To be pissed off about the so called healthy eating advice we've been given for years ?

[Scarletohello]

I did the Atkins diet about 8 years ago when it was considered faddy and dangerous. Low fat was the healthy way to go. I got so much hostility about it, almost like I was a climate change denier. To my surprise,I lost 2 stone easily and quickly. Unfortunately I got scared by all the health warnings about how bad it was for you so eventually went back to a ' normal' diet. And put it all on again. Am currently watching the C4 doc about how sugar is bad for you. Of course it bloody is !!

Why can't the authorities wake up and realise its not fat that makes you fat? It's sugar and fast acting carbs.

It's time we had a major overhaul in our thinking about what really makes us fat...

I also think that the nhs needs to start taking a more detailed and individual approach. I went to my doc when I struggled to lose weight and got the general low fat calorie count advice. Explained that I was doing this but was told that I wasn't doing it right. Went back with food diary-they eventually agreed to test my thyroid, but nothing else. Thyroid fine. Refuse to run any more tests as they are expensive. No help or guidance just 'cut down more'from what was already a stonking calorie reduction. The ridiculous thing about refusing to do this slightly more expensive test is that I'm probably a walking diabetes and heart disease risk. I've already lost a brother to it. But if I followed their advice I would just keep getting fatter. I'm lucky really in that I've, by trial and error in absence of medical tests, worked out what works for me. Plenty of people won't be able to do that and will keep following generic advice that does not work for their bodies and getting sicker.

Baby, she should see how that croissant affects her! It might be OK for her. The amount of butter probably slows down the carb release a bit too. Weirdly, although I almost never eat them, an almond croissant became one of my 'after the birth...' dreams!

I wish people would stop referring to a low carb diet as 'cutting out an entire food group'. It's low carb not no carb. I eat berries, nuts and loads of vegetables that all contain carbs in varying degrees. I limit the higher carb vegetables such as potato, sweet potato and carrots but I do still eat them, just in smaller quantities. I occasionally eat a small amount of wholemeal bread or rice now that I'm at my ideal weight. I don't eat sweets, cakes, pastries, milk chocolate, white bread, crisps, ice cream or most processed foods. I find it difficult to reconcile what I eat on a day to day basis with being on a 'fad diet'.

Well said StuntNun.

I remember reading 'pure white and deadly' back in the 80's.

I wonder what the healthy eating advice will be ten or twenty years from now, something completely different perhaps?

Actually I think it will be genetic testing to determine each persons optimal food intake, or gene therapy which allows you to eat anything and everything without getting fat.

I'll be first to sign up for that Suzanne, when's the clinical trial?

The healthy eating advice may well change - the science of nutrition is still in its infancy - it was believed for some time that tomatoes were poisonous! Obviously the more time passes and the more studies are done, the more information we will have. I can't believe the advice on sugar will change however, as you say, doctors were pointing this out when 'Pure White & Deadly' was first published - to pass that off as a 'fad' is sort of being deliberately obtuse (dangerously so if you consume loads of it) to my mind.

I also agree with the comments on low carb diets - I think in reality most 'low carb' people are actually 'much less carb than the general population' people - particularly those maintaining a healthy weight. They don't necessarily eat loads of high fat food, but they do tend to eat more veg, they don't necessarily completely ban any carbs, but will more often have pasta/bread/rice etc in small amounts or as an occasional thing rather than a daily staple - its just changing that balance of carbs:fat:protein to a ratio that works better for their body - often more or a 30:40:30 split instead of the government advice (clearly not working) of what, 50:20:30 ? Our bodies need protein and fat and vegetables, proportionally it will use up more of these constructively, with less left over - they don't need pasta and bread and when we eat lots of it and don't move around pretty soon after to burn it off, a larger proportion is stored immediately as fat.

Some people appear to be resistant to the obesogenic effects of sugar and junk food in general.

The obesity epidemic is snowballing still, I think that in the future we will decide that the 'war on junk food' is futile and we will instead all have our genes modified.

Attempting to emulate the diet of paleolithic man will seem ridiculous...something on a par with trying to emulate paleolithic social norms.

Not much help to all of us now though Suzanne !

True, but advances in biotechnology may not be as far away as we imagine, and then who knows what the paradigm will shift to!

I should add that I'm not advocating eating anything and everything, I speak as a total health freak.

Joins in

I've started semi-low carbing (no carbs after breakfast) - mainly to force myself to eat more widely, as I tend to live off bread. I've lost 6 lb in the last 2 weeks, although I was a healthy weight already. Woohoo!

But I have a query about the logic that we evolved to eat this way. OK - but we are the descendants of those who survived eating this way. And those who survived must be those who gained weight on this way of eating (everyone else starved).

So ... how can it be that we are primed to lose weight eating paleo etc?

Good point!
Perhaps paleo logic is a red herring
Really it's just that modern life makes some people metabolically disordered and super sensitive to carbohydrate

I'm not sure we are primed to lose weight eating paleo, but over time, the kind of things that have become a major part of our diet are large portions of starchy carbs, processed foods, high sugar consumption, the creation of HFCS, artificial sweeteners, trans-fats etc - that our bodies simply don't need (most of us are pretty sedentary, even the people who got to the gym every day, so we don't need fast working carbs), or can't really cope with well because they are un-natural in themselves or processed to a point that their nutritional value is negligible.

By cutting out or reducing all that stuff I think we 'un-clog' our systems. We can then eat when truly hungry (rather than the 'hunger' we feel coming down from a starch/sugar high), stop when full, the food is satisfying and mainly nutrient dense so hunger strikes less often and needless to say by dropping pastry, pasta, potatoes etc we are immediately cutting out the fat and sugar that is so often attached to it. It is pretty difficult to eat large amounts of fat not wrapped up with carbs and/or sugar. So there's an instant calorie reduction and also a hormonal/metabolic change that results from dropping the sugar.

x post Suzanne

my head is spinning with all this conflicting advice.

Yes, I think I'd agree that it's partly calorie reduction. I'm far less hungry lately, despite eating more calories than when I had toast 3 times a day, so I don't need to eat between meals now.

It is still hard for me to buy the full-fat stuff, though: training myself to do it!

Huh - my post made no sense. I meant I eat fewer calories now

What is conflicting Pinkone?

Oh, pork scratchings have only 1.6% carbs!

Right, off to Tesco ...

Apologies, I've not trawled through all 12 pages of this thread. But two things occur to me about why low carb is more sensible these days:

carbs are useful energy givers - necessary for anyone with a super active life style. But most of us have a pretty sedentary life style these days, so we don't need anything like as many carbs as we did, even in, say 1970s when people walked to school and work, and did small things like washing up after tea and getting up to switch tv channels etc.

Carbs help disguise the richness of fatty foods, and fatty foods help disguise the blandness of carbs. So if you put the two together, it's easier to want to overeat. If you eat fatty foods without carbs, it's far harder to overeat, as the taste is so intense. So cutting out one or the other will help our appetites calm down and balance.

Ugh, I tried pork scratchings once after finding out about their low carb content. NEVER again, they're covered in hair!

Until companies like coca cola stop selling their crap sugar and chemicals mixed with water and advertising it everywhere, claiming it's fine to drink when really theyjust want to get you hooked its a problem.

A good pork scratching is food of the Gods to me. I had consigned it to the junk food pile, but maybe I was wrong ...