Its not often that I get excited by something happening in the House of Lords, the upper house of the UK Parliament but I did today!

The Daily Telegraph reports that Lord McColl, emeritus professor of surgery at Guys Hospital in London, has been speaking about the obesity calamity in the UK and has warned that advice to avoid fat was ‘false and misleading’ and was fuelling the obesity epidemic.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/06/09/low-fat-diets-and-exercise-are-pointless-for-losing-weight-warns/

(the Telegraph only lets you read a limited number of articles a week)

He makes the point, that I make to my clients all the time, that when farmers want to fatten animals, they feed them carbohydrate. They do not feed them fat. As a small boy, I used to go on holiday to France. In those days they still put pictures of farmers force feeding geese with a funnel to make the delicacy fois gras (fat liver) on postcards. Its pretty grotesque and a very odd thing to put on a postcard. Anyway, the idea is to hugely over-fatten the animal and in particular its liver, and the liver is then very soft like pate. The food they use to accomplish this massive over-fattening? Corn. I see people eating popped corn as a “healthy” alternative to crisps and wonder how their liver is faring under the onslaught.

If you want to be put off fois gras for ever…

As the noble Lord points out, fat has other functions in the diet apart from providing energy. It slows down digestion and by encouraging leptin release it regulates the appetite. I suspect that fat also has a role in governing our mood as years ago, when I was trying to lose weight on a ridiculous low fat diet, I was as miserable as sin.

I feel the case against the current dietary guidelines is gaining momentum. After 40 years of making us fatter and sicker it is time for them to be thrown in the bin and for the establishment that has peddled the myths to apologise.

Research presented at the Europen Obesity Summit (yes, we now have them) suggests that abdominal adiposity, or a beer belly or rather a carbohydrate belly, is a significant indicator for prostate cancer. Something no man or partner of a man wants to experience.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/02/prostate-cancer-four-inches-extra-on-a-mans-waistline-increases/
(The Telegraph only lets you view a limited number of articles per week)

It really rams home the message that fat is not an inert tissue. It doesn’t just sit in the body doing nothing. It sends messages, it secretes hormones, it is part of you as much as your calf muscle or eyeball. Just the same way as you wouldn’t want an eyeball on your kneecap, you don’t want fat sitting around your middle. Insulin deposits fat around your middle and you produce insulin in response to eating carbohydrates.

Thought experiment: if; somehow, as well as depositing fat around your middle, insulin also caused you to grow an eyeball on your kneecap, would you continue to eat highly processed fast carbohydrates? 

We should cut another risk factor for developing another unpleasant disease suffered at some point by one in eight men and cut the belly fat. We will look better too.