Waiting tediously in a dentist’s office, I spied a women’s fitness magazine cover article titled: “Are Carbs Outright Evil?” I admittedly did not read the article, and can assume that the spunky title was just coaxing readers to get wise to carbohydrate’s role in diet and exercise. I remained sitting but jump-started a spiral of curious questioning. Is there some satisfaction in allowing objects to be “evil,” or “killers,” or “irresistible?” Not only do we tend to describe objects like the carb as seeming human, termed “personification,” we go so far as to allow them to take on human feelings and behaviors, termed “anthropomorphism” (a distinction of word choice which makes the difference between a seductive looking donut and a donut that grabs your face and forces a kiss).
On one hand, characterizing a carb as an adversary is a neat way to provide a quick, commonly recognized point of reference when making dieting decisions. It also serves as a point of pride or a symbol of strength when its nefariousness is overcome. Low-carb weight-loss success stories owe part of their dazzle to the implication that this individual was able to vanquish a dietary foe, like the Shape Magazine feature on Kelly Espitia’s transformation from 271 to 155 lbs using the Paleo diet (“How One Woman”, n.d.). Like carbs, other objects have been personified as villains, including high fructose corn syrup. It appears in a Change.org campaign requesting an outright ban (the site that compiles online signatures to petition powerful groups like the U.S. House of Representatives), calling it the “enemy” of health (Skelton, n.d.).
Looking from another angle, endowing the carb, or any other object, with enough power to shish kabob diets and annihilate waste lines allows failure to be out of one’s control. After all, one carbohydrate is only an itty bitty biological molecule made up of letters (CH2O)n, which mean something to the scientifically inclined. You can’t see them with the naked eye, and they can be found in places other than Wonder Bread, like apples, sweet potatoes and low-fat yogurt (which are all considered healthy sources). Psychological researchers explored this issue by putting faces on caloric cookies before presenting them to dieters, versus blank cookies, and found that the anthropomorphic nature of the products diminished participant’s use of self-control because they expressing feeling less conflicted when deciding to consume them (Hur, Minjung & Hofmann, 2015). In other words, making the cookies more adorable and human-like allowed the dieting participants to feel less guilty about breaking their long-term goal of dieting. The object with human qualities offered an excuse for giving up, and controlling willpower is a hefty skill to give a cookie.
It seems that the carb is a great example of something that has been anthropomorphized negatively in the national psyche, because it is almost never portrayed as an adorable, happy-faced cookie, but rather as a diet-murderer during conversation and popular literature. Perhaps it can be argued that allowing the little carb to hold such great power is advantageous, by alerting us quickly to potentially unhealthy foods or giving us pride when we are dietarily successful. However, thinking in a larger sense, is it not possible that acceptance for the playbook of the anthropomorphized carb will logically lead to other things gaining human-like power? One must only look so far as the Joe Camel mascot used by Camel Cigarettes, beginning in the late 1980’s, featuring a camel cartoon dressed up like a slick, cool man in motorcycle garb. Anthropomorphizing the mascot, even including a name and gender, was found to be an effective sales tactic for an audience of young children who identified with Joe’s human-like and fantastic appearance; discontinued in 1997 at the behest of the American Medical Association (AMA) for this reason (Elliot, 1991; 1997). Whether giving non-human items smiley faces or murderous thoughts, allowing inanimate things to have too much power can divert attention away from the ultimate decision-maker within. Carbs cannot kill a diet unless you let them, but your recognition of their evil powers may leave you sapped of willpower when choosing kale over potato chips. You can stand up to the killer carb, because in relation to the carb, you are the only one who can stand up.
