Weight loss

According to a study published by the Society for Endocrinology a deficiency of vitamin B12 is linked to obesity during pregnancy. Vitamin B12 is only found in animal-sourced foods and is not present in an entirely plant-based diet. These are the conclusions of the study:

“Low levels of vitamin B12 impair fat metabolism, which could increase the risk of obesity during pregnancy. Pregnant women with low levels of vitamin B12 had metabolic markers indicative of increased fat production and reduced breakdown, which suggests that low vitamin B12 levels could predispose pregnant women to obesity.

Vitamin B12 is a micronutrient found in seafood, meat, and dairy products that is essential for many metabolic reactions that keep our bodies functioning normally. Diets high in carbohydrates and highly processed foods provide poor nutrition and can lead to vitamin B12 deficiency. Approximately 25% of pregnant women worldwide are vitamin B12 deficient, as an even higher intake is needed for the growth and development of the baby. Previous studies suggest B12 deficiency increases the risk for metabolic complications such as obesity or diabetes, but the underlying mechanisms affecting fat metabolism remain poorly understood.

In this study, Jinous Samavat from the University of Warwick Medical School investigated how low vitamin B12 levels affect fat cell function in cultured cell samples and in samples taken from pregnant women. Markers of fat metabolism in both lab-grown fat cells, low in vitamin B12, and in samples from vitamin B12 deficient pregnant women, indicated increased fat production and reduced ability to breakdown fat for energy. There was also increased inflammation, which causes further damage.

Jinous Samavat comments, “Taken together, our data indicate that low B12 levels can impair fat cell metabolism, which may lead to increased fat accumulation, impaired fat metabolism, and inflammatory damage, all of which predispose to weight gain.” Although these findings suggest how fat metabolism may be impaired in vitamin B12 deficiency, particularly in pregnant women, larger studies are needed to confirm this and further explore the underlying mechanisms, to identify intervention strategies and help prevent obesity.

Samavat says, “Our findings reinforce the need for vitamin B12 supplementation during pregnancy and make a strong case for funding further studies and introducing public health policies to help tackle obesity.”

It is interesting that vitamin B12 has a role in fat metabolism as well as all of its other functions. It is also interesting that University academics nearly always end their studies with the suggestion they need to do more research, which they hope will bring more funding to their organisation. It is also curious that they recommend “vitamin B12 supplementation during pregnancy” instead of a vitamin B12 rich diet, which would necessarily include the consumption of plentiful meat and seafood.

The dietary guidelines, which the NHS want us all to follow, advise a high percentage of carbohydrate and a reduction in animal sourced fats. These excerpts, below, are taken directly from the NHS website.

We need to remember that all carbohydrates are broken down by digestion into sugar molecules, usually glucose. So the NHS recommends that over a third of your intake should consist of foods that your body regards as sugar. They also recommend that the natural animal fats which our ancestors have eaten for millennia should be replaced with vegetable oils.

Many decades ago a lot of people were thin and some were very thin. A product was developed and heavily advertised to help those people gain weight. Appropriately, it was called Wate-On. The adverts typically suggested to women that they would be more attractive to men if they gained some ‘female curves’ by adding a little subcutaneous fat.

The manufacturers were so confident that their product worked they offered a money back guarantee if you failed to gain weight after taking it.

What ingredients did Wate-On contain to ensure people taking it would increase their weight. There were some added vitamins to give the product a ‘healthy’ profile but the two main ingredients were sugar and maize oil. Maize oil is the same thing as Corn oil.

Putting more weight on is very rarely an objective for people nowadays because 65% of the UK population are overweight and more than 25% are obese. How did we become so heavy? We became so heavy because we have been following the NHS advice to consume the ingredients of Wate-On, sugar and corn oil.

Everybody in the UK loves the NHS. We have just given up a year of our freedoms to ‘save it’. Parts of the NHS do a wonderful job but their official dietary advice is a national scandal of out-dated misinformation. What they call the Eatwell Guide is nothing of the sort. It is the reason we have an obesity crisis and surging levels of type 2 diabetes. We would all be so much better off if we ignored what they say about food and ate the diet our ancestors ate.

If we need to lose weight, we are told to ‘Eat less and move more’. Both of these ideas come form the mistaken belief that our weight is controlled by calories in minus – calories out. We do not have a calorie counting gland in our stomachs. However, we do have hormones and their response always differs to protein, fat or carbohydrate. It is the type of food we eat that makes us gain weight, and damages our metabolic health. These pictures do not demonstrate a long-term strategy for weight loss and health.

