Weight Loss Theories Abound

And yet, truth be known, weight loss, and health, can only come about when you eat real food.

Getting to the truth of what constitutes real food, is not easy, because food manufacturers don’t want us to know. They exist to make money for themselves and their shareholders, and they will use every bit of cunning to do so.

Stories about how to lose weight abound, as do weight loss industries nutrient-deplete offerings that allegedly ensure weight-loss success, or weight-loss pills, shakes, you name it, you can have them all. Most add the caveat that you may, or may not lose weight depending…

In some quarters we’re told that to lose weight we should count our calorie intake, maybe starve ourselves, or we can move more, or eat less, or only do this, or that, but at the end of the day, though they may help, they are little more than transitory attempts to solve problems.

For as long as people suffered weight gain, there was widespread talk of calories in, and calories out. You only have to think of that for a small amount of time, to realize that if this is the case, whoever created us, humans, was grossly unfair about making things super-easy for some, the skinny, while archly short-changing others.

I taught a girl once who was reed-thin, and if ever the subject of health cropped us she would say things like well look at me. I’m skinny, I always eat junk food and I stay healthy, to which I’d respond: but you’re young. When you get to my age it may be a different story.

She’d laugh, shrug her shoulders, with ne’er a thought to the notion that one day she could be fighting for her life.

And fight she did!

A few years ago, as a teenager, she went into hospital for minor, overnight surgery, BUT it was some four weeks later she went home, still a very sick young woman!

She had suffered a severe case of sepsis, something I had only learned about when another friend’s daughter-in-law had died of just the same disease, a few years previously. Had she survived, she would have been minus all limbs! As a lawyer with two children, that would have been an abhorrent way to live.

Sometimes there are worse things than dying!

‘In 1878, Louis Pasteur conducted a famous experiment on the virulence of anthrax bacilli. In so doing, he provided a sound experimental basis for the current day concept of how the environment of humans and animals can contribute to the development of infectious disease.’

Essentially he had come to the understanding that it’s not germs per se, that we have to worry about so much, but our body’s terrain. If we are healthy, truly healthy, our body will rise to our defence and fight the infection.

Obesity, a true sign that all is not well, has only knocked on our door since the food industry reared its ugly head, and, through clever marketing and intention on profit, we embraced their narrative, and lost track of eating real food.

Some years ago, one of Scotland’s finest (and most feared), food journalists, Joanna Blythman, managed, using a fake ID, to get into, ‘the dark, eerie, indoor expanses of Frankfurt’s Blade Runner-like Festhalle Messe. I was there undercover, to attend an annual trade show called Food Ingredients. This three-day exhibition hosts the world’s most important gathering of ingredients suppliers, distributors and buyers. In 2011, when it was held in Paris, more than 23,000 visitors attended from 154 countries, collectively representing a buying power of €4bn (£2.97bn). Think of it as the food manufacturers’ equivalent of an arms fair. It is not open to the public. Anyone who tries to register has to show that they work in food manufacturing; I used a fake ID.

‘While exhibitors at most food exhibitions are often keen for you to taste their products, few standholders here had anything instantly edible to offer. Those that did weren’t all that they seemed. Canapé-style cubes of white cheese dusted with herbs and spices sat under a bistro-style blackboard that nonchalantly read “Feta, with Glucono-Delta-Lactone” (a “cyclic ester of gluconic acid” that prolongs shelf life).

‘A pastry chef in gleaming whites rounded off his live demonstration by offering sample petits fours to the buyers who had gathered. His dainty heart- and diamond-shaped cakes were dead ringers for those neat layers of sponge, glossy fruit jelly, cream and chocolate you see in the windows of upmarket patisseries, but were made entirely without eggs, butter or cream, thanks to the substitution of potato protein isolate. This revolutionary ingredient provides the “volume, texture, stability and mouthfeel” we look for in cakes baked with traditional ingredients — and it just happens to be cheaper.’

Joanna goes on to explain that she felt she was at an art exhibition, as opposed to a food fair!

And until that day, she explains, she had never knowingly eaten food with ingredients she couldn’t easily understand, but after the exhibition, she realized, the reality might be otherwise.

It’s not that hard to think of ways in which food we readily buy, for convenience, has been added to in ways we might never think about.

