Demi
Wed, Oct-12-05, 05:06
Have just come across this article which was featured in The Sunday Times (London, UK) at the weekend:
Is the end of the great diet quest finally in sight?
A new diet claims, yet again, to have cracked weight loss. That may or may not be, says Lois Rogers, but science means we are getting closer to the holy grail
Diet books have a bigger market than any consumer product other than food itself: some 40% of the female population is on a semi-perpetual weight loss regime and one in four men says he should be. Diet foods and weight loss products add up to a £2 billion-a-year market that is growing steadily as an ever larger proportion of the population staggers helplessly up the weight graph towards obesity.
The latest heavily promoted regime seeking a slice of this multi-million-pound cake is the Total Wellbeing Diet, a programme that has taken Australia by storm, knocking both Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code off the top of the bestseller list.
Total Wellbeing differs from the usual celebrity or “fad” diet in that it has been developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian equivalent of Britain’s Medical Research Council.
The research institute recruited 120 obese or overweight women and split them into two groups, one following a high protein and low fat diet, the other a high carbohydrate and low fat diet, for 12 weeks.
The high protein diet — which involves eating more than half a pound of meat a day, plus half a dozen eggs a week, along with a bit of cheese, fish and even wine — was by far the more successful. Women on it lost 25% more weight than their high carb peers, found the diet easier to stick to and lost weight in the abdominal area, bringing down their risk of heart attack or stroke.
The cash-strapped CSIRO decided to publish the diet as a book and cannot believe its luck as 100,000 copies a month fly off the shelves. A UK version of the diet book has been hastily prepared and is now on sale here.
However, podgy people hoping to find the holy grail of eternal svelteness may be dismayed to discover that the “independent scientific research” upon which the diet is based was generously funded by Meat and Livestock Australia and Dairy Australia, desperate to shift more of their products.
Critics point out that the World Health Organisation has warned of the links between high red meat consumption and kidney disease and it may also be linked to the epidemic of osteoporosis, the brittle bone disease.
Kathy Lette, the Australian author, says that despite its scientific grounding it is really another fad: “The reason it has been so successful is that everyone wants a diet that tells you what you want to know: eat meat and drink wine, when really we all know the answer. Skinny models don’t keep their internal organs in their handbags, they just eat less and exercise more than the rest of us.”
So where to next with the quest for the secret of eternal slenderness? Experts say that we are at last getting to grips with the mechanisms that govern appetite, cravings, the way we process food and the real secrets of metabolism. Once people are “nutritionally literate”, they will be able to understand what causes weight gain and control it better.
Although the method of measuring food energy output by burning it and calculating the heat output generated was first discovered in the early years of the 20th century, dieting did not begin in earnest until the baby boom years of the 1950s and 1960s.
It was the rise of the car, labour-saving domestic gadgetry and the slow but unstoppable increase in processed food consumption that led to the obesity crisis now gripping us.
The majority of the population is overweight, with almost one in four women and one in five men officially classified as obese. Even one in 10 children is too heavy.
Weight loss began with the simple theory of reducing calories. In the 1960s slimmers flocked to the shops to invest in products such as Ryvita and Slimcea bread. Weight Watchers arrived in Britain from America in the late 1960s and now runs meetings in more than 6,000 venues every week, using a points system for calorie counting and marketing a lucrative range of diet foods.
Most relatively inactive people, men or women, probably need no more than 2,000-3,000 calories a day, but with up to 300 calories in half a bottle of wine alone it is easy to see how it is possible habitually to consume more, leading to the inexorable steady weight gain that comes with age for most people.
The food industry claims that the government’s National Food Surveys show that daily food intake has declined by an average 500 calories since the 1970s, but this ignores the fact that most people eat at least half their daily intake away from home, grabbing the odd 700-calorie jumbo chocolate bar on the run and guzzling down 600-calorie snacks from the burgeoning arrays of Pret a Manger, Subway and Caffe Nero, while taking far less exercise than was once the case.
Many people rarely walk further than from their front door to the car and spend hours curled up in front of the television.
Rosemary Conley, inventor of the Hip and Thigh Diet, was one of the earlier stars in the big league of diet gurus and now runs a diet company with a £10m annual turnover, Her diet, published almost 20 years ago, sold more than 2m copies and claimed to “spot reduce” problem areas of flab.
It paved the way for a host of “miracle” regimes, including the Hay diet which insisted that proteins, starches and fruits must be eaten separately, the grapefruit diet which was mainly what it says, the F-Plan diet focusing on fibre, and the Jane Fonda Workout and Weight Loss programme which emphasised the “go for the burn” pain of manic aerobic exercise, at the same time as a drastic reduction in food intake.
Fonda, who started her career as a model, subsequently admitted that her slender form was maintained in her youth by the appetite-suppressing amphetamine Dexedrine and that she lived on a diet of “cigarettes, coffee, speed and strawberry yoghurt”.
The most recent craze has been the protein-based Atkins diet, from which the Australian diet is hoping to catch the rejects. Both regimes have undergone little long-term research but have sold because they offer a quick-fix solution.
