First NY Times. Now the London Evening Standard
So, is fat back?


Do I sense a little crack in the low fat armour?

This is the article:

So, is fat back?

by Alice Hart-Davis

It can take a long time for innovative ideas to be accepted by the medical establishment, especially in the field of nutrition, as Dr Robert Atkins, author of The New Diet Revolution, well knows.
His best-selling diet book, which advocates the unlikely theory that eating fat doesn't necessarily make you fat, is now at the top of the London best-sellers list - but for most of the past 30 years since the book was first published, he has been mocked by doctors and dieticians who felt his work was nutritional heresy.

How could eating steak, with its high content of saturated fat, possibly be good for your health? Surely, it helped raise cholesterol levels and contributed towards the risk of heart attacks? The virtues of the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet became the accepted wisdom by the late 1970s, and has been with us ever since.

But now, new research has revealed extraordinary results which back up Atkins's theories that, actually, carbohydrates are the bad guys.

Here, one man explains how learning to love the fat in his diet changed his body shape for the better - and even lowered his cholesterol levels.

Stefan's story

Stefan de Silva, 30, is a personal trainer. He lives in south-east London.

For years, I couldn't understand where I was going wrong with my diet. Ever since I was 16, when my father had had a triple heart-bypass operation, I had known I'd had high cholesterol levels. His doctors advised that, like him, I should follow a low-fat diet, with plenty of carbohydrates.

On paper, it looked absolutely right, but soon after I began the low-fat regime, I put on lots of weight. I've always done lots of exercise, so it wasn't that I was being idle; but I just couldn't seem to get things right. I'd have a bowl of cereal and a couple of pieces of toast for breakfast; sandwiches or a bowl of pasta for lunch, and in the evening, Mum would make sure that she'd stripped all the fat off the meat she was cooking, and would serve up lots of carbohydrates such as rice. I ate a lot, but I would always get cravings. I never had that feeling of being full. I could eat carbohydrates until the cows came home - a whole box of cereal at a go - but it didn't do a thing for me, in terms of satisfying my appetite. I suffered from water-retention, digestive problems, and despite all the exercise I was taking, I felt lethargic.

When I had my cholesterol levels measured aged 18, they were really high - about 6.5mmol/L. I couldn't understand it. I exercised harder; I watched what I ate, but I'd look around me in the gym and wonder where I was going wrong. I was eating right, working out; why wasn't I getting the results?

But I was living the sort of life that I thought I had to, so I carried on like this for years. I became a personal trainer when I was 24, and didn't battle with my weight - it had gone up from 80kg (12 stone) when I was 16 to about 117kg (17 stone), but I'm 6ft 4in, and train heavily, but it was frustrating because, whatever I did, there was no positive change in my life.

The turning point came when I heard about the theory of "metabolic typing", which works out which foods you need to eat in order to balance your underlying body biochemistry.

It made a whole lot of sense to me. It's not a diet so much as a paradigm. We're all different, and thus, people have different nutritional requirements.

If you go into any bookshop, there are 101 different diet books, and the one thing that holds true for all of them is that they've all worked for a few people, however different the theories are. Working backwards from that, it makes sense to work out what kind of person you are, diet-wise, rather than trying to adapt your body to the prevailing medical theory.

Once you can understand that, then you can begin to explain why some people can lose weight on a highfat diet, while others will lose weight on a high-carbohydrate diet. I found a nutritionist, Alison Loftus, who could put me through metabolic typing tests. The tests aren't too complex - you can get a kit to do them at home - and what they showed was that I was predominantly a protein and fat sort of person, and that I scarcely need any carbohydrate at all. Since then, I've been fine-tuning what I eat.

It's a big change, but a great change. Now, at last, I can eat food that really satisfies me. My appetite has dropped and as a result, I don't actually eat as much as I used to, but I certainly don't feel hungry. I feel full a lot quicker, as well. In terms of calories - I'm probably not taking in any less, but then I simply haven't needed to work it off. When you start eating the right foods for your body type, you can still lose weight even if you are consuming more calories than before. The idea that you simply have to drop calories to lose weight is rubbish.

