I watched the last of C4's My Big Fat Diet Show programmes this evening

In the last of the My Big Fat Diet Show programmes this evening we were given some more misinformation. Food scientist Richard Marshall said, "We're programmed to need salt." - That is certainly not true. Babies are not born with a taste for salt. Salt is an acquired taste, though unfortunately it is not difficult to acquire the taste for salt, so it is wise to provide low salt meals for your children and protect them from getting into the habit of eating salty snacks like crisps, Pringles, salted nuts and cheese, especially the extra highly-salted cheese junk like Cheese Strings. The taste for salt can be like an addiction - a dangerous addiction that can result in high blood pressure, early onset type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and the risk of stroke and heart attack.

The food scientist went on to say, "It goes back to our evolution, we were hunter gatherers, we needed lots of energy all the time, so all those things we needed." - Well that's a strange thing to say in connection with salt, because salt contains no calories at all and so cannot provide energy, nor did hunter gatherers eat salt as such; they ate only the very small amount of salt naturally present in food, i.e. they did not eat added salt.

Reducing salt intake is an excellent way to lower high blood pressure. A guy who contacted me just over a week ago from my website, wanting advice about lowering his high blood pressure, reduced his salt intake as I advised and in just a week this is what he wrote to me: "Just to let you know that after one week of severely restricting my daily sodium intake to around 1000mg, my blood pressure has gone from 152/86(average of previous three weekly readings) to 133/88(average of three readings today." - Impressive, isn't it? He also says he has a lot more energy now.

Early humans in fact had a low sodium, high potassium food intake which means that our bodies evolved on a low sodium and high potassium intake. The modern diet has reversed this to high sodium and low potassium. The intake of salt has massively increased in recent years - as has the incidence of obesity and of the degenerative diseases I have listed.

To lose excess weight it is necessary to reduce fluid retention and fat retention. Both of these are easily and safely reduced by eating less salt/sodium. The weight reduction is speeded up by eating plenty of fruit and unsalted vegetables, because these are potassium-rich foods.

Some further important information these four programmes omitted to mention at all is that when you are overweight it is because you are sensitive to salt and so very prone to fluid retention. This problem with salt in turn depletes the body of the essential minerals calcium, magnesium, potassium and zinc, and the calcium loss in particular results in fat retention. - Fat retention is not caused by eating fatty foods. It is caused by insufficient essential minerals, especially calcium. So if you increase your calcium intake with milk or yoghurt say, you will be helping yourself to lose excess, unwanted fat, and lowering your risk of fragile bones and other problems that calcium deficiency causes. Dieting should be avoided, especially diets that restrict calories to fewer than the body requires. It is not necessary to diet to lose weight, and dieting is likely to make your body even more deficient in calcium and other essential nutrients.

Here is how to lose weight safely.

Sodium in foods

FAT RETENTION

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

My Big Fat Diet Show, Episode 3, shown January 12th

Well I watched tonight and there were points made that pleased me. I was glad to see the 'cheese-addicted' woman helped to get over her 'addiction'. - Cheese is high in salt and so it is a food best avoided by overweight people wanting to lose weight, because all overweight people are sensitive to salt. For overweight/obese people, eating salt/sodium tends to increase their problem of fluid retention and so they weigh more. Because this woman drastically cut down on her cheese intake, this reduced her salt intake and so she lost some of her fluid/water retention. The fluid is lost by excreting more urine. If you want to lose excess weight, you would do well to reduce your intake of cheese.

Cheese figured in another part of the programme tonight too - Dairylea cheese. - But of course Dairylea cheese isn't really cheese at all: it's a concoction. The dietician on the show explained that it is mainly composed of skimmed milk powder, butter, cheese, emulsifiers and a high amount of added salt. - See Nutritional information for Kraft Dairylea Spread. Since it is so very high in salt/sodium it is not something you should be eating if you want to lose excess weight. To convert sodium content to salt content, multiply the sodium by 2.5.

Chocolate digestive biscuits, both the usual ones and the ones labelled as 'lower fat', featured in tonight's show. Both of these types of chocolate biscuit, and indeed almost all sweet biscuits, you may be surprised to learn, are high in salt! - If you are trying to lose excess weight you should cut down on biscuits or avoid them altogether.

