Milk is actually a poor source of B6, so the Ovaltine is the provider. But look what Ovaltine comes with:
Barley Malt Extract (45%),Skimmed Milk Concentrate, Whole Milk Powder, Fat-Reduced Cocoa Powder (6%), Vegetable Oil, Glucose Syrup, Yeast, Salt, Skimmed Milk Powder, Calcium Phosphate, Vitamins (C, E, Niacin, A, Pantothenic Acid, B12, B6, B2, B1, Folic Acid, Biotin), Magnesium Carbonate, Stabilisers (E340, E341), Sweetener (Acesulfame K), Milk Proteins, Iron, Anti-Caking Agent (E551), Flavouring.

So, the B6 is added to Ovaltine – along with a load of other things we don’t need. You may as well just take
a vitamin tablet than drink what is effectively a higher calorie version of a vitamin tablet.

Just have a bigger salmon portion and drop the Ovaltine cocktail. Or, 200g of liver would deliver all the B6 you need (and just about everything else) in one hit. Sunflower seeds are also a good source of B6 (1.3mg per 100g of seeds) but you’d need to be a Parrot or Budgerigar to get through enough for the daily allowance!

This is quite an interesting one this week to show that you need a decent amount of good food to get this essential vitamin. And, it’s a water soluble vitamin, which means the body doesn’t store it, so you need this daily.

I did notice that there is no name next to the article this week – it has gone in anonymously – good to see that no dietician or nutritionist is putting their name to this nonsense this week.

The article suggests this week: “How to get your recommended daily allowance (RDA) of 300mg magnesium”:

2 poppadums (that is how it is spelled in the article) + a 40g bowl of All Bran + 11 Brazil nuts = 300mg of magnesium.

The trouble is – that mixture also adds up to a whole load of different flours, salt and vegetable oil in the poppadums and more wheat (bran), sugar and glucose fructose syrup in the All Bran. Why not just consume the brazil nuts? You’d need 80 grams at 525 calories to get your magnesium from the nuts. Nuts are very nutritious, but they are not great for people trying to lose weight, as they are high in carbs and fat and this combination facilitates human fat tissue storage very nicely (triglyceride formation).

Another way of getting magnesium would be 92 grams of sunflower seeds at 540 calories – again seeds are highly nutritious but high in both fat and carb content – that great fat storing combination. Sunflower seeds are also the best natural source of vitamin E – which is the body’s natural antioxidant.

Lowest calorie way to get 300mg of magnesium? 380 grams of raw spinach (that’s a lot!) for 87 calories.

Sugar free cereal option for magnesium? Over 200 grams of porridge oats (that’s also a lot) for over 800 calories.

Most fun way to get 300mg of magnesium? 60 grams of natural cocoa powder for 137 calories and a great source of protein too. Get out your very dark chocolate and leave the wheat and sugar concoctions alone.

Harcombe Diet followers will immediately spot the error – either in this write up from the Daily Mail Science reporter (Fiona MacRae) or from the press release itself. Food allergy and Food Intolerance are seriously different – potentially fatally. Food allergy absolutely is not in the mind – ever! If you suffer an anaphylactic shock after coming close to a peanut, you have a peanut allergy (and likely problems with many, or all, nuts). If you are like a friend of mine, who has a life threatening allergy to kiwi fruit, you know about it and it’s not in your mind – if it gets near your body, let alone inside you, it can kill.

Food Intolerance is the ‘too much/too often’ problem and the body literally becomes intolerant to this over-consumed substance. It’s the body’s way of saying “I can’t tolerate this substance any more“. (Sadly the withdrawal symptoms that accompany intolerance mean that you will crave the very food(s) to which you are intolerant).

What’s the most likely food intolerance in the UK? (USA and Australia also)? Wheat. Why? Because we eat it several times every day as a general rule: wheat toast or wheat cereal for breakfast; wheat muffins, wheat biscuits, wheat cereal bars etc for mid morning; wheat sandwiches or wheat pasta salad for lunch; more wheat snacks in the afternoon; wheat pasta, or wheat pizza or wheat pies or wheat pastry for dinner and then more wheat snacks in the evening.

The Flour Advisory Bureau statistics tell us “UK flour consumption per capita reached 73.3kg in 2002.” That means 1.4 kilograms of flour consumed per average person in the UK per week. I can’t find a single ingredient that we eat more of .

So – back to this study: researchers at the University of Portsmouth blamed internet searches and celebrity food fads for “make-believe allergies and intolerances” (that allergies mistake again) and said that, as a result, millions of people are unnecessarily restricting their diets – starving themselves of their favourite (interesting choice of word; try ‘addictive’ also) foods and of key nutrients (no nutrients in sugar and bread/cereals need to have added vitamins to be worth consuming, so clutching at straws here nutritionally).

