Which diet advice is to be believed?

[TheDeadlyDonkey]

I've started reading John Briffa's Escape the Diet Trap. It makes for very interesting reading, but has made me question the usual run of the mill low fat type diet advice.
If Briffa is to be believed, low fat diets are unsustainable and can contribute to ongoing obesity issues and increasing the risk of diabetes.

I've also recently heard that if milk is to be drunk, full fat milk is better, as the majority of vitamins and minerals are in the fat.

I'm also hearing varying reports on cholesterol, and how it maybe isn't playing the dangerous role that many drs are telling us.

So, after DH's stroke (which wasn't in any way a lifestyle issue) he has been advised to be cautious and cut down on fat and use benecol spread and yoghurt drink (I have read that these aren't good for you, but can't remember where, could have been on here)

So when there is so much conflicting advice, who do you trust? What do you believe?

John Briffa's book is really convincing, quotes trials, uses scientific charts etc, and makes sense.
I myself have struggled with low fat diets, and failed more times than I care to admit.
I am in no way qualified to interpret scientific trial data (along with the majority of the population) and am growing more and more confused about the conflicting advice that is out there.

I'm not really sure what I'm expecting from this thread, but I'm interested to see what others think about this, and who you trust when it comes to diet advice?

Oh, my mistake, it's not limited to diabetics, just more common.

It's interesting reading that the advice in UK is 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, protein, veg, carb.
Over here (NZ) the advice is 1/2 the plate of veg, 1/4 each protein and carb.

Eat less, move more, be honest with yourself about what goes into your mouth, and recognise feelings of hunger. Thriving in an obesogenic environment needs self determination, not following an arbitrary set of dieting rules.

Ther are so many diet myths about. Dont skip breakfast...drink loads of water...dont eat too little or your body will go into 'starvation mode'...dont eat white things. I buy into as many of them as anyone but I suspect they are mostly tosh or work for some people and not others.

This thread has certainly confirmed OP's point, that there is so much conflicting advice, you just don't know where to turn.

There are many things in life where the 80/20 rule applies - eg in business, 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers, there are many other examples, but I think dieting is another example of this - what matters is what you do most of the time.

It seems pretty clear now that losing/maintaining weight is a combination of eat less/move more, restrict sugar and refined carbs, eat more veg etc etc, but eating the odd pizza/cake/pasty doesn't matter so much, as long as you eat well most of the time.

The sheer amount of food available is one of the biggest problems along with the poor nutritional quality and too large portion sizes of most prepared food. Just look at what is available to 'eat now' on your average high street - places like Greggs and McDonalds are everywhere. With the exception of some supermarket/coffee shop salads, almost all ready to eat food is utter crap, full of fat/salt/sugar and far too many calories for one meal - OK for an occasional treat but not lunch every day.

I don';t think there are lots of differences. Just about everyone agrees if you eat real food (unadulterated, grown etc) then you do fine. If you eat processed food and lots of sugar you don't do fine. Whether you want to make half your plate veg and the rest meat or 100% veg /beans or 100% protein does not much matter as long as what is on that plate if real food.

It will be in the interests of the junk food/sugar business to divide and rule those who instead eat well but there is no need for that division. you will be healthier if you move to eating 100% veg/beans or veg/fish/brown carbs. Don't worry about that and give up thinking it's too difficult. Just go for simplicity. Eat what man ate for 1 - 2 million years and you cannot go very wrong.

This thread is never going to agree because some of us are talking about healthy eating and others are talking about weight loss. IMO and E they are not the same though they SHOULD be.

I agree GinOn but one of the problems is that regarding high sugar,fat, salt and wheat foods as "treats' not just food is what has created our obese society (there's a thread ATM where the poster has a borderline eating disorder due to her mother feeding her 'treats' all the time not occasionally. )

if everyone had commonsense BBB then we'd all be slim and healthy. I notice you ignore my comments about my health though. Just because Dr. Peter D'Adamo has bought out plenty of books doesn't make his advice wrong, not perfect; nothing is perfect. But IMO and E if the NHS took a few of his ideas on board us taxpayers would be saved a ton of money .

