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I was standing in the express line at my local Acme the other day when I noticed that Women’s World promised to help me lose an ungodly amount of weight on the “Da Vinci Code Diet.” I was only able to glance at the article before it was my turn to pay for my three lunch-sized organic fruit juices, just enough time to see “phi” and “Golden ratio” and think, there can not possibly be a Da Vinci Code Diet.

And of course there isn’t, because that would be blatent copyright infringment. It’s just the Da Vinci Diet, and a Portland baker is about to take you people to the cleaners for what you did to his business when Atkins convinced you to be complete douchebags about carbs:

A baker who lost half his business to the low-carb craze has written a book based on the mathematical principles of the Golden Ratio, a formula used by Leonardo Da Vinci and made popular in the best seller, “The Da Vinci Code.”

Stephen Lanzalotta created what he called the “Da Vinci Diet” in response to the decline in bread consumption brought on by the popularity of the Atkins Diet. The diet consists mostly of Mediterranean foods, including bread, fish, cheese, vegetables, meat, nuts and wine.

Phi is one of those numbers, like e and pi that pops up again and again and is quite useful. The advantage that phi has over e and pi (besides, of course, it’s association with the currently bitchin’ Lenoardo Da Vinci) is that most people don’t ever see it. Unlike circles and exponents, really the only thing to do with phi in algebra or calc 1 is to show you a picture of a seashell with some boxes superimposed on it and go, look, phi. Cool, huh?

This means that phi never had a chance to piss you off. The Golden Ratio Diet will succeed where the Circumference Diet and the Exponential Decay Diet failed because while Math Is Hard (TM), Seashells Are Pretty.

His biggest sellers are now combination plates — typically bread or polenta, cheese, olives and braised chard or Italian coleslaw — featuring the basic mix of his diet: 20 percent protein, 52 percent carbohydrates and 28 percent fat.

Lanzalotta said his dietary regimen has helped him maintain a fit 160 pounds without giving up on the foods he loves.

Go play with this for awhile. Down at the bottom of the page there is a table which gives you appropriate ranges for the amounts of fat, protien and carbs you should likely be consuming. Let me know if the reccomendations from the government fall too far outside this magic ratio.

Now pause and reflect on a culture that doesn’t particularly like art or math or moderation but somehow is willing to fork over money (or so WB hopes, to the tune of a “six figure advance”) to be tricked by a fancy math term used by an artist into following the dietary reccomendations offered freely on the internet by both the FDA and people like the Nutrition Data people.

“What? Eat a balanced diet? That’s too hard. I’m gonna try this here Da Vinci Diet that I got at Border’s for 11.99. It says here that I have to adjust the amounts of different foods I eat to fit this ratio so they’re like, in balance and stuff. Maybe they’ll explain what that means when I get the DVD.”

Oh, it makes my head hurt.

His now famous Vitruvian Man drawing (represented on THE DIET CODE cover) of spread-eagled arms and legs bound by a circle revived a symbol tracing back 6000 years to Mesopotamia: the pentacle.
The ancient Greek mathematical school of Pythagoras (often credited with the earliest documented use of the Golden Ratio) saw such perfection in the pentacle they called it Hygeia, or health. It’s five elements even comprise the component recipe for bread! In medieval lore the pentacle stood for the five chivalric virtues of the Grail knights.

What does this have to do with weight loss? Everything!

In exploring the reaches of the Golden Ratio, Leonardo essentially applied ancient wisdom, revivifying ideas form even before the ancient Greeks and Egyptians….Now this universal math forms the foundation of The Diet Code, the diet most closely aligned with the human body, a diet designed the same way your body is – a diet as efficient and effective, as it is beautiful.

Remember kids: Ancient wisdom is better than modern guidelines, even when they’re exactly the same. It’s the same voodoo that makes anything Eastern (like tai chi or Buddism or anime) automatically better than anything Western - even the bastardized Westernified modernized Eastern or ancient wisdom is better than this.