THE TRUTH ABOUT FOOD
Foods are magical.
The right foods can help you to live longer, be happier, healthier, smarter, more energetic, more attractive and even more fertile….
The wrong foods can shorten your lifespan, make you depressed, run down, over-weight, low on sex drive and brain power….
For thousands of years, people have used the magical powers of food – garlic to fight infection, honey to soothe throats, St John’s Wort for well- being and elderflower for the heart. This knowledge came slowly through trial and error and was passed down the generations, from mother to daughter, from father to son. Sometimes these remedies proved no more than superstition but the ones that lasted did so because they worked. What we didn’t know was how they worked and why certain foods had amazing results.
But advances in science are changing all that by unravelling the mysteries of molecular biology. Molecular biology is the study of the microscopic world of our cells, invisible to the naked eye but extraordinarily complex and breathtakingly beautiful in close-up. Every part of our being – from the inner brain to the outer skin – is made up of cells. Every single cell contains our entire genetic code and together they influence everything about us, even our appetite. But what feeds and fuels these cells? The food we eat.
And the real beauty of these advances is that we can now know the truth about how to use foods dramatically to improve the quality of our lives.
I am the Executive Producer at BBC Television for this series, working from the Science Department. (The BBC’s Science Unit is known to be the best and largest such department making science programmes in any television company world-wide)
Working in-house under the headline of the science diet, our intention has been to explore the science of food by bringing together the most comprehensive and up-to-date scientific understanding of the way that food interacts with our bodies and our minds.
Underlying all of our work has been a determination to cut through the spin of the health and food industries and at all times to be truthful and objective in our presentation of the actual facts.
We have also approached the subject in a very interactive, user-friendly manner. Thus our white-coated scientists will be kept in the background and off-screen in favour of the armies of normal people whom we are recruiting, from all over the country. The plan is for thousands of volunteers to help with our research, taking part in experiments supervised by the world’s leading academics and nutritionists. Nothing on this scale has even been attempted before in the history of food and diet research.
We already know that our experiments will produce amazing results - and not always those expected.
So we are testing out new ideas, such as:
- You want to lose weight but haven’t despite trying everything from food combining to the coconut diet. The problem is that everything you try leaves you feeling hungry. But what if you could fool your body into thinking it’s full for longer – and on fewer calories? Our research will tell you exactly how.
And we shall resolve some confusing debates:
- How often do we read that a certain food is good for us, only to hear a week later that it’s actually harmful? Sometimes it depends what you want from food. If you’re a 40-something man and afraid of losing your hair, could soya be good for you? Our twin volunteers, Bob and Duncan, put the soya treatment to the test and the results were categoric: at least they were for Bob, whom we put on a soya-rich regime and who did indeed arrest the onset of baldness. But our evidence also shows that soya contains the female hormone, oestrogen, which is linked to poor sperm quality and infertility in men. There are other foods which counter-balance the latter effect – and we will tell you what they are – but for men with fertility problems who want to start a family, it may be best to sacrifice the hair. (This text will have to change depending on the outcome of the actual experiment.)
Moreover we will lay some old chestnuts to bed:
- “I just can’t help it. I suffer from a slow metabolism”. However many times we are told that the legend isn’t true, it just won’t lie down and die. So we have turned to amazing new technology – snack cams which monitor every mouthful taken by our subjects, fidget underwear which register every calorie burned and a special concoction which measures energy burned down to the very last calorie – and we bust the myth once and for all.
But there’s good news too. There exist foods that help speed up your metabolism. Red hot chilli peppers, for instance, stimulate our bodies to burn more calories for a short period after eating, and green tea contains compounds which prolong that effect. So we set our volunteers to discovering what happens when you combine the two.
That’s where this book begins – with the fascinating, scientifically-proven, truth about food. For the book, I will pull together existing and original research and lay it all out in a way that can be clearly understood and used as part of your daily life. Clearly explaining our experiments, I shall also set out the scientific mechanisms of these results. Using numerous case studies, I will show how people can successfully use food to good effect and explain how others are in trouble because of how and what they eat.
Like the series, THE TRUTH ABOUT FOOD will concentrate on what we think are the most important ways in which food can help us – or harm us if we get it all wrong.
Structured into six main sections, this book will therefore provide its reader with A Plan for Life (I am attaching our working outline for each programme to the back of this folder. There may be small changes but nothing significant).
These six sections currently are:
(1) How to… Stay Young & Beautiful
For centuries we’ve searched for the magic elixir of youth. As nation we spend billions of pounds annually on lotions, pills and salves. But could the answer actually lie with the foods that we eat?
§ In the largest mass trial ever undertaken our Europe-wide study therefore asks whether blueberries can prevent memory loss as we get older?
· Similarly we use our ever-willing volunteers to discover whether red wine can really ward off heart disease and, if so, which wines are the best for the job.
· We take two young mothers – twins, in fact – who love the sun. The issue we explore here is of whether drinking a daily dose of olive oil will keep one looking younger whilst the other suffers UV damage to the skin.
(2) How to… Be Sexy & Fertile
Every culture has its own beliefs about aphrodisiac foods and every good witch a fertility potion. Yet what role does food really play in our sexual and reproductive lives?
