Phew! It’s NOT true that
Like many during lockdown, idrees Mughal spent far too long scrolling through social media to pass the time — and ended up infuriated at what he saw.
The difference was that he used his training as an NHS doctor to do something about it, by calling out outrageous claims made by irresponsible wellness influencers and quacks.
‘Dr idz’, as he became known, took to social media sites to debunk such bizarre assertions that potato juice can cure sore throats, that menopause is due to eating foods that cause mucus in the fallopian tubes and (perhaps my favourite) that spinach destroys your knees — as well as the more conventional but equally fantastical ‘this diet can make you drop 10 lb in two weeks’ claims. He gained a huge following by Dr Idz (Penguin Life £16.99, 272pp)
GLENDA COOPER
when he started ‘ schooling’ those people peddling theories in the pandemic.
As a result, 1.8 million now follow him on TikTok and 296,000 on instagram. His humorous and blunt videos, with his end catchphrase ‘ Class dismissed’, don’t pull any punches when attacking the cranks, and always refer back to peer-reviewed papers to explain the science.
Now, Dr idz is expanding his reach — he has an online subscription platform and this new book to support his burgeoning career. Saturated Facts is a weighty book (no pun intended), divided into three sections.
The first debunks common diet myths; the second looks in detail at the issues of inflammation and sustainable weight loss. Meanwhile, the third examines new scientific thought in areas such as the gut microbiome, sleep and nutrition, and the link between what we eat and our mental health.
A useful checklist at the end of each section gives you the key points (for those used to his social media posts, the writing is often quite dense in the chapters, and there’s a substantial 50 pages of notes at the end detailing the scientific papers cited).
For those hoping for some magic bullet, forget it. Dr idz tells it straight, however unfashionable it may be: no diet will work unless you adhere to it, and you only lose weight if you eat fewer calories than you burn.
He is scathing about some diets — in particular the blood type one, which claims that different blood types have different optimal foods, and the alkaline diet, which argues that what you eat changes the pH of your
body and that acidic foods cause you harm. He also warns that vegan diets are not necessarily healthier.
In the second section he takes on some of the wellness influencers’ most beloved myths around inflammation and sustainable weight loss, but also offers hope for those feeling defeated by their failure to reach their goal weight.
That oft-quoted statistic that 95 per cent of diets fail?
Well, first, it’s from a very old study done in 1959, in which 100 people were given a random diet to follow and there was no ongoing support or guidance.
But Dr Idz also says we need to redefine what we mean by ‘success’ in dieting: if you’re 40 with caring responsibilities you are not going to achieve what you could at the age of 23 when you had nothing to do but go to the gym.
But even small amounts of weight loss — 5 to 10 per cent — can see a meaningful improvement in your health. The third section on the science around sleep, the gut and mental health is perhaps the most intriguing — although a lot of it is common sense (don’t eat late at night in order to digest well, and steer clear of pre-packaged food to keep your gut healthy and avoid dementia).
This book is certainly useful to wave in the face of any gullible friends or relatives who are about to waste money again on the latest fad diet. Not that Dr Idz judges those who fall for that — his ire is more directed at those who make money preying on people’s insecurities.
Instead, he says, give yourself a break and promote your health in very simple ways: eat a Mediterranean diet, stay away from heavily processed food — and don’t trust what you see on social media (except for him).