Have you, for instance, ever bought rich-red tomato sauce that just glides from the bottle? That’s the advantage of, ‘Microlys®, a “cost-effective” speciality starch that gives “shiny, smooth surface and high viscosity”, or Pulpiz™, Tate & Lyle’s tomato “pulp extender”. Based on modified starch, it gives the same pulpy visual appeal as an all-tomato sauce, while using 25% less tomato paste.’

We have reached the stage where food companies could better pass for biochemical businesses. How could we ever have seen fit to confuse the two?

Joanna reached the conclusion that ‘the conference was the domain of people whose natural environment is the laboratory and the factory, not the kitchen, the farm or the field; people who share the assumption that everything nature can do, man can do so much better, and more profitably.’

But all was not lost. Though she had eaten none of the displayed products, she came across a stall serving up a fruit salad, you know the plastic bowls of ready-to-eat, cut-up fruit that we have all bought at some time or other.

But one thing intrigued her. All of them were out of date. The stallholder explained his secret.

‘A salesman for Agricoat told me that they had been dipped in one of its solutions, NatureSeal, which, because it contains citric acid along with other unnamed ingredients, adds 21 days to their shelf life. Treated in this way, carrots don’t develop that telltale white that makes them look old, cut apples don’t turn brown, pears don’t become translucent, melons don’t ooze and kiwis don’t collapse into a jellied mush; a dip in NatureSeal leaves salads “appearing fresh and natural”.

‘For the salesman, this preparation was a technical triumph, a boon to caterers who would otherwise waste unsold food. There was a further benefit: NatureSeal is classed as a processing aid, not an ingredient, so there’s no need to declare it on the label, no obligation to tell consumers that their “fresh” fruit salad is weeks old.’

How far all of this has spread into large industries, or indeed into small-time eateries, would be very difficult to speculate on, but one thing is certain. Every business is profit-driven. It’s the only way they can compete.

What the real selling point about using NatureSeal, is because it is not classified as an ingredient (read ‘processing aid’) it doesn’t have to be declared! Puts a whole new stamp on FRESH, doesn’t it!

Some years ago, I bought a very expensive speciality cheese. The Descriptors made it sound totally irresistible! One tiny piece of it and both my husband and I spat it out. No cheese ever tasted like that in our past.

‘Food engineers can now create a “natural” mature cheese flavouring by blending young, immature cheese with enzymes (lipases or proteases) that intensify the cheese flavour until it reaches “maturity” — within 24 to 72 hours. This mature cheese flavouring is then heat-treated to halt enzymatic activity. Hey, presto: mature-tasting cheese in days rather than months. (Traditional cheddar is not considered truly mature until it has spent between nine and 24 months in the maturing room.)’

Did I take the cheese back? Did I complain? The answer is no, on both counts, yet in writing about this, I have hopes that some of you will have had similar experiences, and that our complaints will take the shape of never buying the product again.

We’re not just talking about one product here. Given the pervasiveness of this chemical invasion on the foods we buy, and if we are intent on regaining our health, we should be:

1. Eating whole foods.
2. Selecting foods from reliable origins.
3. Working towards regaining health.
4. Giving processed food the widest berth possible.

I have written much about food, and standards, and having confidence in their makeup.

I haven’t written for myself, or my family. They already know.

I write because I care about you, and your health.

I write because the future for your children, and mine, is bleak if we can’t turn things around.

I write because I want to inspire you to stand up to global giants who care not for you, or me.

I write because I really want, with your help, to stand up to the deception that the food industry is. It’s a fight that has its origins in simply avoiding factory food. If you, and I, and a few more, continue to react negatively to these agencies, the spark will go out of their industries.

I write because I want the spark to be in your kitchen instead. If I can do it, so too can you.

Think about this. If called to turn your health around, what would your pantry look like?

There is no doubt that technology has been wonderful in so many ways, but the technology to enhance the flavor of butter, for instance, or to preserve things indefinitely, has no place in our diets.

Convenience is easy to accept because it’s CONVENIENT, but at the end of the day, we have no idea about what it’s doing to our health.

So back to my initial reflections on weight loss and the success, or otherwise, of the different ways to go about it, the fact is this. Returning to an all-natural diet, getting switched on to cooking will benefit more than just weight loss.

‘It’s time to return back to the way we used to eat, before the food industry ruined it.’