The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat

by Tim Spector

The low-density lipoproteins are the bad guys, allowing small drops of lipids to get caught in the blood vessel walls, which leads to a build-up of plaque and heart disease or stroke.

Cholesterol is a complex lipid that is part of virtually every cell in our bodies: 80 per cent of it is synthesised naturally inside us and only around 20 per cent is eaten as food.

Verify?

Once again, we see how scientists seem driven to ignore the big picture and try to find the single magic ingredient that makes people healthy or sick.

Big Mac, fries and a large Coke, which in the US gives you instantly 1,360 calories and adds up to over half the average total intakes. Furthermore, much of it is fat, plus as a bonus the equivalent of nineteen extra teaspoons of sugar. Currently one in three Americans eat in a fast-food restaurant at least daily. Even in the UK, a third of children under ten now eat junk food every day.

So treat the ‘zero fat’ sticker as a sign of processing, not of health. Except in the artificial world of food labels, fat and protein are inseparable.

fewer than one in six dieters said they have ever managed to maintain a 10 per cent weight loss for more than twelve months, and that is probably a big over-estimate.

although the mechanisms vary depending on the diet, the body always has a trick up its sleeve to ensure the replenishment of its fat stores.

The main factor that predicted diversity was the number of different plant species you ate each week; diversity peaked when you ate at least thirty different types of plant. This may sound a lot but includes grains, nuts, seeds and herbs.

The UK has over twice the proportion of vegetarians as the US, and the gap is increasing each year. This is in complete contrast to the numbers practising religion, where the steady threefold greater numbers in the US are outstripping the diminishing UK numbers.

We think it likely that the changes in diet led first to the changes in microbes and then the frailty, and cognitive decline rather than the other way around.

The estimates were that you could reduce the risk of heart disease by 10 per cent for every extra 7 grams of fibre consumed.2 Nearly the same protective effects were found in reducing overall mortality, in seven studies of nearly a million people.3

Cutting out wheat, barley and rye from your diet could be OK if you replaced them with other healthy vegetables, but this often doesn’t happen. For many people their diet becomes restricted to odd items like gluten-free cheese pizza and gluten-free beer. Consequently, they may lose out on valuable sources of B vitamins, fibre and prebiotics and see a big deterioration in the variety of their microbes.

Most of the chemical safety-testing of food additives and sweeteners focuses on determining the risks of poisoning or cancer, not on detecting metabolic changes in our bodies.

More recently, the benefits of multivitamins have been assessed and reported on with considerable attendant publicity. Reports included a meta-analysis of over 27 existing studies, and two new large randomised gold-standard studies of multivitamins, totalling close to half a million people. They have shown, convincingly, no benefits whatsoever.4

unless you have a proven deficiency disease or are on a bizarre diet, vitamins don’t help, and may cause harm to you and your microbes.