At Alison's suggestion, I began to eat completely differently. She gave me a tailor-made programme. I'll start with eggs and bacon for breakfast, then have something like a seafood mayonnaise salad for lunch, and a large steak with a vegetable stir-fry for dinner, with cheese and nuts for snacks. It might sound mad, but it had startling results straightaway. At first, I dropped a lot of the water I had been retaining, and so I stopped looking bloated. I have more energy, and I have lost weight - from a top weight of 117kg, I'm now about 110kg (16 stone).

My body has changed, too - my training is showing proper results, and I have much more muscle mass. I feel sharper have a faster recovery rate, and my allround performance has improved. The final bonus has been that my cholesterol levels have fallen rapidly, from 6.1mmol last autumn, to 5.4mmol.

It has proved to me there is little link between ingested fat and body fat.

My friends are a bit taken aback to see me piling into all this high-fat food. "Are you sure you want to eat that?" they ask.

For me, it's a lifestyle, not a diet; it's the way my body needs to eat to be healthy.

Alison Loftus, Hale Clinic: 0870 167 6667.
Stefan de Silva, Total Trainers: 07944 122 198.

Thanks Ruspot for spotting and posting this. It must have been this article which prompted Dr Fox's comments on Wednesday morning as I left for work. See my journal. Unfortunately I was not able to hang around and here him elucidate on what he said.

Well lets hope that it does not go unnoticed.

Bursting the fat bubble

Low-fat diets are good for your health, right? Not necessarily, says Lucy Atkins

Tuesday July 16, 2002
The Guardian

Last Sunday, millions of Americans choked on their bagels as they opened the New York Times magazine. "What if it's all been a big fat lie?" yelled the headline. The author went on to suggest that we have all been duped: the supposedly healthy, low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet that for 25 years our governments have been telling us to eat is making us fat. Our obsession with cutting out fat, says one eminent Harvard doctor, is probably at the root of the current obesity "epidemic" in the US. (In Britain, too, more than half of us are now overweight or obese.)

We all know the theory: fat makes you fat. It clogs your arteries. It has nine calories per gram, compared with four for carbohydrates and protein. It is greasy. It is often extremely tasty. It is bad for you. So cut it out, we are constantly told, and fill up on carbohydrates such as bread, cereal, pasta, rice (as well as fruit and vegetables).

Which is largely what we do. If you are at all health conscious, you probably had cereal with low-fat milk this morning; maybe toast with a low-fat spread and jam; possibly even a banana. In other words: a low-fat carb-fest. Which is exactly what a growing number of US doctors believe is ruining our health.

Dr Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard school of public health, does not mince his words: "The low-fat campaign has been a failure." Ongoing data, gathered from nearly 300,000 people in large-scale studies, shows, he argues, that "a low-fat diet is not an effective strategy for weight control." Indeed, "it may lead to weight gain."

One fact is undisputed: we are about 10% heavier than we were 20 years ago. Most scientists believe this is because we live in a "toxic-food environment", assailed on all sides by unhealthy snacks, fast foods and the temptation to do no exercise. Willett agrees that such a lifestyle is bad for us, but also argues that when we cut fat from our diets, we rely more on carbohydrates and low-fat products which are packed with sugar. This makes us gain weight. The reason is partly sociological, he explains - most of us have come to believe that you only get fat on fat calories, so we simply eat too much other food.

But he believes there is also a physiological reason: "Carbohydrates can cause our metabolisms to hold on to fat. They also influence appetite and can cause us to overeat." This is what Dr Robert C Atkins, author of the Atkins Diet Revolution, has been claiming for 30 years. Reviled by health professionals on both sides of the Atlantic, Atkins' theory that carbohydrates - not fat - make you fat has spawned a whole dietary subset of "low-carb" regimes (like The Zone or Sugar Busters, responsible for the dramatic shrinkage of celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston and Geri Halliwell).

On an Atkins-type regime, if you fancy it, you can eat deep-fried butter balls for breakfast but you can't drink fruit juice, or eat an apple. Outraged health professionals have long pointed out that such no-carb diets are harmful - to our arteries, our livers, our vitamin intake. But now doctors such as Willett are finding themselves in the rather uncomfortable position of agreeing with Atkins, at least on some points.

