Being dangerously overweight is all down to bad diet rather than a lack of exercise, according to a trio of doctors who have reopened the debate about whether food, sedentary lifestyles or both are responsible for the obesity epidemic.
In an article for a leading health journal the authors – who include British cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, an outspoken critic of the food industry – accuse food and drink firms such as Coca-Cola of having wrongly emphasised how physical activity and sport can help prevent people becoming very overweight.
The truth, they say, is that while physical activity is useful in reducing the risk of developing heart disease, dementia and other conditions, it “does not promote weight loss”.
“In the past 30 years, as obesity has rocketed, there has been little change in physical activity levels in the western population. This places the blame for our expanding waistlines directly on the type and amount of calories consumed.”
The authors add: “Members of the public are drowned by an unhelpful message about maintaining a ‘healthy weight’ through calorie counting, and many still wrongly believe that obesity is entirely due to lack of exercise.”
That “false perception”, they claim in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, “is rooted in the food industry’s public relations machinery, which uses tactics chillingly similar to those of big tobacco … denial, doubt, confusing the public and even buying the loyalty of bent scientists, at the cost of millions of lives.”
Given the worsening scale of obesity “let us bust the myth of physical activity and obesity. You cannot outrun a bad diet”, say Malhotra and his co-authors.
They challenge conventional wisdom further by arguing that those who want to avoid excess weight gain should adopt a diet that is high in fat but low on both sugar and carbohydrates.
Athletes and others about to do exercise should ditch high-carbohydrate intake regimes and instead eat more fat, they say, because “fat, including ketone bodies, appears to be the ideal fuel for most exercise. It is abundant, does not need replacement or supplementation during exercise, and can fuel the forms of exercise in which most participate.”
In a broadside against food industry practices, they also urge celebrities to stop promoting sugary drinks, call on health clubs and gyms to stop selling them and denounce “manipulative marketing” for sabotaging government efforts to introduce taxes on those drinks and to ban the advertising of junk food.
But their comment piece was dismissed by the food industry and divided opinion among experts in diet, obesity and health.
Fat Thanks to Ketul P. for the tip!
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