The Truth About Food
Jill Fullerton-Smith 2007 (Bloomsbury ISBN 978-0-7475-8685-2) was published to accompany the recent current BBC television series of the same name. It promises to cut
through the myths to provide the most up-to-date facts on the effects of food on your body. Using a variety of controlled tests on different groups of people, the study even challenges such widely accepted notions such as drinking 2 litres of water each day aids health, that detox diets work, or that overweight people suffer from a slower metabolism than slim people.
The
How to be slim section might be of interest to forum members. The section promotes calorie control combined with increased activity as the only way to lose weight. However, it acknowledges to importance of the psychology of appetite, and gives various tips on how to avoid eating too much. Satiety is also featured, and tips to avoid hunger include eating plenty of fibre and protein.
The book promotes various superfoods within a balanced diet, such as tomatoes, broccoli, garlic, walnuts, spinach, berries, oily fish etc. It places emphasis on including more fruit, vegetables, and nuts into the diet, and replacing fatty meats with lean meats such as fish. It isn't just a book about weight control - it looks at how food and drink can affect us - our resistance to disease, to stress, to cancers and heart disease; how it can affect our sexual prowess, moods, even our intelligence. The study for example uses an experiment on London taxi drivers to demonstrate how by adding omega 3 rich oily fish into their diet for 12 weeks improved their tested memory abilities by 25%! Dairy foods are promoted, or at least the right types - even as an aid to weightloss.
But for me, the reason that I even decided to buy the book after picking it up in the supermarket, was its approach to the whole question of diet and modern society, in relation to the kind of diet that we
evolved to eat.
Humans have been around this planet for some 2 millions years - our species for 200,000. For the vast majority of that time, our diet consisted of eating fresh fruit and vegetables - lots of leafy stuff, plus roots, berries etc. I addition we ate lean meat - the lean muscle of wild animals - often grazing animals. We also ate fish, nuts, seeds, wild birds eggs, etc. This went on some 99% of human existence!
Then around 8,000 - 10,000 years ago (recently in the lifespan of humanity), we invented agriculture. We started eating the meat of domestic animals - fattier than the meat of wild animals. We also started to eat bread, although at least it was still wholemeal. We started eating dairy products.
Then very suddenly, over the past 25 to 75 years, we have changed our diet dramatically. Now we eat processed foods, junk foods, ready meals, more saturated foods, more and more refined sugar, more salt, white bread, trans-fats, etc, etc. So what is it doing to us?
There is a
BBC website to accompany the book and TV series.
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