The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like

The Series:
The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!

Whenever I hear about some new drug or technique to tackle obesity or protect us from diet-related disease I always think of the professor from Futurama. For non-Futurama fans: the professor typically begins “Good news everybody!” before announcing some incredibly sophisticated, yet crazily inappropriate invention which has either fundamentally missed some basic point or is ludicrously over-engineered.

In a recent post, You’re on that Funny Diet, Right?, I mentioned society’s apparent belief that we are entitled to derive pleasure from everything we do and how because of this, many people don’t get the idea of permanently giving up foods they like.

Meanwhile, scientists work hard to find professor-like solutions to what they see as the problem. “Good news everybody! Using my digesta-block-a-tron I can stop fat from being metabolised. I just install this dial in your chest and you can choose how much fat from a meal gets digested!”

The basic point apparently being missed – the elephant in the room, if you like – is that if we all stopped eating junk, we would start enjoying the basic food we currently think we are not able to enjoy and the medical problems we are spending billions trying to resolve would begin to diminish in the population.Don’t get me wrong, I accept the near-impossibility of this - I still daydream about cakes thanks to my latent sugar addiction. We have been led by the nose into a mire of confused cravings and unclear directives from organisations with misguided and dubious agendas.

Yet it's by no means clear the scientists' intentions are quite so innocent. A cynic would say that their ‘solutions’ are not driven by the desire to uphold our right to enjoy our food, but by the desire for money - for them, their employers, or both. A cynic would say they are not missing the point at all – they simply don’t care.

The rest of us are missing the point precisely because of the scientists and what they tell us:

Well hey, the scientists have found the problem - we just to turn off those genes! (The obesity gene) ...or maybe we all just need to take some drugs to prevent us getting heart disease! (Statins for kids!) ...and it's not that we shouldn't eat so much sweet food - we were just sweetening it the wrong way! (except that oops, this may not work after all: Artificial sweeteners and obesity) ...and it's not that we should eat less starchy food - we just have to remember to block its digestion! (Blocking starch digestion)

The list is potentially long, so I will stop here. Feel free to add your own.

As the diagram shows, this is a vicious cycle. How to we get out of it? This is a question for a future post.

The Series:
The Professor Diet - Eat as much Junk as you like
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
The Professor Diet Part Three: No Shortcuts any Time Soon!