1)  I subscribe to the Children’s Food Campaign newsletter and support their campaigns.

The CFC got a great article in The Independent, which can be seen here.

2) This was an extract from the Children’s Food Campaign January newsletter: “Ever thought of avoiding Coco Pops after school?”

“A new advertising campaign from Kelloggs, suggesting to children “ever thought of Coco Pops after school?” has been eliciting outrage from parents on forums such as Netmums and Twitter. We think it’s shocking that Kelloggs, who are partners of the Government’s Change4Life health campaign, are encouraging children to eat more sugary cereals (Coco Pops are 35% sugar) when one of the key messages of the Change4Life campaign is “sugar swaps”, encouraging families to swap snacks with added sugar for low sugar or sugar-free alternatives. If you’d like to complain, you can email Kelloggs at corporateresponsibility@kellogg.com. You might also like to copy the Department of Health into your email to make them aware of your concerns: dhmail@dh.gsi.gov.uk .”

3) So, of course, I emailed Kelloggs Corporate responsibility and the Department of Health as follows:

Dear Department of Health and Kellogg’s (30/1/2010)
I am writing to complain about the advert encouraging children to eat Coca Pops after school. It is bad enough that our young people start the day with a bowl of sugary cereal (coca pops being 34% sugar). It is even worse to think that children are being encouraged to have another bowl after school. We are fighting an obesity epidemic and any sugar (empty calories) either displaces other nutritional food, which adversely impacts health, or it is eaten on top of other nutritional needs, which adversely impacts weight. There is no room for sugar in a healthy diet – let alone this amount being pushed on parents and children alike as a fun thing to do with cartoon animation etc.
That Kellogg’s does this is not a surprise – it’s a private company looking to maximise brand profitability for shareholders. That the Department of Health has Kellogg’s as a Change for Life ‘partner’ is a disgrace. Department of Health – you lose all credibility as an advisor to UK citizens having such blatant affiliations with the food manufacturers.
I look forward to your response
Kind regards – Zoe Harcombe , Obesity researcher

4) You then get an auto reply from the Department of Health saying they will reply within 20 days,  but I did get a letter back from Kellogg’s on 3/2/2010 – fair do’s – pretty speedy. Here is the response (I’ve put in my comments along side each ‘defence’):

Dear Zoe

Re: COMPLAINT TO KELLOGG’s ABOUT COCO POPS ADVERTISING

I wanted to contact you following your recent email to Kellogg’s about us promoting our Coco Pops cereal as an after school snack.

The reason for recommending Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk as an after-school snack is no different from recommending it for breakfast – it’s a nutritionally sound product that is suitable as part of a healthy balanced diet.

The fact is Kellogg’s Coco Pops is a low fat, low saturated fat food, containing just 175 calories per serving with semi-skimmed milk.  It provides 25% of the RDA (recommended daily allowance) for six B vitamins and 17% of the RDA for iron and calcium, as well as encouraging the consumption of milk which is normally eaten with our products.  In fact, 40% of milk consumed in Britain is with cereals. , and breakfast cereals are the leading source of iron in the diet of UK children . (Zoe comment: Coco Pops are low fat because they are a cereal and cereals are predominantly carbohydrate! Coco Pops have vitamins because they are ‘fortified ‘ because they would be nutritionally lacking if they weren’t and even more vitamins are added when people drink milk  – so give your child a glass of milk when they get home).

When it comes to sugar, one portion of Kellogg’s Coco Pops has just 10.5g – approximately two teaspoons.  To put this into context: a portion of fruit yoghurt contains 20g of sugar and toast and jam has 13g . (Zoe comment: sugary yoghurts and jam are also full of sugar  – this doesn’t make our product good, but we’ll compare it to other bad stuff to try to make it look good).

Breakfast cereals provide only 5% of the adult daily intake of added sugars in the diet – compared to 37% from drinks, 32% from sugar, preserves and confectionary and 14% from other cereal products such as cakes .  Breakfast cereals contribute 6% of the average daily intake of sugar in children yet up to 30% of some micronutrients such a B vitamins and iron. (Zoe comment: so let’s double the intake of sugar from cereals, by getting kids to eat them after school, as well as before school, as cereal manufacturers are missing out on their share of the ‘junk’ market. Check spelling of confectionEry also).

