The Men Who Made Us Fat (That Aren't Us)...

Its been a while since my first post. Mainly because I still find blogging self-indulgent and don't really believe that anyone gives a shit about what I say. BUT I did feel compelled to add my two-cents on a good, but misleading BBC documentary I watched on Iplayer this evening. If you watched it too I'd be keen to hear what you think.

Now don’t get me wrong the food industry has a lot to answer for, especially in relation to misleading advertising re: health food. This BBC documentary, whilst highlighting many of these issues, is guilty of the very nutritional naivety that these companies have profited from. Misleading claims about what is healthy and unhealthy and confusion about some basic points of nutrition somewhat weakens the BBC’s position on these issues.

Lets start with the Negatives:

Dorset Cereals, complete with its
"misleading" label
consisting of nothing but
the actual ingredients
in the package. Bastards!

In the first five minutes we are told how organic cereal, Prêt salads and yoghurt snacks are “more fattening” than Weetabix, a Big Mac and a Krispy Kreme donut respectively. Consumer “expert” Giles Quick is rolled out to give his opinion on a range of so-called “health” products. Why someone from a consumer intelligence agency is being touted as some sort of nutritional expert is beyond me, but we are inflicted to is ill-informed wisdom as if it were gospel.  

First under investigation is a honey granola cereal (hardly the healthiest cereal anyway) which had the audacity to list the actual ingredients on the front cover (“all of these ingredients sound pretty healthy, don’t they?” he notes smugly. Yes, Giles, because they are!) He then tries to claim that its high presence of saturated fat made it a “fattening” product! What kind of pseudo-science babble is that?! A product is only “fattening” if you eat too much of it, the presence of fat does NOT make it fattening. It is plainly obvious that the fat comes from all the nuts and seeds in the cereal, the same nuts and seeds that are low GI, high in Omega 3’s and almost all the essential fatty acids most people are so lacking in!

Yes, if you ate bowl after bowl of it you will get fat but you would get fat if you ate 5000 calories worth of carrots a day. Fat does not equal fattening! 

Is the BBC really trying to claim a Big Mac
is "healthier" than a Pret Salad?
It might have fewer calories
but not all calories are created equal

We are then shown that a prêt salad has more calories than a Big Mac. This may be true but to suggest that the Big Mac (the same Big Mac that NEVER DECAYS due to all the artificial preservatives) is healthier than a Rocket and Lentil salad is plain madness! Yes it has more calories but that only becomes a problem if you eat too many calories over the course of an entire day; not a single 500-calorie meal! A rocket salad is packed with nutrients whilst a Big Mac is a nutritionally void frankenfood! Plus who eats a Big Mac on its own? They come with fries and a sugary drink which ramps the calories way past that of the Pret Salad!

The summary of all this pseudo-science waffle is that just because something has fat or calories it is unhealthy. WRONG! All calories are NOT created equal, the calories in a prêt salad are better for you than the calories in a Big Mac. You will only get fat if you eat too many of them!

 ...And now the Positives 

The program did go on to make a lot of good points and rightly held the “health” food industry to account on a variety of matters, including the ludicrous claim by companies like P&G that market their juices as “fruit juice” despite containing as little as 5% juice 

Another interesting segment was with Harvard Business professor Pierre Chandon (again not a nutritional expert). He told us of his study comparing consumer perception of a foot-long Subway sandwich with that oft-cited nemesis the Big Mac, the former marketed as healthy and the latter with a reputation as fast-track heart attack. 

Now my first reaction to this was, “who in their right mind would think a foot-long Subway was a healthy food?” but that is beside the point. The point of the study was that people did think a Footlong subway contained fewer calories than a Big Mac and that was due to misleading marketing. People are so fixated on the idea that “low-fat” means “unfattening” or “healthy” that anything marketed thus is seen as healthy. People think in dichotomies of Healthy or Un-healthy. Food companies have realised this and realised that just one “health” claim is enough to trick consumers into thinking food is healthy. This is a serious issue and the BBC does a good job of highlighting this.

