Why We Eat (Too Much)

by Andrew Jenkinson

In moderate or heavy drinkers, any weight gain due to their drinking could be secondary to the heightened appetite that alcohol produces, leading to poor food choices. Once the diet deteriorates and more processed Western foods are eaten, the weight set-point will rise. In addition, these drinkers will have higher cortisol levels, causing fat to be distributed in their body to the abdomen. If these changes have affected your weight, then by cutting down significantly your alcohol intake or by quitting completely, your weight set-point and your weight will fall. If you are an occasional or light drinker, and if you make good food choices when alcohol tells you to eat, then it is unlikely that it is having a significant effect on your weight set-point.

  Summary

  In this chapter we have looked at the effect that insulin has on our weight. We learned that when this hormone is used as a treatment for diabetes, it automatically causes weight gain. When it is withdrawn, weight loss occurs.

  Insulin is released by the pancreas when we have too much sugar (or refined carbohydrates like wheat) in our blood. Our blood-sugar levels then spike, resulting in a powerful insulin response. The high insulin causes the cells to suck too much sugar from the blood, which leads to blood sugar that is too low, and then causes a strong craving for more sugar. This ‘sugar roller coaster’ – fluctuating blood-sugar levels throughout the day – increases our average daily insulin levels. Just as if insulin was given to you as a treatment, this leads to weight gain.

  The US government guidelines to reduce saturated fats in our diets have led many food companies to increase the amount of sugar in their ingredients to keep their foods palatable. The result has been a 20 per cent increase in the amount of sugar consumed by the general population since 1980. In addition, as discussed in the previous chapter, the recommended dietary changes led to vegetable oil consumption skyrocketing and resulted in an increase in the omega-6 content of our cells. The result is a decrease in the efficiency of insulin, meaning even more insulin is now needed.

  The recent changes in our diet and our new snacking culture have also led to much higher average insulin levels – producing a higher weight set-point for most of the population. Changes to an individual’s insulin profiles can be made by changing dietary preferences. Lowering insulin levels by dietary changes will lead to weight loss. Part Three of this book will provide instructions on how to do this.

  ELEVEN

  The French Paradox

  Saturated Fat, Nutritional Advice and Food Culture

  We have been told two things about fat by the nutritional scientists over the last forty years:

  Fat makes you fat.

  Saturated fat causes heart disease.

  There is now a growing body of evidence that both these pillars of dietary advice are in fact built on shaky foundations (see Appendix 1). As the French, the Maasai and the Inuit have shown us, fat does not make you fat.

  Fat has had two perception issues. The first is its energy efficiency. Yes, it does contain more energy calories by weight than other food categories (compared to carbohydrates and protein). It was therefore assumed that people would be consuming more calories if the food was fatty; it was assumed that satiety, the feeling of fullness that stops us eating, was due to the volume of food eaten. However, this is an old-fashioned way of looking at it – unless you happen to be in the middle of the eating challenge show on American TV, Man v. Food. In fact, we now know that fat causes a much more immediate and more pronounced satiety response than carbohydrate. When we consume fat, it triggers a strong release of the satiety hormones discussed in chapter 4 (peptide-YY, or PYY, and GLP-1); the hormones then act on our weight-control centre (in the hypothalamus) to stop us eating.1 The research explains the observation that when rats are fed diets of calorie-dense foods, they do not suddenly start consuming more calories; instead, they control the amount of food consumed based on calories and not food volume.2 The second issue is its unfortunate name – FAT. If a marketing person had coined this name, they would have surely lost their job a long time ago. If foods were to be named for their effect on the body, then sugar should probably be given the name ‘fat’. Maybe fat could be called ‘strength’ or ‘vitality’.

  Nutritional science, which demonizes saturated fat, is a relatively new speciality. Unfortunately, the advice that the nutritionists have given us has caused more harm than good.fn1 Much of the research is based on poor data (dietary recall questionnaires are notoriously inaccurate) and is sponsored by the food industry (you can imagine the conflict of interest here).

