I will NEVER diet or follow nutritional advice again

[holmessweetholmes]

I thought I was pretty clued up on healthy eating and on why certain foods were good or bad. Then I read 'In Defence of Food' by Michael Pollan. It is astonishing to read about how utterly clueless, completely untrue, or often deliberately misleading, official nutritional advice is. And incredible how simple it is to eat healthily. Anyone who has ever dieted/low carbed/low anythinged should read this book.

Can you link to the Eat betterers thread? Can I join?

Just de lurked to say that yes, this book should be required reading for everyone. It changed our lives, and once you start eating proper food, rather than edible food like substances, you suddenly realise what being healthy feels like, and it's great.

Sounds eminently sensible.

However diet is only one side of the equation. In the days when the uk diet was 'natural' ie veg, full fat dairy, potatoes, some meat, nothing processed, we are also burning far ore calories doing our jobs, travelling, looking after our homes, keeping warm.

I'm not on boot camp long term so it's probably closer to the same thing anyway. Eggs, tuna, loads of green veg, protein, salmon that type of thing.

I do think we eat way too much sugar and obseity levels are reflecting that. Has The Guardian article been linked? It was good.

Betrayed - yay! A fellow fan!

Beatrice - here - look forward to seeing over there!

Irian - very true. Somebody told me yesterday tjat standing up for three hours a day is equivalent in health terms to running a bunch of marathons (I forget how many) per year. I run (not marathons! ) but I definitely spend yoo much of the rest of my time sitting down on MN .

Oh and Betrayed, I meant to say - great that you feel it has changed your life. I'm hoping that it changes mine from a mental point of view as well as physical. It is depressing to think how many hours of my life I have spent worrying about what I eat and beating myself up about my choices.

nothing wrong with the traditional western diet.

Meat or fish with two veg, boiled/mashed potatoes, very good and not processed.

Exactly, BravePotato - just what I was saying. And what the book says.

I agree with the book's idea

just feel sad I did not write it myself.

but then I also think dieting actually makes people fat (kerching! for the diet industry!)

I thought I was a lone voice in the desert!

Yep MarshaBrady, it probably is. Certainly sounds good. I think the extreme low carb method of shovelling yourself full of coconut oil and cream and gallons of water and avoiding fruit and any carby vegetables is exactly the kind of thing I am going to be avoiding from now on though!

Brave - yes, Pollan basically says dieting makes you fat. In fact many of us probably started dieting for the first time when we weren't really actually fat. Then dieted on and off for years and got progressively fatter! And of course the feelings of anxiety we get when we obsess about our weight tenpt us to comfort-eat!

Yes true Holmes I've ditched the cream and it's more about roasted broccoli, cauliflower and salad, artichokes etc these days. And protein.

Although I'm not even on a diet, I think my body is too used to it for it to do anything but maintain. I do it more because I feel great and never have control / guilt issues about food. Which I think the diet industry particularly loves to get a handle on. It is fascinatingly bad.

Especially all that low fat stuff, juice and cereal which is billed as healthy.

So true. I started dieting when I was 10 st 5lbs aged 23 and ended up aged 53 at 18 st 5lbs. Having been up and down the scale in the intervening 30 years. What a fucking waste of time.

I am now 13 stone and follow an eat fresh philosophy. And wine.

holmes it will change your life. My DH and I lost 8 stone between us on weight watchers, then realised that we couldn't keep that up for the rest of our lives. We read Michael pollen, changed what we were eating and we have maintained our weight (actually lost a little more) for three years. My irritable bowel has vanished, as has DHs high blood pressure, and in those three years we haven't had so much as a cold between us.

Funny. I never get colds now.

I really don't think everyone knows this at all. The number of parents I know who really genuinely believe "no added sugar" means healthy and good for their DC I find astounding. Also cafes, soft play centres, kids' parties will all push no added sugar drinks, puddings etc at you.

When what it really means is that either they have used a concentrated fruit sugar product instead, like concentrated apple juice - basically sugar - to get around the rules so they don't have to call it "added sugar" – or they have added artificial sweeteners, which may or may not have adverse effects but which also confuse your body because you are not getting the calories your body expects from the sweetness, and also encourage people to think "Hey I am having "healthy" squash so I can have 5 pieces of chocolate cake and loads of crisps".

I have always avoided "no added sugar" products mainly because some of the artificial sweeteners used seem to give me skin rashes, though now also for the other reasons. And it is so hard to find the products I want. Things like medicine, squash, yoghurt often come only on the "no added sugar" variety, as default.

Same for "low-fat" products which often means lots of unnecessary sugar and lots of weird bulking ingredients which are not nutritious like real food. Yet people lap them up.