Sugar adds to the enjoyment of food with no detrimental effect to health – there is no scientific evidence showing a link between sugar and obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hyperactivity or cancer. (Zoe comment: I love this one! I didn’t actually suggest that sugar is behind the major killer diseases of the modern day, but, now you mention it… See Warburg, see Yudkin… what was my quote again? “If we have been eating food as nature intended for 24 hours then agriculture, which gave us large scale access to carbohydrates, started 4 minutes ago and our consumption of sugar has increased 20 fold in the past 5 seconds. I wonder which substance is more likely to be responsible for obesity, diabetes, or indeed any modern disease…”)

What I hope we can agree on is there’s an established link between excess calorie consumption and weight gain.  So – given the obesity challenge we all face – it seems prudent to compare the amount of calories in Kellogg’s Coco Pops and milk to many typical post school snacks. A serving of Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk contains around 10% of a child’s calorie GDA, a suitable amount for a snack. A typical milk chocolate bar is 255 calories; a 4 finger chocolate and wafer bar is 213 calories and a bag of chewy fruit flavoured sweets is 222 calories. Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk have noticeably fewer calories and less sugar then most of these options and provide many positive nutrients the other snacks do not. (Zoe comment: No. We can’t agree on this. I actually don’t care about calories – they are just fuel. I care about empty calories – sugar – which deliver fuel with no nutrition. This is what an obese society cannot afford to consume).

As a mum of two I understand the need for kids to have a quick snack when they got home hungry from school.  But, we don’t see any evidence that encouraging Kellogg’s Coco Pops as an after school snack prevents children from snacking on fruit. (Zoe comment: Are they eating both?! Not much room left for a good dinner eh?)

Independent research shows 90% of mums  give their children a snack after school, therefore we are not encouraging an eating occasion that would not normally happen.  The top six foods eaten being crisps, fruit, sweets, yoghurt, chocolate and biscuits.  Those who said that they would choose Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk as an alternative said it would replace (in descending order) crisps, chocolate, sweets and biscuits – not fruit or yoghurt. (Zoe comment: So parents who give their kids junk now have another option. The parents that give fruit will still do so. This is the argument used by cigarette manufacturers – we don’t increase the size of the market – we just encourage people to swap brands).

Therefore, having Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk as an after school snack does not discourage the selection of fresh fruit, and also encourages the consumption of milk and provides essential micronutrients – an accepted dietary recommendation.

It’s for these reasons we don’t see promoting Coco Pops as an after school snack as being counter to our involvement with Change4Life. (Zoe comment: see what else Kellogg’s sponsor below…)

I’d like to assure you that at Kellogg’s we ensure all of our marketing and advertising is rigorously reviewed so that it complies with the relevant CAP broadcast and non-broadcast advertising codes.  (Zoe comment: None of this matters much because we comply with the advertising standards code, so we can do what we want!) I’d also like to advise you the current Coco Pops outdoor advertising campaign comes to its natural end this Friday.

I appreciate dialogue via a letter isn’t always the most productive.  So, I or a member of my team of nutritionists would be more than happy to meet with you and discuss your concerns in person.

Yours sincerely

(Zoe: I’ve left out the name and contact numbers for privacy, but after the job title is “State Registered Dietitian”) (Zoe comment: why am I not surprised?! The Kellogg’s Senior Manager for nutrition is a dietitian. The head of the Sugar Bureau is a dietitian. The British Dietetic Association (BDA) is “delighted” (their word) to be ‘in bed with’ the sugar and flour organisations. Kellogg’s are the sponsors of the British Dietetic Association’s annual conference on obesity. The American Dietetic Association is sponsored by Mars, PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Unilever, General Mills and Coco-Cola. The BDA won’t tell me their sponsors – can’t think why. And then the dietitian primary slogan is “Trust a dietitian to know about nutrition”. Not when every dietitian I have met defends sugar I won’t!)

Finally – check out the Children’s Food Campaign competition for a new Coco Pops slogan - great fun! x

The estimate goes that eating the government recommended saturated fat intake (which by definition means eating more carbs – because that’s all that is left to eat) could save 3,500 lives a year. I really cannot recommend highly enough Dr Malcolm Kendrick’s “The Great cholesterol Con” , where he goes into an example of these lives saved claims…

The British Heart Foundation, Heart Protection Study is the study Dr Kendrick tears apart: The study claims that if an extra 10 million  high-risk people were to go on statins (the drug companies must have loved this report), this would save about 50,000 lives a year. First of all – lives can not be saved. Life can be prolonged, but we’re all going to die! The issue then becomes – for how long can statins possibly prolong life/delay death – if at all.

