For people struggling to lose weight, it’s an appealing notion: slash your carb intake to turn your body into a fat-burning machine. Yet scientific opinion about the importance of carbs is still divided. Increasingly, research suggests that cutting back might be beneficial, especially to treat type-2 diabetes and obesity. But official dietary advice, such as from the NHS Choices website, continues to state that carbs should make up one third of our total diet (which adds up to half our total calories*). The public has good reason to be confused.
A BIT OF HISTORY
Low-carb diets are nothing new. In the mid-19th century, William Banting published a paper in The Lancet expounding the benefits of a low-carb/high-fat diet for weight loss. Cardiologist Dr Robert Atkins took up the baton in the 1970s, gaining millions of followers. Since then the Atkins model has been repackaged as keto, LCHF (lowcarb, high-fat) and Dukan, to name a few. The diet even found its own catchphrase: “No carbs before Marbs”, coined by stars of The Only Way is Essex, who cut back to lose weight before a trip to Marbella.