To question the Eat Well plate?

[TheGruffaloMother]

I know it can take an age to filter new evidence down into official advice but am really struggling to fathom why the Eat Well plate hasn't yet changed despite everything I keep seeing in the media suggesting we've known for a while now that eating such a high proportion of carbohydrate isn't necessarily healthy. Is high fat the way to go? High protein? Is the official advice wrong? Do the alternatives offer lasting ways to keep your weight under control?

I keep pointing out the eatwell guide is not a guide to weight loss but to healthy all round diet for people of normal weigh and kids. We can eat a variety of foods including long acting carbs. They do provide us with energy we need as well as nutrients and fibre needed as part of a varied diet. The Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest in the world and they eat pasta and rice.

I don't think it matters what you eat if you want to lose weight as long as you cut calories. My GP thought I had gallstones and advised fat free. I constantly stuffed my face with white bread and jam as well as trying to finding something non fatty to eat. I lost half a stone without even realising it, didn't have gallstones and put the weight back on as didn't want to lose weight but it shocked me how easy it was. I did enjoy all the cakes that I usually refuse! Not healthy of course but an interesting experience.

If you want to look to lose weight don't look at the eatwell guide but at a real diet plan

Good (natural, animal or vegetable) fills you up so although it's calorific you will get full and eat less calories overall. Any excess of sugar filled "health" food in your body gets turned to fat: you get a sudden sugar spike so store the excess. Look at the stereotypical heavy beer drinker: overweight from all the sugar. You will get the same effect if you overload on low fat high sugar food. Of course if you limit your intake and exercise you will lose weight but it is clearly very very hard to do this successfully given the number of diet book bestsellers out there...

*good FAT - animal or vegetable.
As opposed to stuff in processed food.

I keep pointing out the eatwell guide is not a guide to weight loss but to healthy all round diet for people of normal weigh and kids.

Funnily enough, that's exactly the point I was coming back to the thread to make.

If your diet matches the Eatwell plate, your portion control is good, and yo get a reasonable amount of exercise, then it is a healthy and balanced diet.

If you need to lose weight, or struggle not to put weight on and thus need to 'feel as full as you have done in the past' but eat fewer calories, then it probably isn't ideal as it doesn't deal in such 'tricks', but that's not what it was designed to do.

I don't need to feel 'artificially full' - I had a carbohydrate breakfast, i am currently feeling exactly how i normally do at 11 am which is mildly peckish but fine, and by lunchtime I will be hungry. Equally by 4 pm after an Eatwell-type cold lunch I will be mildly peckish (and have a biscuit or a slice of cake) and by suppertime at 7ish i will be hungry and will eat an Eatwell supper. I suppose that it comes down to being 'used to a level of hunger without feeling the need to immediately satisfy it', as well as having portion sizes that fill me - and my gangling 6'2" footballing 16 year old DS - up when eating them without being 'overfull'.

Given that obesity is increasing, there is possibly a need for a 'revised guidance of portion size as well as balance between food groups' for those who are overweight / obese, and I do think that the Eatwell plate would gain a LOT from strict portion sizes being indicated on it, as well as proportions. But that doesn't mean that the Eatwell plate, as published, doesn't represent a balanced diet for adults and children who are of normal weight.

The Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest in the world and they eat pasta and rice.

They do not eat carbohydrates to the extent that we do, or eat as few vegetables and fruit as we do.

Do you really think anyone would take any notice of portion guidance though? I don't think people eat tons of carbs because the NHS Eatwell plate says you should eat plenty of carbs. People eat loads of carbs because they are filling, cheap and often full of tasty flavours and sugar.

People have all sorts of misunderstandings about the Mediterranean diet. It does not mean pasta and pizza, but the kind of diet Italian and Greek peasants would have eaten a hundred years ago or so: lots of fruit, veg, olive oil and minimal carbs and animal protein.

I forgot to say the Mediterranean diet includes lots of fat instead of sugar in the form of olive oil and nuts and cheese. A french person does not eat a whole lot of baguette with their cheese either. They will have some cheese with some salad as part of a meal. Every meal does not include either rice or potatoes in France. Puddings are not eaten everyday as the Mediterraneans often eat fruit or a little yogurt or cheese instead. Real Italian pizzas are not Dominos style are not an everyday staple part of the diet like they are for some people here.

