Dr James Le Fanu says eat more fat and grow thin

There is nothing equivocal, no "ifs and buts", about the scientific vindication of Dr Robert Atkins's politically incorrect "high-fat" diet, as reported in this paper last week.

For the best part of 20 years, legions of nutritionists, doctors, health educationists, food faddists and other busybodies have solemnly warned us about the wickedness of saturated fats in meats and dairy foods - how they make you fat, clog up the arteries, cause cancer and, indeed, virtually any illness known to man.

If only we were to embrace the more wholesome and ascetic virtues of a low-fat diet - piling our plates high with pasta, pulses and bread - we would be slimmer, our cholesterol levels would be lower and we would live forever.

As we now know, however, that is not how it has turned out. When the two types of diet were directly compared, those on the Atkins high-fat diet won hands down, losing twice as much weight, with lower levels of glucose and a better balance of fats in the blood. This outcome, so contrary to prevailing opinion, requires some explanation.

Body weight is the crucial factor in nutrition, as when it falls within the normal range then, in essence, everything else looks after itself. There are several reasons why Dr Atkins should be more successful than the no-fat orthodoxy in helping people maintain their ideal weight.

First, it is simpler: the admonition to eat what you like, but avoid the readily avoidable bread, pasta and pulses (or, as Atkins puts it pithily, "eat the hamburger, throw away the bun") is much more straightforward than having to switch to low-fat products, trim the fat off meat, worry about "hidden" saturated fats in processed foods, and so on.

Second, the Atkins diet is much more appetising, because animal fat - as every self-respecting foodie knows - enhances the intrinsic flavour of food. Michel Roux apparently likes "nothing more" than a bleeding steak with a generous margin of fat, while Egon Ronay "just loves" full-fat cheeses.

The Atkins diet is also much easier to prepare, because you only have to stick the steak under the grill, whereas the low-fat adherents must faff around trying to make their pulses taste more interesting than desiccated cardboard.

The upshot is that, once started on the Atkins diet, people have no difficulty in sticking to it, and a few hundred calories less each day over several months soon adds up. Before you know where you are, you're several stones lighter.

"Last week I saw a man who told me he had lost 70lb on the Atkins diet," writes Dr Thomas Pickering of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, in The Journal of Hypertension.

"When I asked him how he had managed it, he replied with irrefutable logic, 'because I like eating meat'. No patients of mine have lost anything like 70lb from taking my advice that they should eat less fat and more carbohydrates." Quite so.

Paradoxically, however, that is not all, as for some a low-fat diet may cause them to put on weight. The carbohydrates in bread and potatoes are rapidly broken down in the liver to glucose, whose increased levels in the bloodstream cause the pancreas to increase its output of insulin.

This may result in increased hunger after a carbohydrate-rich meal, thus contributing to overeating and obesity. Meanwhile, the combination of high glucose and insulin predisposes to diabetes and coronary heart disease.

"For the good of my heart, I cut out cheese, cream and juicy steaks, and switched over to low-fat everything," writes a reader from Sussex, "and as a result I put on nearly four stone, which was variously blamed on greed, middle-age and HRT - and compounded by escalating levels of flatulence, fatigue and periodic feelings of extreme hunger."

In the 10 days since giving up "carbs", she has lost 5lb "without trying" and her abdominal symptoms have disappeared.

There is, of course, nothing intrinsically virtuous about cream and meat, or anything necessarily harmful about bread and potatoes. The preferred diet incorporates both, and the sole criteria in deciding what to eat for dinner should be whether it tastes good.

None the less there seems no doubt that for those needing to lose weight, Dr Atkins offers the best option.

It is too much to hope that the experts might do the decent thing and apologise for the mountains of misinformation and mischief they have generated over the past 20 years - but with luck they may be rather more circumspect in future in telling us how to lead our lives.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

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