Public Health England (PHE) gets a lot of stick on this site. PHE is the public sector organisation that exists to
“protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities.”
… and that’s a pretty tough gig especially in a nation that seems to have no regard for following advice (whether its good or bad) and, rather than look after its own health, expects the National Health Service to simply cure us after we have made ourselves ill. PHE also exists and provides its advice within the boundaries of what is acceptable to the orthodox wisdom of the medical community. It terms of obesity, this has meant faithfully reproducing the advice and guidance that has created the inexorable rise in obesity in the developed world over the last 40 years.
But, I hear you ask, how can you both criticise the advice as incorrect and in the same argument, say that people don’t follow advice? Well, on the whole I don’t think people do follow advice, but sometimes, maybe on purpose maybe by accident, they do. When they do follow advice, I think that surely the advice giver should look at the outcome and reflect on their advice to see if it was right?
Anyway back to PHE. One thing they are really good at is collecting and publishing data. You can find LOADS of it here
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/phe-data-and-analysis-tools#obesity-diet-and-physical-activity
Just trawling around through the data in a loose moment (as you do), a few things jumped out at me…
- In the UK, 7 out of 10 men and 6 out of 10 women are overweight or obese (yikes!)…
2. We are getting fatter… this is for severe obesity (BMI 40+)
… but its not just the severely obese, its everyone. This is a population shift… approaching 50% of the population. That’s shocking!
3. But look at this… we do listen to advice!! Fat consumption is BELOW the recommended levels… thick black line is the PHE recommended intake and we are below! How come we are still getting fatter?
4. Here’s the kicker… sugar consumption is massively (and I mean massively) ABOVE recommended levels. Again thick black line is the PHE recommended amount.
So, Public Health England, here’s my analysis of your data…
a) Your advice overall is simply not working (slide 1).
b) As well as not working overall, its ACTUALLY GETTING WORSE (slide 2).
c) People have followed your advice with respect to fat (slide 3), it hasn’t worked and things are still getting worse (slide 1 and 2).
d) People have totally ignored your advice with respect to sugar and are consuming MORE THAN TWICE your recommended maximum (slide 4) and are getting fatter (slide 1 and 2).
Therefore, taking all that together, I propose it shows us that:
- it’s not eating fat that makes people fat, it’s sugar;
- reducing fat intake is easier for people to do than reducing sugar: because
- Big Food has reduced the fat content of prepared food and replaced it with sugar. In the process it has created a whole population of sugar addicts that also just happen to be very good for business.
That’s my analysis anyway. There’s more data on PHE’s website so maybe I’m not completely correct, but guess what, PHE has no analysis whatsoever. Maybe its just to difficult for them…
LivPrimal 