  The French Paradox

  In Western Europe today, there is a great example of a population whose weight set-point doesn’t seem to have gone up as far, or as fast, as its immediate neighbours. The population of France consumes more saturated fat (and more wine) than neighbouring countries, yet it has somehow avoided the worst of both the heart disease epidemic and the obesity crisis. How can this be? The food scientists and nutritionists do not have an answer. They have called it the French Paradox because they cannot explain it. But this may be because their way of thinking about both obesity and saturated fat is flawed.

  The French are proud of their national food culture. It is being eroded by the spread of other Western food products, but they are trying to hold out. Despite their access to ‘Westernized’ food, they mainly eat fresh ingredients. They cook; they do not avoid saturated fat as this is part of their traditional diet, but they do not have the culture of snacking. They are proud of their cuisine. When you have savoured a hearty breakfast, lunch and dinner – with fats that make you feel full, and no empty carbs – you do not feel the need to snack. This is the reason the French remain slimmer than the population in the rest of Europe and the USA – by consuming fresh, unprocessed foods (producing a better omega ratio), fewer carbohydrates and more fat (therefore a better insulin profile) and no snack culture (again improving insulin profile). A few years back, the French government imposed a cap of thirty-five hours for the working week; regulations to give employees the ‘right to disconnect’ from work emails after a certain time of day have also been rolled out. On top of this, maybe the French prefer an early night with their loved ones or meeting at terraces and bistros for a chat (improving their levels of cortisol and melatonin) to spending hours commuting, then bingeing on Netflix. The end result? A much lower weight set-point and, as a bonus, an improved quality of life. When you eat the correct foods, avoid snacking and enjoy and embrace a lower stress life, there is no need to count calories – your set-point will be within a healthy range and your metabolism will keep it there.

  The French ignored the American nutritional advice to cut the cholesterol from their diets. They continued to enjoy cheese and steak and cream while the rest of the Western world switched to vegetable oils, refined wheat and sugar – and got fat. There are other cultures that probably did not heed or hear the Americans’ advice: for example, the Maasai tribe in Kenya who just eat meat, blood and milk and remain healthy and very slim despite their extremely high-fat diet. And the Inuit in Greenland, who still consume large quantities of seal and whale meat and blubber, almost pure fat, also avoided the obesity and heart disease crisis.

  The Food of the Earth

  Food culture plays such a critical part in the health of a population. From the raw fish and rice of Japan to the vegetables and noodles of Indonesia, from the salads, pasta and olive oil of southern Italy to the steak and red wine of the French, the wild meat and tubers of the Tanzanian Hadza to the spicy curries and dal of India – food cultures are so diverse, not only in what people from different countries eat, but how they eat (chopstick, hands, spoons or knife and fork). But all food cultures have two important features in common, aspects that are gradually being lost in the West.

  First, food cultures develop over many generations; they are inseparable from local traditions and, most importantly, they encourage social interaction (through preparing, cooking and eating food together). When the Western world embraced nutritional science, it threw
away generations of accumulated food wisdom. Food culture is much more important to health than the individual constituents of the foods that are eaten. It is integral to a happier, more active and more content population – all factors that are ignored by the food reductionists who, by focusing on the benefits/dangers of individual nutrients (i.e. carbohydrates or fats or vitamins), are then able to rubber-stamp refined and fortified highly processed foods.

  The second similarity among diverse food cultures is the need to cook fresh and local ingredients. By definition, local food culture means picking, preparing and cooking locally grown food – this means food that is not imported from far away (and therefore not preserved). One of the advantages of freshly grown foods is seasonality. The type of food available depends on the time of year, whether it is spring, summer, autumn or winter. Seasonal foods ensure food variety. Once we have grown bored with summer leaves, the warming winter bean broth will be extra appealing. Seasonal foods are also entwined with our seasonal traditions: Halloween (pumpkin), Christmas (parsnips, Brussels sprouts and swedes), Diwali or Thanksgiving (autumn and winter feasts). Food culture provides a variety of healthy local food throughout the seasons. Fresh local produce, cooked traditionally and with love, and eaten with family and friends – that is true food culture and that is what we have started to ignore with our factory-produced, industry-marketed foods and nutritionalist ideology. Your great-grandmother would not have known what a ‘superfood’ was, but she would have taught you how to make a steak and kidney pie – just as her mother had taught her.