Health is a bit of the luck of the draw pp - I don't really hold much store in a anecdote. My father smoked from the age of 14 to the age of 80 and went to the doctors about 4 times in his adult life until he was diagnosed with Alzeheimer's - never with anything smoking related. Would you recommend we all smoke or even infer that smoking is good for us just because he has been in excellent health? A sample of one is not data, it is an anecdote and I would rather my medicine had some basis in science. For the record, I don't get colds and infections either, so what? I am lucky that way.

'Eat less, move more, be honest with yourself about what goes into your mouth, and recognise feelings of hunger. Thriving in an obesogenic environment needs self determination, not following an arbitrary set of dieting rules'.

Nightlark, that is it in the nutshell. So many dieting books are just an arbitrary set of rules to milk money out of the desperate, the ill-informed and the gullible.

I think the honesty bit is the hardest for a lot of people. They won't admit how much crap they do eat or they know but don't do anything about it (I include myself in that). There aren't many people who are so ill-informed about nutrition that they couldn't improve their diet if they would just make a few changes even if they don't go the whole hog (we could quibble about the finer details until the cows come home but we all have a rough idea what less fat, less sugar looks like). There are a lot of reasons why people don't make the changes and I grudgingly concede that if some diet book triggers something that makes you make the changes you need make then that is a good thing. That does not however, mean that the book itself is the salvation for us all or that the unproven claims made in them are right, just that it was a psychological trigger for a few that made them improve their diets.

I think something like Diet Chef is probably the utter opposite of what just about everyone on the thread feels we should eat.

Breakfast treacle granola chocolate granola - i.e. sugar.
Lunch - tiny lunch of 147 calories only being a soup - with look at the huge number of ingredients on one of them...

Ingredients: Water, Sweet Potato Purée, Carrots, Potatoes, Creamed Coconut, Double Cream, Cornflour, Dried Onions, Thai Red Curry Paste (contains Soyabean oil, garlic, cayenne pepper, shallots, lemongrass, sugar, flavour: natural shrimp, fish sauce (anchovy extract, salt, sugar [ IE SUGAR]), galangal, salt, pineapple juice [ IE FRUCTOSE/SUGAR], kaffir lime peel, herbs and spices), Butter, Concentrated Vegetable Bouillon (contains Salt, Sugar [ YET MORE SUGAR], Yeast Extract, Onion Powder, Potato Starch, Vegetable (contains Celery), Herb Extract, Spice Extracts, Vegetable Oil), Yeast Extract, Sea Salt, Honey [ IE SUGAR], Lemon Juice, Dried Red Peppers, Thyme, Sage, Garlic Purée, White Pepper

If you change how you eat to healthy non processed foods you will feel better, improve your immune system and lose weight at a rate that is sustainable for life.

BBB smoking affects your blood vessels; don't the blood vessels go into the brain then? My ILS also smoked their whole lives they lived till 80ish BUT they had emphysema, arthritis, obesity etc. you name it.

I wouldn't want to live like that.I suppose the fact they didn't eat junk food may have improved their longevity. You'll sneer but they were both O types who statistically have longer lives regardless. It's us A types who die young esp. if they eat a lot of meat. BTW D' Adamo is a scientist.

I knew you would say that pp, but my point was that at your age he was in as good health as you are. He is 83 next month. He doesn't have arthritis, heart disease or any other disease. His blood pressure is fine, he survived pneumonia that would have killed many last year and to be fair, nearly finished him off. There is an element of luck and I repeat again, that one person's experience isn't really a basis for extrapolating a whole lifestyle is it?

Can you link to a study that shows that different blood types have different life expectancies?

Actually, thinking about it some more, does the fact that your blood group makes you more prone to dying young than not ring any alarm bells for you about the blood group diet hypothesis? Your blood group is supposed to arisen later on in the evolutionary process, is it not? Surely, if Darwin is to be believed, evolution is a way of improving on what has gone before and any weaknesses would be breed out (for want of a better way of putting it). Why is life expectancy shortening with later mutations? It doesn't make any sense. Of course, there are many who believe that O was not in fact the first blood group which would make more sense in terms of your lower life expectancy, but then that throws the whole diet into question because it is based on what people ate in prehistoric times.

Surely, if O type lives longer, you should be eating more like them? They are clearly doing something right.

