FROM THE EDITOR
It’s fair to say that in the West we have an unhealthy relationship with fat. In the UK, before the pandemic, the NHS reported that 28 per cent of adults in England were classified as obese. Fourteen per cent of children aged four to five fall in the same bracket. And these figures look to be climbing.
The causes for this are complex and tangled. Your genetics, how much you earn and how little you sleep can all help a scientist predict how much you might weigh. Add to that cocktail the availability of food, as well as the way it’s marketed and sold to us, and it becomes clear that resisting the bad stuff takes a Herculean effort.
At the same time, fat is also demonised. Both traditional and social media seem to have a pathological obsession with chimeric body standards that change year after year. Meanwhile, health influencers, who know that those of us who are overweight want to change, bombard us with conflicting messages about our weight and our diets. Some will tell you that low-fat, lowcalorie (and low joy) meals are the only way to shed some pounds. Others suggest you eat mostly fat, while ditching the carbs. It can feel like a dizzying merry-go-round.
So, with all the mixed messaging and noise around the subject, we thought it was worth asking biologist Tom Ireland to be the voice of sanity and explore what fat actually does in the body. Over on p70 he explains the difference between good and bad fats, why we need fat and why a balanced diet with moderate exercise is the sensible way to keep your body happy.