The obesity epidemic, which afflicts so many people, has been caused by our hormonal response to the high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet enshrined in the National Dietary Guidelines. The ‘experts’ tell us to avoid fat because there are more calories in a gram of fat than a gram of carbohydrate, but calories do not control our weight. The hormone Insulin controls our weight and carbohydrates cause a surge in insulin. Dietary fats have no meaningful effects on insulin levels.

The National Dietary Guidelines tell us to base our meals on carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes, pasta and rice. All of these foods contain carbohydrate in the form of starch, which is a long chain of glucose molecules joined together. Our digestive enzymes easily slice these glucose molecules off the chain and absorb glucose into the blood stream. This makes the blood sugar level shoot up, which in turn triggers the release of insulin to bring it back to normal. If the cells don’t need any more energy and the glycogen store is full, insulin gets the liver to convert the glucose into fat. The blood sugar level now comes down but, if it has spiked high, the pancreas has to produce a lot of insulin and a lot of insulin makes the sugar level fall too low, which triggers a feeling of hunger. You only ate a couple of hours ago but now you feel hungry again. You eat some more carbohydrate and the process repeats itself.

This is known as the blood sugar roller-coaster: blood glucose spikes up; insulin stores the energy as fat; blood sugar comes down too far and you feel hungry. You eat more carbohydrate and blood sugar spikes up again and insulin stores it as fat. This is the reason obese people always keep eating. It is not because they are greedy: it is because they are hungry. They are stuck on an extreme version of the sugar and insulin roller-coaster. The only way to get off is to stop eating food that raises blood sugar. Carbohydrate raises blood sugar and insulin levels further and faster than anything else. Protein raises insulin a little bit but fat hardly moves it all.

How can we change our food intake to lose weight and improve health? Click here.

The following is a small excerpt from Stop Feeding Us Lies

The calorie counting myth

Is it possible to lose weight and keep it off without willpower, hunger and lethargy? Yes it is, but before we get to that we need some basic information. We are always told to count the calories in our food and that weight loss comes from consuming fewer calories than we use. This is referred to as the ‘Calories in – Calories out’ method of weight loss, or the CICO diet. In early 2018 the Government-backed organisation, Public Health England (PHE), issued guidance on what we should eat, in its attempts to reverse the obesity epidemic. They proclaimed that all adults should eat 400 calories for breakfast, 600 calories for lunch and 600 calories for dinner, with 100 to 200 calories in snacks twice a day.

            In my opinion, the nutrition department of Public Health England is one of the most misguided organisations that ever wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers money. I have an image in my mind of couples up and down the country, where one asks the other, “What should we have for dinner tonight?” and the partner replies, “I think I fancy 600 calories”. Public Health England did not specify any particular types of food in their advice; they just want us to consume 600 calories. Eating a delicious meal, with our loved ones, is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Public Health England wants to suck all the joy out of it and reduce it to a type of energy accountancy, tinged with guilt.  How on earth is anyone supposed to cook and serve a meal of precisely 600 calories per person? Will 600 calories of salmon and broccoli have the same effect on your weight and health as 600 calories of sugar-coated doughnuts? The answer is no and I will soon explain why, but first we need to know what a calorie is. We can’t keep talking about calories without knowing what they are.

            A calorie is a unit of heat energy. It is defined as ‘the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree centigrade at normal atmospheric pressure’. Carbohydrates and proteins contain 4 calories per gram and fats contain 9 calories per gram. How do we know this? The experiments to determine these values involved placing a gram of each macronutrient into a special container surrounded by water. A stream of oxygen was directed over each sample so it would burn when it was set on fire. When the food samples had burnt out, the heat created had caused a rise in water temperature, which was used to calculate the calorie content of each food type. The calories we see listed on packets of food, and referred to by Public Health England, are kilocalories (Kcal) and one of those is the energy required to raise the temperature of a litre of water by one degree. So, if we manage to calculate and serve 600 calories of food on to our plate, as Public Health England want us to do, will we know how much weight we are going to lose? No, we will not. However, what we will know about our meal is how much it could raise the temperature of a litre of water if we set fire to it.           

Public Health England’s preoccupation with counting calories is misguided. It implies that the most important thing about our food is how much energy it contains. Instead, we should be thinking about how much nutrition it contains.