Demise of the diet

Published in The Grocer 14th January 2012

Shedding and regaining weight is a national pastime. Would-be slimmers blame themselves for lacking willpower and self-control, but might the explanation for failure lie elsewhere? Dr John Briffa is the shrewdest, most sensible nutrition authority around, and his erudite, yet highly readable new book, Escape The Diet Trap, mounts a detailed, science-based challenge to orthodox nutrition advice to ‘eat less and exercise more’.

Dr Briffa argues powerfully that low-fat, calorie-controlled dieting makes sustained weight loss virtually impossible. He mounts a deeply persuasive, evidence-based critique of calorie counting, and the notion, fostered for decades by the nutrition establishment and the self-interested processed food industry, that it’s total calories that matter, not the form in which those calories come. In fact, he says, different types of food have different fattening potential because of their impact on key fat storage hormones, insulin and leptin.

Dr Briffa performs a great service to legions of ‘failed’ dieters by marshalling convincing evidence of how conventional dieting emphasises foods that actually encourage the body to lay down fat. It causes the body to ‘defend’ its weight and hang onto fat through a variety of mechanisms. Over time, when food is restricted, the body compensates by down-regulating the metabolism.

A controlled, forensic sense of outrage permeates Escape The Diet Trap, with justification. Dr Briffa illustrates convincingly how governments and health professionals have dispensed duff diet advice for decades, promoting a formula that dooms many to a life of excess weight. “I have met countless determined and disciplined individuals who just can’t seem to crack their weight issue by ‘doing the right thing’” says Briffa. Why? They have been sold a pup, dutifully cutting back on the amount they eat and upping their exercise in a fruitless, often counterproductive effort to shed pounds.

Briffa is no less withering when he considers how peddling weight loss ‘solutions’ that are ultimately destined to fail is good for big business. Processed food manufacturers, he says, have exploited the idea that it’s an excess of saturated fat that is fattening to sell us a dizzying array of ‘low-fat’ or ‘fat-reduced’ foods that promise weight loss. Based on sugar and grain, such foods are cheap to produce and offer considerable potential for profit, but are bad new for health.

Escape The Diet Trap is a masterly, forensic deconstruction of current nutritional gospel, a long overdue dish to relish.

Don't fall for the low-cal trick

Published in the Independent 5 September 2011

Don't rush to applaud fast food restaurants for displaying calorie counts on their Big Macmenus. This move, which comes as part of a deal between the Government and the food industry, might look enlightened, but it is no more than a marketing ploy that will yield no rewards for the nation's health.

As legions of dieters can testify, calorie counting is a useless way to lose weight. This is why Weight Watchers, the world's largest diet organisation, recently ditched its long-standing calorie-based points system. Foods can be low-cal, but have a poor nutritional profile. Seen through the calorie lens, popcorn and bagels, for instance, can be mistaken for health foods, eggs, dairy and meat, despite being naturally rich in life-sustaining macro and micro nutrients, can look like dietary demons. However, the finger of blame for obesity increasingly points not at whole foods containing natural fats, but at processed foods laden with refined carbohydrates and sugar, which rapidly turn into body fat.

The whole calorie theory already looks like the last half century's bankrupt nutritional paradigm. But it has served junk food barons well, creating a bonanza for profitable value-added processed foods and low-grade convenience meals. The sooner we wise up to this, the better.

Saturated fats are not the enemy

Published in The Grocer 8th October 2011

Now that the Danish government has imposed a tax on foods with more than 2.5 per cent saturated fat, we can expect demands for similar legislation in the UK. This would delight the dietary establishment, which has been parroting the anti-sat fat gospel for half a century without feeling the need to review it in any way. But such a tax would be nonsense. The truth is that there is no sound evidence implicating sat fat in increasing rates of obesity and diseases such as heart disease and cancer. Counterintuitive as it may seem, it’s time to revisit the dominant nutritional script.

