Want to stay fit and healthy? Then ignore the PM’s bad advice because fat and salt aren’t our enemies

BORIS Johnson clearly hasn’t been in control of his weight for years. It took coronavirus to make him realise that those extra stones he’s been carrying are a marker for poor metabolic health, which predisposes you to all sorts of disease: heart, cancer, stroke, Type 2 diabetes; the list goes on.

So he’s waging a war on fat, quoting his government’s so-called nutrition experts: count calories, up your physical fitness, and avoid foods that are high in fat, sugar, and salt.

This advice is worse than useless. It got us into our current mess.

If I can summon up a scrap of compassion for Johnson, it’s this. Public health advice in this country has been so misguided for so long, it’s quite hard to take in just how counterproductive it is.

In the Anglophone world, from Auckland to Austin to Aberfeldy, nutritional guidelines have been wrong since the 1970s, and have barely changed in the five decades since, despite the fact they demonstrably don’t work.

They were concocted by committees of apparently august scientific experts, who either represented vested interests in the food industry or who went along like sheep with this bankrupt advice.

Now it’s just too embarrassing for them to admit that this hokum has actively contributed to the public’s ever-expanding waistline and ill-health.

Fortunately, an alternative nutrition establishment has emerged. It deals not in fuzzy epidemiological associations of the “a rasher of bacon makes you 50% more likely to die of cancer” sort, but in rigorous, randomised, controlled trials and intervention studies.

Doctors Zoe Harcombe, Aseem Malhotra and Malcolm Kendrick in the UK, Dr Garry Fettke and Belinda Fettke in Australia, Dr Tim Noakes in South Africa, Nina Teicholz in the US: their work is freely available online and well worth perusing, but here’s my executive summary.

Over 50% of the food we now consume in the UK is ultra-processed, that is, so transformed from its natural form that even the bulk ingredients are no longer recognisable, let alone the synthetic chemical additions: flavourings, colourings,