Category: Uncategorized

To read the previous article click here

Below is a copy of my article published in the August issue of Pampering Times.

Phil Nuttridge continues his series of articles looking at the modern take on diet and nutrition.  He explodes many of the dietary myths that have defined the latter decades of the twentieth century and left their legacy of chronic illnesses in the first decades of this century.  In this month’s article he looks at how the “eat less, move more” weight loss paradigm is flawed by our love affair with sugar and starches.  More information can be found on Phil’s website cuttingcarbs.co.uk or by following him on Instagram:  CuttingCarbsUK

There is an increasing video trend on social media for fitness ‘gurus’ to stand in front of flip charts and essentially tell us how stupid we are.  (Have a Google at ‘James Smith Fitness’ or ‘RH Fitness’ if you have not experienced the ilk before).   These gurus are of a type – fit young men, usually in their twenties or thirties, they have muscles barely contained within their t-shirts (they sure know their target audience are women of a certain age) and they have a strange penchant for swearing at the camera.  Let me refer to them hereon in as the ‘swearing gym bunnies’, or SGBs.  Maybe SGBs think that the bad language will shock us out of our stupidity. 

According to these SGBs, the pivotal point of our stupidity is our lack of understanding that weight loss is as simple as ‘eat less, move more’.  “You are fat because you eat too much”.  “You’re fat because you are not tracking your calories”.  “You are fat because you are not exercising enough”.  “You are fat because you are stupid”.

Judging by the number of followers they have, stupidity is big business.  It is a real pity therefore that ‘eat less, move more’ is a flawed strategy.

Inescapably weight loss is hard.  If you are already obese, as opposed to just over-weight, weight loss is incredibly hard.  If you have had a BMI over 30, your endocrine (hormone) system will have changed in such a way that your body will fight all attempts at fat loss.  It will fight you in sneaky ways.  It will let you watch the SGBs; it will shame you into counting those calories; it will shame you into obsession over your daily step total.  It will even trick you by giving you easy(ish) wins in short and medium term weight loss.  Your body will dupe you into believing that ‘eat less, move more’ actually works.  You will then fawn over these SGBs as they have shown you that you can shed a few pounds.  You too will genuinely believe everyone else is stupid. 

But your body fat plays the long-game.  It will wait.  Like the Grim Reaper, nothing is forgotten – every shed pound is tallied.  And when your willpower and motivation reach the point of exhaustion, your body will have its moment of revenge, as each shed pound surreptitiously creeps back into your body with a few extra for good measure.  Of course, the more you have paid the SGB for their ‘no-nonsense’ diet plan, the more you will be motivated and so the longer your fat has to wait to get its revenge.  But be sure, it WILL always get its revenge.  

Of course, next year there will be a new SGB, with even more brazen language and you can do it all again.  And again.  And again.  It does not matter whether you pay Slimming World or Weight Watchers or any of these SGBs, when the willpower is exhausted the only pounds you will have permanently lost will be those in your wallet, not those on your hips.

I know that those of you currently on any of these weight loss plans and particularly those of you in the ‘honeymoon’ stage where you are still losing weight, you are going to be quite rude to me.  “Of course it works” you will splutter.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about” you may protest.  Maybe.  Allow me though to explain the science.  In doing so, I promise not to swear or take any of your money!

“Eat less, move more” sounds so obvious doesn’t it?  This idea is predicated on the seemingly incontrovertible assumption that if you eat more calories than you burn, the remaining excess calories (the unit we use to measure energy from food) will be stored as fat in your body.  But then if you create a calorie shortfall by eating fewer calories and moving more to burn more calories, you will use-up some of those stored fat calories to meet that shortfall. That all seems perfectly logical.  

Those who swear (literally, swear) that this is the case and suggest you are stupid to think otherwise will, implicitly or explicitly, be invoking what is known as the First Law of Thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed.  If you eat calories then they have to go somewhere; either burn them or store them as fat.  Simples.

There’s a problem.  There are two conditions that have to be met for the First Law of Thermodynamics to be true:  

1. The system you are applying it to (in our case the human body) has to be a closed system.
2. ‘Energy (calories) eaten’ and ‘energy (calories) out’ have to be independent variables.

