Spoon-Fed: Why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong

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Tannins and bitter tastes are another positive sign, in foods such as high quality coffee, green tea, extra virgin olive oil, dark chocolate and red wine But the greatest hope for better diets, he suggests, is in education – something not covered by the government’s new policy paper. “We need to be teaching our children about real and fake foods with the same zeal that we teach them how to walk, read and write.” If Spector is right, then knowing how to recognise real nourishing food when you see it is a far more useful life skill than mindlessly counting calories. Spector concludes with a galvanising call for governments around the world to think differently about food, to ditch the pointless calorie counting on menus in favour of policies that could actually make it easier for people to eat a healthy diet. The unanswered question is whether any UK government will ever be brave enough to enact the radical food policies that are needed, rather than simply slapping a calorie label on a menu and leaving consumers to their fate.

Neither GPs nor hospital doctors are obliged to keep up to date with any changes in diet or nutrition advice as part of their continuing education- not even diabetes doctorsMy main issue is with the tone of 'advocacy', and even the correct focus on the food companies, and their overreaching influence, can sometimes get in the way of the food science and nutritional essentials I suspect many will have been seeking. Vitamin supplements like Vitamin D and Omega 3 get treated like foods and not drugs even though they are proven not to work

Thirst is an extremely well-balanced and effective signaling system that we should listen to - no evidence to suggest forcing ourselves to drink more water is beneficial The risk with this is that our actual understanding of the research is limited. We don’t know enough of any of the studies he cites to understand the context for ourselves or to draw our own conclusions. Also, I don’t have the time to review all his studies either. We are in his hands and trust his honesty and his own understanding of the research. Displaying calories in menus at restaurants is pointless as studies have shown actual calorific content of a meal varies 200% from the number on the menu due to non-automated processes and portion sizeA 5 year follow-up study of 1600 women and their children found that small amounts of alcohol consumed occasionally (as opposed to regularly) during pregnancy probably isn’t harmful. If you’re sensible, the odd sip of wine or beer here and there isn’t likely to do your baby any harm Spector, a professor of genetics at King’s College London and author of The Diet Myth, says: “I have been astonished to discover how much of what we are told about food is at best misleading and at worst, downright wrong and dangerous to our health.”