Sorry ! can't do links but the encyclopedia does have the stats. Yes it seems strange that A's should not have evolved to cope with high meat diets we're ok with most fish and a bit of poultry. But before ever knowing about the Blood type I couldn't stomach red meat at all or bananas oddly both are avoids for me..

Might we have evolved in more fish eating areas? Bs and ABs are interesting because they can eat more like an evolved O. IFYSWIM even though they came later. It's a fascinating subject and I wouldn't pretend to understand it fully I just know what i'm good with and not. (coffee is supposed to good for A's but when i gave up my daily fix i lost weight so as I said i don't follow blindly!!).

DH sounds like your D he is an O has been checked by the medics and is in good health he doesn't smoke he drinks a bit too much wine though but has been limping. He has rheumatics but has stopped eating cashew nuts stopped eating pork which was literally disabling him, and is fine now.

The thing is BBB is does sound a faff but I KNOW i feel so much better without certain foods.(if I ate like DH I'd be in a wheelchair and with claws for hands like my gran. also my family has a bad health history) that's the reason.

Xenia Interesting ingredients in that soup it's just padding and most supermarket jars and soups are like that aren't they?

Yes. Whereas if we take my lunch which I am sure was a huge lot more than 147 calories (who can eat 147 calories for lunch for life and be happy and healthy?) I had a piece of fish (nothing added), spinach - quite hard to add stuff to spinach, brown rice and half a butter nut squash. So no ingredients as it were and just what I call real food and of course it tastes very good too and I would imagine it would be 3 times the calories of the soup above but I don't count calories.

Xenia your food sounds healthy but also very dull and worthy. You are the only person I know who would describe a piece of plain fish with brown rice and spinach as tasty, are you a super taster? I'd have to fire in at least some ginger, chilli, garlic, tamari and coriander, maybe some fish sauce too.

I didn't think that Sweet potato soup was too bad - at least it had real ingredients. My problem would be that processed soup always tastes bland, in fact i think most processed food tastes bland - it's designed to appeal to the majority, so sweet and bland work.

Yes snoworn not chilli or fish sauce but I love garlic, onions and also olive oil they'd go in the spinach, fish and esp. whole rice for me also maybe a bit of tamari with the rice?

I don't think I'm alone. If the food itself is tasy why hide or ruin it with stuff added on?
Isn't it just the same as those who eat chocolate who think how could anyone ever prefer nuts or spinach to chocolate when in fact it is just a question of taste and what you are used to. One man's meat is another man's poison.

I don't expect you are many though - and I suspect you would have a hard time convincing many people to follow your diet based on the meals you have described.

Diet food always reminds me of that Croc Dundee - "you can live on it but it tastes like shit"

What about garlic though xenia would you have that as a side or a roasted chilli pepper - I mean what's wrong with the small stuff - why let spinach and squash have all the fun? Surely some coriander and lemon juice would br keen to snuggle up next to that salmon, don't they deserve a moment of glory? Are they not worthy food stuffs too?

I've got a friend who is a super taster and likes food bland without garlic chilli etc. She doesn't like much veg though!

I like the idea of simple food. Xenia is almost converting me but yes the addition of garlic or lemon etc sounds more appetizing!

Xenias lunch : so long as it was liberally seasoned with pepper and maybe some raisins in the spinach and rice sounds nom nom

but my main meal of the day is always family supper : I tend to only eat solid food in the evening during the week now so I can really enjoy my meal.

Can someone point me to studies that have found that artificial ingredients (sweeteners, chemicals, stabilisers etc) have harmful effects?

My actual meals are all basically homemade and using fresh meat, fresh veg etc. But around that, I drink Diet Coke and no-sugar squash, use low fat spread (simply don't really care for the taste of real butter that much) and eat the odd jaffa cake. I thought that there hadn't actually been any scientific evidence to prove that the chemicals in these products were bad for you? Obviously if you're eating all that stuff to the exclusion of everything else you're not getting the nutrients you need, but is it actually proven to be harmful if consumed in supplement to a balanced diet?

I had the book E is for additives, when the dcs were small, after reading that I decided where possible that artificial additives were best avoided as even if they didn't do any harm they rarely did your body much good and in my experience, the more artificial additives a food contains the poorer its quality and flavour.