Why (Nearly) Everything You've Been Told About Your Diet Is Wrong

We all know that fat is bad for you and veganism is super-healthy, right? Not necessarily. Read on as we bust some of the biggest, most-enduring food myths…

- Prof Tim Spector

Global rates of obesity and related disease have increased in the 21st Century to epidemic proportions, despite the efforts of the health services, doctors and nutritionists. We are told that good health is about eating less and exercising more, but is it that simple? Science shows that we all have different metabolic responses to the same foods, so any guidelines will not work for all of us. Many diet recommendations are often based on poor, outdated or biased science.

We are all influenced by deeply ingrained or inherited myths about food (breakfast is the most important meal of the day, fat is bad, fish is good, and so on), and these can be hard to shake. In addition, the global food industry throws billions of dollars every year into manufacturing and marketing processed foods that some believe are designed to leave us wanting more.

There are many reasons for our deep misunderstanding about the science of food, not least that nutrition is an incredibly complex and relatively new science. It only became a serious area of research in most countries in the 1970s, and it has long been sidelined in medicine. When I trained as a doctor, 40 years ago, nutrition was just an afterthought, and we learnt more about scurvy than diet and obesity. Sadly, this is still true today in medical schools. Good nutritional research is difficult and expensive to carry out, and it’s not easy to secure funding for the large, long-term studies needed for reliable results.