The trendy nutritional advice that's more likely to make you ill than healthy

Isabel Hardman and Lara Prendergast report for The Spectator,

It’s not entirely clear why ‘eating clean’, by avoiding gluten and certain carbohydrates, would keep people healthy. As the British Dietetic Association puts it, carbohydrates are crucial; they represent the body’s main energy supply and should make up half of each meal. They are not inherently fattening; any unneeded energy ‘will be converted into fat no matter what the source’. Those low-carb diets? Research suggests they ‘don’t seem to help people lose weight and keep it off’. But the overwhelming message from the plethora of people urging us to eat cauliflower couscous and gluten-free loaves is a simple one: carbs are bad.

The fear of gluten, milk and other newly unfashionable foods could also damage children whose parents foist their fads on the whole family. ‘Muesli-belt malnutrition’ was first identified by doctors in the late 1990s, when they found children were suffering as a result of the excessively restrictive diets that their health-conscious middle-class parents had developed. Now, with the internet so readily at hand to offer quick diagnoses, the new obsession seems to be with allergies and intolerances, and cutting out all sorts of foods in order to deal with them.

It ties into a similar mantra espoused by those who pursue wellness — that you can heal yourself — and your family — by cutting out entire food groups. Earlier this year, the charity Sense About Science warned that parents were risking leaving their children malnourished by restricting their diets in order to deal with perceived health problems. A decade ago, a study of 969 children in the Isle of Wight found that a third of them were thought by their parents to have food allergies; in fact, only 5 per cent did.

The overwhelming advice from the people who know a lot about nutrition and dietary health doesn’t seem to have changed much over the years: everything in moderation.

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