I recently attended a fascinating conference where independent medics and nutritionists challenged the demonisation of natural fats from animal sources. They demonstrated how time and again, research findings have been tortuously shoehorned to fit the anti-sat fat paradigm, pointing to all the ‘anomalies’ that had never fitted the theory. Why, they asked, when consumption of sat fat has decreased in both the UK and US, are populations there increasingly ill and obese? Might that have something to do with the supposedly healthier, but denatured vegetable fats that we have been actively encouraged to eat? Not just the old lethal trans fats in early margarines, but the industrially refined oils used extensively in processed foods?

The previously underestimated role of vitamin D in supporting good health, especially in sun-challenged northern and eastern European countries, was also centre stage. The best sources of this fat-soluble micronutrient, it was pointed out, are animal foods. When we diligently drink low fat milk or avoid cream and fatty meat, we deprive ourselves of this crucial vitamin.

Speakers and experts were united in seeing much more logic and emerging evidence for the theory that the key cause of obesity and diet-related disease is increased consumption of sugars and starchy carbohydrate foods. These wreak havoc with insulin and blood sugar so encouraging the liver to lay down fat. Ironically, people now eat much more carbohydrate and sugar-rich food because they don’t offend against the ‘no-fat’ rule.

Interestingly, Denmark’s fat attack is at odds with nutritional thinking in Hungary, where the government recently imposed a tax on foods with high levels of sugar and carbs. At least one government understands that the anti-sat fat thesis is melting away like butter spread thinly on hot toast.

Fat chance

Published in Sunday Herald on 30 May 2010

As a child, I loved swimming, but the guaranteed snack that followed it – a poke of chips – was a large part of the attraction.

That was when council pools didn’t have hairdryers, so you stood at a windy bus stop with wet hair and shivered all the way home on a draughty bus. In this context, the salty, fatty chips were viewed wholly positively, almost as health food, actively preventing your body temperature dropping to levels that courted pneumonia. But the chips were also pragmatic. Everyone recognised that swimming, like all sport, makes you hungry. It was accepted that the more you exercised, the more you would want, indeed need, to eat. Now that was sensible.

In recent years, however, public health authorities have tried to deny that exercise creates appetite, and physical activity has become a key plank in government nutrition advice. The Food Standards Agency advises the swelling ranks of weight-watchers up and down the land to “eat less and do more”, cavalierly ignoring the fact that the more you do the latter, the less likely you will be to do the former.

Never mind the glaring logical flaws in the “exercise makes you thin” nostrum, many of us have taken it to heart. We take up aerobic classes, join the gym, run marathons and purchase pedometers. And guess what? We get damn all by way of results because the whole physical-fitness-as-a-means-to-weight-loss package brings with it in-built failure. Who hasn’t felt defeated when they read those statistics about the levels of exercise it takes to burn calories?

You’d have to swim lengths for two hours without stopping then walk briskly up every hill in San Francisco to burn off a croissant, or do 60 to 90 minutes of sustained physical exercise every day just to maintain your weight, that sort of thing. I exaggerate, of course, but then, the whole exercise-your-way-to fitness project is patently ridiculous.

This was, albeit in much more diplomatic terms, what Professor John Speakman, director of the Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences at Aberdeen University, told the Royal Society of Edinburgh last week. He chided nutrition advisers for “deceiving patients into believing one of the benefits of exercise is weight loss, because that is not realistic”.

I congratulate the professor on his frankness and his preparedness to challenge the public health gospel, although this observation is not original. A pile of research is stacking up that questions the exercise-yourself-thin delusion. Apart from exposing the sheer, self-defeating impossibility of burning up sufficient calories through reasonable activity, researchers have flagged up the heightened appetite of people who exercise and the consequent tendency to “reward” yourself with a food treat – cue my steaming hot bag of chips – as hard-earned compensation for all that virtuous activity.

