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?

Very few products produced by those companies feature on the Eat Well plate anyway running. All the chocolate, ice cream and fizzy drinks are shoved in the 'eat as little as possible of this crap' corner.

If people followed the existing Eat Well guidelines, all those multinationals would either go out of business or have to change their offering to survive.

I don't think carb is as evil as people think. I eat a lot of carbs and my weight has never been an issue.

There just appears to be a carbs are evil thing going on at the Moment, when its sugar that's the real bad guy

I would also argue that mental health problems like low mood and depression, and difficulty managing uncomfortable emotions are unacknowledged factors in the nation's obesity problem. Weight loss always seems to be described in the most overly simplistic terms: eat less food, do more exercise. Well no shit Sherlock.
When people are finding life hard, which many are because of job, relationship, money worries, a lot of them will turn to (a) alcohol (b) tobacco (c) food (d) drugs to soothe them. THAT is the problem IMO but no one will acknowledge it.

YANBU. Most people eat too many carbs.

Surely wholewheat toast and porridge is a good carb breakfast? Better than eggs and bacon.

Does the eatwell site recommend white toast and sugary Frosties?

IMO carbs are not the devil. It's the sugar that people don't watch out for and that bastard gets everywhere.

Carb heavy diet in This house for us and no weight problems here.

Fat, salt and even eggs at one time, have been demonised in public health messages.
Sugar never has. Sugar is the common denominator in all the multinational food companies.

Ironically I read the recommended carb intake has recently gone up by a couple of percent. With an emphasis on whole grains. The issue is everyone is different. And these guidelines are very prescriptive and allow no differences for individuals. I exist far better on a high fat low carb diet. As does dh and as would dd. See a trend there?? Even saying that, there is no one size fits all. And it's about time it was explained that there are a lot of carbs in some vegetables and fruit, which the eat well plate doesn't acknowledge.

The obesity crisis is a combination of reduced activity levels combined with increased portion sizes and increased snacking, sugarry drinks and fast food consumption.

This ^^ from Barbara. I couldn't agree more.

Reducing sugar consumption is at the forefront of current guidelines, yet many people are widely ignoring them. I don't see Coca Cola, Cadbury, Mars or Pepsi Cola going out of business.

Focus needs to be on why so many people either can't or won't eat healthily.

And I don't think it's always a money issue. Many of the unhealthy food and drink that is being overconsumed is in the expensive/treaty/luxury/optional extra category.

Govt have renamed the Eatwell Plate and now it's slightly tweaked to be the Eatwell guide.
www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-eatwell-guide

I wouldn't eat that combination of foods and think it was healthy for me, it's a choice.

My preference is to listen to Dr Aseem Malhotra, Dr Moseley of 5:2 and beat type 2, and John Briffa, I also think what works for one person isn't as successful for another.

However, as regards living a healthy lifestyle, it's not only food in the equation. It's exercise, wellbeing, adequate sound sleep and a host of other factors which all influence overall health.

Two people can eat the same size portions of the same things, but one may not be more healthy than the other because of lifestyle.

Xand van Tulleken's self-help project is getting a lot of publicity lately.
www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-01-10/should-i-diet-in-2017-tv-doctor-xand-van-tulleken-shares-his-dieting-dos-and-donts

Surely wholewheat toast and porridge is a good carb breakfast? Better than eggs and bacon

There is a whole new lot of evidence that says you'd be better off with bacon and eggs!

Carbs of any kind- but ok especially refined ones- cause an insulin spike which is a risk factor long term for diabetes.

Eggs are great for you and bacon is ok occasionally but the nitrates are the issue there, so if you have mushrooms or tomatoes with your eggs, great!

The main reasons for obesity now are:

-Huge portions (watched the Channel 4 prog last night on diets and was shocked at how people there thought their allowances were 'tiny' when in fact were normal for me.)
-Snacking all day long
-Coffee with a muffin daily
-Lack of exercise - the majority of people aren't even doing 2.5 hours a week of brisk walking!
-Alcohol
-Denial over what is a normal size (calling normal people 'thin' and 'skinny'.)

I never understand the carbs are the worse thing ever attitude that people have at the moment. Sugar is what people should be looking at not sodding potatoes

Growing up my parents fed me lots of veg/fruit, hell of a lot of carbs, not much meat or crap and I was never overweight and was a healthy child. As an adult my diet is pretty much the same and still no weight troubles.

A lot of things are to blame for the weight troubles we have in this country;

Portion size

Snack culture, some people struggle to not eat for just a few hours.

fast food readily available, Most city centres have so many take away outlets now it is un real

Lack of education in food nutrition

Lack of cooking skills, Ready made meals/sauces etc are ok now and then but they do have a lot of added sugar that you don't need so ideally you should be cooking your own rather than buying pre made

What the others said above on the eat well plate reflecting the established scientific evidence. Too easy to diss the NHS. It's a hard job, giving a simple message to support healthy eating.

There's nothing wrong with carbs.

I've been in hospital for anorexia so obviously kept a very tight eye on the correlation between what I ate and what happened to my weight. When in hospital, you're put on a very high calorie diet, eating every couple of hours- following the live well plate guidelines, but in higher quantities. Two courses at every meal, juice and milk to drink, 3 snacks a day.

When transitioning to a healthy BMI maintenance diet, the first thing to do is cut out one of the snacks.
Then cut out the puddings, make the drinks optional, and if necessary the other snacks- but that was never necessary.

