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As the NHS struggles with rising cases of diabetes, it is time to examine the role of diet and lifestyle in tackling this challenge. The so called benefits of medical interventions detracts from more beneficial lifestyle changes, says Dr Aseem Malhotra
Early this year, Karen Thomson, the granddaughter of pioneering heart transplant surgeon Christiaan Barnard, organised world’s first low carb summit in South Africa and invited me as a speaker.
The four day conference was co-hosted by leading professor of exercise and sports medicine Timothy Noakes, and there was no food industry or pharmaceutical industry funding. There were a total of 15 international speakers including academic researchers and medical doctors and was an eloquent and evidence based demolition job of current dietary guidelines that promotes “low fat” as best for weight and health.
Award winning author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health Gary Taubes opened the conference explaining that obesity is not so much a disease of energy imbalance but one of fat accumulation caused by excess insulin, driven primarily by carbohydrate consumption.
Swedish family doctor Andreas Eenfeldt, who runs Diet Doctor, the country’s most popular health blog, discussed the beginning of a decline in the rate of obesity in Sweden where it is estimated that up to a quarter of the population are embracing low carb diet and the sales of butter have rocketed in the past few years.
“You don’t get fat from eating fatty foods just as you don’t turn green from eating green vegetables,” he said in response to a two year review of 16,000 studies carried out by the Swedish Council on Health Technology.
It concluded that such a diet may not only be the best for weight loss but also at reducing several markers of cardiovascular risk in the obese. And he’s right.
Fat calories which have the least impact on insulin secretion promote satiation and energy utilisation whereas refined carbohydrates in particular promote fat storage and hunger.
A public health message to lower cholesterol as if this was the end in itself may have also been counter-productive.
More powerful than aspirin
Not many people know that during the first 14 years of the Framingham heart study - a long term, ongoing cardiovascular study on residents of the town in Massachusetts - which sanctified high cholesterol as a major risk factor for heart disease for every 1mg/dl per year drop in cholesterol levels, there was a 14 per cent increase in cardiovascular death and an 11 per cent increase in mortality in the following 18 years in those aged over 50.
Read on: http://www.hsj.co.uk/5089797.article#.VdeQCvlVikp
Early this year, Karen Thomson, the granddaughter of pioneering heart transplant surgeon Christiaan Barnard, organised world’s first low carb summit in South Africa and invited me as a speaker.
The four day conference was co-hosted by leading professor of exercise and sports medicine Timothy Noakes, and there was no food industry or pharmaceutical industry funding. There were a total of 15 international speakers including academic researchers and medical doctors and was an eloquent and evidence based demolition job of current dietary guidelines that promotes “low fat” as best for weight and health.
Award winning author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health Gary Taubes opened the conference explaining that obesity is not so much a disease of energy imbalance but one of fat accumulation caused by excess insulin, driven primarily by carbohydrate consumption.
Swedish family doctor Andreas Eenfeldt, who runs Diet Doctor, the country’s most popular health blog, discussed the beginning of a decline in the rate of obesity in Sweden where it is estimated that up to a quarter of the population are embracing low carb diet and the sales of butter have rocketed in the past few years.
“You don’t get fat from eating fatty foods just as you don’t turn green from eating green vegetables,” he said in response to a two year review of 16,000 studies carried out by the Swedish Council on Health Technology.
It concluded that such a diet may not only be the best for weight loss but also at reducing several markers of cardiovascular risk in the obese. And he’s right.
Fat calories which have the least impact on insulin secretion promote satiation and energy utilisation whereas refined carbohydrates in particular promote fat storage and hunger.
A public health message to lower cholesterol as if this was the end in itself may have also been counter-productive.
More powerful than aspirin
Not many people know that during the first 14 years of the Framingham heart study - a long term, ongoing cardiovascular study on residents of the town in Massachusetts - which sanctified high cholesterol as a major risk factor for heart disease for every 1mg/dl per year drop in cholesterol levels, there was a 14 per cent increase in cardiovascular death and an 11 per cent increase in mortality in the following 18 years in those aged over 50.
Read on: http://www.hsj.co.uk/5089797.article#.VdeQCvlVikp