Reasonable exercise is certainly good for general health, but for weight loss, it’s a dead loss, this much is now obvious. So one nutrition orthodoxy has been scrunched up and is heading for the bin, but the mystery of obesity still looms large. Professor Speakman believes that the only way to fight the problem is to tell people to eat less. He may be right, but the emphasis is unduly brutal. Self-denial isn’t motivating. There are legions of people stuck on useless calorie-counting diets, trying really hard to reduce their intake. We should be telling them not to eat less, but to eat differently.

A more productive strategy for addressing our spiralling weight gain would begin with the concept of ­satiety, which is increasingly a focus of research. The more we are satisfied by what we eat, the less we are likely to feel hungry and consequently overeat. Certain nutrients satisfy us better, and for longer than others, namely fat and protein. The public health establishment’s five-decade fatwa on fat must be rethought and with it the simplistic theory that cutting obesity is all about counting calories.

Instead of exhorting us to fill our plates with low-calorie carbohydrates, the Food Standards Agency should be telling us that unless they are of the unrefined, complex sort, our bodies burn them up like newspaper on a fire, leaving us hungry and unsatisfied in no time. Public health authorities need to consider the possibility that many people may need to eat more relatively high calorie, protein and fat-rich foods if they want to be properly satisfied, and ultimately, stay thinner.

I’m not optimistic that the official line will change. The nutrition establishment is embedded in its bankrupt “thinness through fitness” paradigm and a lucrative industry has been built up on the back of it. It’s bonanza time for companies which get rich flogging us membership of private gyms, the latest line in heart rate monitors, coloured, sweetened water masquerading as “sports” drinks, over-priced lycra and sweatshop trainers. This sweaty, hyperactive bandwagon rolls on, defying reason and reality. I feel exhausted, and hungry, just thinking about it.

Bring on the protein and, yes, fat

Published in The Grocer on 26 June 2010

I’m glad that the European Parliament knocked traffic light labelling on the head. This kindergarten scheme was absurdly simplistic and positively misleading. My main objection was its demonisation of time-honoured foods that contain fat and cholesterol, like butter, milk and red meat. Any scheme that fails to distinguish between natural, whole foods and processed foods is useless as far as I’m concerned. The fact that the traffic lights scheme was silent on critical matters like additives and pesticide residues just underlined it inadequacies.

This gut reaction has been reinforced by reading Dr John Briffa’s important new book, Waist Disposal, a book which should be compulsory reading for public health advisers, food campaigners, and anyone who has too much fat round their middle. Briffa is Britain’s most thoughtful, informed and independent commentator on nutrition. Like all sane medics who aren’t in the pocket of Big Sugar, he heartily agrees that sugary foods and drinks are unhealthy and fattening, but thereafter, he blows apart the current “healthy eating” gospel.

While the mantra has been that we should cut out fat and fill our plates with starchy carbohydrate foods, Briffa argues that because they encourage the body to secrete insulin, the chief fat storage hormone, carbohydrates are the prime cause of weight gain. Natural fat (saturated or otherwise), on the other hand, is not inherently fattening and has definite health benefits. His advice is to eat fat freely as long as it isn’t the artery-clogging hydrogenated fat widely used in processed food.

Briffa picks apart the number-crunching calorie theory that has dominated nutrition thinking since the 1930s, pointing out how it has spawned unrealistic diets that condemn people to hunger and disappointment. Instead we should be looking at which macronutrients satisfy appetite best, he says, and here, the answer is protein, followed by fat.

Briffa advocates an eating approach that mirrors our ancient, evolutionary diet which means not eating processed food, and basing your diet on protein and fat and limitless vegetables. (Vegetables are carbohydrates but they don’t disrupt insulin as cereal-derived carbs do. Plus, they contain lots of beneficial micronutrients.)

I look on the study of nutrition as a work in progress. We should always examine critically any nutrition orthodoxy. But when the “right answer” eventually emerges, I think it will look a lot more like Briffa-style thinking than calories and traffic lights.

Be wary of eating by nutrient and number

Published on guardian.co.uk 23 October 2008

When anyone tries to tell us that popcorn is healthier than an egg, we ought to be very sceptical indeed. That's just one of the dietary howlers from the NuVal system featured in yesterday's G2, yet another example of dietary advice that is worse than useless.