Willett's argument revolves around insulin. Your body produces it when you eat carbohydrates. It regulates your blood-sugar levels, but also helps your body store fat. In the few hours after eating, you burn carbohydrates for energy and store the excess calories as fat. When your insulin has been depleted, you start to burn that fat as fuel.

Willett's claim is that "if you eat too many carbohydrates, you produce too much insulin, so your body does not get the signal to burn fat. Some people may therefore store fat more readily when they eat carbohydrates than they would if they had got those extra calories from other sources."

Many other nutrition specialists disagree. Dr Susan Jebb, of the MRC human nutrition research group in Cambridge says this is simply "not proven". In experimental conditions, she says, if you give two people the same amount of calories - one lot from fat, the other from carbohydrates - "there is no significant difference in how their bodies store the fat". Indeed, "there is every reason to believe that fat calories are 'more fattening' because, in the real world, it is easy to overeat on them."

Different types of carbohydrates, says Jebb, affect the body in different ways. Refined carbohydrates - sugar, or anything made with white flour - are known as "high-glycemic index carbohydrates". Your blood sugar rises quickly when you eat them and gives you a surge of insulin. A few hours later your blood sugar levels crash. You get suddenly hungry, and crave more carbohydrates.

What, then, should we be eating? Interestingly, this is where the two sides of the debate edge together. Both agree that we should not cut out carbohydrates - rather, it is the type of carbohydrate that matters. Willett says our diets should be dominated by whole grain foods along with plant oils (such as olive, soy, corn, sunflower, peanut). Jebb agrees. "You should avoid refined foods and sugars," she says, "and try to eat mainly unrefined carbohydrates - like whole grains and vegetables". This will stop your blood sugar levels - and therefore insulin - from the surge-crash cycle.

Both sides also believe that we should still cut back on saturated fat (such as fried foods, butter, cheese). We should, however, eat more monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats (nuts, fish, avocados, seeds and vegetable oils). Willett believes that this will not provoke us into eating more calories, because a diet that includes fat is more satisfying, and gives us less temptation to snack because we are not fighting the glucose/insulin swings. What is more, some fats are essential if we want to stay healthy. "We are starting to see serious health problems in people who have completely cut fat from their diets," says Willett, citing fat-free salad dressings as a major culprit (they deprive people of "healthy" oils).

It does, then, look like the familiar "cut the fat" message is subtly out of date. The current (1991) UK government dietary guidelines advise us to get more than 50% of our calories from carbohydrates. There is no obvious distinction between refined and unrefined carbohydrates. And all "fats" - cooking oils, butter, margarine - are lumped together in the "eat sparingly" category.

Jebb recommends that our daily diet should contain 30 to 35% healthy fats; 15 to 20% protein (mainly fish, poultry and eggs), and the remainder from carbohydrates - unrefined where possible (this would be slightly fewer than current government guidelines suggest). "If you want to lose weight," she says, "you should eat the same balance of food groups. But in smaller portions."

In short, the bottom line hasn't changed: you still get fat if you eat too many calories. And the message now remains fairly straightforward: replace saturated fats with "healthy" ones. Eat whole grains and vegetables instead of refined foods such as cake, white bread and biscuits. If you do this, the chances are that in the absence of sugar highs and lows, both your bathroom scales and your arteries will reward you for it.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/health/st...,755926,00.html

This still doesn't do the job though, does it. If you eat 'the same balance of food groups, but smaller portions' you're just going to be hungry and your insulin is still going to cause you problems. Who is this stupid Dr from Cambridge? They really can't get out of their blinkered thinking can they. So all over the country, GP's will still be giving out bum advice, cos that's what they're being told.
And every time I eat in public, I'll still be getting the 'eating that way is bad for you and stupidly faddish too'. My eldest daughter, who is a nurse, told me yesterday that 'X had been on that no carbohydrate diet and she was really ill'. Turned out that what she was talking about was the fatigue that you get in the first few days. Note the popular idea that they're no C diets too.
So much misinformation - but how do you counter it?
Jay