A broadside for diet beliefs: Moderation is the sanest response

ANYONE trying to follow a good, healthy diet, one based on sensibly-sized portions of good food, must regularly revise their idea of what constitutes good food and diet.

The battleground around food choices is as much about fashion as it is health or sustenance. It’s as much about show business as it is the business of eating healthily. Sometimes it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, the informed, peer- reviewed conclusions from the snake-oil salesman’s pitch.

The latest reports from Britain’s National Obesity Forum and the Public Health Collaboration will not make it any easier to navigate conflicting report after conflicting report about fats, calories, the role of the food industry — sometimes hidden — in funding “research” and the integrity of some scientists. How a sensible, well-informed person can adjudicate on utterly confusing advice is as grand a mystery as the recipe for Coca-Cola.

At one moment low-fat is the mantra, the following week high carbs and full fat are advanced as the true path to wellbeing. One month we are encouraged to use cranberries, the following month couscous gets star billing. A little later we are urged to cut out white bread and pasta — even potatoes! — replacing them with whole wheat bread or brown rice. One month eggs guarantee salmonella, the next they are kitchen gold dust. Sugar is in the firing line today even though a moderate quantity, some physicians assure us, is essential.

A whole lexicon of comfort has grown around these issues. Warm, touchy-feely phrases like locally sourced, ethically farmed, rare-breed, foraged and, most impressive of all, sustainably produced — or caught — can occasionally seem as much about marketing as a definition of fuzzy merit. The latitude afforded to producers who describe their produce as organic adds to that impression.

Yesterday’s reports add to the confusion. The charities send a broadside into today’s received wisdom around confronting obesity, cholesterol or diabetes. They say that encouraging people to follow low fat diets and to lower their cholesterol is having “disastrous health consequences”. The reports accuse major public health bodies of colluding with the food industry and call for a “major overhaul” of dietary guidelines and a return to “whole foods” such as meat, fish and dairy. The report argues that saturated fat does not cause heart disease while full-fat dairy — including milk, yoghurt and cheese — can protect the heart. One of the authors described Britain’s current Eatwell guide from Public Health England as “more like a metabolic time-bomb than a dietary pattern conducive for good health”. Strong words indeed.

It’s not surprising that bodies like the Royal College of Physicians and the British Heart Foundation rejected the core findings pointing out that they have not been peer- reviewed and hinting darkly at funding issues.

Confused? Aren’t we all. The sanest response seems to be to eat as well as you can but moderately and take as much exercise as you can. These basic steps, and most of all, portions smaller than we have become used to, have a simple, practical ring of truth about them.