Horizon - Genes and Obesity - 3kg?

Cut out ALL carbs. (Some will always sneak in.) The idea is to lose fat, not lose weight. Muscle weighs about 10 times as much as fat so your body will shrink but your weight, at least at the beginning, will remain the same. That's why low carb diets often fail. People look at the weighing machine instead of their waist measurement.

As a vegetarian I feel I have to jump in and defend carbs On average we vegetarians and vegans get a greater proportion of our energy from carbohydrates than omnivores, yet on average we weigh less than omnivores. Big difference between different sources of carbohydrates. Whole food carbohydrates like a carrot for example is excellent fuel for your body. Carbohydrates in the form of heavily processed crap like Coca Cola for example is not good fuel for your body. That's what I think anyway. If someone I knew went on a very low carb diet I'd be worried about the long term health consequences tbh.

I don't think you need to cut all carbs, but definitely avoid the high GI ones. And as far as I know, the carb cutting is much more effective for men than for women.
Women have it a lot tougher when it comes to weight loss.

I am pretty sure I would lose weight if I became a vegetarian.

Don't get me wrong, I like sprouts as much as the next man, but much of weight gain is because of overeating stuff that tastes nice and can be eaten without much effort.

Even if you are right, Mr Anderson, that vegetarians weigh less than meat eaters on average (I think some stats from a credible source would do it), I can think of at least one reason why that would be so.

Vegetarians and suchlike tend to be more health conscious, they tend to be better educated and they are more likely to be better off. Whereas if you broadly lump everyone else who is not a vegetarian together, you will have a great many people who couldn’t care less about health or waistline, who will eat what they can afford and who do not know or care how to cook properly. They simply skew the figures to make it look as if vegetarianism is intrinsically healthier, an opinion only, and (probably) not supported by any reputable study.

I was a vegetarian for a total of about six years, and only ate lean chicken for longer. I was also physically more active than I am now and obviously younger. I’m super lean on a high fat diet. By the way, unless you are fighting cancer in which case it might help, there’s no real need to go zero carb, I have 20-30g a day and it's more than enough for me.

Found a scientific paper about weight differences between vegetarians and meat eaters that I hope is good enough: http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v27/n6/full/0802300a.html According to this paper at least most of the difference remains if you adjust for lifestyle factors. (I'm super lean on a vegetarian diet that is pretty high in carbohydrates)

Thanks for bothering to find a decent study rather than just linking to an article.

My main fault with the study is that the vegan (men) group (who did best, as you know) were of median age 35y. The meat eaters were 48y. I think that’s a big discrepancy, the meat eaters are nearer to fifty than the vegans are to forty. Can you really fairly compare people who are well into middle age with those who are not that long out of their 30s?

Despite that, what was the difference after six years of the study? The ‘worst’ group – the meat eating men – had an average BMI 24.49, the best group – the vegan men – had an average of 22.34. That, in my opinion, is not a stunning difference.

Also, although vegans faired better they also ate about 1000 calories per day less than the meat eaters, which could account for the difference in BMI. Well that suggests to me that there’s nothing instrinsically superior to a specialist diet like the vegan diet in terms of body mass. After a number of years the ones eating the least calories have the lowest BMI, but not by a lot, surely no surprise.

That’s another point, the vegan diet is a specialist diet. Looking at the meat eating men only 19% engaged in high physical activity compared to 34% of vegans. To be fair, lower levels of physical activity were about the same between all groups. But my point is, as I said before, vegans en masse are likely to look after themselves better than meat eaters en masse.

To be a fair comparison, I think you first have to ensure the ages of the participants are broadly the same – all over 50s or all under 40s, or whatever. And if you have, as I called them, ‘specialists’ like vegans you ought to have the equivalent in meat eaters, which would be those on a ketogenic diet like me. My kind of diet isn’t a high meat diet but a high fat one, moderate protein and low or very low carbohydrates. Again, the meat eaters on that study were also eating a fair amount of carbohydrates, so a fairer comparison would be between meat eaters who don't also eat high carb, and vegans.

Finally, one of the flaws with these kinds of studies is that you are looking at what participants filled in on a questionnaire. Not worthless - there’s a great deal of difficulty in locking people up for 6 years and making them eat only what you want them to eat. So these kinds of studies are about as good as it gets, I think. But it still reduces the quality of the data because you are relying on people not lying, not forgetting and not being bothered to do it all properly.

We have lots of people locked up for 6 years or more actually, and it should be easy to control exactly what they eat, but we don't take advantage of that. If I got to decide all long term prisoners would be randomly assigned an interesting diet that nutritional scientists want to study. We could conduct some really interesting and high quality long term diet studies in prisons!

Right now it feels like long term studies of really high quality are in short supply. Often it's impossible to say with total confidence that diet x is superior to diet y or vice versa. Do group z live longer because of their diet, or is it because they get more everyday excercise and have a rich social life? Not always easy to determine.

For me personally it's good enough if my vegetarian diet is no worse than it would be with some meat in it, and I'm at least 90% confident that it's not I don't completely rule out the possibility that adding some high quality meat or fish would be slighlty better for me, but I don't think so with the information available to me today. Would be very surprised if all the high carb vegetables I'm currently eating are harmful to my health.

if i won the lottery i'd like to try running a fat farm.

the showed a documentary on Mario Lanza the operatic singer in the movies. He would sing the score of the movie while he was heavy. His singing had better reverberation coz he was fat. Then he went to a clinic/fat farm. they would lock him up for a month/six weeks. feed him a diet with a bottle of beer a day. he'd lose the weight and look quite slim for the role.
But he did this yoyo dieting for years and inactivity in the locked room got to him. deep vein thrombosis caused by not moving/exercise killed him. 38 years old.

I have always thought that we are encouraged to spend money on processed food, eating out regularly in restaurants, fast food places, encouraged to have the latest cooking gadgets
that we will only use once or twice, encouraged to buy recipe books by celeb chefs, encouraged to buy gym memberships
encouraged to join Weight Watchers, buy diet books and schemes, active sportswear, £200 trainers, etc etc etc.

Pay to get fat, pay to get thin.

Capitalism, eh?

Isn't it a bit surprising that the fundamental issues of obesity have not been determined and agreed upon by the whole of the medical world?  It is as if no-one wants to find out and agree on the answer.

Now.....that IS a good conspiracy theory.

same companies that sell you the food. have subsidiaries that sell us medicines. They also sell us soap powers and detergents/chemicals that are cancerous in nature. Spray on deodorants that have aluminum?