I have recently finished a fascinating book by an award winning journalist who specialises in science books, by the name of Gary Taubes. Essentially, and this is a very brief summary, while the book is not a diet book, he goes into the history of the various diets and the problems that have beset various populations once certain foods have been introduced to them. To summarise what he has to say very quickly, it is essentially that cancer, heart disease and obesity are all related to the same thing – white flour and sugar.

Carbohydrates are far too big a portion of our diets now and should basically not be eaten at all and there is nothing wrong with eating good fats. For example, butter is a good fat whereas margarine would not be. Essentially, one is encouraged to eat proteins all day which would mean, for example, eggs and bacon for breakfast, fish or chicken for lunch and possibly meat for dinner. He throws conventional wisdom on its head and pretty much set out a scientific and factual basis for all of his arguments, making it very hard to dispute what he says. Ultimately, he says that basically any diet that is in the media that restricts carbohydrates, or makes you diet and thus minimises what you eat, and thus reduces the carbohydrates, is going to work because you are reducing carbohydrates and not because you are eating less. His book basically says that it is not how much you eat at all, but it is what you eat and in that regard he is quite open about the fact that he is not coming up with any new theory at all – this is same theory that has been espoused, for example, for years in the Atkins Diet.