· Over the last 50 years sperm counts have dipped dramatically and an approximate 25% of the fertility problems which couples encounter can be blamed on poor sperm quality. So we look at the role of oestrogen – which specific foods contain – and reveal how your diet can indeed affect your fertility.
· Just as the right mood is vital for good sex, so the smell and taste of the foods we eat are vital. Find out which foods have a proven power to drive men wild and whether they have the same effect on women.
· Personality has been shown to be closely correlated to food choices. What flavour best suits your personality, and can that preference therefore lead you towards a mate? We asked a sample of the couples in our survey group to choose snacks for a trip to the movies. Will someone who likes tortilla chips, we wonder, hit it off with a pretzel eater; and will a choc ice fan ever find love with a woman who prefers strawberry cornettos?
(3) How to… Look Good and Stay Slim.
Diets are everywhere, yet obesity levels continue to rise. It’s a familiar scenario. You want to lose weight and you’ve tried every diet possible but they all leave you feeling hungry. How wonderful it would be, then, if we could control our appetites simply by adjusting the nature of what we eat.
· What difference does it make if you eat an apple or a bowl of apple puree or drink a glass of natural apple juice? The calories may be exactly the same in each but one will leave you feeling distinctly fuller. Which one?
· Take two gems of popular wisdom: (1) breakfast is the most important meal of the day and (2) eating late at night will make you put on weight. When we put both to the test, only one turned out to be true.
· Is it really all in our genes? Are we born with a propensity to be thin or fat? To what degree are our eating habits pre-programmed?
(4) How to… Perform at Your Peak
Whether you work in the cut-throat world of business or you’re a home-based, stressed-out parent, you will want to be the best that you can at what you do. Food is your fuel and the choices you make can affect everything from your energy levels to your concentration.
· We know the quickest way to get an energy boost is to eat carbohydrates, but you’re trying to keep slim, and keep your calorie count down. How do you squeeze the maximum of out of your body and mind. What is going to give you the edge. The time of eating holds the key.
· It’s 8 a.m., there’s a big work meeting on the schedule and you really need to feel alert and focussed. Coffee seems to do the trick – after all, it’s the most widely used drug in the world – but your colleague has eaten cornflakes and you’ve taken the healthy option and eaten porridge. Who is going to perform better in the meeting?
(5) How to… Stay Healthy
There’s nothing like a bout of illness to make us appreciate our health. Sometimes the medicines prescribed by your doctor do work wonders, but could many illnesses be prevented and others be cured just by eating the right foods?
· We are all obsessed with being healthy and so the idea we can detox our body is alluring. We will give our passionate detox advocates harmless tracers attached to food and we prove that the idea of retaining toxins in the body is complete garbage.
· Buying organic food may make you feel better about animal welfare and the environment but is it actually any better for your body?
· Whilst there is an unavoidable genetic factor to cancer, there are also many facets to cancer prevention and for many people diet is integral. We pull together what is now known on the subject of diet and cancer and look at the latest research.
(6) How to… Raise Healthy Kids
The best route to long-term health is to start young but, as any parent knows, children are easily lured towards the dark side where food is concerned. But you can fight back.
· The latest scientific research shows that children are naturally afraid of new foods (neophobia) and we can prove it. But that’s no help to a parent. How to get your kids to try new food? If we’re honest we have all had our grouchy moments begging and bribing them to at least taste that hateful slimy spinach. We will convert them within a month to loving their most hated food.
· We all know a healthy mum makes for a healthy foetus but can the food which you eat during pregnancy also be a factor in whether your child prefers junk food later in life?
· Once upon a time food was scarce and there was only just enough to go round. Nowadays we can have as much food – often calorifically rich food - as we want, when we want; and our natural appetite signals are too weak to overcome temptation. We therefore examine the under fives in our research sample, and discover the ideal age at which to educate children about food and pre-empt them over-eating.
For me, the joy of working on this series, as it will be with the book, is the recognition here that we all have different concerns and motives for changing our diets. You may be in your late thirties and worried that it will soon be too late to conceive, your other half may be having trouble at work with fatigue and low concentration and your ten-year old may be struggling with his or her weight. We are all unique and we can use the science diet to target our specific needs.
And the great thing about food is, well, it’s just food. It’s what we all put into our shopping trolleys every week. It’s not about expensive drugs or complicated medical techniques. Nor is it about spending lots of money or radically altering your lifestyle. Armed with the knowledge in this book – knowledge proven to be correct - we can now all start practising our very own science diets.
BBC Science Unit
The BBC has the largest dedicated Science TV unit in the world. It produces ground-breaking high-ratings programmes like Walking With Dinosaurs, The Human Body, Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Super Volcano. BBC Horizon is the world’s longest-running Science strand. The Science unit regularly wins top awards for factual programming at key industry events like BAFTA and the Royal TV Society in the UK and the Emmys in the USA.
Almost all the Science unit’s researchers and production assistants have first class Science degrees from top universities, and a majority with post-graduate qualifications (MSc or PhD). For example, Jill’s Research Associate on a programme about the Russian space shuttle had a First in Maths and a First in Astrophysics. This is the team that drives the research base on all programming. It is recognised by the scientific community as thorough, professional and credible.
The Science unit is the world leader in innovative representation and visualisation of science subjects, using CGI (Computer Graphics Imaging) and hidden or micro cameras – techniques that will be used in Truth about Food to show what is happening inside the body.