwheat and those super-nutrient sea vegetables in a pile-'em-high-sell-'em-cheap supermarket. Even if you did, you'd have to be earning a fair amount to make them a substantial part of your diet, especially if you wanted to cook them with organic vegetables. Jamieson takes the criticism head on, fully accepting not everyone can afford to do their weekly shopping at a farmers' market. "There is a trickle-down effect," she says. "The more the middle class takes a hold of it, the lower the prices get. Hopefully, organic is going to become more affordable." In the meantime, she'd love to write a book on healthy eating on a budget. It is impossible to read The Great American Detox Diet without questioning your own eating habits and Jamieson's message stays with you. A couple of days after our lunch, her words on sugar still fresh in my mind, I found myself rejecting a choc ice in favour of a banana - no mean feat, I can tell you. I also go from thinking veganism is nothing short of a cult to thinking that perhaps there's something in it.
© 2006 Sun Herald