You read on and find that the report was written by Dr Carina Venter – a dietician who specialises in allergies (allergies or intolerance? This is quite important). Then you get to the point in the article where I break out into something between a smile and a grimace – I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The study was funded by the Flour Advisory Bureau. Now what was the most common food intolerance again?!

Dr Hilary Jones (love him) answered a question in the News of the World Sunday supplement (love it) in the October 2009 issue and said “About 45% of people suffer from food intolerance“. Personally, I have yet to find someone who does not feel better and lose weight faster when they avoid wheat. Sugar and flour are still the two products that I rarely consume – even after over 10 years of being in Phase 3. Has my health suffered in any single way? Quite the opposite.

Sadly in this world of conflicts of interest and food interested parties sponsoring diet advice – you are better off being your own judge and taking charge of your own health. If you do Phase 1 (it’s only 5 days) and feel better and then try the advice on food intolerance -  reintroducing foods and testing and keeping a diary -  you will see what makes you feel well and unwell. Your body will tell you – if it can be heard over the conflict of interest advice!

Good luck – Zoe x

The girl was really funny – her verdict on the Sainsbury’s “Tropical Pork & Peppers” was “it looked like the dog had been sick“, while the Tesco meatball bake “had pastry which looked like mum’s” (Ah)

The reason I kept this article though was for the horrors coming from nutritionist, Angela Dowden. She went from “saturated fat, which raises cholesterol…” to “cholesterol-raising saturated fat” in a couple of columns. The first comment was bad enough, but when did cholesterol-raising become an adjective for saturated fat?!

It absolutely has not been proven that eating saturated fat raises cholesterol. If you look at the process by which cholesterol is synthesied, you would wonder what on earth fat has to do with any of it! Interestingly, carbohydrate has an important role as carbs cause insulin to be released and insulin facilitates metabolism processes in the liver, which is where cholesterol is synthesised.

When I first started writing about diet and obesity, I too thought that saturated fat raised cholesterol – because it is written as a fact in just about everything we read. But, with a fair bit of digging, it becomes clear that it is not a fact and once we are enlightened about this we become acutely aware of how it is presented as a fact time after time. Just as it is by Angela Dowden in this article.

We have to become very sceptical and tune in to every health message that is being presented as a fact and check that it really is true. The more I challenge, the more bad science I see out there.

If in doubt – go back to common sense – would nature put anything in food that would kill us?! I don’t think so. Hence nothing in real food, saturated fat or otherwise, is going to cause us fatal harm. Plus, the functions performed by cholesterol in the body are absolutely critical and this substance should not be lowered without consequence. See all my other blogs and videos about the fact that the FSA and the NHS are invariably talking about carbs when they think they are talking about saturated fat.

Every time you see someone attacking saturated fat – think about this – fat is in jail for the crimes committed by sugar and refined carbohydrates and we need to get it out!

Tragically we all know the answer – we want to be slim more than we want anything else in the world (surveys say), so we will take extraordinary risks to try to achieve this.

Lorraine made some really good points – we would never buy headaches tablets from the internet, without being sure that they were genuine, and yet we would take slimming tablets all too easily. There were numerous examples of women ruining their lives in the pursuit of slimness – trying to survive on next to no calories, only to eat everything they could get their hands on soon after.

Remember Colin Hendry’s wife who died at just 42 following complications resulting from liposuction. She was a beautiful size 12 with 4 beautiful children, before the needless surgery, and she is now dead and the children have no mother. This is beyond tragic.

The only bit I didn’t agree with was Lorraine’s ending where she said that people who had joined weight watchers were the fortunate ones, who “appeared not to have done any harm to themselves.” If Lorraine could see my clients – most of whom pinpoint the day that they joined weight watchers and/or started calorie counting as the day that their weigh problem started. You eat less and then want to eat more and do less at the same time. You then get to the point where your metabolism has slowed so much that you stabilise at 1000-1200 calories a day and put on weight at a level that used to lose you weight.

The body’s job description is to keep you alive, so let it do its job to the best of its ability by giving it wonderfully nutritious, healthy food, three times a day, in nourishing quantities and it will stop fighting you, storing fat and highly likely to end up slim!

(Don’t you just love the NOTW headline!)
This story just doesn’t go away. I first saw it around November 2008. The news then was that Manchester would begin the scheme and then, if successful, it would be rolled out. The idea was that people would accumulate points for things like: losing weight; walking children to school; joining exercise classes and/or slimming clubs etc. Points could then be traded in through supermarkets for healthy food.

The initial proposal received much negative reaction – Tam Fry of The National Obesity Forum called it “too little, too late”. Other politicians attacked the idea as ‘gimmicky’ and ‘open to abuse’.

The April 2009 NOTW article, didn’t mention Manchester, but said that scheme would be set up under the name “Weight Wins” and that it would be run by the NHS. The maximum payout would be £425 for someone who loses 50lbs. Apparently even 40 “chubby” (as the NOTW calls them) nurses had signed up to the scheme.

