If the low carb diet was a political party, it should be now be close to forming a government. Its story mirrors that of actual parties – founded decades ago, it was small for a long time, languishing on the fringes of respectability; its policies were dismissed as untested and possibly dangerous by the low-fat ruling party which had close links to big business.

‘I wish they’d make up their minds,’ you may find yourself muttering if you don’t follow healthy eating debates all that closely. ‘One moment they tell us to stop eating butter and eggs on pain of having a heart attack and to have marge and no more than an egg a week.

The sugar tax is obviously a very sensible idea but it’s much more than that. It’s prophetic, it’s a sign of a major change, it’s the swallow that could be heralding a medical summer. The tax is shorthand for a long running battle around what is a healthy diet, which turns out to be about a lot more than just diet.

Last month sounds of the slaughtering of sacred nutritional cows could be heard coming from Cape Town International Convention Centre in South Africa – the venue for the first International Summit on low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diets.

Among those forensically dispatched were such perennials of the dietitians’ lexicon as: obesity is simply the result of greed and sloth; calories in equal calories out (CICO, pronounced psycho); saturated fat causes heart disease, and type 2 diabetes is irreversible.

Professor Richard Feinman is a biochemist who came late to nutrition. He was shocked by the poor quality of the science he found there. HIUK asked him about the background to his paper that calls for a major U-turn on the diet diabetics are advised to follow. (Read More…)

If you know anything about nutrition, and especially if you have friends or people in your family with diabetes, you have probably wondered: Why are diabetics advised to follow a low fat diet?
It means you will eat lots of carbohydrates, which get turned into extra blood glucose. Odd surely when the key aim of diabetes treatment is to keep blood sugar low? … (Read More…)

About ten years ago for various personal reasons I became interested in the benefits of an Atkins-type low carbohydrate diet. I read a lot of research material, talked to many experts and became convinced that the advice to follow a low fat/high carbohydrate diet has been disastrous for our national health. (Read more…)