If you find exercising difficult, please do not feel you have to do it to lose weight. Exercise is good for many aspects of health, but it has practically no part to play in losing weight.

Here is how to lose weight

Sodium in foods

FAT RETENTION

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

C4's 'My Big Fat Diet Show' was better tonight because the dieters ate less salty food

Well Channel 4's My Big Fat Diet Show was better tonight - better in that the dieters had their intake of salty snacks restricted. The previous programme scarcely mentioned salt as an ingredient to avoid. Because of the lowered salt intake this time it was to be expected that there would be significant weight loss, as there was, because of the water loss resulting from sodium reduction. The dieter who didn't lose weight this time despite sodium reduction was the one who drank a lot of alcohol, and of course alcohol also causes fluid retention (ascites, in the abdomen) in people who are sensitive to salt. - Details about sodium in food and about alcohol on this page: Sodium in foods

The best and safest way to lose excess weight is to cut down on salt/sodium and salty food. - If you do this gradually you will lose weight gradually; if you do it more rapidly you will lose weight very fast indeed, especially if you make sure that you eat plenty of fruit and (unsalted) vegetables as well, because fruit and veg are rich in potassium, and potassium displaces some of the sodium in your body, thus enabling you to excrete more of the excess fluid from your body. Reducing salt intake is safe and we are advised to eat less salt. Most of us eat too much salt.

It is DIETING - by which I mean eating fewer calories than your body requires - that is harmful. Calorie counting and advice about increasing exercise and reducing fat intake to reduce obesity are ineffective, counter-productive and often damaging. - See the article in the British Medical Journal of November 2003 http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/327/7423/1085 for actual research on what happens when this advice is followed! - Over 800 obese adults were put on energy deficit diets, given diet sheets and plenty of instruction and help from trained staff, and apparently, visited fortnightly for a year, at the end of which they had GAINED weight! This mirrors the real experience of obese people, viz. - dieting makes you fatter.

If you have fat retention as well as fluid retention, you will find that the fat retention is also reduced by cutting down on salt. - Fat retention is not caused by eating too much fat and is not cured by eating meals low in fat. - Read about fat retention here: FAT RETENTION

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Channel 4's 'My Big Fat Diet Show' last night gave the usual bad advice to people wanting to lose excess weight.

Channel 4's 'My Big Fat Diet Show' last night gave the usual bad advice to people wanting to lose excess weight. The overweight women dieters featured on the show were told they must cut down on calories to lose weight, and that for this diet they must eat only 1200 calories a day - i.e. fewer calories than their bodies need.

For the purposes of the programme there was a gimmick of providing 100 calorie portions of different foods, e.g. a quarter of a cup cake was a 100 calorie portion and one very large egg was a 100 calorie portion. Fresh vegetables obviously provided a lot of food for 100 calories, compared with the junk processed food that seemed to be the major element of the food usually eaten by the women.

At the weigh-in after a few days, most of the women had lost weight, and one, who had lost several pounds, was congratulated warmly and told excitedly that that was proof that reducing calorie intake reduces overweight. - This was despite the fact that another one of the women had gained 2 pounds! - The woman who had gained 2 pounds was very distressed because, presumably, she had put a lot of effort into reducing her calorie intake. - But she was not told that gaining weight was proof that eating fewer calories increases overweight! - No, of course she wasn't. She was told not to worry, that weight gain sometimes happens, but that she would lose weight if she continued with the calorie reduction.

It's all such nonsense. The women victims chosen for the show are all serial dieters and therefore should know from experience that dieting almost always results ultimately in weight gain to a heavier weight than before the diet.

If only programme-makers could abandon their misplaced obsession with calories and dieting, and instead think of outcomes for the subjects in their programmes. All overweight people are sensitive to salt and that is why they are overweight. And so the safe, fast, effective way to lose excess weight and reduce obesity is to cut down on salt/sodium and salty food, and eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and plenty of real food, instead of salt-laden processed junk.

