h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

During the recent najopomo epic I wrote about being totally confused about advice re diets and what 'safe' weight I needed to be. Things haven't got any better really though I have actually lost 4lb over the month.
Today I see the media is fuelling that confusion. There's one mega headline where a church leader says the govt should pay more attention to the UK hungry and support food banks.
Then, lo and behold, in another paper the headline screams, 'gastric bands fitted to kids as young as 13 to combat obesity'.
You don't have to be Einstein to spot where these two opposing headlines just don't gel.
Now the question remains, who do we believe? If there's an obesity epidemic then where does the 'hungry UK' fit in this? Surely there would be an epidemic of underweight people and all the potential health risks that entails?
If there's an epidemic of obesity then isn't pushing more food onto people sending the wrong message and thus costing millions in health issues as a result?
Where's the middle ground in this debate? Where is the sound, solid, medically proven, fully independent evidence and advice on what is or isn't a good diet? Why do we only ever get the extremes presented as being the only facts when clearly the evidence doesn't actually bear this out?
Oh, a footnote to my weight issue. After yet another telephone consultation with my new GP its been decided I need to lose another stone but that the limit set by previous advice, that is, get down to 7 to 8 stone is no longer valid or deemed safe. It seems now 8 and 1/2 to 9 and 1/2 stone is the best weight range for me hence still need to lose a stone as I'm currently 10st. It seems my cardiologist has also backed this so between now and next May, (next cardiac clinic check up)I will endeavour to lose this stone.

" Where is the sound, solid, medically proven, fully independent evidence and advice on what is or isn't a good diet?"[BMT]

Thanks to the cholesterol/saturated fat hypothesis of Ansel Keys in the 1950s and 1960s, other hypotheses did not get enough research grant money, and were never adequately researched. The people who persisted were marginalized as cranks. I distinctly remember experts in the early 1990s claiming that no one ever got fat from eating carbohydrates. What little data does exist suggests that high consumption of sugar is at least as likely to contribute to coronary heart disease as high cholesterol. There are so many variables, though! And the few large-scale studies that tried to test consumption of different types of fat ran into the problem that people just didn't *like* eating what they were told to eat over the long periods that would prove or disprove the issue at hand.

The largest-scale data come from national statistics. For example, in Country X, did consumption of butter/margarine/sugar/beef/poultry/eggs/etc. go up or down over several decades? Such statistics exist. There are also data for national cholesterol levels and coronary heart disease [CHD] and strokes. Thus, in the 1960s, the Japanese had much lower cholesterol levels than the U.S. or England. They also had very low CHD, but high levels of stroke. Fast forward to the present day: they now have much higher cholesterol, but even lower CHD incidence. The Greeks used to have the world's lowest incidence of CHD. That was at a time when they led the world in per capita olive oil consumption.

Smoking, exercise, stress, etc. also need to be factored. It's complicated, darn it!

So seek some kind of balance in your diet, as well as in your life. Exercise well, especially in terms of sessions of thirty or more minutes regularly. You can burn off some fat with exercise, but the fat does not start being burned off until you've been at it for a half an hour or so.

Alcoholic beverages are a source of carbohydrates. If you looked at the fattest men in your neighborhood, chances are most of them drink at lot of beer or ale. Maltose is *very* fattening. If you confined yourself to noncaloric beverages [water, coffee, tea], you would be cutting out some carbs. Eat some protein as part of your breakfast. Try to eat a bit of food every four hours or so. Go easy on eating just before bed. My doctor advised me not to eat no more than two pieces of fruit and two slices of bread per day. If you can manage to eat *less* than that, you should get good results.

Your body can manufacture enough blood sugar from protein and/or fat.

Fruit juice? I recently stopped consuming it entirely, and promptly lost weight.

Don't consign yourself to a tasteless, bland diet. I dropped my breakfast banana, substituting a boiled egg or a small green salad with an ounce of chicken breast. For dressing, I use a teaspoon of lemon juice. It tastes fantastic! I wish I had tried that years ago.

Sorry, I had a superfluous "no" or "not" in the sentence about fruit and bread. No more than two slices/pieces per day is what I meant.

It used to be that most malnourished children were obviously so, because they were painfully thin. Now (in the first world, at least), malnourished children are as likely to be overweight--the cheapest food isn't all that nutritious

I don't know about the food side to health etc, but I have sort of noticed ? that keeping kids totally clean etc, they still get the odd bugs/germs. But! I've seen many "mucky" kids (not saying anything about family lifestyle and THEY don't cop anything because a bit of muck helps build the bodies defences