The July 2009 Daily Mail article said that “Men and women are to be paid to lose weight in the first scheme of its kind in the UK”. They will be given a £1 shopping voucher for every pound they shed, in the pilot scheme involving 100 volunteers. The pilot is due to start in September 2009 in Essex and Basildon. A Basildon council spokesman said “we have initially set aside £1,000 for the scheme. We don’t want to encourage people to excessive weight loss.” (This is probably a fair sum given the success people usually have following government weight loss advice!)

I’m confused! So what happened after November 2008 and April 2009? Nothing?! Is this the pilot scheme or the third scheme? Will we hear about results, or just initiatives?!

And all of this misses the complete point that people who want to be slim don’t lack motivation. In a study of formerly fat people, who had lost weight after intestinal bypass surgery, researchers at the University of Florida reported that virtually all said they would rather be blind or deaf or have a leg amputated than be fat again. That is how much people want to be slim and yet two thirds of people in the UK are overweight (Body Mass Index, BMI, of 25+) and one quarter are obese (BMI of 30+).

So people don’t lack motviation – they lack advice that will actually work. The current eat less/do more, base your meals on starchy foods, graze, eat everything in moderation – all this advice is what needs to be changed – not financial incentives offered to already desperate people.

mysupermarket.co.uk have surveyed 250,000 grocery orders to see what is going in the shopping baskets in different parts of the UK. They found the following:
– Shoppers in the North East spend 22% less on fruit & veg than those in London and the South East;
– Shoppers in the North East spend 23% more on crisps & snacks than those in London and the South East.
Interesting that a study published in the same week estimated men living in the SE had a 71% chance of living to age 75, vs a 63% chance for men in the NE living to the same age.

There was the usual helpful Daily Mail graph of the UK in the article – showing the annual spend on fruit and veg by region:
– Scotland and the NE were lowest at £400-£419 p.a.
– Wales and the NW were next worst at £420-£439 p.a.
– Yorkshire and the Midlands were at £440-£459 p.a.
– The SW spend was at £460-£479 p.a.
– East Anglia and the South of England were second with an annual average spend of £480-£499 on fruit & veg and
– London & the SE was top with £500 plus.

My hubby took one look at the article and said “But she’s writing the article, so she knows she hasn’t actually had a gastric band fitted – am I missing something?” (So funny)

I like Claudia – she writes some cracking articles in the Daily Mail – and for her health and well-being I really hope that she finds something that works for her. I will be really interested to see if this is the thing that does (joking from my man apart). Anything that helps an overweight person lose weight and keep it off is to be embraced. I am not trying to convert the world to The Harcombe Diet – if anyone out there has something that works for them (Atkins, whatever) – stick with it! Rare is the person that can lose weight and keep it off.

However, I am nervous for Claudia that this is taking her down the ‘eat less’ route. Indeed, she says in the article “I burn 1600 calories a day. A non dieting woman will averagely consume 2,000 calories a day which means I have 400 extra calories that are not being burnt and are turning into fat. If I cut my calorie intake to 1,300 a day, I can lose a pound a week – if I exercise as well I can double that.”

The maths is all over the place (aside from the fact that, as other blogs will show, the calorie theory maths doesn’t hold anyway):
1) If Claudia only ‘burns’ (the body does not behave like a Bunsen burner for a start) 1,600 cals a day and then eats 1,300 a day, she will only create a deficit of 7*300 cals in a week, which is 0.6 of a pound a week (according even to the theory);

2) Exercise will not automatically double this – it will depend on how much exercise and whether Claudia eats more after the exercise because exercise makes you hungry!

3) The type of calories eaten are (in my view) far more important than the number eaten, when it comes to weight loss. As Kekwick and Pawan proved in 1956 – Claudia could eat 2,000 cals of carbs and put on weight and 2,600 cals of virtually no carbs and lose weight.

This is just one reason why we have to Stop Counting Calories to Start Losing Weight!

This diet diary was Nancy Sorrell’s and her calorie intake for the week came to 9,784. (How can any calorie count be so precise?!) Assuming that Nancy needs 14,000 calories per week, according to the ridiculous calorie theory, Nancy has a deficit of 4,216 calories each week. Assuming that this is a typical week, Nancy should be losing (4,216*52/3500) = 62.64lbs per year. That’s four and a half stone – each and every year, if she keeps this up. Yes – that means she’ll weigh nothing within 2 years – that’s why I call it the ridiculous theory.

The tragedy is that it is the basis of all current diet advice. Everything stems from this and the simple slogan “Eat less/do more” derives directly from it. Frightening that obesity has gone up most dramatically over the past 30 years – the time during which we have been pushing this theory most vociferously.

My money is on Nancy staying a very similar weight and having to maintain this calorie restriction (because the body will have gotten used to the lower fuel intake) and yet another poor woman starving to prove the calorie theory doesn’t work.