The UK is the most overweight nation in Western Europe with levels of obesity growing faster than in the US.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says Britain is the sixth-worst country in its 35 member states, coming behind Mexico, the USA, New Zealand, Finland and Australia.
Around 27 per cent of the population is now clinically obese and another 36 per cent is overweight, making the combined figure among the highest in the world.
Worldwide, the incidence of obesity has tripled since the late 1970/early 1980s, which is when the dietary recommendations to reduce fat and increase carbohydrates were first introduced.
As explained below, there is now convincing evidence that this has been caused by the consumption of diets that have a high content of sugar and carbohydrates. This in turn stimulates the pancreas to produce large quantities of insulin.
Insulin has many different functions but one of the most important is to control the level of glucose in the blood, most of which is derived from the sugar and starch present in the diet.
Essentially, it does this by pushing the glucose to the liver where it is converted into fat, which is then moved into the body cells for storage.
If there is excessive glucose, then there will be loads of fat all over the body.
Hence there will be fatty liver disease and high content of fat in the blood. This means that when a blood sample is tested for triglycerides (TG) (fat), a relatively high value will be reported.
It is therefore no great surprise that the storage of fat is why a person becomes overweight/obese.
All of these are basic facts that are widely accepted and are found in standard text books.
It follows that if this sequence of events is to be avoided then the obvious solution is to reduce the amount of sugar and carbs in the diet.
Replacing the sugar/carbs with healthy fats has the great advantage that these are broken down to ketones not glucose. The ketones do not cause insulin to be produced and are available to supply the body with the energy it needs.
So if you wish to lose weight or avoid putting it on, then make changes to the diet by increasing the healthy fats and consuming much less sugar/carbs. Type 2 diabetics also lose weight by adopting this diet even though it is not their primary objective.
Confirmation of these concepts is shown by the work of Dr David Unwin who has found that a diet low in sugar/carbs and high in healthy fats was extremely effective in reversing T2D and therefore substantially reduced the requirement for drugs.
In addition, most of his patients lost weight and in one case study, a woman completely eliminated fatty liver disease.
The hard reality is that with the focus on calories, successful weight loss can only be achieved by starvation. So, it is no surprise that at the end of the dietary regime, the excess weight is put on again.
The whole calorie story flies in the face of our scientific knowledge because it completely ignores the basic facts that fats, carbs and proteins are used in very different ways in the body.
The body does not act in the same way as the bomb calorimeter many of used in our physics classes at school. The body is much more sophisticated than that.
Once that is recognised it is immediately obvious that as the research on T2D has shown, excessive consumption of sugar/carbs is detrimental to health.
On the other hand, the body needs plenty of healthy fats to function properly. Hence the diet that successfully treats T2D is also the most effective way of achieving permanent weight loss.
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