Neither condition is met in humans.  Let me skip the physics of closed systems for the moment (maybe in a later article) and let me focus instead on the second condition that the calories you burn and the calories you eat are not independent variables: Paraphrasing, what you eat affects how many calories you burn;  how many calories you burn affects what you eat.  

The swearing gym bunnies will abhor this idea – they will assure you that it does not matter what you eat – just eat less of it and/or burn more calories and you will have a calorie deficit.  Allow me to show you that it critically DOES depend on what you eat.

The interdependence between calories in and calories out pivots on many hormones – the two chief protagonists are insulin and leptin.  

Whilst many of you will have heard of insulin – more of that one in a moment – maybe fewer of you have heard of leptin.  Leptin was a discovery of the Nineties and in the few decades we have known of its existence, it has been quietly over-turning much of our thinking regarding fat storage and obesity.  So quietly in fact, that most of our SGBs are completely unaware of it and how it has been the death knell for what little science there ever was to support the ‘eat less, move more’ strategy.

In brief, leptin:  is produced by your fat cells when they are ‘satiated’; it suppresses appetite; it is an antagonist of insulin (more of that later); together with insulin, it controls the appetite ‘thermostat’ in the brain; it controls thyroid function and adrenaline function thereby controlling metabolism; its levels are promoted by HIITs – high intensity interval training; we can become leptin resistant (bad news for controlling appetite) and that resistance is exacerbated by high sugar diets, particularly diets high in the fruit sugar, fructose; leptin resistance is correlated with insulin resistance (more of that later too) so diets high in grains, cereals, starches and synthetic oils and margarines are going to impair appetite and metabolism management.

So although it is (in terms of discovery) a new kid on the block, it is proving itself to be pretty pivotal in connecting appetite and the energy we burn in our metabolism.   Because how you get your calories – whether for example you eat lots of fruit sugar and grains – will affect your leptin levels, this is going to have a big impact on how many calories you burn.  And, how you choose to burn calories through exercise – HIITs versus more conventional forms, for example – will also affect leptin levels and that is going to impact how many calories you will burn during exercise, how many you burn during rest and also your post-exercise appetite.

They used to say a calorie, is a calorie is a calorie.  Leptin has put pay to that.

The other hormone involved in this metabolism-appetite axis is insulin.  Although we have known about this hormone for nearly a century, we are still adding to our understanding of how it controls metabolism and fat storage.   

First and foremost, insulin controls blood sugar levels.  If you eat sugar or starch, this will increase your blood sugar level.  This is not something your body wants to keep elevated for too long as excess blood sugar will start attaching itself to your protein molecules and thereby critically disturb your protein metabolism.  Cue insulin.  

Your body releases insulin in response to raised blood sugar.  Various tissues of the body in turn respond by taking-up the excess glucose (the molecular form of sugar carried in the blood).  Insulin tells muscle cells to burn the glucose for energy release;  in the liver, insulin instructs the cells to stop producing glucose from excess fat and protein, a background activity performed by a healthy liver all the time; in the skin cells, insulin triggers fat storage.  All of these responses lead to a fall in blood sugar levels, the desired result.

The problem is sugar and starch are addictive.  And, through the dietary advice of the last few decades we have been told to ditch the fat and encourage to eat lots of starches (bread, pasta, rice) instead.  So we now eat them at every meal, every day.  Under this sugar-borne onslaught our insulin mechanisms will start to show signs of wear and tear.  The orange juice, cereal and toast you have for breakfast; the muffin with your coffee, the bread or jacket potato for lunch, the pasta or rice with your evening meal and the biscuits before bed all load you with sugar and starch and put strain on your insulin system. 

Under this strain some of the target cells that should be listening out for the insulin message become a little deaf to the signal.  This is the start of Insulin Resistance.  Once Insulin Resistance takes hold, your body has to produce more insulin to get its message across.  

There is then an escalation – eat more sugar and starch, more insulin, more insulin resistance; eat even more sugar and starch, even more insulin, even more insulin resistance.  Eventually, your body cannot produce enough insulin to get the message across and this becomes Type II Diabetes.  One of the most prolific non-communicable diseases of the twenty-first century and it is caused by constant bombarding of your body with sugar and starch.  An insulin system that evolved to deal with occasional sugar surges in the Autumn when berries were in season, is now bombarded all year round and with quantities of sugars way beyond those ever before experienced in the millions of years of human evolution.   We now additionally ‘refine’ much of that carbohydrate making the sugars and starches all the more accessible to our bodies.  That refining just creates a shortcut to our insulin and leptin mechanisms.