Kendrick:  “If one in two hundred more people are alive after one year of taking statins, this means that if you wait another two-hundreths of a year (plus another little bit) the statin group will have caught up on the ‘placebo’ group in total number of deaths.” Kendrick works out that there is an increased life expectancy of slightly under two days. Then “50,000 lives will be saved” becomes the slightly less sensational “If 10 million people, at very high risk of heart disease, took a statin for a year, they would all live – on average – two days longer“. They would have to take statins every day for two hundred years, from the date of diagnosis, to live an extra year! Or, if people take statins for a (pretty long) thirty year period, they may buy themselves approximately two months.

That’s just heart disease stats remember. The largest study of cholesterol levels and overall mortality (Honolulu study) shows that you are more likely to die from one of the many overall causes of death if you have low cholesterol. Low cholesterol and high mortality are the correlated factors in this study (and others looking at overall mortality). So – you may gain 2 months, you are more likely to die of cancer or some other cause and you may have some pretty nasty side effects from statins during the 30 years.

Anyway – back to the butter. Here was my response to the article on the Daily Mail blog this morning:

“This is verging on medical malpractice. I don’t know what is worse – a doctor making such an outrageous statement or the fact that Unilever PR are behind it . Unilever being the makers of low fat spreads and the co. represented on the board of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Nutrition – advisors to the Food Standards Agency, Dept of Health etc.

Fact – butter is a real food, delivered as nature intends us to eat it and naturally solid at room temperature.
Fact – man made spreads are processed foods, delivered as food manufacturers intend us to eat them and goodness knows what has been done to them to make them solid at room temperature.

The UK National Food Survey tells us that we eat 39 g of butter per person per week. As compared to 731 g of sugar (World Health Org) and 1.4 kilos of flour (Flour Advisory Bureau) per person per week. Which substance is more likely the cause of  heart disease (obesity) or any other modern illness?”

(The above photo is of a 1kg box of chocolates – the 1.4kg box has the batons and slabs!)

Once I’d eaten all the 85% dark batons and slabs, one does find oneself having a coffee ganache here and a hazelnut praline there – but these are mainly sugar, not mainly cocoa/cocoa butter/vanilla/cream/nuts/coffee and other natural ingredients that can make up real chocolate. The outcome was that, within about 10-14 days, I woke up in between Xmas and New Year and found myself with a slight, but distinct, craving for sugary chocolate. I was really shocked to see how quickly cravings could return. I went with it on the first day to see what happened and I had an even stronger desire for pralines etc the following day. That day I nipped it in the bud and had no more for several days. I did have the odd one here and there after that but I am happy that they are now all gone.

The moral of the experience? I reckon most of us could get ‘hooked’ on sugar again within a couple of weeks, no matter for how long we had been avoiding it. Learning 2 is not to let any cravings grow by the day (as the three conditions are ‘fed’ and can take hold again). The minute you feel yourself needing something, rather than just feeling you could take it or leave it – that’s the time to stop having the substance immediately, so that the cravings can’t take hold again.

John Yudkin likened sugar to Heroin in his book “Pure White & Deadly”. I don’t think he was far wrong.

A study done by Carnegie Weight Management (fat camp for kids, basically) found that an average Christmas dinner can contain 956 calories and48g of fat. Who cares?! Turkey, carrots, sprouts, parsnips, even roast potatoes and a bit of stuffing are not going to do anyone any harm. What will do the harm is the sugary cereal for breakfast on Christmas morning, any mince pies and Christmas cake in the afternoon and the mountains of selection boxes, sweets, chocolates and total sugar junk that the children get and eat on Christmas day and the days afterwards.

Real food at mealtimes does not make us fat. It’s the sugar and flour we eat at other times that does this.

However, I have just compared some of the yr 2000 DEFRA figs last night with some 2002 stats on the two ingredients we consume the most of – that’s flour and sugar in case you were wondering:

1) The flour advisory bureau confirms that our flour consumption was 73.3kg per person per year in 2002.

2) Our sugar consumption was 38kg per person per year in the same year – 2002. (World Health Organisation statistics).

