The Fat Checkers

As someone who struggles with male-pattern blobness (although I’m a long way from being the fine figure of a man in the picture above) I am only too well aware of the dangers of a poor diet. I know what to do to sort myself out - but those pizzas are just too tempting.

I know what to do - but I don’t focus on the following advice:

Eat less, move more
Calories in vs calories out
Every 3,500 excess calories leads to 1lb of fat

You’ve all heard this health messaging. Those snappy soundbites full of intellectual nutrition. It’s the wobbly version of the “hands, space, face” and “we’re not safe until everyone is safe” kind of mantras.

The problem is that the messaging around diet, like the messaging around covid, has been an absolute disaster. And, like covid, based on shitty science.

The hugely influential seven countries study of Ancel Keys, the generator of the “diet heart hypothesis”, was a particularly appalling example of scientific cherry-picking to shore up a hypothesis. It’s a shame because Keys actually did some very good work. His seven countries study is not an example of this.

For some reason, Keys had a bit of an aversion to saturated fats. He seemed to believe that eating them to excess clogged up your cardio-vascular system. A somewhat simplistic (and incorrect) picture, as it turns out.

The whole calories in vs calories out thing is also ridiculously simplistic. Obviously, if you eat fewer calories than you actually use, you cannot gain weight. The energy requirement of life has to come from somewhere and if it’s not coming in from food, you have to ‘eat’ yourself.

However, it’s a lot more complicated than this. Your body doesn’t have some kind of “energy counter” ticking off the calories as they come in and then storing the excess as you go over some nominal correct amount. Everything is regulated by hormones.

Let’s suppose you require 2,000 calories each day. Do people really think that eating 2,100 calories of broccoli, or steak, every day is going to lead to the same result (in terms of weight gain) as eating 2,100 calories of Mars bars? Of course not, the hormonal response is going to be entirely different.

The culmination of the diet heart hypothesis nonsense was the promotion of the food pyramid. Since its introduction we’ve had a pandemic of obesity and diabetes. The public health intervention, based on the SCIENCE™, has not worked out too well. Perhaps we can think of a recent example too?

If the Fat Checkers had been in existence back then, perhaps anyone questioning the official narrative would have had their offending thoughts and opinions and arguments removed and labelled as “dangerous misinformation”?

Of course this happened back then too - counter narratives were dismissed and ignored. Several really good studies on the dangers of (excess) carbohydrates, back in the sixties, were just ignored and very few people even know about them.

One of the key components in our body’s response to food is insulin. This hormone acts as a kind of gatekeeper. It’s produced in response to most foods. It tells our body that we don’t need to access the long-term reserves (fat deposits) because there’s stuff to use up first. It’s a bit like spending the cash in your wallet before having to go to the ATM. It “switches off” our body’s capability to use up the long-term storage.

In order to access those long-term reserves (burn off the fat, so to speak) you have to get your insulin levels down. But what do we do? We eat 3 meals a day, with snacks - often stock full of refined carbohydrates (thanks food pyramid) - and our insulin levels never get a chance to return to a sensible level. It’s not just about what we eat, but the frequency of eating also plays a role too.

There’s (obviously) much more going on than this broad-brush picture, but even this little morsel should convince you that the overly-simplistic calorie mantra isn’t really of much use.

We’ve been manically stuffing refined carbohydrates into our bodies for the last 50 years, thinking that by avoiding saturated fats and candies we’re eating healthily. Not only have we caused an absolutely stunning rise in obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance, we’ve also put ourselves at a greatly increased risk of serious complications from covid.

The gym and a decent diet would have been the best vaccination. As Zuby likes to say - get Jaxxinated. Advice I’m determined to follow. When my New Year’s resolutions finally kick in.

The public health catastrophe partially caused by truly dangerous health and diet misinformation has more than a few warnings for us today.

The first warning is that those “trusted” and official health professionals can get it disastrously wrong. The second is that if we’re not allowed to question the SCIENCE™ we’re preventing the necessary self-correction mechanism that is the characteristic of science proper.

I’m fundamentally opposed to the idea of “misinformation”. I’m even more opposed to the idea that we need to be “protected” from it.

I don’t always act like one, but I am, technically, an adult. I don’t want some nameless and unaccountable entity deciding what information I am “allowed” to access - presumably in the name of “the greater good”. I can make my own mind up. And if I come to the wrong conclusion and end up harming myself - then so be it.

Remember that if someone controls the information you have access to, they effectively control you. They can shape your entire worldview, and therefore push you in certain directions. Even though you might be a totally rational and very intelligent person, you can only process what information you have.

Covid has become a very convenient excuse to bring in all sorts of information control and manipulation mechanisms - all for the most chilling 4 words ever spoken in history: for the greater good

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