But we have another problem with Insulin Resistance: Not all cells become resistant at the same rate.  Whilst your liver becomes deafer to the message of insulin quite quickly, in many people the fat cells in your skin do not.  This has important consequences for those wanting to lost weight.  

As you pump out more insulin to overcome the deafness of the liver, your fat cells are listening to every single drop of insulin and store more and more fat in response to those ever higher levels in circulation.  This insulin-mediated grip on your body to store ever more fat is hugely problematical – being hormone controlled, just telling yourself to ‘eat less and move more’ to overcome it, is not going to cut the mustard in the long term.  It will sabotage you.  You might well eat fewer calories today than you think you need, or exercise a bit more to burn a few extra calories to create a calorie deficit, but insulin in cahoots with leptin will (eventually) reset your resting metabolism to recoup those missing calories. Or it may so enflame your appetite, that binge eating on that Hagen Das to replace those missing calories becomes irrepressible.  If your plan to lose weight leaves you feeling hungry, lethargic or depressed that is a sure sign that you are fighting your insulin-leptin mechanism.  You cannot escape those hormones.

OK, so in the honeymoon period of falling in love with your latest ‘diet plan’, your motivation may be able to overcome many of these insulin-leptin mediated metabolic and appetite pressures.  You will almost certainly lose weight in the first few weeks of the ‘eat less, move more’ plan.  And maybe for longer than a few weeks if you have strong enough motivation, usually correlated to how much you paid for this diet plan.  But as soon as that motivational over-ride is exhausted, leptin and insulin will have their way.  

Let’s be clear, all you are buying from the swearing gym bunnies is motivation.  And that need for motivation is driven by the carbohydrates – sugars and starches – you are eating. 

As we saw in my last article, fat phobia is a phenomenon of the last few decades of the twentieth century and through its grip we have been steered away from natural, healthy intrinsic fats and instead been led to believe that it is healthy to fuel ourselves on lots of carbohydrates. Of course, many of the grains and cereals from whence we source our carbs are cheap to produce.  Food manufacturers love them as they can highly process these carbs making them more addictive and more accessible and increase their profit margins.  How wonderful it must be for a food producer to be able to take a natural food like yoghurt, process it to remove the intrinsic nutritious fat, add lots of cheap sugar and starches to make it flavoursome and addictive and then charge a premium for labelling it ‘low fat’.  Ker-ching!

No wonder then that through the effect all this sugar and starch has on our insulin and leptin mechanisms we are getting fatter and fatter.  And then, we have the SGBs telling us that it is simple – just carry on eating the food that has chronically harmed our metabolisms to make us fat (i.e. the carbs), reduce our intake of the foods that the carbs displaced from our diets before we were all fat (i.e. the natural fats) and miraculously you won’t be fat any more.  Who are the stupid ones now?

And I haven’t even mentioned gut bacteria and how they affect how fat we are.  You don’t see that mentioned on the SGBs flip charts.  I will cover that next time.

I fully appreciate that much of this ‘new’ science overturns the models of diet and weight management of the last fifty years.   But of course, it has to.  The last fifty years has seen epidemic increases in the levels of obesity, Type II diabetes, inflammatory diseases, cancer, eating disorders and mental disorders in children.  These conditions all have dietary associations and the hitherto prevailing science of diet has almost certainly contributed to these epidemics.  Time for a rethink.

In my next article I will continue this discussion by looking at some of the confirmatory evidence for this new model of appetite and obesity.  It will be an interesting journey where we will look at fat babies, fat mice, faecal transplants, Ice Ages and how conscientious objectors have helped our understanding of fat metabolism and weight loss.

To read the next article click here

To read the previous article click here

Below is a copy of my article published in the July issue of Pampering Times.