That means we were eating 730 flour calories and 416 sugar calories per person per day in 2002 (and I bet it hasn’t gone down). That’s 1150 calories per person per day with whatever nutrients are added to flour by law (fortified) and no nutrients in sugar whatsoever.

Another way of looking at this is that we eat 1.4 kilos of flour per person per week, 731 grams of sugar per person per week and just 39 grams of butter per person per week and 1.75 eggs per person per week. Does anyone really believe that the eggs and the butter are a) making us fat or b) giving us heart disease?! Or could it be this enormous quantity of refined carbohydrates that we consume, which we have had no chance to evolve to adapt to?

p.s. is it also any wonder that wheat intolerance is getting so common? This is an extraordinary amount of one ingredient being added to everything from Pizza to bread to sausages to biscuits to cakes to pies to pastries to sauces to cereals and much more.

The ingredients in Actimel Original are: Yogurt (Skimmed milk, Skimmed milk concentrate, Yogurt cultures), Water, Skimmed milk, Dextrose, Stabiliser (pectin), L.casei imunitass® cultures, Flavouring, Sweeteners (aspartame, acesulfame K).

The ingredients in Forest Fruits Actimel are: Yogurt (Skimmed milk, cream, skimmed milk powder, yogurt cultures), Skimmed milk, Liquid sugar (sucrose 8.4%), Fruits of the forest 2.1% (strawberry, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry), Dextrose, Stabiliser (modified tapioca starch), Flavouring, L.casei imunitass® cultures.

The ingredients in Natural (Live) Yoghurt are: yoghurt!

Bottom line: Don’t have the original or flavoured versions of Actimel, if you are trying to follow The Harcombe Diet.

p.s. Danone have another registered trademark ® (there is one in Activia also). What is L.casei imunitass?! Do we need it in our bodies?!

p.p.s check out those sugars (dextrose) and sweeteners – even in the original version.

A “Which” Consumer survey found that a child’s lunchbox could contain as much sugar as 10 doughnuts. A packed lunch with 5 items including cheese, biscuits and fruit juice, contained 60g of sugar. This equates to 12 teaspoons making the lunch as sugary as 10 McDonald’s Sugar Donuts or nearly a pint of coca-cola.

One of the worst products was the Robinson’s Fruit Shoot Orange Juice with 23g of sugar per 200ml bottle.

The various offending companies had spokespeople put up a defence:

Robinsons said it makes a low sugar version and the labels contain clear information so that parents can make an informed choice.

Nestle said its Munch Bunch (low in fruit and 2 teaspoons of sugar in a small pot) was high in sugar and protein and its packaging was clearly labelled.

Kellog’s said its Frosties cereal bars are a low-fat alternative to chocolate.

Isn’t there legislation for crimes against children? Can there be any defence for putting company profits before the health of our children?

When are we going to have a CASH 2 – Consensus Action on SUGAR & Health? Why does no one seem to care about the sugar in food? The weight watchers product, apparently, compared quite favourably on salt content – probably because there was no room for salt once all the sugars were fitted in!

Here are some interesting thoughts on salt:
1) If you eat real food, you never need worry about salt or check a label again in your life – nature will put salt (and potassium) in food in the right balance.

2) If you are getting ‘too much’ salt, you are, by definition, eating processed food (because nature will get it right). Hence we cannot conclude that salt is causing a health problem because salt comes in processed foods and this generally, and all the other ingredients specifically, may be causing the problems.

3) Hypertension (blood pressure over 140) and obesity absolutely go together hand in hand. So, whatever is causing obesity is likely to be a chief culprit in hypertension (that’s processed food in my view).

4) Carl Von Voit (1860) first observed that water retention and hypertension go hand in hand. He deduced that carbohydrates play a huge part in water retention, and therefore in hypertension. (I tell you – most of the things we needed to know about diet and obesity, we knew before 1900 and then we went backwards during most of the 20th century!). The Harcombe Diet Phase 1 has a massive impact on water retention – how about testing this for hypertension?!

