Why Calories Don't Count: How We Got the Science of Weight Loss Wrong by Giles Yeo

Author:Giles Yeo [Yeo, Giles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health & Fitness, General, Diet & Nutrition, Diets, Medical
ISBN: 9781409199731
Google: 8hHoDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2021-06-17T23:58:41.076234+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The wonder of fibre

‘My internet connection and my diet are missing one thing in common . . . Fibre’

Dad joke on the internet

I am, and always have been, an honest-to-god ‘meatatarian’. I eat all manner of vertebrate species, roasted, BBQ’d, burgered, cured, tartared . . . you name it, I love it. So when the producers of the BBC’s Trust Me, I’m A Doctor, on which I am one of the presenters, asked me to go on a vegan diet for a month, it gave me pause for thought. Actually, in truth, just the thought of it terrified me! But glancing down at my mid-forties and slightly wobbly belly, and knowing that my cholesterol levels were a tad high, I recognised an opportunity to be grasped, and grasped it.

Veganism as a diet is easy enough to understand. You just have to avoid consuming anything animal based, including dairy and eggs. In contrast, the reasons motivating people to become vegan are complex. To some, it is a philosophy deeply rooted in ethics, while others are driven by the environmental impact of the meat industry. Many, however, choose a vegan diet to become healthier, which was the angle the producers tasked me with investigating.

Whatever the reasons people choose to become vegan, it is undoubtedly one of the (if not the) fastest-growing food trends. At the beginning of 2019, Beyoncé and JAY-Z, the American power couple of R&B and hip-hop, even offered the chance for fans to win lifetime (!!) tickets to their shows, as long as they were incorporating plant-based foods (more on this later) into their diets! If I needed any added motivation to give this a good old-fashioned go, then this was it!

Before leaping in with both feet, I spent quite a bit of time researching and planning (with military precision) how exactly I was going to implement a vegan diet. First of all, I went through all of the food in my kitchen to identify the items that were clearly meat- or dairy-based, which was, for the most part, a straightforward task. Closer reading of the back of packaging, however, revealed quite a few surprises. While most dried pasta is vegan, some has egg in it; there are powdered soup-bases for some instant ramen noodles which, while suitable for vegetarians, actually contain milk protein; and who knew oyster sauce actually had bits of oyster in it? OK, maybe I should have known about the oyster sauce.

Now with my eyes zeroed in on the minute levels of pesky non-vegan ingredients in foods that were otherwise entirely vegan, I began to loiter around supermarket aisles to try and find out just how ‘healthy’ vegan food actually was. Clearly it would not be controversial to consider whole fruits and vegetables as healthy. The issue becomes mired in complexity when foods are ‘processed’, a loaded term if there ever was one. The word ‘processed’ encompasses a broad church; curing, drying and pickling are processes, so is the simple act of applying heat

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