I have to say that this fills me with a great deal of confidence about dietary advice

As I mentioned yesterday the WHO has come out with a couple of little recommendations about the amount of sugar we eat. Don't swill too much around your moth because of caries and do remember that sugar does indeed have caloties. Too many calories, compared to your activity levels, makes you fat. That is indeed what they said. So today we have one of those campaigning prodnoses in The Mail:

On Wednesday, for instance, no less an authority than the UN’s World Health Organisation came out with the firm recommendation that we should all be aiming to cut our sugar intake by half and that children should not be given fizzy drinks at all.

No, that isn't what they said at all.

That came just one day after Dame Sally Davies, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, proposed that a sugar tax needed to be introduced if we wanted to cut sugar intake and reduce obesity.

She did indeed say that but there doesn't seem to be any evidence to back it up.

And it came on the same day that an eminent New York cardiovascular research scientist warned that the long-running demonisation of fats, and saturated fats in particular, could be entirely misplaced. The real killer, according to Dr James DaNicolantio, particularly when it comes to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes — those two scourges of the modern age — is sugar.

And isn't that just wondrous? Absolutely everything we have been told about diet and health for the past 50 years turns out to be, in your words, untrue. So we should immediately abandon that 50 years of advice and hop aboard your bandwagon?

It doesn't really have the ring of confidence around it this idea, does it?

Oh, and here's a little challenge. If you can find those doctors who tell us that eating as much fat as we like, including those saturated ones, if just absolutely fine for us, indeed that pig lard is better for us than sugar, then we might start taking this all a tad more seriously. Indeed, we would, if this were true, we certainly should if this were true, find Action On Sugar telling us to fill up on beef dripping.

Which, amazingly, they ain't so clearly not even they believe the tosh they're spouting. In which case why should any of us believe it?

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