William also focused on fructose and how the body metabolises this type of sugar and the many and varied side affects of fructose on the body which positively encourage diabetes. However what he did not write about is the poison in our thinking about fructose.  Fructose is used by many food companies as a way of making things sweet and indeed some food companies positively believe it is a good replacement to sugar. The reason for this is based on the glyceamic index (GI)of foods and fructose has a far lower GI rating than its well known brother sugar.  For this reason some so called health companies have been busy using fructose in abundance in the belief that a low GI count will mean that it is healthy.

Fructose is low GI but is definitely not healthy and should be avoided unless you are eating it as part of whole fruit and even then too much fruit is not great for a vast amount of the population.

Thank you William for writing such a great article and thank you Dr Rober Lustig who is the anti sugar campaigner who stimulated William into writing the article.

I hope that a few people who are really interested in understand human metabolism will take the trouble to read this study and understand that fat is not bad and indeed fats may be the very food that protect our heart.

Once I made the change I never looked back and whilst for some, the reason to go low carb is purely weight loss, for me it was general health. For years I believed that others in the world of health would see the same evidence that was so obvious to a lawyer but it seemed that I was a loan voice in a noisy market of low fat and high carb advocates.  Indeed the only people that seemed to share my understanding of human nutrition and food metabolism were either very specialist doctors in the US and the wonderful Dr John Briffa in the UK.

True low carb is really eating as a caveman which means that we should only eat natural foods and that is why I set up golower so that any low carbers or even non low carbers could eat snacks and food that lived up to the true principals of low carb eating. Whilst it does take years to develop products with such strict nutritional guidelines it is worth it as there is nothing more important than our bodies and our health , both inside and out.

Now 10 years on I am thrilled to see that Joanna Blythman , the very well respected food journalist, has written a great book on the subject called What to Eat. For me this is a brilliant break through and I do hope many more people will be open to the fantastic world of low carb which has been  seen as unhealthy or faddish. This is a real life changing diet and not only does it bring great changes to your body shape it actually gives you great health inside from lowering your blood pressure to reducing your bad cholesterol.

Thank you Joanna for having the balls to write this book.

There is no doubt about the fact that weight loss in isolation is harder than weight loss within a proper group or network or structure. This means that you have a better chance of losing weight, whatever the method, if you have proper help.

There is also no doubt about the fact that many people are not always properly confronting their weight issues.  One
client recently admitted that even though she had been obese for many many years the trigger that made her pick up the phone to us was the moment when her doctor wrote obese in his letter to the specialist at hospital on a quite
unrelated matter. It was facing up to the reality of the situation that gave her the push to make a real change.

I think in many ways being a smoker is not so different to being obese.  Giving up the weed is not easy.  It really is about changing your habits. For many it is not going to the pub for a bit so that you break the association between alcohol and the fag.  For others it might be not going to the regular coffee break at work to stop the fag break
outside or it might be replacing the fag with the patch or the false cigarette but whatever the change
it will only work if you keep the change for life.   However, most diets  don’t really make any fundamental changes to
the way people eat or think about food. And without change – real change you can be sure that it will not last.

The low or reduced calorie diets, and boy there are a lot of them, try to make you eat less and by doing so help you lose weight. Apart from the slightly dodgy science which underpins these regimes (think metabolic rate) they also argue
that they teach you portion control. If that were true the world would be a thinner place now. We have had these diets
around for over 30 years and most fat woman today have tried them at some point.  Eating less doesn’t work in
isolation because often we will eat less but eat more often as the food we are eating is making us more hungry more regularly ( see the effect on blood sugar levels of certain foods).  Also eating less is seen as part of a diet and when the diet is over…guess what we go back to piling the food back onto our plate in abundance. Diet over ! Now let living and eating begin.  With low calorie diets the principal is that nothing is off the menu but just eat less. The Marjorie Dawes character from Little Britain is the perfect example of how to eat less but have more.  In addition this approach teaches nothing about the effects of different foods on the body. How some foods will actually stop you wanting to eat more and others will drive your body to want more.  Very salty or sweet foods will drive hunger.  Protein drives satiety. Fibre has been associated with fullness but actually performs poorly when compared with protein.

And so we see ladies on and off these well known low /reduced calorie diets blaming themselves for not losing weight and constantly paying for overpriced “diet foods” which have little or no nutrients and teach them nothing.

The next category of diet is the extreme version called the very low calorie diet or shake diet.  Their brilliant idea is
that we get you thin through starvation (think metabolic rate again but far worse) and then say, after depriving you of  food, that it  is ok but you must only ever eat up to 1200 calories a day! Well no surprises that this sort of regime
doesn’t work either. Think all of the above but now add additional problems with fear of food, deprivation and metabolic mess up!

So to really change a person’s shape you need to change what they eat and help them change for life.  This does not mean eating the same food when you were fat and when you are thin. It does not mean a little less of the same. A diet is not just for January as the famous saying goes.

Every day I find myself speaking to someone who is surprised
by the concept of low carb / high protein diets.  There seems to be a deep and profound belief
that we have eaten a diet low in fat and high in grains for many many years.
There is also a deep belief that somehow the low carb way of life is faddy and
weird. This deep belief is actually quite recent and we only need to go back a
short period of time to see the normality of low carb eating.

