The BBC’s Truth about Food programme provided some great information about good nutrition and dispelled a few myths which tend to get in our way when we try to figure out whether our eating habits are good or bad.

The key observation from DJ Andrea Oliver was about the difficulty of finding good information. Unlike fad diets and fad diet shows, the BBC used a wide mix of food scientists and very effective computer-generated animation. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans gave an amazing picture of the fat deposits in the DJ celebrity’s body. The very basic truths about calorie intake versus expenditure came through very clearly. And the myth of the lean person’s fast metabolism was neatly despatched to the poo-collection pot of history (Question: why are there so many prime time diet shows at the moment which concentrate at faecal matter, just when you’re trying to eat your TV dinner?). The fatter person simply eats more: end of story. There was also some fascinating evidence from Denmark about the value of low-fat dairy sources of calcium in helping us excrete dietary fat. Too many of us think of all dairy products as inherently fattening.

The cost of acquiring information, either to generate a healthy exercise regime or a good diet, seems crucial. It takes time, and to put it into practice takes a lot more. The BBC here proved a very reliable source. But there will always be snake-oil salesman with another fad to obscure the basic truths. Like Rome (or the marathon runner) it is not built in a day. Andrea Oliver observed at the end that when she started the programme she was looking for a result. What she realised by the end was that it’s an ongoing process. These two things are very different. We live in a results-driven culture, whether on the football pitch, in business or in our quest for products, diets, weight loss or exercise regimes. Oliver’s weight loss was not dramatic, averaging about 1 pound per week. Over three months she lost 7 kg, or about 14 pounds. On a week-to-week basis, weight fluctuates naturally, meaning that it would actually be hard to observe the trend. So, if you are not committed to the process, the short term results might be disappointing and throw you off course.

The New York Times produced a useful article this week where journalism professor Michael Pollan argues that the whole nutrition industry is the problem and that fundamentally we will be all right if we cook our own food, mostly plants! Interestingly, it was Tyler Cowen, author of economics blog Marginal Revolution, who linked to this piece, except that he rather unhelpfully seemed to suggest that fruit was bad for you. This sort of confusion means you have to invest the time in finding out how and what to cook, and persist with the process long enough, despite any setbacks.

The BBC did a sterling job in making light work of that for most people today.

One of the best websites I’ve come across recently in this context shows exactly what 200 calories of each food looks like. When the internet has to be shut down because it is too big and dangerous for us to cope with, perhaps they could leave that site up.

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