After two months of Zoom video call meetings, my friend reports that at least two of her colleagues have visibly put on weight. Fear, boredom and inactivity are saboteurs of healthy eating. Add in that coronavirus craving for comfort and what have you got? Loads of people stuck at home eating worse than they usually do.
To flog their unhealthy products, junk food companies have taken full advantage of our feeling that we deserve treats. Krispy Kreme’s stunt – delivering doughnuts to NHS workers to say “thanks” – is just the most egregious example.
Her Majesty’s Government has also been egging us on. The only coronavirus food guidance from it that’s insinuated its way into my consciousness has been Twitter ads that told me: ‘Stay home. Do some baking’.
Now I love a homemade cake as much as anyone else, and the aroma of baking speaks to the child in me, but as the weeks drag by, facts have to be faced.
Finding succour in recipes that involve heaps of sugar and white flour will see me emerge from lockdown plumper than when I went in.
This really matters. Obesity is linked to poorer outcomes for those who are infected with the virus.
An analysis of 99 countries by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that obesity is the biggest risk factor for death from Covid-19 in both the under-50s and those aged between 50 and 64.
Why? Obesity is often a marker for underlying health conditions, such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
The thinking is that being overweight leaves your body in a chronic state of inflammation, which impairs the ability of your immune system to recover from disease.
Not everyone, of course, is marooned on the settee eating cookies and crisps.
Now that lockdown has severely curtailed our outdoor activities and stopped us eating out, many are using it as an opportunity to cook more, and feeling all the better for it. Another friend of mine has Type 1 diabetes, but since lockdown she has been cooking all her meals. Net effect?
She has lost 15 pounds and has gained better control of her blood sugar levels. This isn’t just because she’s now more hands-on in the kitchen, it’s also a reflection of what she’s been cooking.
A self-confessed carb addict, she decided to try out a low-carb diet, an eating plan that go-ahead doctors who are up-to-date with the science now increasingly recommend to prevent and reverse Type 2 diabetes. Even as Type 1, she’s seeing promising results.
Under assault from coronvirus, government should be recommending the benefits of low-carb eating to the general population.
After all, Health Secretary Matt Hancock says that he lost two stones this way.
But neither Westminster nor Holyrood will advocate this approach because it flies in the face of the bankrupt dietary advice that they’ve been dispensing for 60 years: “Base your meals on starchy food”.
Yet the evidence I’ve researched convinces me that this mantra has been a public health disaster.
Until the 1960s, the medical consensus was that carbohydrate foods were fattening.
Then US grain barons, and propagandists for vegetarianism, such as John Harvey Kellogg, started punting the miraculous health properties of cereals.
Coco Pops edged eggs, bacon and black pudding off our plates and the our waistlines expanded accordingly.
Personally speaking, I rarely over-indulge in obviously sweet foods, but I can come off the rails big time with pasta, potatoes, rice, bread, and other less obvious sugar-spiking carbs.
When it comes to what I eat. I’m a bender of rules to suit my fancy, a self-deceiver, if you like.
That said, once I had understood, for instance, that there are the equivalent of 10 teaspoonfuls of sugar in a small serving of rice while an egg contains no sugar at all, I’ve become more circumspect about filling up my plate with refined carbs.
If you ask me, people who tell you that they speak the one true, definitive gospel on healthy eating are arrogant fools. I believe in keeping an open mind and constantly retesting old assumptions.
Feel free to try low-carb eating for a week or two and see if it works for you.
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