And no need at all for that pointless exercise, struggling up and down stairs to 'use up calories'...)o: - What a waste of life that is!

If those women had cut down on their salt intake instead of cutting down on calories they would ALL have lost several pounds, without any hunger and without damaging their health. And then we could have stopped having these silly TV dieting programmes cluttering up the schedules and harming people's health.

How to lose weight

Sodium in foods

I watched the ITV programme: Claire Sweeney: My Big Fat Diet

I watched the Claire Sweeney My Big Fat Diet programme last evening. Here are my thoughts about it:

The peg on which the programme hung was that Claire would abandon her usual highly disciplined pattern of eating (about which I noted that she said she was always hungry! - not a healthy way of living, in my opinion) - and her rather heavy commitment to exercise, which seemed to involve a great deal of running up and down an outdoor stairway - very boring, I thought - and a lot of repetitive exercises like sit-ups, etc. accompanied by her personal trainer and a stopwatch.

I think most people would want to abandon that routine...

However, the idea was that after abandoning this unhealthy routine, she would take up a different unhealthy routine for 6 weeks - of eating whatever she felt like, whenever she felt like it, and eating/drinking as much as she wanted - and see how much weight she would gain and how unfit she would become.

She didn't stick to this though. At first she claimed not to be making a pig of herself and deliberately eating more than she wanted, but later on it was clear that she was forcing herself to eat more than she wanted, because she was, for example, really struggling to stuff a HUGE concoction of layers of bread bun and other stuff into her mouth when her mouth was nowhere near big enough to get it round the concoction...)o: - I forget what was in the ghastly mountain - was it a built-up hamburger? - meat/cheese/sauce etc etc squashed into the bread? - No way would I or anyone I know ever eat such awful 'food' in such quantity in such an ugly form or unattractive way...)o: -

She gained a load of weight very quickly indeed! - And raised her blood pressure and her pulse rate, etc.

If you force yourself to eat more than you have a stomach for you will of course gain weight, just as the guy in the 'Supersize Me' film did. - He gorged himself constantly, making himself feel ill and sick, eating far more than anyone in real life would.

This is NOT how people become fat. - It so clearly isn't. - And most fat people are constantly trying to lose weight or at any rate not to gain more weight. They are not trying to burst out of their skin. They are uncomfortable and long to weigh less and feel less bloated and not be laughed at and insulted... This means in reality that most fat people are watching what they eat, counting calories, etc most of the time for many years, often for most of their lives. - Yes, some of them eat too much, but that is a minority of them. And some slim people eat too much as well. - The apparent paradox there is that the naturally slim people simply excrete the excess calories/fat/salt they eat, whereas the fat people have a different body chemistry and cannot do this.

Such a pity that the programme reinforced yet again the false stereotype of fat people as greedy and lazy...)o:

It wasn't the amount of fat/food/calories that Claire ate that caused her to gain a lot of weight fast (though the amount of alcohol she seemed to be knocking back would certainly have contributed to the fluid retention in her abdomen). - It was that her salt intake must have been very high, and as a person who had in the past had an eating disorder - bulimia - she will have a tendency to salt sensitivity/fluid retention and so will easily put weight on.

I didn't think much to the programme. People need to be told the truth - namely that salt intake and fluid retention are the main critical factors that determine whether they are overweight or not. - Exercise has nothing to do with it, however many people insist to you that exercise helps you to lose weight. - It doesn't! - Reducing salt intake and avoiding dieting result in swift, safe weight loss, and if Claire happens to read this, then I advise her to adopt this easy, healthy way of living and give up always being hungry and constantly pounding those boring outdoor steps - and cut down on the booze! - Alcohol causes fluid retention in the abdomen if you are sensitive to salt.

A note about the clothes Claire wore in the show: - she seemed to go out of her way to wear the tightest clothes she could manage to get into, so that it was absolutely impossible not to notice her fatter tummy, etc. - Doesn't she have any clothes that are not skin-tight?

The final irony of the programme to me was that salt was not mentioned even once in the context of weight gain/loss, except that at the end Claire said something about taking something 'with a grain of salt'...(o:

Lose weight safely, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.