Summer reads: Body of evidence – the best diet tips, from managing sugar to tackling middle-age spread

This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The
New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.

We also tackled our literacy crisis in our Reading Block series, while dogged investigative reporting by Kate McNamara resulted in an investigation into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.

This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2022. Today we take a look at some of the best diet and nutrition advice of the year.

How to reset your midlife metabolism and lose weight

How can you ditch those extra midlife pounds? Photo / Towfiqu Barbhuiya, Unsplash

There is a new buzz-phrase being touted as the way to ditch the midlife extra pounds, as well as prevent chronic disease like Type 2 diabetes, without the need for a depressing diet regime.

Forget soups, shakes and a life of no carbs – instead, experts say, we need to retrain our bodies to return to a more natural metabolic flexible state.

“Metabolic flexibility is how well your body can switch between using carbohydrates and fats for energy,” explains registered nutritionist Rhian Stephenson.

The body naturally burns carbohydrates first because they are easier to convert to energy – but if we can retrain the body to burn both more readily, it boosts the ability to lose weight.

But our modern diet and lifestyle can often impair this essential process, which can lead to metabolic imbalance and disease.

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Read the full story here.

How I lost 6kg in a month

It’s not too late to get into better shape. Photo / File

It’s strange but true that among the earliest beneficiaries of political correctness were fatties. As early as 1970, for example, long before we started being kind and “inclusive” to some of the more niche groups in society, the Billy Bunter children’s books – comedies about a corpulent, greedy public schoolboy – started being banned from public libraries for making fun of overweight children. More than 50 years later, despite two-thirds of the adult population being overweight or obese, it’s still taboo to say someone is too fat. I write, I should say, as one of the porky community, so I think I have a licence to offend myself.

But I’ve finally met a man to give me, and the rest of us who need to lose a couple of stone, hope of doing so, and also “getting into shape” – meaning a shape other than the one we already have. It’s evident within five minutes in the company of David Higgins, an easy-going 39-year-old Australian, how he has got stars fighting for the privilege of paying him huge sums to train them up.

He simplifies attaining a “Hollywood body”, as he calls the ideal shape for someone who’s not an actual athlete.

Jonathan Margolis details how David Higgins helped him shift some weight this year.

Read the full story here.

Diet hack: The simple new rule for managing your blood sugar and weight

Eating your vegetables first could manage a range of deadly conditions, notably obesity and diabetes. Photo / Paul Taylor

For someone whose research career briefly hit the doldrums after emergent DNA science failed to answer her burning questions, Jessie Inchauspé’s enthusiasm bounced back on a surprisingly simple concept: eat your veges first.

The advice that everyone’s great-grandmother might have doled out is hardly the holy grail the young biochemist had set out to find to elucidate the human condition. But her research on the effect of eating patterns has brought promising new insights into how to manage a range of deadly conditions, notably obesity and diabetes, from their ground zero: blood sugar, or glucose.

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Inspired by her own experience using a personal blood sugar monitor, she has aggregated recent clinical trials into strategies for controlling blood glucose spikes – known to be one of the golden keys to controlling obesity, diabetes and other metabolic disorders

The chance discovery could revolutionise the way we eat and help fight obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Read the full story here.

Almost everything you think you know about diets is wrong – here’s why

For decades we have been taught that calories are king and the most important thing about our food is where it fits in the neat division of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Photo / File

Professor Tim Spector has a straightforward theory: almost everything we think we know about food is wrong. For decades we have been taught that calories are king and the most important thing about our food is where it fits in the neat division of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Don’t skip meals, we are told. Cut out meat. Eat more fish. Drink eight glasses of water a day. All of this, Spector says, is flawed.

“There is no single diet that will work for everyone, just as there is no such thing as a superfood or a toxic food,” Spector writes in his new book, Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well. “Provided it is a real food, there is no such thing as a bad ingredient.” Yet, he says, we are in the midst of a global “food health crisis”, with more people overweight than malnourished for the first time in history. “If everyone ate optimally, we could prevent or delay around half the disease burden of heart disease, arthritis, dementia, cancer, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases and infertility.”

At the heart of Spector’s theory lies the belief that the overriding influence on how we react to food is not genetics, or culture, or ethnicity, but the microbiome — the bacteria in our guts.

Read the full story here.

The six calorie health myths making you fat

Been blaming your tight waistband on advancing age? We’ve got news for you. Photo / File

Earlier this year, a study from the University of Aberdeen, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, caused a stir by dispelling a certain myth. It looked at the time of day people ate and whether it had any impact on metabolism.

Participants were provided with all their meals for eight weeks. All consumed the same number of calories, some weighted towards the morning, and some towards the evening. Their energy expenditure and body composition was then monitored for changes.

The result? “The time of day at which they ate the bulk of their calories made no difference at all to their weight loss or metabolism,” says Alexandra Johnstone, professor of appetite research at the University of Aberdeen. Breakfasting like a king, lunching like a prince and dining like a pauper may not be the best for our waistlines after all.

So what other fallacies have we been swallowing?

Read the full story here.

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