DIPPING MY TOE INTO A WAR OVER LOW CARB

TWITTER is the only form of social media I use on a regular basis, answering questions, often about weight loss, and writing the odd tweet.

And while I don’t take part in them, I do enjoy following intense and sometimes fractious arguments between well-informed enthusiasts.

Some of the most ferocious are about carbs. On the one side, there are the committed low-carbers, convinced that their approach is the answer to tackling obesity and type 2 diabetes.

On the other side are those who think that by removing carbs, you’re cutting out an important part of our diet.

A recent study, published in the British Medical Journal, gave the low-carbers something to crow about.

Based on the diets of 137,130 people in 21 countries, researchers from a wide range of academic centres around the world found that consuming lots of refined grains, mainly in the form of white bread, pasta, noodles and breakfast cereals, was associated with a higher risk of heart disease, stroke and early death.

To be precise, they showed that eating more than seven servings of refined grains a day (which is a lot) was linked to a 47 per cent increased risk of stroke, a 33 per cent greater risk of heart disease and a 27 per cent greater risk of premature death.

Critics, however, soon pointed out that a diet so high in refined carbs is almost certainly a ‘poverty diet’, eaten by the poorest people in the community, so that all this study is measuring is the impact of poverty on health.

It’s an argument that will run and run.