Watch this. Very interesting TV regarding being obese or overweight

[LittenTree]

last night's Horizon programme on BBC2

The other problem is that the programme blamed hormones for not being able to lose weight but it offered no explanation about how your hormones get to the point where you crave crap food. For a very long time (teens to early 30's) I weighed something between 9.5st at my lightest and 11.5st. What happened to make my hormones go heywire? I can give you plenty of reasons why emotionally I put weight on but nobody has yet offered a reason why my hormones should suddenly go into overdrive.

Ok I tweeted at the producer to find out more.

He spoke to the doctors who did the study and came back to me to say that the studies show that the three ways to change hormones are:

a) bypass
b) hormone injections
c) eating "vast" quantities of protein

Asked exactly how much protein and does this need to be kept up indefinitely but he hasn't replied.

Sort of think that c) might have been a more interesting one to explore ie eating vast amounts protein (like dukan?) cheaper, easier & more practical than bypass.

Wow, tweeting the producer! I really need to get to grips with Twitter - I didn't realise it could be so useful! That is interesting about the protein too. They didn't mention that in the programme did they? I don't remember that bit, if they did. I suppose that isn't going to make anybody any money though, it is? Charge for the surgery or make a fortune from being the one to cure the global obesity epidemic with a little hormone pill. Getting people to eat more dairy or nuts or meat and not quite so exciting or lucrative is it?

Do you have to eat the protein to the exclusion of other food groups, I wonder. Don't know much anything about Dukan. I shall Google.

I found this programme very interesting. I am not sure it tells the whole story or gives the whole picture but it obviously has lots of scientific facts. One thing that was only really touched on was what caused the twins who put on weight to do so, the suggestion seemed to be stress or stress at a key time that changed the hormones.

I have just read this page....

stress.about.com/od/stresshealth/a/weightgain.htm

Can't verify any of it but makes in interesting reading.

My own feelings are that there may well be lots of biological reasons why some of us put on and retain weight etc, but there are also social reasons, I was slim until in my 20s but over last 20 years my weight has really varied a lot. I think it is my eating habits that are at fault and I am not sure these are totally fuelled by biology, but also by habit, mood, and lots of other factors. Maybe like most things there are a combination of reasons. With the right sort of help I think people can be really helped but I do think a lot of weight loss stuff is too general and only scratches the surface. Much of what we eat is addictive and so the more we eat the worse it is, (I mean fatty processed foods) and not a 'natural' diet for humans. So maybe a total re-vamp of diet and lifestyle and way of thinking of food is what is needed and with that will come a different outcome.

Foreveronadiet I know you have had some great success with losing weight. Well done tweeting the director, who knew!

They mentioned nothing about protein in the programme because I was waiting on them to discuss low carb high protein approach to regulating blood sugar....they told half a story.

I didn't like the presenter, honest of her to admit that she thought she had a superior character which had to her very slim shape, but also breath-takingly arrogant, empathy not being one of her strongest character traits - unfortunately!

I think that is my feeling on the matter as well ItalianGreyHound

BettyBathroom - I think it is just as well she is a surgeon. Probably not GP material.

Yes, they did not touch on the types of food we eat a bit didn't they but maybe not enough. I am not sure what the problem with carbs is, but really all veg is carb and mostly fruit and veg is super good for everything, so it is not just carb but the processed cereals, breads etc that are the problem and they did touch on our prehistoric tummies verses our current food laden society. It was more like one of a series than the whole picture!

I hadn't used twitter before, but I was trying to work out how to contact the producer and I noticed he used twitter. You all can tweet at him too his name is time usbourne.

I agree much less profitable to tell people to eat protein but more practical surely. Have googled and there are lots of scientific studies showing that eating protein (and fat) increases the pyy hormone to make us feel fuller, thus resulting in less calories, this is why atkins and dukan work - because carbs don't affect the pyy hormone.