5) Gary Taubes – genius – does some great maths on p146 of The Diet Delusion: cutting our average salt intake in half (difficult to do) would drop blood pressure by 4-5mm Hg in hypertensives and 2mm Hg in the rest of us. If we have the lowest level of hypertension, we already have (systolic) blood pressure (that’s the first reading they give you when they take your blood pressure) at least 20mm Hg over what is considered healthy. If we have stage 2 hypertension, we are 40mm Hg above ‘healthy’. So, GT concludes: “cutting our salt intake in half and decreasing our systolic blood pressure by 4 to 5 mm Hg makes little difference.”

What will help high blood pressure? Being within the normal BMI range is probably the single most important thing that will help. But then, of course, dieticians will try to achieve this by putting overweight people on a low fat/high carb (high water retention) diet – brilliant!

Member:  I was wondering whether you would have time to answer a question for me…  Upon looking at the ingredients (in Lighter Life),  I wondered if there might be stuff in them that don’t try and cure my intolerances.  Wondering if this diet is minimally injecting me in minute amounts of the items that cause cravings etc.  I am at my wits end, so picked up your book and refreshed myself and then had this thought, maybe I am not illiminating all traces?

Zoe:  Please check out my blogs – there are 2 particularly on lighter life. It won’t surprise you to know I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole and yes it is full of milk, sugar and sweeteners, so is likely feeding all sorts of cravings. Don’t do it! Eat real food!

Member:   It is totally incorrect that there is sugar in the lighter life packs, yes, slim fast hence why I never did that, but not lighter life, have the ingredients in front of me. I agree with everything else you say and the article but not that there is sugar in lighter life, that is totally wrong.  There is no sugar or salt at all.

Zoe: I have a packet in front of me too – a client kindly gave me one for research. The ingredients are:
Skimmed MILK powder, soya protein, soya oil, dietary fibre, thickeners (guar and xanthum gum – nice!), flavourings, GLUCOSE SYRUP, SODIUM citrate, potassium chloride, maltodextrin (this is starch SUGAR), colouring, magnesium oxide, vitamin and mineral mix (because you have to put some nutrients in) and aspartame (SWEETENER).

I said it is full of milk, sugar and sweeteners and the number one ingredient is milk, glucose syrup is the sugar (they are not going to make it easy for you and actually call it sugar). More sugar in maltodextrin – let’s hide it again. Plus the nutritional analysis says 31.8g sugars per 100g (that’s high enough to justify my comment) and the final ingredient is sweeteners, so I stand by my view of the heap of junk!

I didn’t mention salt, but, as you did – sodium is listed – again – let’s not call it salt and make it easy for the consumer. To get the salt figure from the sodium content you multiply by 2.5, so this has 3g of salt per 100g.

Can you see how food manufacturers lie to you?! I won’t – I have no reason to! Eat real food! Nature provides it – not someone out to make money from you!
Very best wishes – Zoe x

UPDATE: Member: Hiya! Made me laugh as that shut ME up LOL!!  Fair enough.  They have hidden it via another name, so hence why I thought otherwise.  That is SHOCKING then with most of it sugar! Nothing more to say other than thanks for taking the time to prove to me Zoe. One now has your book strapped to my hip. xx

Zoe: p.s. I forgot to say from whom I got the Lighter Life packet – it was from a lovely nurse (who freely admitted she should have known way better). She lost 4 stone,  then developed gall stones (was flown home from an anniversary round-the-world trip-of a lifetime) and then spent the next few months in and out of hospital (regained the weight) and ended up having her gall bladder removed.

(There is a direct connection here as our gall bladder is required to ‘emulsify’ fats – effectively to separate and break down the fat so it can be removed. With virtually no fat being consumed, the gall bladder thinks it’s redundant!)

The programme looked at sugar (and salt) in our breakfast cereals and did some really practical exercises with children and parents, which were very visual and impactful. The parents didn’t have a clue how to read a cereal packet label (not their fault was the conclusion – the implication being that the cereal manufacturers are not exactly going to make it easy to work out that their products are full of sugar/salt). The children then demonstrated that they had a strong familiarity (and therefore preference for) branded cereals and shunned the supermarket own label products, which were invariably lower in sugar and salt.

Frosties came out top of the sugar table, with a whopping 36% sugar! Honey Cheerios, Sugar Puffs, Coco Pops and Honey Loops all came out at around 1/3 sugar. Imagine taking 3 spoons of cereal and the third spoon, in effect, is white sugar every time. This is quite a shocking thought.

It was great to see sugar getting a bashing for once – 99 times out of 100 it seems to be fat in the dock.