Phil Nuttridge continues his series of articles looking at the modern take on diet and nutrition.  He explodes many of the dietary myths that defined the latter decades of the twentieth century and left their legacy of chronic illnesses in the first decades of this century.  In this month’s article he looks at the ‘Fat is bad for you’ myth.  More information can be found on Phil’s website cuttingcarbs.co.uk or by following him on Instagram:  CuttingCarbsUK

I have often wondered if the Sprat household was a harmonious one:

Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean
And so between them both, you see
They’d lick the platter clean

Putting this in a modern context, Jack was clearly following the ideals of a low-fat diet but what of his wife? Was she an early adopter of the high-fat, low carb movement by insisting that there was ‘no lean’ on her plate?  The rhyme does imply that they lived in some sort of harmony, a sort of ‘yin and yang’ approach to eating.  Sadly such harmony does not exist between the two distinct camps in modern nutrition:  We have the ‘fat is bad’ movement in one corner, firmly believing in the evil of dietary saturated fats and cholesterol.  In the other corner we have the ‘Carbs are bad’ disciples; their mission is to convince us that sugar and starches have been the public enemy and that eating fat is good for us.  But who is right?

As you will discover in this series of articles, I am very much in the latter camp.  I firmly believe that many of the chronic non-communicable epidemic diseases of the twenty-first century are linked to our love affair with sugars and starches and our fear of dietary fat.  But I will also show that I am not particularly an advocate of boundless fat consumption either – there are limits and ‘rules’ we should apply here too.  I will discuss for example, how modern genetics has shown that those of you with one particular variant of one specific gene should limit saturated fat consumption.  I will also discuss how there are good fats and bad fats, but will surprise you as to where I draw the line between the two.  

But where did this fear of fat come from?  Consumption of natural fats – olive oil, coconut oil, animal fats and blubber has been a key part of traditional diets around the world for much of Man’s history. In our hunter-gatherer past, fattier parts of an animal were much more highly prized than the leaner, fat-stripped skeletal muscle which is pretty much all supermarkets offer us today. Where we have records or where we are still able to observe populations eating high natural fat diets, we see that there was or is little incidence of modern epidemic diseases such as obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease.  When these same populations have been introduced (forcibly or by choice) to the foods of industrialised society – principally refined grains, cereals and sugars and synthetic fats – then those epidemic diseases appear, often in startlingly short timescales.   And yet we still blame the consumption of natural fats.

If like me you were a baby of the Sixties, for pretty much all of your adult life you have been told eating fat is bad: “Fat makes you fat”, “fat clogs your arteries”, “fat gives you heart attacks”.  Conversely we are also told carbs are good, carbs are healthy, eating carbs will make you slim.  Eat lots of grains and cereals and you will be okay.  Low fat eating is the healthy way forward, or so we are told.

And the statistics show we have indeed done what we were told.  We do eat less fat than 50 years ago, we do eat more low-fat versions of food, we do eat more carbs.  So why are we now so fat and unhealthy?  I and many others now believe this is due to our obsessive fear of dietary fat.

Fat is a vital component of your diet.  There are in fact ‘essential’ fats, fats (actually fatty acids) that your body must eat. Stop eating all fats and you will die. You will become unhealthy if you restrict your fats.  Fats are a vital energy source, they insulate us, they protect our vital organs.  Fat is an important medium for storing essential minerals and vitamins.  Cholesterol, which is a particular form of fat, is actually a very key substance in your body.  It acts as an anti-inflammatory for the brain and immune system, it is the precursor for Vitamin D which your body synthesises when sunlight bathes our skin. It is similarly used to make many of the body’s hormones.  Cholesterol is an essential component of all cell membranes and a particularly important building block for the nerve cells in our brain.  Cholesterol is also part of the ‘first response’ process when there is inflammatory damage to our blood vessel walls.  Fats are essential for us to survive and thrive.

There are no essential carbohydrates.  You mainly use carbohydrates as fuel and you can quite easily train your body to use fat instead.  And although your body does need some (not much) carbohydrate even when fat adapted, it can synthesise all the carbohydrate it does need from fats and proteins. Stop eating carbs and you will not die. As my later articles will show, you would actually thrive on reduced carbs.  

So how come we have been told to restrict our consumption of fat?

