Anthony Warner is a professional chef and blogger. A regular contributor to New Scientist and The Pool, his blog has been featured in the Guardian, Mail on Sunday and other publications. In 2017, he was named on the Telegraph's Food Power List of tastemakers changing the way we eat and drink. He lives in Nottinghamshire, blogs at angry-chef.com and you can follow him @One_Angry_Chef.
Assembling a crack team of psychiatrists, behavioural economists, food scientists and dietitians, his new book, The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth about Healthy Eating, unravels the mystery of why sensible, intelligent people are so easily taken in by the latest food fads, making brief detours for an expletive-laden rant. Below, exclusively for Foyles, Anthony explains what needs to change in diet books.
Heres a bit of free advice to save you some time, energy and heartache over the next few years. Diets dont work. I give you permission to ignore every single diet and health title in the latest book charts. Dont feel the need to buy any of them, and if you already have one, make sure you ignore all the advice contained within.
Dont believe me? Well, despite the diet industry being worth well over half a trillion dollars per year worldwide (1), there is good evidence that almost all that money is being wasted on false hopes and broken promises. Numerous scientific studies and reviews have shown that the large majority of people who start a diet will have regained any initial weight loss within five years. To make things worse, around 40% of dieters will actually end up heavier than when they started (1,2). In fact, one of the most reliable indicators for whether or not you are going to put on weight in the long term is if you are currently on a diet.
So, for those of you who have taken the cant be bothered approach to weight loss, congratulations. You are probably doing better than all those kale munching detoxers, faithfully clutching the latest lifestyle gurus guide to effortless perfection.
And dont be fooled by the many books that promise this is not a diet, its a sustainable lifestyle change. For within the pages, you will still find rules and restrictions, disordered eating dressed up with pseudoscientific language and some flashy food styling. These books hide aspirations of thinness under a veil of wellness - gluten, grains, carbs, dairy or meat, being needlessly demonised to hide the weight loss goals that lie at their heart.
These are still rules. This is still dieting. And diets just dont work. Long term, you will most likely put on weight, and once again be forced to invest in the latest fad, probably just a reworking of the same pointless rules that let you down before. Your financial, physical and mental health will all be much better off if you do nothing at all.
So, given that their product is scientifically proven not to deliver on its promises, what exactly should the authors and publishers of diet books do? Well, I have three simple rules they might want to consider following -
I think that following those three simple rules would kill the diet industry for good, and for the mental and physical health of the nation, that would be no bad thing. But would it create a dystopian future of deep fried cakes, trifle sandwiches and rampant Type 2 Diabetes? Is every attempt to improve our diet destined to failure? Am I really suggesting that we should we all just stop bothering?
Perhaps not. In many ways, the greatest books about healthy eating are the ones that never mention the word health at all. For it is only when we learn to celebrate food, to enjoy a wide variety of delicious ingredients, and break the moral associations that we have with dietary choices, that we start to eat well.
To the endless stream of health bloggers, chefs and authors, that dominate the book charts, I say this. If you want to help people eat healthily, write books that celebrate fruits, vegetable and fish because they are delicious, rather than harping on about their supposed medicinal value. Give us recipes that help people take the time to appreciate and enjoy variations in flavour, colour and texture. Make dishes that tempt, delight and surprise. Use your culinary talents to create a world where people look forward to trying a new broccoli recipe with the same excitement as a new ice cream and one that makes no moral distinction between the two.
Although books telling us how to lose weight are destined to fail, recipes that provide a joyous celebration of food can genuinely improve our health. We need to let go of the guilt we attach to food pleasures, and dismiss any feelings that treats need to be earned or justified in some way. For it is only when the food we want to eat is the same as the food we should be eating that we will ever have a truly healthy diet.
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Anthony Warner Explains Why Diets Don't Work - Foyles
