An A-Z of Scoff

Q IS FOR QUANTITY


The problem with food and health can now be summed up in one phrase: ‘too much’. More than six out of 10 men and five out of 10 women in the UK are overweight or obese. Talk to medics such as cancer experts and they say it’s especially important not to put on weight around your middle — the dreaded middle-age spread.

How to lose it? ‘Eat less’ is obvious — but too simple. Increasingly, obesity experts think the environmental aspect of overeating also needs to be addressed.

In the 1990s, the phrase ‘obesogenic society’ — in which we in the West live — was coined. Everywhere you go there are encouragements to over-eat, from the sugar in breakfast cereals to ballooning portion sizes to the fat that is loaded into restaurant food to make it tasty. Then there’s the ever-increasing range of choice. Studies show that the greater the choice, the more you eat. All in all, unless you actively try to not eat too much, you are likely to do so.

Part of cutting back is simply to be more conscious about how easy it is to over-eat. One diet tip is simply to eat off smaller plates. We eat, apparently, according to the visual cue of portion size rather than satiety. Our bodies are good at recognising that we’re hungry but not so good at realising when we’re full.

There’s also the question of not eating too much meat, in a world of scarce resources (it takes at least 7lb of grain to produce 1lb of intensively reared beef). Rachel de Thample’s timely tome, Less Meat More Veg, puts this into the context of how much protein we actually need (two pieces each the size of a pack of cards per day, she says) and gives good recipes to show how to eat less and better.