  TWELVE

  The Miracle Diet Book

  Why You Should Stop Dieting

  Bariatric Surgery Outpatients Clinic, London, 2015

  ‘Weight Watchers, Slimming World, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, LighterLife, the Rosemary Conley Diet, the Dukan Diet, the Red and Green Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet …’ My pen moved rapidly across the page of notes, trying to keep up with the list of diets Mrs Thompson had tried. ‘And all of the rest, I can’t remember them all,’ she finished. I looked up. ‘Do you want to know why they didn’t work for you?’

  The New Miracle Diet

  A great way to make money is to produce a diet book. All that is needed is a new angle on calorie restriction – something that has not been tried before. Something that people will really think is the solution to their troubles. Add in testimonials of satisfied dieters; if possible mention how the diet changed their lives. A C-list celebratory endorsement comes in handy. The next step is to reproduce a snippet of the new diet book in a tabloid newspaper and then arrange an appearance on daytime TV to explain the miracle discovery.

  Here’s how a ‘miracle diet book’ will sell after the initial media splash:

  Phase 1: The diet book inspires its readers to go on the new, ‘cannot fail’, diet. The readers follow the diet, which involves restricting calories. Lo and behold they lose weight, usually between 3 and 7kg (7lb to 1 stone) in the first few weeks! This is the secret: 3–7kg will get the readers’ weight loss noticed at work. Their friends in the office will see this and the readers will inform them of the new miracle diet book that has finally saved them.

  Phase 2: Ten of the office workers go and buy the book and lose weight. They tell all their friends, relatives and neighbours.

  Phase 3: Interest spreads like a dodgy Ponzi scheme, expanding to social media chatter about the book (it could go viral at this stage!) and hundreds more copies are sold.

  Phase 4: A few months after the launch is the quiet phase. Book sales may hold up for a little while, but the chatter and interest from the diet is dying down. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has started to regain the weight that they lost. Fortunately, none of the weight gainers are very vocal about this. None of them are annoyed with the book, because they blame their poor willpower.

  Phase 5: This is the stage at which most readers weigh more than when they purchased the book. But this will not stop them looking for the next miracle diet book (they normally appear every six to twelve months). After all, the diet did work – just not for long. It was a short-term miracle diet.

  Phase 6: You can imagine the author of the diet book returning to chilly England from their new Caribbean beach-house (bought with the book’s proceeds). They notice someone else’s new bestselling miracle diet book prominently displayed in the lifestyle section of the local Waterstones … and spot their book hidden quite far down the shelves … and now sporting a 2-for-1 sticker.

  For each of the pounds that were made from each book sold there will be at least as many extra pounds of fat carried around by the readers as they regain the weight they lost – and then gain even more. But it’s the perfect crime because the poor readers will think that it is their fault that they put on the extra weight. They will not know that it is a normal metabolic consequence of dieting: the weight set-point is raised in the long term, in the aftermath of weight loss from a low-calorie diet.

  The reason there are so many diet books out there is that none of them considers the master controller of our weight: the weight set-point. That’s why none of the diet books seems to work long term, and that’s why there are so many failed miracle diet books cluttering the lifestyle section of your bookshop. Your weight will always return to its predetermined set-point.

  When I ask my patients which diet they lost the most weight on, LighterLife wins the prize in most instances. This ultra-low-calorie food-replacement diet produces outstanding short-term weight loss – however, ALL my patients (without exception) reported to me that within a few months of finishing the diet they had regained ‘all their weight and much more’. This simply confirms the conclusion we reached earlier in the book: the more extreme the diet, the more extreme the metabolic and appetite response will be – the weight set-point always wins.

