you still have to cut out trans fats and lower the consumption of saturated fats though. and salt. and alcohol. and smoking. and cholesterol.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/diet_and_fitness/article4523487.ece

But some choice bits here:

Advocates of FBCG (fat bad carbs good) believed that the big dietary change behind our new miseries was increased consumption of animal fats on the basis that, for early man, there were lots of vegetables and fruit lying around, but a good kill would be rare. Recent research, however, suggests that kills could be very large and our ancestors did not, as we do, carve out the best bits; they ate the whole animal. Their fat intake was, in fact, much higher than we thought.

The truth is that the big dietary change was not fat but carbohydrate consumption. Agricultural settlement resulted in the cultivation of cereals and root vegetables. Bread, potatoes and rice became the staffs of life. The FBCG people didn’t think they were a problem: pound for pound, they contained fewer calories than meat. But what carbohydrates do is stop you burning fat, so the fat you do consume gets laid down in your arteries and on your stomach. It’s not the burger that bloats, it’s the bun.

Furthermore, carbs become sugar in the body. In the case of refined carbs – white flour or sugar – the effect is instantaneous. “Some of these starches, as soon as they hit the saliva in your mouth, become sugars. Pasta is a bowl of sugar, briefly deferred.”

This produces blood-sugar spikes that stress the pancreas and put millions in a pre-diabetic condition. They develop metabolic syndrome in which fat accumulates about the midriff and fundamentally alters body chemistry. This, it is thought, may well be either a primary or secondary cause of the diseases of modernity: cancers, heart attacks, strokes and, of course, all the woes that flow from obesity.

Arthur is not alone in understanding the lethality of carbs. The whole FBCG ideology is now on the run. One very successful book, The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes, exposed how threadbare the science behind the ideology actually was. A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine seemed to show conclusively that a low-carb diet was a better way of losing weight than either a low-fat or a Mediterranean diet. It also showed it reduced bad cholesterol – a clear refutation of most orthodox dietary advice. The Palaeolithic diet, meanwhile, a regime based on the diet of early man, was first advocated in 1975. .

I think a lot of the people buying the “low fat” or “fat free” stuff would be better off with a dollop of lovely plain full fat yoghurt, for instance, instead of a hideously sweet sugary carton of flavoured “low fat” yoghurt. And so on.

There’s no way it should be available over the counter, though. There are too many people neurotic about food as it is.