So as we near the end of 2010 I can only say that another year goes by and still the country is no further forward to solving the obesity question. The FSA has been quite rightly disbanded for all the obvious reasons but in its place the Health Minister has decided to cut to the quick and get the food companies to solve the problem. In his naive view they made us fat so they can make us thin. How mad is that. The foods that make us fat won’t suddenly make us thin. 

Most of these big food companies (now in control of the obesity problem) make money from selling starch and sugar in bulk. That is the purpose of their existence. Since it is sugar and starch that makes us fat it does make a mockery of the notion that they will be able to help the obesity problem. Having said that, it is not their fault that they believe that fat makes us fat. 

And that is the rub.  How do we unpick 50 years of miss information? I recently interviewed a nutritionist to join the golower team and when we got onto diet recommendations the young lady struggled to get her head around the idea that starch may be bad and lard might be good. I asked her what evidence was provided to support the statement that saturated fat is bad for us. The response – silence and then “ it was what we were taught”.

How sad is that.  She had been told something by a lecturer and believed it.  I am certain that the lecturer believed it too. He or she would have been told this when they were at college and so it goes on.

There never has been and never will be clinical evidence supporting the notion that saturated fats are bad per se. Mix them with starch and sugar and the picture changes and then add in a sedentary life and you have an obesity epidemic but the the real elephant in the corner is not our friend saturated fat but sugar and starch.