I have now complained to the bbc about the bias in the program towards surgery and that it was incomplete without saying hormones could be improved via protein (and fat) diet.

Nice one forever. Since a lot of people pay for their gastric surgery one can't help thinking there is some money being made somewhere and the cynic in me sees this as surgeons drumming up business.

However, that aside, I think that telling people that the only way to lose weight is to have surgery (until such times as somebody is able to do the same job in tablet form anyway!) is not going to help the obesity epidemic. Losing weight is an uphill struggle no matter how you try to do it. But what incentive is there to even try if you are told that you can't lose weight without having your stomach drastically reduced in size? There are people who will give up even trying and you are never going to succeed unless you try, no matter what the OP thinks. You do have to consciously decide to start and continue with losing weight which requires thought and commitment. The mind is important but that biased programme has given the obese a get out clause.

I think it is always dangerous to say that things are kind of written in stone in people's lives and there is nothing they can do to change it. I remember hearing a radio programme called Bad blood or bad science. In it the presenter interviews James Fallon, professor of Psychiatry and human behaviour at the University of California at Irvine. James Fallon scanned the brains of serial killers (as part of his work) and discovered there was a real pattern in the brains of psychopathic killers. He went through a series of tests and brain scans of himself and his family, and he discovered that his own brain scans and genetics were very abnormal, the PET scans came out and they looked exactly like those of the psychopaths he had been studying! He concluded some interesting things about himself but he had never been to jail etc. Luckily for him he had had a wonderful life growing up, taken care of really well, which seemed to account for why he had not gone a different way in his life.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0118lkh fascinating!

I was able to find the radio programme because I knew the date I listened to it, cos it was a day I had a job interview!

Anyway, I guess in that sense there may be genetic determiners or brain factors of stuff that influence how we might behave (which could include eating) and there is other stuff in our life so maybe some of us have managed to avoid pit falls when it comes to over eating and some of us have not!

This is a really interesting thread because I had always put my food problems down to an over-eating disorder but now I wonder if it could be a combination of social triggers and also biology. I was very slim as a child and young person and did not start to put weight on until I was in my mid twenties, which makes me wonder why!

I just had a lightbulb moment today. I was on the train from Liverpool to London, and there was a family - the adults were v large. The dad ate continuously for the whole journey - started with pork pies and yoghurts, then jumbo sized bags of crisps, sweets, chocolates, biscuits.

My conclusion. He couldn't possibly have been hungry. It was obviously either carb cravings or habit. Ok so he didn't have the hormone making him feel too full to eat, but its not just about hormones - other people wouldn't feel totally stuffed either but wouldn't have overeating behavior.

Just watching this www.channel4.com/programmes/supersize-vs-superskinny/4od#3298789

It is good because it does cover the psychological reason why people get into over (or under) eating. It's not rocket science but it makes sense.

What is scary is when I worked in an office, in a job I did not like that much, I just snacked a lot - bacon rolls at 8.00, Tesco run at 11.00, Indian at 1.00 etc!! Coffee all day and I seem to remember choccy biscuits in there somewhere! In the programme we see the guy in his office eating almost all day.

There is a very sad item about a lady who is having binge/purge incidents. But it also covers one way of trying to deal with it (counselling).

When this programme first started a few years back I thought it was an odd gimmicky idea but now I think it really does help people to see how ridiculous their diet is, and to see someone else struggling with eating and drinking what they eat/or do not eat, brings it home to them.

forever - no he can't have been hungry but blaming it all on hormones isn't the answer, I don't think. The part of the reason gastric surgery works is because you can't eat as much. A fat person is going to have a larger stomach which will take more food to fill. Stands to reason that a fat person will probably never feel full because their stomach capacity is so large. They can keep eating when smaller people just run out of room. And because it is large I doubt their stomach ever has the time to empty between meals so they never feel really hungry either. I have still yet to be shown proof that the hormone levels are the cause of the overeating and obesity rather the result of them.