It is hard to understand how anyone would think that the
human diet is based on vegetables. It is politically safe but that should not
make it right. Actual human anthropology shows that the only food that took us
from monkeys to Homo sapiens was MEAT. And in fact it was the marrow in the
bone that really helped us develop our minds. So vegetables were not critical
to our development. I know that some experts talk about our diet being based on
tubular plants prior to our evolution into Homo sapiens but we were a different
species.

So the idea that our natural diet is based on vegetables is
a little innocent when it comes to human history. Indeed if we had stuck with
vegetables we would still be swinging from trees and living a far more primitive
life.

Even if the vegetable lover accepts the development of the
human mind was dependant on meat they appear to have a complete blank on human
history spanning over 150,000 years when we lived as hunter gatherers relying
primarily on what we could hunt and kill. Vegetables and fruit were seasonal
and grains were not even widely available. Yes for 150,000 years we were low
carbing and didn’t even know it!

But even more naïve is the idea that a high protein /low
starch diet as a means of losing fat  is
new.  We know from letters written by
Darwin that he was a great fan of what he perceived was the natural human diet –
low carb / high protein.  We also know
from The Philosopher in the Kitchen by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin first
published in 1825 that the natural solution for obesity was cutting out sugar
and starch. In addition it was also the diet of choice for the hero of Anna
Karenina, Count Vronsky which was published during the 1870s.  Leo Tolstoy recognised the use of low carb /
high protein diets for good health and obesity avoidance.

So low carb is not new or faddy. It is as old as the hills
that we walked as hunter gatherers before the industrialisation of food and
man.

The first group of people that could really benefit from recognition of natural ketogenic diets are the diabetics and without a great deal of work we could cut the NHS bill by several hundred million and not lose a single job.  Another less well known group who are serious beneficiaries of natural ketogenic diets are epileptics. This has been well known in the US for some years now and Meryl Streep and long been a supporter of what has been defined as revised Atkins. 

The need for dieticians to become educated in ketogenic diets is desperate as they could improve the health of numerous different patients in very real and deliverable ways.  The patients they could help range from epileptics through to diabetics and now there is research that shows that cancer patients may also have real benefits from cutting out sugar and starch.

What is hard for most people wishing to live a low carb life is the lack of natural high quality products available to them to buy. Everything today is full of either sugar or starch. Indeed we find that today many companies like M and S and other well-known trusted brands are actually developing, through third party suppliers, strawberries which are extra sweet.  Too much sweet stuff makes the human body crave more and more and so the battle to lose weight becomes harder and harder. 

And for those that fear ketogenic diets do remember that the diet which man was evolved to eat is simply a ketogenic diet which has been with us for over 150,000 years and the low fat high carb option currently recommended by HM Gov has been with us for just for 20 years during which time we have got fatter than ever before….

This excitement was triggered by a recommendation by SACN (the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition) who had decided in their ultimate wisdom that notwithstanding the fact that we have evolved to eat meat in large quantities, this food is probably bad for us.

Now before we go into the studies that the SACN relied upon to make their announcement you have to remember that this same committee also announced that low fat is good for us and that eggs are bad for us.  Both these pronouncements have been quietly forgotten and no doubt in due course the latest proclamation will also be lost from the website.

When taking advice from any individual you need to look at their track record of evaluating and providing advice and the track record for SACN is poor.  The damage that the low fat message has done to the UK population is beyond calculation and there can be no doubt that the messages released by SACN have directly contributed to the obesity epidemic.

So what are these studies that tell us red meat is going to cause cancer? Are they clinical trials or are they epidemiological and if epidemiological have they been supported with smaller clinical trials…Well you can guess the answer to this.

And what adds insult to injury is that the NHS website also then recommends that we get iron from our cereal in the morning. Well let’s all be clear that the iron found in cereal packets has been added by the big cereal companies. Why don’t we just hand out vitamins and minerals in capsules to the British population to avoid eating whole unprocessed food?

Recommendation by SACN in 2011

Eat cardboard and take tablets for your minerals and vitamins

Yesterday in the US two organisations, in very different ways, announced a move to a low carb diet, Harvard Centre for Public Health and secondly American Diabetes Association, which is the US equivalent to Diabetes UK.

Harvard (a centre of excellence in public health and nutrition) announced that the US should end the low fat message.  Walter Willet, Professor of Nutrition at Harvard told the food industry that we must stop making low fat foods because they are full of carbs.

In the same week the ADA made some pretty radical changes to their dietary advice pages but did not announce anything. They simply made some significant changes.  Up till now the basic message has been the same as Diabetes UK which I attach below for all to see.  I have copied it onto my blog so that we can all remember what is and was being said to the millions of diabetics across the UK and the US for the past 15 years.

Having supported a high carb low fat message for the past 15 years, the American Diabetes Association has now decided that it is each man for himself and that there is no one diet to suit all. Indeed it emphasises that the critical issue is keeping blood glucose levels stable and refers people to one of the best known low carbers of all time, Dr Bernstein.

There is also an article called “Eating With Diabetes: 3 Approaches” lists the low-carb approach first, and then follows with “Moderate-Carb” and “Vegan/High-Carb”.  It should be highlighted that the three approaches are labelled by reference to their carb content which shows that finally the ADA has linked the illness of diabetes with the intake of carbs. Thank god – they have finally read the science.  Indeed it was re assuring to read the statement;

“Understanding the effect of carbohydrate on blood glucose levels is key to managing diabetes. The carbohydrate in food makes blood glucose levels go up.”

Finally they are getting to grips with the issue of diabetes.  But let us not forget where the problem started and who should be responsible for sorting the mess out!