Nonsense slimming diets

Part 2: Modern slimming diets

High-carbohydrate, low-fat diets have been recommended since 1,500 BC. Banting's diet — a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet which had no calorie restriction — had always been out of step with all other diets. It worked, and this meant that people using it did not become fat and did not need to spend money continually struggling to stay slim. But when it was hypothesised that a fatty diet could cause heart disease all that changed. People could be exploited again. Thus, all modern diets have reverted to the discredited early-19th-century theory, relying on one overriding philosophy: if you are overweight, you must cut down the calories, starting with the most calorie-dense fat. All modern diets, therefore, work on only one principle: cut down. In effect, you starve. It is a dangerous course of action unless great care is taken.

The first thing any eating pattern must do is provide a 'balanced' diet. That simply means a diet that provides all the nutrients your body needs in sufficient quantity to prevent deficiencies from occurring. Nutrients such as vitamins and minerals, which are required in small quantities, can all be met on a restricted-calorie diet because supplementary pills can be taken. However, where your body needs large amounts of a particular nutrient, it is not so easy. Your body needs water, for example, every day. Fortunately, perhaps, water contains no calories so there is no restriction on the amount you can drink. But your body also needs complete proteins every day, and with proteins come calories. The average woman could realistically get her protein needs from the foods in Table I. (Although I do not advocate a low-fat diet, I have deliberately made this example typical of the kinds of foods slimmers are advised to eat to illustrate realistically the extent of the danger of malnutrition if you cut calories too much.)

Men need about twenty-five to fifty grams more meat or another egg. Your body also needs a certain amount of fat. If only to supply the essential fatty acids needed for proper brain function, you must eat at least fifteen grams of these per day. That is another 135 calories, but as the foods in the examples all contain these fats, the calories they contain are already included.

So you can see that, if you are counting calories, and are on, say, a 1,000-calorie diet, it must be composed almost exclusively of foods which are very high in protein and fats if you are to take in the minimum amount of these nutrients to be healthy. It should be obvious, therefore, that a crash diet supplying, say, 500 calories must be harmful to health. And even at the more usual 1,000-calorie level, you must be extremely careful as you can only afford to have around one hundred of those calories from carbohydrates. The type of slimming diet advocated today, which is low-fat and largely carbohydrate for the rest, will inevitably be dangerously deficient in protein even if it is deficient in nothing else.