If you think you should be counting calories in an attempt to lose or control weight you are, on paper at least, an ideal candidate for the Scio, a neat palm-held scanner that uses beams of light to detect the quantities of fat, carbohydrates and protein in food. The Scio’s main selling point – for all except those of a geeky bent who are gripped by curiosity to record the chemical make-up of their food – is that it counts calories. No more thumbing through dog-eared Weight Watchers calorie charts or eye-crossing consultation of wildly differing calorie-listing websites is required: just point the Scio at your lunch and bingo, you’ve got your calorie content in a flash.
The Scio is currently available for pre-order priced at £160, so it is surely only a matter of time until it features on daytime TV shopping channels, and beds down nicely among the heart-rate monitors and nasal-hair trimmers in those catalogues of nifty gadgetry that tumble out of magazines. The Scio undeniably rehabilitates the plodding 20th-century chore of calorie counting, reinventing it as a more accurate, more desirably consumable 21st-century technology. We all need one, right?
An alternative way of looking at this techno-wizardry is that the Scio is already redundant because calorie counting is last century’s bankrupt diet concept. Far from being the keenest tool to control your weight, calorie counting looks like the bluntest.
Now this may sound like nutritional heresy. Indeed, the NHS still informs us that knowing how many calories are in our food is “the key to a healthy weight”, a proposition reiterated daily by well-intentioned healthcare professionals, health charities, and assorted loyalists who adhere to the gospel that weight can be boiled down to an arithmetical calculation of calories in and energy out (calories burnt). As their clients get fatter and fatter while dutifully counting calories, exercising more and studiously eliminating saturated fat from their diets, some health practitioners may be quietly troubled by the nagging thought that this nutritional tablet of stone is irredeemably flawed. But if this jaded doctrine were to be revised, the public might conclude that the advice doled out by supposed experts over the years has been wrong, and how embarrassing would that be?
No matter, the calorie-counting myth is being taken to task left, right and centre. Zoe Harcombe, an independent diet authority, maps out succinctly the thought line that counting calories (in order to restrict them) is counterproductive, because it sends the body into starvation mode, triggers hunger signals (“rumbling tums”) that then encourage us to overeat, makes us more likely to store fat and lose lean muscle, and slows down our metabolism.
Furthermore, a growing body of research suggests that different calorie sources do have significantly different effects on energy expenditure and the hormones that regulate food intake. Many voices now argue that the “a calorie is a calorie” dogma has done much to contribute to the ever-worsening health of the western world. Dr Robert Lustig, for instance, has effectively challenged the orthodox dietetic view that “all calories should be treated equally”, showing, for example, that identical calorie counts from fructose, or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, will cause entirely different metabolic effects.
The drift of scientific research on weight loss is moving away inexorably from the tunnel-vision focus on calories to the more holistic concept of satiety and the “fullness factor”: that is, how well certain foods satisfy our appetites. And counterintuitive though it may seem, the most satiating and often most calorific foods (fats and proteins) are in the frame as possibly stronger candidates for the job of weight control than the starchy, lower-calorie carbohydrate foods on which we have been told to rely.
In parallel with this scientific debate, the “low-cal” and “diet” zero-calorie products on our shelves are not delivering their fat-reducing promise. The most spectacular flop here is the diet sweetener, the sort found in “healthy” colas, diet yogurts and “slimmer” ready meals. Several large-scale studies have actually found a positive correlation between artificial sweetener consumption and weight gain.
It’s a foregone conclusion that the debate over what constitutes a healthy diet, and therefore the appropriate content of public health advice, will continue to rage long after many of us are in our graves, but it seems unlikely that calorie counting will hog the limelight for much longer. What should we do in the meantime?
My own thinking, as someone who has watched the ebb and flow of the diet debate for years now, is based on common sense and observation, as follows. We live in an obesogenic culture, so if you go with the flow – that is, eat a “normal” diet containing lots of processed, convenience foods washed down with diet drinks, you will get fat and ill sooner rather than later. The government and the public health establishment are leant on by Big Food lobbyists and loth to unpick the dietetic status quo, so aren’t going to save you from this fate. No amount of calorie counting and savvy shopping for “healthy options” among supermarket shelves loaded with health-denying junk can prevent us from piling on the pounds and bearing its consequences.
If you want to stay passably slim and in reasonable health, the only practical alternative is to avoid processed foods and drinks as much as possible, even if they do have low-calorie labels, and base your diet around wholefood ingredients that you cook from scratch. This is why I won’t be needing a Scio. A sharp knife would be more to the point.