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Just yesterday Nora Ephron (the genius behind When Harry Met Sally and many other brilliant films) wrote a piece in the Guardian on growing old etc.  She clearly loves food and life and at the age of 70 looks pretty fantastic.

The best bit in the piece was a short rant on egg white omelettes. Nora mentions a new book on healthy diets and it is likely that she was talking about the new book by Gary Taubes which explains why low fat, high carb diets are a road to misery and poor health.  She quite rightly reminds us that food is to be enjoyed and that there is nothing enjoyable about an egg white omelette.

Most people I know that are slim after the age of 40 fall into one of the following categories:-

• They are super fit and don’t have a day job so have bags of time to exercise intensely for 3 hours a day
• They are naturally thin and frankly couldn’t get fat even if they tried
• They don’t eat starch and sugar.

Life is unfair but it is good to know that Nora also knows the secret to enjoying good health in later life.

Happy New Year!

Or should I throw myself under the proverbial bus after the miserable message from the Health Minister that we are going to solve obesity in the UK by handing out money off vouchers to buy low fat high starch food?

 Dear,  oh dear. When you have the World Health Organisation actually saying that it is wrong for a government to endorse a low fat message I am even more convinced that a legal action becomes more likely. 

I had hoped after the Harvard announcement that the simple solution to obesity was cutting out sugar and starch – that someone somewhere in Whitehall might have, at very least, decided to look into this. Is it really that much to ask? 

Later on this month or in early February there will be another NHS report which will show rising obesity numbers and show that more overweight people are becoming obese. It will show that nothing appears to be working and it will blame the individuals for being lazy because that is easier than asking difficult questions.

 Let us brace ourselves for another year of eat less do more and watch Rome burn.

With every new year comes new resolutions and I am sure that many people right now are trying to work out how they are going to improve their health profile in 2011. Do they try and eat a little less and do a bit more? Perhaps the answer is to join the gym or perhaps buy a smaller plate to eat from?   What is clear is that most people will go back to the same old same old – count a few calories and hope that by some miracle that calorie counting will work.  It would be a miracle for calorie counting to work if you are several stone overweight.

But while loads of people burn cash joining the gym or calorie counting clubs it was great to hear two leading cardiologists talking about obesity and in particular the connection between carbohydrates and obesity. Finally we get some science on the radio.  If you want to listen to the interview go to:-

http://radio.theheart.org/bob-harrington-show/2010/12/10/31-atkins-diet-obesity-and-cardiovascular-disease-risk-with-dr-eric-westman

In deed if you follow this link you can listen to the conversation and you may even find that at the end of it you will agree with Dr Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health that :-

“If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we
would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases.”

Is it not remarkable that whilst the best brains in the world all believe that the issue is starch and sugar the average person is still being told to count calories and reduce fat?

Happy New Year

After a long silence, as I focused my attention on some internal issues, it has come to my notice that the weight watchers team (wherever they hangout) have finally noticed that the issue is not how much you eat but what you eat.  Last year WW woke up to the well known science ( which has been around since the 70s ) that protein keeps you fuller for longer.

So for the many thousands of people, who have religiously attended their meetings and counted their points, but have failed to either lose weight or keep the weight off it is a time to celebrate. It wasn’t your fault. The fault is entirely with WW but what is extraordinary is that WW seem to have no difficulty explaining this to their audience. This was also true when they introduced the idea of protein into their diet.   I didn’t hear a single sorry or apology over the weekend as they launched their new programme. I know that I would be pretty pissed off if I had found out that the theory behind the WW proposition has never been properly tested and didn’t work.

This WW announcement takes me to the continuing theme of responsibility and integrity. The diet industry is absolutely teaming companies and people who feel no sense of responsibility or integrity. From snake oil to church halls this market is full of amateurs.  Obesity is not and never has been a simple problem which can be solved by eating a little less and doing a bit more. It is a biochemists nightmare and pro points are clearly not the solution.