“These diets are essentially too boring for people to follow long term,” said Becky Lang of the Association for the Study of Obesity. “They don’t really promote the permanent lifestyle change that you need to lose weight.”
The real glimmer of light in the quest for a diet that works has come from a growing interest in the “glycemic load”.
It is known that low blood sugar is what triggers hunger pangs and that it is sugar and starch (known as carbohydrate intake) which moderate blood sugar levels. The trick is to consume a diet that maintains blood sugar at a relatively constant level by eating foods that are digested slowly and consequently trigger a slow release of sugar into the blood.
Patrick Holford, the nutritionist who founded London’s Institute of Optimum Nutrition, is one of the crusaders for this weight-loss method. He cites studies in rats and mice which have indicated that where experimental groups are allocated the same total daily calorie intake, those allocated a diet with low glycemic load foods — ones that release sugar slowly into the bloodstream — have a much more impressive long-term weight loss.
In one eight-month study involving rats, the group eating low glycemic index foods were 14% lighter and had almost a third less body fat.
While no studies in humans have gone on long enough to demonstrate lasting effects, Holford is convinced. “I would lay money on this being the way ahead,” he said. “The only problem is getting it across to people.”
Ian Campbell, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, also believes that the glycemic function of foods might turn out to be an important aspect of the campaign for weight loss, but he points out that it is based on calculations using unprocessed foods when the majority of the population subsists largely on pre-packaged processed foods.
Susan Jebb, head of nutrition and health research for the Medical Research Council, says that glycemic control diets have been used successfully to help diabetics to control their blood sugar and weight for many years, but for her there is a much clearer message for everyone: processed food.
“We all need to eat fewer cakes, biscuits, confectionery and soft drinks,” she said. “There are no processed foods in sight in the Total Wellbeing Diet. It is a regime that will appeal to middle-class people who enjoy cooking and are prepared to go and buy things like red snapper, and that says it all. If getting good-quality food became a priority, we would all start to lose weight.”
DIET FADS WE HAVE KNOWN
THE F-PLAN
Early Eighties hit. A high-fibre diet that reduces calorie intake while keeping you full for longer
ATKINS
The non-carb diet that allows gorging on meat, cheese and butter. Encourages the body to use up its own fat
GRAPEFRUIT DIET
Half a grapefruit before every meal provides so-called fat-annihilating enzymes
GI DIET
Measures glycemic index, the speed at which food is broken down to form glucose. Low GI makes you feel less deprived
WEIGHT WATCHERS
Legendary diet scheme that works through group support and a points system
CABBAGE SOUP
As much as you want for seven days. High-speed weight loss plan used to kick-start other diets
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1817014_1,00.html
Is the end of the great diet quest finally in sight?
A new diet claims, yet again, to have cracked weight loss. That may or may not be, says Lois Rogers, but science means we are getting closer to the holy grail
Diet books have a bigger market than any consumer product other than food itself: some 40% of the female population is on a semi-perpetual weight loss regime and one in four men says he should be. Diet foods and weight loss products add up to a £2 billion-a-year market that is growing steadily as an ever larger proportion of the population staggers helplessly up the weight graph towards obesity.
The latest heavily promoted regime seeking a slice of this multi-million-pound cake is the Total Wellbeing Diet, a programme that has taken Australia by storm, knocking both Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code off the top of the bestseller list.
Total Wellbeing differs from the usual celebrity or “fad” diet in that it has been developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian equivalent of Britain’s Medical Research Council.
The research institute recruited 120 obese or overweight women and split them into two groups, one following a high protein and low fat diet, the other a high carbohydrate and low fat diet, for 12 weeks.
The high protein diet — which involves eating more than half a pound of meat a day, plus half a dozen eggs a week, along with a bit of cheese, fish and even wine — was by far the more successful. Women on it lost 25% more weight than their high carb peers, found the diet easier to stick to and lost weight in the abdominal area, bringing down their risk of heart attack or stroke.
The cash-strapped CSIRO decided to publish the diet as a book and cannot believe its luck as 100,000 copies a month fly off the shelves. A UK version of the diet book has been hastily prepared and is now on sale here.
However, podgy people hoping to find the holy grail of eternal svelteness may be dismayed to discover that the “independent scientific research” upon which the diet is based was generously funded by Meat and Livestock Australia and Dairy Australia, desperate to shift more of their products.
Critics point out that the World Health Organisation has warned of the links between high red meat consumption and kidney disease and it may also be linked to the epidemic of osteoporosis, the brittle bone disease.
Kathy Lette, the Australian author, says that despite its scientific grounding it is really another fad: “The reason it has been so successful is that everyone wants a diet that tells you what you want to know: eat meat and drink wine, when really we all know the answer. Skinny models don’t keep their internal organs in their handbags, they just eat less and exercise more than the rest of us.”
So where to next with the quest for the secret of eternal slenderness? Experts say that we are at last getting to grips with the mechanisms that govern appetite, cravings, the way we process food and the real secrets of metabolism. Once people are “nutritionally literate”, they will be able to understand what causes weight gain and control it better.
