This is the claim made by television chef Heston Blumenthal is an article for The Daily Telegraph newspaper. Here Blumenthal writes:
“Altering our relationship with food requires us to re-engineer our most fundamental behavior patterns. It’s possible, but not easy and it’s why so many dietary resolutions made tomorrow are destined to fail by February.”
Is there a scientific basis to this? There appears to be something. In September 2015, at the annual meeting of The Physiological Society, it was reported that the offspring of rats fed a diet rich in animal fats developed more internal fat than the offspring of rats fed the normal diet.
Furthermore, what the mother eats while pregnant also appears to be an influencing factor. The same researchers showed where the mother rat consumes a fat-rich diet during pregnancy she is more likely to produce offspring with larger fat stores, which is due to the pups having enlarged fat cells. Data on rats may give an indication of a similar physiological response in humans.
Moreover, according to research from the University of Exeter (U.K.), people are biologically programmed to overeat during the winter. This relates back to a time when food was scarce and people needed to build up fat to survive the winter.
The research also shows that when eating “natural food,” the body is better equipped for sending a signal that sufficient food has been eaten. However, when processed food is eaten, this signal becomes jammed and there is a tendency to overeat.
The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The paper is titled “Fatness and fitness: exposing the logic of evolutionary explanations for obesity.”
In related news, Public Health England has launched a ‘sugar app’, designed for mobile devices to enable consumers to check the sugar content of food in supermarkets. The app has been developed to contain information on 75,000 products. The aim is to raise awareness of how much sugar is contained in everyday food and drink.
