Trust Your Gut When It Comes To Weight Loss

Rethinking our approach to food is the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to being a healthy weight, discovers Louise Pyne.

- Louise Pyne

‘Obesity has been shown to be an infectious disease – transplanted microbes from a fat mouse can make a normal mouse obese’

Something very strange is going on in the world of dieting. As a nation, we’re more obsessed than ever with our weight and exercise, yet obesity rates have tripled in the last 30 years. Now, two in three Brits are overweight and one in five children are clinically obese.

But the weight loss industry is booming. How could that be? We’re constantly being fed conflicting messages: should we give up gluten, or meat, or dairy, or sugar? What vitamins should we be taking? Is juicing or fasting the best way to go? ‘Amid the confusion, we are living longer but are conversely becoming less healthy,’ believes Tim Spector, British scientist specialising in genetic epidemiology and author of The Diet Myth.

In his new book, Tim seeks to unravel the real science behind what we eat, and he believes the key to wellness lies in what some scientists call the ‘forgotten organ’ of our bodies our microbiome. An area within our lower gut, the microbiome weighs 4lb and houses 100 trillion microbes. ‘We all possess a unique set of these microbes, which vastly outnumber our cells and genes, and their function is to digest our food and keep us alive and healthy. Now cutting-edge research and technology is allowing scientists to discover how by changing our diets we can encourage microbes to keep us slim. It’s time to embrace what science is telling us in order to achieve optimum wellness.

The calorie myth