Diets and fashion: Let’s sort the wheat from the chaff

DIETS, like beards, come in and out of fashion.

Not so very long ago the Atkins diet was advanced as the holy-grail answer to all our weight problems. We’ve had high-fat low-carb diets, we’ve had raw-food diets, blueberry and cranberry diets.

We’ve had the paleo or stone-age diet, we’ve had sugar-free diets and some people even invested time and faith in the clay cleanse diet.

The VB6 diet, whatever that Top Gear-sounding adventure entails, was endorsed by popular entertainers so it must be a good way to manage weight and rebuild health.

Many of these disciplines have their virtues but some elements of them are plain bonkers and have little enough to do with structured, peer-reviewed medical research.

One after another these sometimes eccentric blueprints promising a Peter Pan body and a reinvigorated, healthy lifestyle have fallen by the wayside and been stood down like tank tops, the more vibrant tartans and bell bottoms.

Some may record a passing success but few, if any, are a long-term solution to a weight problem brought about by poor diet and inactivity — or even, as some research now confirms, genetics.

Research published in the Open Heart Journal has challenged if not overturned a dietary certainty from the 1970s and 1980s.

It has suggested that the anti-fat advice, once considered more a gospel than an argument, to cut the intake of fat and saturated fat to reduce the risk of a heart attack was incorrect and should never have been given to the millions of people who followed it.

That philosophy recommended reducing overall dietary fat consumption to 30% of total energy intake, and specifically, saturated fat to 10% of total energy intake has been refuted.

Contemporary research reviewing the original anti-fat thesis found that cholesterol levels fell more in the group that changed their diet but this did not seem to have any impact on the death rates from all causes or from coronary heart disease.

So, there it is, another certainty rejected like a slice of fatty meat at the lady captain’s lunch.

This is important because dieting, and all of the fads that tortuous process encourages, is not a matter of fashion.

It is a matter of health and in a world where obesity is taking an ever tighter grip on the wellbeing of millions of people it is important to sort the wheat from the chaff; to differentiate between suggestions coming from the fashion and entertainment industries and science.

This is more challenging than it seems because belief — and novelty — is central to the process.

Some doctors in the 1920s and 1930s, even later in some cases, recommended smoking as a way to exercise the lungs so it is important that when considering a diet a person can easily distinguish between witch doctor quackery and regimes endorsed by science and medical authorities.

Just last week the Government approved plans to force restaurants to declare calorie levels on menus.

Maybe it should do something similar with the dieting industry and insist any programme be tested and endorsed — or not — before it is made public.