A bit of history helps explain this. By the 1950s there were serious concerns about the rising epidemic of heart disease.  In 1955 President Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack and suddenly heart disease was headline news.  It became the primary health concern in the Western world.  No-one knew for sure what caused heart disease – there were ideas and theories but nothing was definitive. Of the many hypotheses of the time, one was that heart disease was caused by dietary saturated fats and in particular cholesterol.  One of the key proponents of this hypothesis was a pathologist called Ancel Keys.  He had unshakable faith in his idea and coupled with his dogged and bullying personality he managed to get his hypothesis incorporated into the thinking of the American Heart Association (A.H.A.). In the wake of the President’s heart attack, the A.H.A. was under significant pressure to be seen to be doing something to combat the rising level of heart disease.  Fuelled by Keys’ unwavering faith in his own hypothesis, the A.H.A. issued dietary advice for all Americans and this advice was predicated on the idea that cutting consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol would reduce your risk of heart disease.  That was it, courtesy of the A.H.A. and Ancel Keys, Fatphobia was born and from it grew the monster that is the current dietary advice for the developed world.

The demonisation of fat took hold quickly and flourished.  The low-fat industry was created and under its coat-tails, in crept the high sugar, high grain and cereal diets.  Food producers rubbed their hands as the low-fat, high sugar and highly processed grain foods are hugely profitable.  Manufacturers of synthetic fats were happy too as their chemically engineered oils and margarines were advocated as the ‘healthy option’ by the A.H.A.

But what was the scientific evidence for fatphobia?  The evidence centred on just one dietary study, conducted by Keys of course, where he looked at the dietary habits of seven countries and correlated the levels of fat consumption in those populations with their heart disease outcomes. He measured the fat and cholesterol consumption of 13,000 men in those seven countries and then waited to see who died of a heart attack. 

The problem is that we now know he cherry-picked his data.  Through a pilot study conducted earlier, he knew which countries had both low rates of fat consumption and and low rates of heart disease and included those countries in his study.  He also knew, but chose to ignore, the countries that had high rates of fat consumption and yet also had low rates of heart disease.  He had pilot study data from 22 countries but chose to use data from only seven, discounting the other 15 as they did not fit his hypothesis. With his cherry-picked data, he was able to show that those countries that ate lower amounts of fat had lower levels of heart disease and those that ate more fat, had more heart disease. But even with his skewed data, all he showed was correlation – he could not show that high fat diets causedheart disease.  Yet he was determined to use the study as evidence for causation.  He ignored the fact that those countries with low levels of heart disease also had low levels of sugar consumption.  He also ignored that his data showed a much stronger correlation between heart disease and sugar consumption than between heart disease and fat consumption.  

Keys aggressively defended his study and although there were significant academic voices questioning his methods and his interpretation of the results at the time, he prevailed. In the following decades, literally hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on clinical trials trying to support the outcome of that original seven countries study.    The most ambitious and most costly single study trying to support the ‘fat is bad’ hypothesis is the (rather snappily titled) Women’s Health Initiative Randomised Controlled Dietary Modification Trial (WHIRCDMT) which alone cost $700 million, took eight years to complete and involved over 48,000 test subjects.  That trial along with all of the other trials spectacularly failed to show that low fat diets offered any improvement in heart disease outcomes.  Every single one.  In fact, if you look closely at the data from the WHIRCDMT, you see that it actually shows worsened health outcomes, including weight gain, for those on the low fat dietary regime.  The data is also very troubling reading for the manufacturers of statins, but I will save that for a later article.

So there we have it: ’Fat is bad’ is a flawed hypothesis and always has been.  And yet we have built a megalith that is the modern paradigm of dietary advice based entirely on that flawed hypothesis.  

Although the incidence of death from heart attack is less than it was fifty years ago (mainly due to reduced levels of smoking and earlier diagnoses), incidence of all cardiovascular disease markers is now at the highest level ever.  Obesity is at the highest levels ever.  Vitamin D deficiency is pandemic creating its own chronic health issues.  Degenerative neurological disorders – dementia and Alzheimers included – are also an increasing burden on our health services.  All are certainly correlated with the low fat dietary advice; contributory causation is highly likely.

As has been suggested by leading voices in modern nutrition, the low fat dietary advice has been a mass experiment carried out on the population of the developed world and it has failed.  For more information on the history of fatphobia, I would highly recommend ‘The Big Fat Surprise’ by Nina Teicholz.  

So perhaps Mrs Sprat was on to a good thing after all.  By ‘eating no lean’ she was ensuring good amounts of healthy fats in her diet promoting good health.  Her poor husband however, was setting-up chronic illness and in all likelihood premature death, by cutting the fat.  No wonder she has a wry smile in all the books of Nursery Rhymes.