Some Meditterranean people are changing now though from fast food, giant bottles of fizzy drinks, too busy to cook life style etc.

I wonder if our weather has anything to do with our diet.

In Summer people do tend to eat differently to Winter.

I say as a slim, tall person that it is incredibly facile and dismissive to say that obese people have no self control. People's metabolisms work in different ways and at different rates, and people really have to work out best what works for them. For years it was all 'you must eat a healthy breakfast and lots of snacks' and now it seems to the lay person that evidence is building that skipping a meal, i.e. fasting through it might actually be healthier - FOR THEM.

I am slim but I have at least three super skinny friends that I have lived with/worked with/spent enough time with to know that they can eat whatever they want, whenever they want. Lucky them. I also have friends who have phenomenal self-control in many areas of their lives but who are overweight - it makes them miserable, they are always trying to change it and they seem to be fighting a losing battle.

I have put on weight a couple of times in my life - once after a long course of antibiotics, which seems to be coming up as not unique with all the new knowledge about micro biomes. The other was when I was pregnant and had a medical issue. Both times it was so difficult to control, it genuinely felt like a foreign force had taken me over, incredibly depressing and difficult. One time when I was breastfeeding I lost so much weight despite eating EVERYTHING in sight, the second I lost not a pound no matter how careful I was, but did not put on a pound no matter how much I ate.

There is lots on the internet about this story, this is prob not the greatest source but it's a good summary - faecal transplant makes woman obese. I think there is a lot of research into transplanting gut biome between lean and fat mice, it will be interesting to see in a few years' time what information if anything this shows up.

Our environment is clearly full of crap food and highly processed calories, but perhaps its easier for some people to avoid it/process it without immediately gaining weight.

Currently reading FAT CHANCE: THE BITTER TRUTH ABOUT SUGAR which is written by a doctor treating children with obesity. There seems to be a lot of science and research going into this area so I'm surprised at bio chemists saying there are no results about the effect that the type of food we eat has on things like visceral fat etc.

As he says, we are less judgmental about children, so perhaps talking about them makes us more caring and empathetic and keen to find a real solution to a huge global health problem rather than just saying 'Well, I'm alright jack, lovely and slim here, so you're clearly just a gluttonous old fatty with no self-control; why not get some' which is not just a) cruel but b) utterly pointless and doesn't seem to work!

Well of course people eat rubbish, sugary carbohydrates because they are cheap and tasty and the whole point of the eatwell guide is to peruade them to eat healthier carb alternatives.

wholewheat carbs are healthy as part of a normal diet for most people.

The Mediterranean diet includes good carbs and the French eat croissants for breakfast, the Germans often have a roll, ham and cheese and a yoghurt type thing called quark (I lived there a few years ago) so carbs form part of a healthy diet. What isn't healthy is the shite lining the supermarket shelves and the dreadful sugary drinks which people seem addicted to.

I think the average European diet would look similar to the eatwell guide.

I personally think the eatwell advice is aimed at people who really don't know about portion control and healthy balance and the people looking at food science and more esoteric research won't need its advice.

If the guide said you've got to source raw milk, unpasteurised yogurt, cook everything from scratch, including cooking your own cannelloni beans, buy your own kefir grains etc etc then no one would even look at it. It's got to be easily accessible.

Agree with everything Zara said. Previous generations ate plenty of carbs and they weren't fat. What they didn't have was easy access to processed food and sugary snacks at every possible opportunity coupled with largely sedentary lifestyles. If low carb works for individual people just as low fat or low GI works for others, then fine, but I don't think this should be recommended for everyone. It's also unsustainable for everyone to eat a high protein diet, and high meat gives you higher risk of certain cancers. 1/3 carbs seems perfectly fine to me.

I just find it very hard to believe that something like the Eatwell plate has much influence on people's habits at all. Everybody knows that having lots of sugary drinks, sausage rolls and cake and biscuits etc is not good for you but it doesn't stop people having them. It's not a lack of knowledge that's making people obese, it's an inability or unwillingness to actually make changes to their diet. Because it's hard.