Italiangreyhound - it is the old nature/nuture thing I think. I would not say we are affected more by one thing or another personally whereas the programme seems to be putting it all down to biology.

How and who we are is a mixture of our genes, biology (hormones in this case), our up bringing, our personalities and the environment we live in I think what makes us who we are is a complicated mixture of all of those and how we think is intergral to that. I still can't fathom how anybody would blame just one of those areas for the obesity problem. If it were that simple I am sure it would have been fixed many moons ago. There are probably as
many reasons for being fat as there are fat people. We are all different.

Thanks to both of you for the links. I shall try and have a look/listen at some point. It has been an interesting thread hasn't it?

BBB - I was telling a friend and she thought he might have been a smoker, eating non stop to cope with lack of cigarettes on train.

My friend is wonderful. She was v v overweight, has lost 4 stone and still has at least that again to lose - using hypnosis (personal one not Paul Mckenna). She says already (3 months in) her stomach has shrunk such that she feels full on much much less food BUT her overeating was connected to her addictive personality, and she could just keep on going even if not hungry or full. And didn't really know what either hungry or full felt like. Now of course she does.

And yes agree re: chicken and egg point ie what comes first being overweight or out of control hormones - would be interesting for my friend (who is still overweight) to do the experiment - she said she would like to!

Incidentally she was supposed to have a stomach bypass but it was cancelled at the last minute, but she'd already lost 1.5 stone on the pre-bypass diet that she decided to visit hypnotherapist and do it on her own.

They finally replied to my complaint:

Reference CAS-1373730-BSN891

Thanks for contacting us regarding BBC Two?s ?Horizon: The Truth about Fat? broadcast on 20 March.

We apologise for the long delay in replying. This was due to an administrative error and we?re sorry that you had to wait on this occasion.

We understand you felt the programme displayed bias towards gastric bypass surgery.

Your complaint was raised directly with the Producer, who passed on the following response:

?Thank you for contacting Horizon. I?m sorry to hear that you found aspects of the programme misleading.

As you know, I contacted our key contributor, Dr Le Roux, to ask him the questions that you had asked me. He replied that as far as we knew, the only things that had any affect were massive regular intakes of protein, injections of a specific hormone called GLP-1, or the operation. The implication was that these other two techniques were too impractical to be useful as a treatment, so that at the moment, the operation was obese people's only hope. I then passed this message back to you.

I then contacted Dr Le Roux one more time to see if he felt that the other two treatments merited discussion and he replied as follows:

'You need to consume around 500-1000kcal of protein to show a significant difference change in gut hormones, but there is no amount of protein that an obese person can consume to give the same gut hormone levels as a gastric bypass patient after 500 kcal.

Injections of GLP-1 in an obese person does change the gut hormone levels in the peripheral blood as much as a gastric bypass patient, but the levels within the portal circulation (the blood vessels from the gut to the liver where most of the signalling to brain takes place) cannot be mimicked by peripheral injections as the bypass patient releases the hormone at the right place in very high concentrations where it is signalling. Thus peripheral injections give you more side effects and less beneficial effect than the bypass patient releasing it endogenously.'

The point is this: the only way we currently know to profoundly and permanently affect our gut hormones and our appetite with few side-effects is stomach bypass surgery. This isn't the preferred outcome for all as it is expensive and invasive, but hopefully we can learn from it and find a less invasive technique.

More importantly the outcome of this surgery is a scientific revelation. It is a discovery that may change our whole understanding of the nature of obesity. For that reason it had to be the key story in this Horizon.?

We hope this addresses your concerns and that it demonstrates how seriously they were taken. Please again accept our apologies for the unfortunate delay and thanks for taking the time to contact us.

Kind Regards

Shona McCullough

BBC Complaints

www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

NB This is sent from an outgoing account only which is not monitored. You cannot reply to this email address but if necessary please contact us via our webform quoting any case number we provided.