In this month’s edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition there is a really good Editorial commentating on a piece of research recently published which shows , surprise surprise that the biggest hazard to health is not Fat but processed carbs. This will come as no surprise to the average low carber but to many this is news. The study is large and has a long duration and provides direct evidence that substituting high GI value carbs for saturated fats actually increases heart disease risk. This article and research was published in the same month that SIGN decided to publish its guidelines on healthy eating for Scotland. Well guess what , the Scottish Government in its brilliance have decided that notwithstanding the published science that they will continue to pursue and healthy eating campaign that recommends high carb / low fat. No wonder that Scotland is the fattest place in the UK.

While all this continues we have the “experts” in the Food Standards Authority mulling over the issue of carbohydrates and their potential impact on heart health. I do hope that they bother to read this study or some of the other studies that support the argument that the biggest problem in our diet is not the fat but the carbs and in particular starch and sugar.

I suspect that by the time the FSA complete their investigation and decide that in fact the carbs are the problem, we will all be a lot fatter or dead. Meanwhile while these slow and rather desperate organisations rummage through old studies and old theories the smart thinkers are way ahead. There are studies now being published which show that low carb diets help epilepsy; PCOS; cancer and many other ailments but we are light years away from this being recognised by your average dietician.

Don’t hold your breath!

It is so disappointing to sit through these election campaigns and no one has brought up the real issue that affects all of us in some way – health. I am not talking about money for nurses or beds for patients but basic health issues.

According to a survey by Diabetes UK in 2008, diabetes costs UK plc £1,000,000 per hour! Yes that is £1,000,000 per hour which adds up to £8 billion per year or £4billion if you don’t count sleeping hours. These estimates don’t include the cost of pre diabetes or obesity. We have all been told that the numbers of diabetics are about to escalate and that will increase the costs to UK plc.

Diabetes can be managed with diet alone but unfortunately the diet that manages diabetes is a low starch low sugar diet and not the eatwell plate promoted by the government. As I have frequently noted in other blogs it is the eatwell plate that is causing the obesity crises.

One very easy win to reduce our deficit and improve the lives of many millions in the UK would be to switch our diet away from starch and sugar. No investment required. No job cuts and no tax. Just a change to the shopping basket.

Good morning
Over the weekend I was delighted to read an editorial piece in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Frank B Hu focusing on the publication of the significant study by Jakobsen et al comparing the association between the intake of saturated fats and carbohydrates. This is the largest epidemiological study ever done looking at the replacement of saturated fats with good and bad carbohydrates and is also notable for its long duration.
To converts like myself the outcome of the study brings no surprises and shows that you actually increase your risk of heart disease etc when you replace saturated fats with carbohydrates.
What Frank Hu very kindly points out, in his editorial summary, is that the low fat carbohydrate based diet (approximately 70% carbs) which is traditional in Asian populations has the potential to cause havoc in a western population. The Asian communities are generally very active and lean in the first place. Therefore the high carb low fat diet is fine. Mix this diet with a passive overweight community and you create an obesity diabetes crises and the reason for this is insulin and insulin resistance.
So the simplistic idea that we should look at thin people around the world and copy their diet is based on a lack of sophisticated thinking and quality biochemistry knowledge.
Let us all hope ( especially those that are obese or diabetic) that this small editorial piece is the first of many shouting from the roof tops that the problem in our diet today is not the fat or the protein but the starch and sugar!