Although the method of measuring food energy output by burning it and calculating the heat output generated was first discovered in the early years of the 20th century, dieting did not begin in earnest until the baby boom years of the 1950s and 1960s.
It was the rise of the car, labour-saving domestic gadgetry and the slow but unstoppable increase in processed food consumption that led to the obesity crisis now gripping us.
The majority of the population is overweight, with almost one in four women and one in five men officially classified as obese. Even one in 10 children is too heavy.
Weight loss began with the simple theory of reducing calories. In the 1960s slimmers flocked to the shops to invest in products such as Ryvita and Slimcea bread. Weight Watchers arrived in Britain from America in the late 1960s and now runs meetings in more than 6,000 venues every week, using a points system for calorie counting and marketing a lucrative range of diet foods.
Most relatively inactive people, men or women, probably need no more than 2,000-3,000 calories a day, but with up to 300 calories in half a bottle of wine alone it is easy to see how it is possible habitually to consume more, leading to the inexorable steady weight gain that comes with age for most people.
The food industry claims that the government’s National Food Surveys show that daily food intake has declined by an average 500 calories since the 1970s, but this ignores the fact that most people eat at least half their daily intake away from home, grabbing the odd 700-calorie jumbo chocolate bar on the run and guzzling down 600-calorie snacks from the burgeoning arrays of Pret a Manger, Subway and Caffe Nero, while taking far less exercise than was once the case.
Many people rarely walk further than from their front door to the car and spend hours curled up in front of the television.
Rosemary Conley, inventor of the Hip and Thigh Diet, was one of the earlier stars in the big league of diet gurus and now runs a diet company with a £10m annual turnover, Her diet, published almost 20 years ago, sold more than 2m copies and claimed to “spot reduce” problem areas of flab.
It paved the way for a host of “miracle” regimes, including the Hay diet which insisted that proteins, starches and fruits must be eaten separately, the grapefruit diet which was mainly what it says, the F-Plan diet focusing on fibre, and the Jane Fonda Workout and Weight Loss programme which emphasised the “go for the burn” pain of manic aerobic exercise, at the same time as a drastic reduction in food intake.
Fonda, who started her career as a model, subsequently admitted that her slender form was maintained in her youth by the appetite-suppressing amphetamine Dexedrine and that she lived on a diet of “cigarettes, coffee, speed and strawberry yoghurt”.
The most recent craze has been the protein-based Atkins diet, from which the Australian diet is hoping to catch the rejects. Both regimes have undergone little long-term research but have sold because they offer a quick-fix solution.
“These diets are essentially too boring for people to follow long term,” said Becky Lang of the Association for the Study of Obesity. “They don’t really promote the permanent lifestyle change that you need to lose weight.”
The real glimmer of light in the quest for a diet that works has come from a growing interest in the “glycemic load”.
It is known that low blood sugar is what triggers hunger pangs and that it is sugar and starch (known as carbohydrate intake) which moderate blood sugar levels. The trick is to consume a diet that maintains blood sugar at a relatively constant level by eating foods that are digested slowly and consequently trigger a slow release of sugar into the blood.
Patrick Holford, the nutritionist who founded London’s Institute of Optimum Nutrition, is one of the crusaders for this weight-loss method. He cites studies in rats and mice which have indicated that where experimental groups are allocated the same total daily calorie intake, those allocated a diet with low glycemic load foods — ones that release sugar slowly into the bloodstream — have a much more impressive long-term weight loss.
In one eight-month study involving rats, the group eating low glycemic index foods were 14% lighter and had almost a third less body fat.
While no studies in humans have gone on long enough to demonstrate lasting effects, Holford is convinced. “I would lay money on this being the way ahead,” he said. “The only problem is getting it across to people.”
Ian Campbell, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, also believes that the glycemic function of foods might turn out to be an important aspect of the campaign for weight loss, but he points out that it is based on calculations using unprocessed foods when the majority of the population subsists largely on pre-packaged processed foods.
Susan Jebb, head of nutrition and health research for the Medical Research Council, says that glycemic control diets have been used successfully to help diabetics to control their blood sugar and weight for many years, but for her there is a much clearer message for everyone: processed food.
“We all need to eat fewer cakes, biscuits, confectionery and soft drinks,” she said. “There are no processed foods in sight in the Total Wellbeing Diet. It is a regime that will appeal to middle-class people who enjoy cooking and are prepared to go and buy things like red snapper, and that says it all. If getting good-quality food became a priority, we would all start to lose weight.”
DIET FADS WE HAVE KNOWN
THE F-PLAN
Early Eighties hit. A high-fibre diet that reduces calorie intake while keeping you full for longer
ATKINS
The non-carb diet that allows gorging on meat, cheese and butter. Encourages the body to use up its own fat
GRAPEFRUIT DIET
Half a grapefruit before every meal provides so-called fat-annihilating enzymes
GI DIET
Measures glycemic index, the speed at which food is broken down to form glucose. Low GI makes you feel less deprived
WEIGHT WATCHERS
Legendary diet scheme that works through group support and a points system
CABBAGE SOUP
As much as you want for seven days. High-speed weight loss plan used to kick-start other diets
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1817014_1,00.html