Most people, when maintaining a BMI of 22 (hospital standard) ate one course at breakfast, one course at lunch (standard live well dinner plate, or crisps fruit and sandwich, or a large filled baguette), one snack mid afternoon (whole milk drink counted), dinner and pudding. Some people who did sport would have evening supper too.

It's just that most people seem to serve huge portions of everything so of course you will gain weight eating it, you could gain weight eating anything if you ate enough of it.

*Because the actual scientific evidence hasn't changed. The eatwell plate is still following current best guidelines.

When this idea that carbs are baaaad has passed through multiple peer review studies (amongst other things), then the NHS will update its advice. Don't confuse popular noise/opinion with actual science.*

This.

I am a biochemist. I have never been able to get anyone to explain, and back up with evidence, any other diet. The stuff about insulin is pseudoscience, and is an idea has been made to fit a hypothesis and back up the "science" of a particular diet. There is no scientific evidence to back up any of it. And I have searched many, many peer reviewed journals looking for it. I did find one study from many years ago looking at atkins, and the conclusion was that people get so bored with only eating protein, they eat less overall, and that's why it works from a weight loss pov.

Metabolic chemistry is extremely fucking complicated. Extremely. Far more complicated than any Dr making money off a book can know.

It's just that most people seem to serve huge portions of everything so of course you will gain weight eating it, you could gain weight eating anything if you ate enough of it

Indeed. One of the diet programmes I watched a few years ago was a perfect example of this. It might have been Secret Eaters - it analysed what people really ate rather than what they said they ate.

There was a woman who 'couldn't understand why she couldn't lose weight as she ate really healthily and only ever had fruit for breakfast', which she did, but her portions were enormous.

Her 'healthy breakfast fruit salad' could have filled a washing up bowl - whole punnets of blueberries, strawberries, a whole pineapple, multiple kiwi fruit, that sort of thing. I think they worked it out as about 600 calories.

If you follow a low carb diet you cut out the usual things like bread, rice, pasta, potatoes etc but you also cut out the sugars. So you automatically stop eating sweets, chocolate, ice cream, biscuits, cakes, flavoured yogurts. You follow a diet higher in fat which keeps you feeling fuller longer and more satisfied.

So often it is rolled out that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and people fill themselves up with cereal and toast and juice. A quantity of food that should keep them full yet by 11am they are reaching for a snack to keep them going until lunch time. A carb heavy lunch and then a mid-afternoon snack to keep them going until dinner. A carb heavy dinner and then a snack in front of the TV before bed.

On a low carb, higher fat diet you lose the sugar cravings, you feel full up, you don't reach for the snacks.

People have been so brainwashed with what they should be eating that they roll out the same old sayings all the time - "eat less, move more", "eat low fat", "whole grains are better for you", "eat more 'good' carbs". People need to take take back control of their own diets, stop eating so much processed junk and eat simpler, nutrient dense foods.

I'm a 70's child and all my adult life I have been battling my weight. I now eat low carb and follow a fasting regime. I've lost the excess weight, have more energy, am much healthier and have finally broken away from a feeling of always being hungry and being unable to satisfy my appetite. I eat when I am truly hungry - something that people have forgotten how to do.

I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that following a high fat diet caused my gallstones. At the very least it definitely contributed.

Surely wholewheat toast and porridge is a good carb breakfast? Better than eggs and bacon.

I have porridge with banana/berries most mornings. Eggs and bacon are off the menu for me now, I'd be writhing in pain within hours - and for hours. Wholewheat sandwich thins, porridge oats, vegetables, fish, lean meat, rice, and baked potatoes may be dull, but at least there is only a minimal risk of them putting you in the hospital!

I agree with Zara

I think the NHS is unfairly criticised for not jumping on the bandwagon of demonising carbs.

My family have always eaten lots of carbs, without ever having weight issues. As have lots of people I know

Eating toast or cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and potatoes or rice or pasta with the evening meal.

I don't think it is these carbs that make people fat (unless they never move at all)

I think that huge consumption of fast-food, fizzy drinks, cookies etc, are fattening, and yes, they are very carbs.

But a slice of wholemeal toast with peanut butter at breakfast is not a recipe for obesity.

Also, eating all that protein, as is currently fashionable, can be hard on your kidneys/liver, doesn't it? Apparently lots of people over-eat on protein,

Substituting overeating carbs with overeating protein is not the solution.

I am glad the NHS isn't bandwagonnistic!

I think the daily calorie intake is misleading too. 2000 for a woman. I didn't realise this meant an "average" woman. I'm only 5' and should only have approx 1200 calories a day to maintain (the NHS calculator says 1500 but that's too many for me, I gain). It took me a while to realise that and wonder why I wasn't losing weight.

Carbs are fine. I eat loads and they are filling, tasty and packed with fibre.

Low carbing works for some as a weight loss tool but if more than 1% of the population eat a low carb diet all the time and don't feel at all deprived I'll eat my hat.

Taking health and nutrition out of the equation for a second, there's really a brutal law of energy at work. If you eat more energy than you burn in a day, you gain weight. If you eat less, you lose it.

The problem I find with carbs is that it's incredibly easy to eat too many calories, particularly with highly processed things like white rice, pasta. I think most people would be amazed to discover how little pasta or rice or white bread you can eat if you limit yourself to, say, 200 calories of it in a meal that includes other things. This, I suspect, is why a lot of low-carb diets work for people: it is simply another way of controlling the amount of energy consumed.

Of course, there is an additional question of what constitutes a 'nutritious' diet that ensures that we have all of the vitamins and minerals we need.

Ruby

If I ate that much carb, I'd feel atrocious. Which goes back to everyone's body is different. And I agree eating too much protein is also not recommended for the average person.