The latest research out of the US suggests that dieting cant work because of the hormone cortisol which is released in stressful situations and causes the body to max out on glucose conversion. This is really not that surprising as stress is linked to our fight / flight survival mode which means that when we are in a stressful situation our body is designed to either make a run for it or fight both of which require energy and both of which will stimulate other hormonal responses. The other hormonal responses are a release of adrenalin and insulin. So when you are stressed your body will turn as much food into glucose as quickly as possible so that it is ready for the fight or flight. If you then sit down as we do and tap away on a keyboard the excess glucose, created by the release of cortisol, will then stimulate a release of insulin which will in turn ensure that you create fat. And so it goes on.
Anyone that has read my blogs before will know that I am definitely in the camp that sees insulin as a critical stimulant of our obesity epidemic and that for many people in the UK eating less and doing more simply won’t work.
Accepting that cortisol has a role to play in weight management is a step in the right direction because it shows that the body is far more complex than the silly notion that a body responds simply to calorific intake. The human body has evolved over thousands of years into a very complex unique machine.
In reality cortisol doesn’t stop all diets working but it will stop low calorie diets working because they do not deal with hormonal response. A really smart researcher should have thought about that before they completed the research.

An article published in the Sunday Times this weekend touched upon the latest big idea out of our beloved government through the Food Standards Agency. Their big idea is to follow the NY idea of asking food outlets to provide calorie guidance on retail / restaurant food.
The big question to ask oneself is this? Does calorie counting work? Clearly the authors of the article published last week thought otherwise . Are they right? Could the government be wrong?
Whilst the basic idea of eating less and doing more seems totally logical the logic does not account for two very real sciences – physics and bio chemistry. The world looks flat but isn’t.
Unless you drop your calorific intake to starvation levels (Very Low Calorie Diets) there is simply no evidence to show that calorie reduction, as recommended by government, will work. In fact the published peer reviewed science in this subject shows quite the contrary. When I wrote Big Fat Lies I had hoped to engage the government in a discussion on this topic to discover what piece of research I had missed that showed calorie counting as effective in weight loss. Unfortunately the only response I got from the Food Standards Authority was an attack on my status as a lawyer. It is unbelievable that the government continue to peddle this nonsense when there is more than enough evidence to show that it doesn’t work. Here is a short list of reasons why calorie counting is total rubbish:-
• Reduce calories and you reduce your metabolic rate
• Measuring food by reference to calories doesn’t tell you about the quality of the food
• The key is to burn fat and not muscle – calorie counting is more likely to reduce muscle rather than fat
• The rules of thermodynamics show that higher calories can mean more fat burn if you eat the right type of food
• Linking food to numbers is a very bad way to show people how to value food.
• Calorie counting will create a dependency on mass manufactured food.
These are just a few of a long list of reasons why calorie counting is a complete waste of time and perhaps explains why we are all fatter now than we were in the 70s before calorie counting started.
We need to start a campaign which actually works across experts who are united in one message which is stop the calorie counting and start looking at real nutrition.

A big thank you to Dr John Briffa who has responded to a ridiculous blog on the Food Standards Agency web site by Dr Wadge.
Dr Wadge decided to attack Big Fat Lies on the basis of my involvement in golower and the fact I am a lawyer. He does not even begin to challenge the real basis of Big Fat Lies which is science.
Turning to the issue over conflict of interest I suspect that the general public would find it far more worrying that Unilever sit on all the scientific committees. That is a true conflict of interest. Yes I started golower but this is not advertised or promoted in the book which is focusing on science and not product.
The whole problem with the current guidelines on “healthy eating” is that they are not based on robust evidence and experts in evidence are lawyers and not doctors or scientists. The reason I wrote Big Fat Lies is because the evidence supporting a low calorie low fat diet to manage obesity is poor and would not stand up to interrogation in court. It is also true that many of the statements made on the Food Standards Agency website are misleading and fundamentally wrong. If an expert makes misleading or wrong statements which are relied upon then they are breaching a duty of care which exists in law. That is why a lawyer is just the right person to attack the government agency which is actually fuelling the obesity crises by publishing misleading and wrong information.
The shame of Dr Wadge is that he did not confront the science in Big Fat Lies and for that reason it shows that either he doesn’t understand the science or doesn’t know it and in either case he is just another so called expert talking total and utter nonsense with complete disregard for the damage he is doing to the general public who are getting fatter and fatter sicker and sicker..