Friday, January 18, 2013

The men who made us fat

This is a very interesting BBC documentary that I heard about when it came out last summer, but never had a chance to sit down and watch (and then forgot about).  Since my cold finally did get bad enough again to be off work, I have been watching lots of youtube stuff and I decided to take a look at this.  I was already aware of many of the issues discussed but it is always interesting to see how different people present the data.  As it's a British production it is also a bit more interesting for me, as the ads shown and the cultural shifts talked about are those I remember from my childhood.

It's, in total, 12 youtube videos, I think perhaps three-parts and each part has four 15 minute videos.  I watched it as a playlist so that I didn't have to keep on clicking through to the next one.  Here's the first part of the first episode:

The really interesting thing I found about this comes within the first few minutes.  The presenter, a fairly slim, healthy looking guy, has an MRI done to look at the levels of fat in his body and the although the subcutaneous fat is about as expected, the levels of fat around his organs are about double what a healthy amount is considered to be.  Interesting to know that not all fat is the same.

And I very much like this quote from the final part:

"Putting the food industry at the policy table is like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank." Professor Simon Capewell, University of Liverpool 

Well worth a look, even if it mostly just involves the same conclusions and the usual obfuscation from politicians and the food industry.

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