NuVal purports to bring "a groundbreaking nutritional vision to market" in the form of a food scoring system based on a "patent-pending algorithm" that rates foods on a scale of one to 100, an "Overall Nutritional Quality Index" that can help us make more informed decisions about what we eat.

All that's happened here is that a bunch of professors have put the existing US guidelines for healthy eating into the blender and blitzed them in a crude number-crunching exercise. It's yet another example of the narrow, reductionist approach that dominates dietary thinking. Rather than than looking at food in the round, NuVal encourages what US writer Michael Pollan calls "eating by the nutrient and the number". This is the sort of dietary wisdom that the US has followed for the last thirty years. Result? Americans are fatter and sicker than ever before.

What's wrong with NuVal? It gives its highest meat score, 48, to turkey breast while leg of lamb gets only 28. This rating is doubtless based on the current orthodoxy that fat and cholesterol are dietary antichrists. But there is little evidence to support this and much to challenge it. The Women's Health Initiative trial, for instance, found that after eight years of low-fat eating, women were no better off in terms of cardiovascular disease or cancer risk, and not significantly lighter than their higher fat-eating counterparts.

NuVal doesn't take any interest in farming methods, so it doesn't consider that although the lamb may be fattier than the turkey, the composition of that fat may be healthier. A substantial body of evidence shows that meat from pasture-fed livestock contains nutrients that protect against cancer and heart disease; a healthy balance of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids along with high levels of both vitamin E and conjugated linoleic acid. Poultry like turkey, which is more often than not indoor-reared and fattened on cereals, has none of these benefits. So when you widen the frame of reference, that turkey versus lamb dilemma isn't half as clear-cut as the NuVal rating suggests.

Like our own Food Standards Agency's "traffic light" food labelling system which uses a kindergarten-simple system to flag up the supposed healthiness of various foods, NuVal ignores the portion sizes that we actually eat. Unless you have an eating disorder, you probably don't consume the same amount of cheese in a sitting as you do of couscous. Under the NuVal system, foods like cheese, raisins, olives and dark chocolate that most people eat only in small quantities become dietary baddies. Follow NuVal, and you'll eat canned pineapple in juice (60) by the bucketload but think twice about even a square of bitter chocolate with its unimpressive score of 10.

There's no distinction made between highly processed technofoods and natural foods, so egg (18) and cheese (17) do only marginally better than diet fizzy drinks (15). In fact NuVal is quite well disposed to processed food when vegetable soup mix merits a rating of 63. Some scores are downright baffling. Canned tuna gets 67. How can that be when (a) it's bound to be super-salty and (b) the valuable omega 3 fatty acids in tuna are more or less destroyed on canning ?

I'd say go to NuVal's website for clarification, but it leaves too much unanswered. It makes great play of being a not-for-profit venture headed up by august, independent scientists, yet the trademark motif that accompanies every mention of NuVal indicates commercial ambitions. Only a very limited number of scores are listed on its website, but all will become clear as some of the US's "leading grocery chains will be rolling out the NuVal nutritional scoring scheme...using banners, shelf-talkers, brochures and other forms of instore communication to educate consumers... Manufacturers may also license rights to include the NuVal Score on their packaging." Sounds to me like there are an awful lot of snouts in the NuVal trough.

America is full of books and websites authored by experts in white coats who are pushing their own brand of live-saving healthy eating advice. It's a huge industry in the US that makes our own efforts in the UK look trifling. But the quest for one universal prescription for healthy eating is futile. One thing we can agree is that populations who eat a time-honoured, traditional diet - however much the content of these diets may vary around the world - stay reasonably healthy. Those who adopt the globalised western, processed food-based diet don't.

We don't need any more advice that exhorts us to eat by nutrient and number. The principles of healthy eating can be distilled in one sentence: eat as little processed food as possible and base your diet on home-cooked meals made from scratch from raw ingredients.

It really is that simple. Maybe I'll patent it.