In my next article I want to explain how this has been a doubly-whammy.  Not only is cutting fat from your plate bad for your health, but putting carbs – sugars, grains and cereals – in its stead, is in all likelihood creating yet more problems.  In particular, I shall be looking at how the epidemic of Type II diabetes, inflammatory diseases and obesity can be laid at the door of excess carbs.

To read the next article click here

Below is a copy of my article published in the May 2019 issue of Pampering Times:

Phil Nuttridge – Biophysicist, Statistician, Manual Therapist and Pilates Instructor – begins an occasional series of articles for Pampering Times looking at the new science of nutrition.  These articles will draw from his research and investigation into what the modern science of food and diet is telling us and how it is confronting head-on many of the old concepts and over-turning much of what we used to believe.  Be prepared to be challenged!  More information can be found on Phil’s website cuttingcarbs.co.uk or by following him on Instagram:  CuttingCarbsUK.

Eating is easy. We all do it and we would all get into a pickle if we stopped. The hard parts are knowing what to eat, when to eat and how to eat.  There is advice everywhere, some supposedly supported by science, some not so.  Choose a dietary path and there is bound to be someone saying it is good for you and yet someone else saying it is not.  Turn on any social media feed or open any newspaper and there will be some article with a headline “Latest study shows….”; today a particular food is good for you tomorrow it is bad for you.

In this series of articles I hope to throw share some of the wisdom I have gleaned from many months of research and investigation. I will explain how some very flaky science in the 60s and 70s has led us down a cul-de-sac of dietary advice that in all likelihood has led to the epidemic of chronic non-communicable illnesses we see in the 21st century. Dogmatists are trying to drag us further down this dead end; pragmatists are advocating the status quo muttering platitudes such as ‘everything in moderation’. But there is a new breed of evangelist gaining an ever-louder voice trying to get us off this cul-de-sac and lead us in a new better direction. I would like to think I am one of those evangelists, piggy-backing on the work of others, adding volume to those voices. I hope that by the end of these articles, there will be a few more evangelists spreading the word of this new science of food and nutrition. 

But let’s start with a quiz. We all love a quiz.  To see where you are on the dogmatist-pragmatist-evangelist spectrum, please take a few moments to answer the following questions with a simple ‘true’ or ‘false’.  We can add up your score at the end.

Question 1:  Low fat dairy foods are better for you than full fat versions?

Question 2:  Vegetable oil is better for you than butter?

Question 3:  You should avoid egg yolks because they raise your cholesterol and cause heart attacks?

Question 4:  Eating red meat is unhealthy and causes cancer?

Question 5:  Orange juice and oatmeal are good ways to start the day?

Question 6:  The best way to lose weight is to eat a low-fat diet?

Question 7:  Sushi is a health food?

Question 8:  You should eat at least five servings of fruit every day?

Question 9:  An apple a day keeps the doctor away?

Question 10:  Fresh fruit is more nutritious than frozen fruit?

Question 11:  Substituting margarine for butter is a healthier choice?

Question 12:  Eating whole grain wheat-based flour is better for you than eating de-husked (‘white’) flour?

Question 13:  Beans are a good source of protein and healthier than eating meat?

Question 14:  Nuts are fattening and should be eaten only sparingly to avoid weight gain?

Question 15:  Microwave cooking is unhealthy and destroys all the nutrients in food?

So now let’s work-out your score.  It is actually quite easy: Award yourself one point for every question you answered ‘false’, but then DEDUCT one point for every question you answered ‘true’.  Now, what’s your score?  Be honest, don’t cheat!

If you got the full 15 then welcome aboard, you are already there – you could perhaps even help me write some of the upcoming articles!  Less than fifteen, then we have a journey ahead of us.  Zero or even a minus score, then we have a long journey ahead.  

Read the questions again and I assure you that in the modern understanding of nutrition all of the above statements are false. There are certainly some that will be more contentious than others and some that might even be quite a shock to you.  Over upcoming articles I will be tackling each of these areas and presenting to you the latest evidence and research that will help us out of the dietary cul-de-sac we find ourselves in.

In my next article I shall be looking at Fatphobia.  I shall be summarising some of the history of how we got to believe that ‘fat is bad’ and how that set us on the dietary dead-end leading to obesity, Type II diabetes and many of the chronic illnesses of the 21st century. 

To read the next article in the series click here