We have just been told it is Healthy Eating week at school (secondary) and when I looked at the link it was all low-fat advice. However fat is not the problem as much as the carbs it seems.

It is the same at primary- those "Sugar Swaps' saying o swap for something like fruit or plain cereal- it's still sugar in a different form! I have also had a problem with primary recently as sent cheese for a snack and told they ned fruit and cheese isn't healthy (to ds) and not to bring it. So I had to explain to him why that is wrong.

I also think they need to not give them low fat milk and normal milk instead but found that we are only 'allowed' semi skimmed. Except for 'medical reasons'. This is despite studies showing children having full fat milk are actually thinner at age 7.

A very good book to read on this subject, is called The Big Fat Surprise- it is a but Americanised but that is because it is a study of how these guidelines (albeit in USA) came about- and it's based on a lot of rubbish basically. Same with the Eatwell plate.

Also should point out that 1/3 carbs is very different to recommending 'a diet which is based on starchy carbohydrates' which is what the guidance says

We had a dental advice leaflet thingy when starting reception. It advised semi skimmed milk. For four year olds. The free milk they get (yay Welsh government!) is semi skimmed.

The NHS eat well plate doesn't suggest overloading on carbs to me. It looks balanced.

Carbs are essential for brain function and they're really not the devil.

Full fat milk is absolutely teeming with fat. Basically it is 90%fat and 10% calcium. Like a very greasy piece of chalk. It's not mostly water with vitamins and minerals in a nice tasty no added sugar drink.

You need the fat to take in the goodness. Why on earth are they suggesting semi skimmed for small children. They need the nutrients.

Full fat milk is only about 3.5% fat. The name is misleading. It should be called whole milk.

"ShowMe"
Carbs are essential for brain function and they're really not the devil

There are plenty of carbohydrates in vegetables and pulses and some unrefined grains without it being "necessary" to eat piles of, often fried rather than boiled, potatoes; rice and pasta, pizza, powdery white baguettes, chunks of ciabatta, refined flour loaves, sandwiches with little filling followed by crisps and a fizzy drink in a "meal deal" & pastries which is how "carbs are essential" gets interpreted in the UK diet. The way they are eaten in the UK in many diets, is the devil imo.

Meanwhile the supermarket shelves full of huge bags of crisps and sweets, "fine as part of a healthy well-ba;anced diet", and the almost ubiquitous addition of sugar to prepared food tells what is happening in addition to top it all off.

The food pyramid was more-or-less a scam, but its ideas seeped into everything. Here is a quote from the following linked article:

"You may also notice that the original American pyramid suggest 6-11 servings of bread, cereal, rice and pasta per day. Which is, well, a hell of a lot if you actually think about it. According to Luise Light, one of the people who worked for the USDA during the time the pyramid was being developed, this was due to interference from food industry giants as well. How does she know this? Well, she was the leader of a group of top nutritionists who developed the original food pyramid for the United States before it got “sold to the highest bidder” as she put it".
www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/09/invented-food-pyramid/

Children being given skimmed milk is considered questionable now, I think, LovelyBath77.
www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/03/19/174739752/whole-milk-or-skim-study-links-fattier-milk-to-slimmer-kids

LOL at full aft milk "teeming with fat"

it's about 4% fat, it's not liquid butter (82% fat) haha

Full fat milk is absolutely teeming with fat. Basically it is 90%fat and 10% calcium. Like a very greasy piece of chalk. It's not mostly water with vitamins and minerals in a nice tasty no added sugar drink

Eh? Even pure butter is only about 82% fat.

Granted, recommendations about full fat/whole milk vs semi skimmed are usually misguided but surely people aren't shying away from it based on the name?

If full fat milk were 90% fat then given that it's saturated fat it would go rock solid in the fridge

It contains around 3.5% fat.

Carbs are essential for brain function

The brain works very well on a ketogenic diet. IE low carb diet.

Kind I didn't say it was necessary to eat piles of fried food or piles of carbs either...and the eat well plate (which is what this thread is about) does not suggest doing that either.