Throughout the show, I kept wanting to answer the question of "who made us fat?" with "us and our own stupidity"; anyone who eats a footlong subway thinking they are on the fast-track to skinny town needs their head examined! This was only confounded by the BBC making so many basic nutritional errors with regards to "fat content" and "fattening". This assumption would be misplaced, however. Food marketing is so incessant and pervasive that those who don't have the time to look up the difference between mono and polyunsaturated fats or LDL and HDL cholesterol will believe the crap these companies lie about and they need to be held to account....fast! Unfortunately amateurish documentaries like this one only highlight the pervasiveness of the "health food" myth by making so many of the basic mistakes that the consumers they are trying to protect are being duped into! 

First Blog Post

Jack Lalanne telling it like it is forty years ago. Each word still rings true today! I urge you all to watch :) 

Rather an unimaginative title for my first blog post but I'm still only tentatively dipping my toes into this so-called "blogging". I'm sure they'll get better soon

I intend over the coming posts to talk about three of the things that take up a lot of my time. Unsurprisingly those three things are Eating, Running and Climbing. A broad-brush group of topics that I'm sure will widen considerably as the posts go on. 


For today I wanted to talk about this video from recently deceased US fitness king Jack Lalanne. Now, not many of us in the UK will have heard of him unless any of us have had the propensity or desire to call a "star jump" a "jumping jack". That will be his transatlantic influence! 


Anyway,  I was struck about how relevant his words seem some 40 years after this video was made. The way he describes the miserable, downtrodden faces of those on his local "streetcar" despite all their "modern conveniences" that, by all accounts, would seem downright archaic to us is strikingly relevant to anyone who has ever had to endure a rush-hour tube. 


"People have gotten so far away from the way they should be living  that they've lost the ability to be happy anymore" laments Jack. Could there be a better way to sum up the general malaise with which people tend to live their lives now? People wait endlessly for the next paycheck, the next gadget, the next quick fix and, dammit, they've been waiting for nigh on 40 years and not a damn thing has changed!!! 


Now, whilst I admire Jack and his many achievements (including working out 7 days a week until the very day he died at the tender age of 97) there are a few things I disagree with him about such as his mantra of "If it tastes good, spit it out!". Ugh, I could not think of a more miserable existence than one that involves solely bland food designed for sustenance and nutrition only. In a way I think this mantra stems only from the culture that Jack fought so hard to bring down. If fast food companies hadn't pumped their food with addictive additives that create desires that can only be satiated by further consumption of the very same additives and describe it as a "great taste" there would be no need to spit out tasty food!! If it tastes "good" for these reasons then by all means spit it out! If it tastes good because it has been cooked from scratch and flavoured with natural herbs, spices, sweeteners (such as honey, fruit, agave...) then devour away!! 


So I guess thats why I wanted to write about my aforementioned topics. I am a firm believer that a good diet and a modicum of exercise can alleviate all but the most deep-seated depressions (excluding, of course, medically diagnosed depression) and so would most people who blog/write/about food or exercise but I do believe there is still a culture that deems the two spheres quite separate. 


The fitness and exercise community tend to advocate healthy eating (naturally) but eating that is designed at sustenance to fuel a workout and not fuel our tastebuds. No carbs after seven? No thanks!!


And whilst the food community of the Jamie Oliver ilk (of which I would not be ashamed to align myself with) pay the natural lipserivce to getting fit and healthy alongside eating well it never goes beyond the occasional government-led 30 minutes, three days a week mantra. 


There is a real lack of committed foodies AND fitness fanatics....at least not ones that write about it! I'll probably be too busy climbing or running to ever experiment with Soux-Vide beef and too enthusiastic about baking (and eating with jam and butter) my own bread to ever get a washboard stomach and I'm sure there is a whole community of people out there who feel just the same and THEY are probably too busy to blog about it!! Lets see he how it goes!!