  These findings fit in with our weight set-point theory of weight regulation. When food might become scarce at any time, our food-seeking behaviour signals and our enjoyment of high-calorie food are ratcheted upwards and remain there. Diets tend to be short-term – ‘I’m on a diet at the moment.’ Because we are disciples of the simple energy in/out equation we think that we can have a period of negative energy balance for a few weeks, lose weight, then come off the diet when we have reached our ideal weight. This is the underlying premise of all diet and diet and exercise plans – they are short-term, rapid fixes to get the weight off. Because these low-calorie diets can have unpleasant side effects, they cannot be continued in the long term. We have an idea that when we come off the diet we will try and curb some of our previous dietary bad habits – perhaps eating less fast food than before – and maybe we vow to continue with the gym membership. We think that by doing this we will keep the weight off.

  A Dieter’s Body is Different from the Body of a Non-Dieter

  What we don’t appreciate is that by the very nature of dieting we have changed our bodies. After we have lost 5, 10 or 20kg in weight by dieting, biologically we become a different person. We have adapted to our new low-calorie environment and developed a low metabolism. And remember, our bodies cannot tell the difference between a voluntary diet and a food shortage or famine.

  The more weight that we have managed to force off by low-calorie dieting, the slower our metabolism will get, and the more our appetite hormones will be screaming at us not to walk past Starbucks. Our new, metabolically hyper-efficient and hyper-hungry bodies will not maintain the weight loss with our original maintenance plan. Cutting down on fast food and going to the gym once or twice a week is not going to be enough any more. In order to maintain the weight loss, we will need to be much more aggressive with our energy in/out equation: cutting calories further and further, and flogging our poor bodies in the gym even harder. The longer we fight to keep that weight off, the more aggressive the body gets to prevent us – because we are fighting against our weight set-point.

  Our weight control is subconscious – just like our breathing. We don’t have to remind ourselves to breathe an
d we shouldn’t have to consciously worry about our weight, providing our body is happy with its environment. Just as we can override our subconscious control of breathing in the short term, by holding our breath, so we can also override our weight set-point temporarily by dieting – but when the body senses we are going away from ideal conditions it will intervene to change your behaviour. The longer you hold your breath, the more unpleasant the feeling. Eventually you are screaming inside for release; you know you cannot win. You start to breathe again, and the pain goes away.

  A similar protective mechanism comes into play when we diet. As you finally step back into Starbucks and smell the reassuring aroma of coffee – and order the Mocha and glazed doughnut ‘snack’ (710kcal) – you can breathe easy again: the set-point has won another battle against your conscious will.

  Why Not Skip the Diet and Go Straight on to the Maintenance Phase?

  Your initial plan was to lose weight on the miracle diet and then, once you had lost the weight, be a bit more sensible with your eating habits and gym attendance. But what would have happened if you had skipped the diet and gone straight on to your lifestyle changes? Maybe you were lazy before and ate fast food twice a week rather than cooking a meal. Maybe you were so tired that you rarely went to the gym.

  OK, so now you have decided not to go on a diet, but instead to cook better-quality food and exercise a couple of times a week. Note here that there is no calorie-counting involved in this change. You are just altering a couple of habits for the better. The outcome would be – no dramatic weight loss; probably no weight loss for weeks or months (in fact if the exercise you did was weights then you might even gain some weight from your increased muscle). However, if you continued with your better dietary and exercise habits, eventually the message would get through to your weight set-point after some months. Your set-point would go down and maybe many months later you would be 4.5kg (10lb) lighter. A year down the line your weight might settle at 10kg (22lb) lighter. But, unlike the weight loss through dieting, your body would be happy with this weight loss. Your actual weight would be matching your weight set-point, so you would not have a voracious hunger or low metabolism. In fact, because you are fitter, your metabolic rate would increase and as time went by everything will get easier and easier. Your body would be at peace at this weight.