Georgina Fisher posted on January 01, 2008 15:36
If every other new year is anything to go by, 2008 will usher in a brand new collection of fad diets. You know the ones, eye-catching cover, snappy title, big promises. And what better time to unleash these diet gems onto the nation than our Weakest Moment. The post-Christmas crises. The moment you realise that it was only the turkey that was supposed to fatten up for Christmas. Clearly, there’s no point in dusting down your old collection of diet books. They won’t cut it this time. There can only be one solution. The New Diet Book.
But should we really be investing all that much hope, not to mention our left-over Christmas book vouchers, in the diet industry? By rights the diet industry should have gone out of business years ago. It’s not exactly got a great track record of success. After all, its profits aren’t the only thing that’s bulging.
When it comes to the obesity epidemic, we can sit back in our armchairs and let the facts speak for themselves. Being overweight or obese is fast becoming the number one health problem in the UK. Obesity rates in England have trebled in the last 20 years. And the rather bleak vision of the future predicts that by 2050, 60% of adult men, 50% of adult women and 25% of children could be obese, with an additional super-sized cost to society of £45.5 billion per year.
By some twisted logic, the expansion of our waistlines appears to have mirrored the meteoric growth of the diet industry and its profits. Diets have come and gone without leaving so much as a dent in the spiralling obesity statistics. That each passing fad diet quickly gains iconic fashion status through celebrity endorsement is quite a remarkable triumph of marketing over common sense. And deeply worrying it is that we care more about what’s on Jennifer Anniston’s dinner plate than our own. The way we’re headed, we’ll be following the diet endorsed by our favourite footballer’s wife’s sisters’ cat before too long.
That’s not to say that the whole diet industry is bad or that we can just blame someone else for the obesity epidemic. The reality is that we have complete freedom of choice (albeit grotesquely influenced by multi-million pound marketing campaigns) when it comes to what we eat, what we don’t eat and how active we are.
There can be no doubt that our collective diet and lifestyle has undergone enormous reconfigurations in the last 100 years. For millennia we evolved eating a diet high in fibre, rich in micro-nutrients (that’s techno-speak for vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals etc…) and with a low-Glycemic Load (that means foods that release their energy slowly into the bloodstream). Typically, such unprocessed fare tended to be low energy density food, leaving us not only well nourished but feeling full and satisfied. The contrast with the modern diet couldn’t be more stark. The processing and refining of our foodstuff has left us with a predominance of low-fibre, high Glycemic Load, high energy density foods, stripped of their micro-nutrient content. That such fare tends not to leave us full and satisfied compounds the problem by paving the way for the ‘Super Size’ portion culture.
It’s likely that even the most conscientious attempt to diet will be doomed to failure if changes aren’t made to our energy expenditure. Sedentary lifestyles are now the norm. Once upon a time we would have expended great energy hunting and foraging for our food. With internet shopping, that nice man from the supermarket now appears on our doorstep clutching the weekly shop at the click of a button. We now live in what has been dubbed an ‘obesogenic environment’. You don’t have to be greedy and lazy to get fat nowadays. An abundance of energy dense foods, sedentary lifestyles, labour-saving devices, and motorized transport will see to that.
If there is a simple message it’s that we’re just not hard-wired to thrive on a modern western diet and lifestyle. It’s not in our genetic programming so to speak. We have become grossly out of sync with the types of foods we evolved to eat and the level of activity we were designed to perform. And let’s be clear that the consequences of obesity go way beyond mere aesthetics. Obesity is a time-bomb ticking when it comes to such chronic health problems as type II diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoarthritis and even some cancers. If there is any hope of reversing the current trend it’s surely time to slim-down the diet industry and instead look for a super-size solution to a super-size problem.
About Glen Matten BA Hons DipION MBANT, Nutritional Therapist
Glen runs a busy private practice at East Anglia’s premier complementary & alternative health centre; The Complementary Health Care Clinic, 34 Exchange Street, Norwich. His highly popular, not-to-be-missed, one-day nutrition courses are running in Norwich throughout 2008. For more information phone 01603 665173, visit www.holistic-care.com or email glen@realnutrition.co.uk.