Low-fat diets and exercise will not help the obese to lose weight – only eating less will, a leading expert has claimed. Lord Ian McColl of Dulwich warned ministers it was ‘misleading’ people by suggesting obesity could be tackled through exercise and calorie counting.
Lord McColl, emeritus professor of surgery at Guys Hospital in London, said the only effective way for people to lose weight would be to cut the amount of calories from carbohydrates and sugars they consume.
It comes as the Government today published its long-awaited Childhood Obesity Strategy.
Critics accused politicians of caving in to the junk food lobby after they abandoned plans to force companies to reduce sugar in children’s food.
But the Government insists its actions will slash the number of children and teenagers who are overweight within a decade.
Speaking at a House of Lords debate in June, Lord McColl said politicians refused to admit the cause of obesity was over-eating.
The former shadow health secretary said recommending exercise would do little to curb the obesity epidemic, which he likened to being as bad for public health as the 1919 flu epidemic.
He said the focus of the Department of Health and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence on obesity being caused by a lack of exercise was wrong.
Lord McColl said encouraging people to exercise was ineffective because it was so difficult to burn off calories.
‘One can pedal away on one of those machines for half an hour and only two or three hundred calories are burned up. One has to run miles to take a pound of fat off,’ he said.
‘The whole subject has been bedevilled by all sorts of theories about the course of the obesity; genetics, epigenetic, psychological disturbances. None of them is the cause of the obesity epidemic.
‘One fact remains. It is impossible to be obese unless one is eating too many calories.’
Lord McColl’s comments came the month after the National Obesity Forum and the Public Health Collaboration called for a major overhaul of dietary guidelines, stating urging people to adopt low-fat diets was having ‘disastrous health consequences.’
In May, the report’s authors said the epidemic’s roots lie in the modern-day obsession with low-fat diets, while snacking between meals is making people fat.
‘Eating a diet rich in full-fat dairy – such as cheese, milk and yoghurt – can actually lower the chance of obesity,’ it said.
Lord McColl said eating fat was important because it kept people feeling fuller for longer.
He said fat enters the small intestine and slows the emptying of the stomach, helping people to feel full and stopping people from eating too much.
Earlier this year, a landmark report in The Lancet revealed more than one in ten men and one in seven women around the globe are now obese.
And the situation is only set to get worse, with experts predicting almost a fifth of us will fall into this category within a decade.
The alarming statistics were part of the world’s biggest obesity study, which measured the height and weight of nearly 20 million adults.
It revealed there are currently 640 million obese people around the globe, comprising 266 million men and 375 million women.
Overall, the fattest men and women now live in China and the USA.
However the USA still has the highest number of severely obese men and women in the world.
In Britain, obesity rates are 28.4 per cent for women – the second highest in Europe behind only Malta – and 26.2 per cent for men, the worst in the continent.
And in a decade, it will be the fattest nation in Europe, with almost 40 per cent of adults obese.
Earlier this week, chief executive of the NHS Sir Simon Stevens said the obesity crisis costs the UK more than police and fire services combined.
Type 2 diabetes rates are soaring, fuelled by obesity, and the condition uses up a tenth of the NHS’s budget.
Baroness Jenkin, who called the debate in the Lords, said the current situation was not sustainable for the NHS.
‘If we don’t wake up to the extent of this crisis the NHS could end up bankrupt, ‘ she said.
‘Already enormous amounts of money are spent on disease which are entirely preventable.’
The Childhood Obesity Strategy, published after a year of delays, has disappointed some health campaigners after it abandoned plans to force companies to reduce sugar in children’s food.
It will instead ‘challenge’ the food industry to cut sugar levels by 20 per cent before 2020.
But one campaign group described it as a ‘shocking abdication’ of the Government’s duties.