There should really be a major education programme and law overhaul so that manufacturers are not allowed to fool people like this.

I and my family don't have a perfect, glowing-with-health diet, there are some sweet snacks and shortcuts in there, but basically we follow the same idea of cooking from scratch, raw ingredients, unprocessed stuff as far as possible. My DC have sweets and puddings sometimes but NOT the low-fat/no added sugar stuff. I also try to teach them about what various foods do for your body, encourage them to self-moderate etc, and get exercise. They are slim, and while I wouldn't mind a more toned post-pregnancy stomach, me and DP are healthy weights. So you don't need all this low-fat, no-sugar crap to avoid being fat.

Yet, a lot of people buy this stuff, and a lot of people are fat.

Oh yes - no added sugar! I went to a school dinners taster session at my dc's school and tried some very delicious flapjacks, labelled 'no added sugar'. I politely enquired what they used to sweeten them... golden syrup apparently . Oh so not sugar at all then...

Exit - yes, wine is important. .

It can be hard to buy 'normal' food in the supermarkets. I wanted some Greek yogurt recently - a whole aisle in asda of low fat, artificially sweetened yogurt - esque substances and no full fat yogurt (which isn't full of fat - it's about 10%).

Same with squash - I wanted to but a fruit squash with sugar, but they all have artificial sweeteners.

Hobbes8 - I always buy full fat Total Greek yoghurt. Don't they have that in Asda? I love it. There are so many crappy artificial-tasting low-fat yoghurts though. And many of the ones claiming health benefits are absolutely stuffed with sugar or sweeteners or both!

Often the no-branded squash is fine ( no sweetener).

I know Lidl, Sainsbo and Wairise do them ( the lidl on is best, ingredients: 50% black current juice, 50% sugar)

I suspect that you are very right.
I sometimes look at supermarket aisles.
Whole aisle devoted to drink. And another one for biscuits/cakes.

By 'Traditional Western' diet Michael
Pollan is referring to the American
diet that has slowly spread across the world.

Ie: foods that have been processed so
much as to be unrecognisable from their
original state.

What he advocates basically falls in line
with 'Paleo' eating. Which is essentially
eating in line with our genetic blueprint.

The further we move away from this the more
overweight and unhealthy we become.

The reason pale hasn't been as popular as
other diets is because it isn't a quick fix
diet at all, it's simply a way of living a healthy
lifestyle.

If you're serious about wanting to get slim and
healthy in the long run, read Michael Pollans
book as well as The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain
and if you take their ideas on board you will
soon be living a slimmer, healthier and hopefully
happier lifestyle...

The shift has been gradual but momentous. We're so far removed now, our supermarkets and advertising show it.

This kind of book is a drop in the ocean, we're receptive to it here as it's close to what we think. But how do you change the eating habits of the majority. So tough when the sugar industry has so much money to pump into it. And governments, are they in thrall to the industry? Not sure.

I have followed Paleo and a myriad of other diets, right now I am following Slimming World. I've come to the decision that too much protein is as bad as eating lots of carbs. I really think the key to effective weight loss is primarily plant based with small helpings of protein.

The book indicates that governments are indeed in thrall to the food industry. Pollan points out how ludicrous it is that there are heaps of healthy fruit and veg in the supermarket but the foods with massive labels proclaiming 'low sugar', 'wholegrain', 'fat free', 'vitamin enriched', 'added omega 3' etc are by necessity procesed foods - it's hard to inject extra nutrients into an avocado! And these processed foods are the ones which make the companies the most money.

Pollan cites some examples of this kind of thing - some bigwig (in America) who was asked how he could justify a sugary beakfast cereal having a 'healthy choices' sticker shrugged and said 'Well it's better than eating doughnuts for breakfast'!

It started a long time ago too. Pollan says this is why nutritionists and governments started talking about separate nutrients (omega 3, saturated fat, wholegrain etc) - so that they could superficially seem to be helping the nation's health by directing them towards or away from certain good/bad things, but without getting flak from the food companies by demonising actual specific foods. So 'Eat this because it's got wholegrains(but we can avoid mentioning all the other crap it's got in it!)'.

The labelling thing has become ridiculous. There was some programme on tv a while back which looked at how 'wholesome' you could make a crappy product look just with packaging and irrelevant labels - I think they made some awful procesed meat snack product, stuck a picture of a farmer on the front, spouting some nonsense about his family's long history of producing good stuff, and added as many labels as they vould without breaking the advertising standards rules. Including 'dolphin-friendly', as I recall! Because of course it's true - it didn't harm any dolphins...