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From the web page:

""" What did this study do?

[...]

* an additional 30 minutes of physical activity each day

* a family cooking workshop each term

* in collaboration with local Aston Villa Football Club, three sessions of coaching in physical activities and two on preparing healthy meals, with weekly activity and healthy eating “challenges”

* information sheets about staying active during the holidays, with signposting to local facilities

"""

So 1.5/4 points about diet, and the rest about exercise. Thus mostly focused on exercise. While diabetes is known to be preventable/reversible by primarily diet. Specifically by removing processed foods (that includes oils, refined starches and sugar) and animal(-derived) products (as they are high in saturated fats), while adding lots of whole plant foods. And not only for cooked meals, but for all meals and snacks.

Seems to me they've been trying to optimize the wrong parameters. Just my 2ct.

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And the diet part is about healthy (at the time) meals.

Just learn to count calories, how much you need and avoid excesses. Bad food in small portions is better than huge amounts of healthy calories.

Research is not yet clear, but not every calorie is the same!

The combination of nutrients in food can have a large effect on the efficiency of nutrient extraction in your stomach and gut. For example, when you consume alchol and a meal afterwards your body will store more fat than if you'd just taken a (slightly larger) meal. This is because your body will prioritize burning the acetate and alchol over anything else (including carbs, fat and protein). Other foods or chemicals might have effects on the resource burning allocation of your body.

Citation/source?

https://youtu.be/T8G8tLsl_A4

Even if you had definitive proof of this, I think OP's assertion still stands.

Concerning yourself with highly complex reactions that could happen between foods, when we aren't even sure how/if those reactions happen is effort spent unwisely, whereas calorie counting has a definitive effect and even if those combinations can hamper or help you, even by ignoring them, you still have the overall desired result.

I find that, as a model, calorie in - calorie out works well, even if at some future time we would discover it's not fully accurate.

>Concerning yourself with highly complex reactions that could happen between foods

This isn't necessitated at all. There's no mystery as to what overlaps between what the most successful food regimens prescribe today: cut sugar, cut refined foods, eat more vegetables and eat real food.

Counting calories is important when it comes to weight management, but optimal health does not stop and start just at BMI. You might be thinner on a calorie-restricted junk-food diet, but you won't be healthier. Your insulin would spike all the time, you'd be nutrient-deficient, etc.

I agree that a certain well thought diet could have further health benefits but the context of the post is obesity prevention.

Monumental benefits, which also extend to obesity prevention by virtue of the elimination of problem-stuffs in the face of obesity (canned soda, fried foods and snacking chips). They're at once high-calorie, facilitate eating a near endless amount (anyone can go through an entire bag of chips), and addictive.

All of which to say, you'll be making the task of losing weight easier just by switching to healthy foods, which you should be doing anyway. It's not "complicated", it doesn't need to be politicized.

What is real food? Plants, Fruits and Water? Everything else has to be processed somehow.

and meat, and unrefined grains and legumes (or partially so). There's processing, and there's processing. I don't even have to tell you I'm suggesting the avoidance of refined grains and added sugar.

Yes.

> Plants, Fruits and Water

Also fungi. And fruits are plants so do not need a special mention.

Some would say meat can be "unprocessed", but its not part of the WFPB diet that I mentioned earlier and it known for it's health (obesity reversing) benefits. To the contrary.

Of course every calorie isn't the same. Otherwise two-three pints of beer could count as a breakfast.

They don't? Shit, there goes my master plan.

I disagree, when eating natural unprocessed plant foods it is virtually impossible to OD on calories. Sure we need to eat varied. But ODin on calories on a whole-plant-based (WFPB) diet will need you to go straight for the avocados, dates and nuts. Otherwise you are pretty much safe.

When moving towards a WFPB myself I had to get used to eating much larger portions. Its bizarre to know how many olives one needs to eat to get the same amount of fats as in one tbsp of olive oil. Also, combined with the fiber in the olives, that same fat is suddenly not that harmful.

Counting calories sucks. I hope we can fix our notion of food in a way that we do not have to teach all children to count calories. Just teach them to differentiate between real food (as it was growing on this planet before we evolved into humans) an what comes from a factory. The go to the beach and show them how your food choices affect you.

> Bad food in small portions is better than huge amounts of healthy calories.

2 strips of bacon vs a 500gr monster salad..? I know my pick.

> I disagree, when eating natural unprocessed plant foods it is virtually impossible to OD on calories. Sure we need to eat varied. But ODin on calories on a whole-plant-based (WFPB) diet will need you to go straight for the avocados, dates and nuts. Otherwise you are pretty much safe.

You're not really contradicting OP, just outlining simple and obvious ways to reduce calories. The end effect is the same. The best part of the salad is not that it's vegetable, not that it's more natural, but that it's low in calories.

> 2 strips of bacon vs a 500gr monster salad..? I know my pick.

I don't know, what else do you have in that salad? Sauce? What kind? Croutons?

> The best part of the salad is not that it's vegetable, not that it's more natural, but that it's low in calories.

Nope. It about nutrients/calorie, which is high in a salad. Try playing with the cronometer.com app and you'll see what I mean. It's not so easy to get all the bars in green.

> I don't know, what else do you have in that salad? Sauce? What kind? Croutons?

WFPB salad, no oil, no processed junk.

So a completely dry salad, not even a bit of olive oil? Yeesh.

Since you're asking curious, see some ideas for dressings here:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wfpb+salad+dres...

The salad underneath the dressing is usually WFPB as it is, so needs little adjustment.

I also like just salad, with a little salt, pepper and balsamico. But tastes differ. IMHO oil is still not a health food, no not even olive oil. There is science to back it up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbtwwZP4Yfs

My personal conclusion: i eat very little (<1tblsp/d) and very high quality coco or olive oil.

Have you read some of the studies your video link to?

"10 people", "18 men" etc. Most are blood tests some hours after a meal.

Nothing about long term effect on health. Just full papers published from what should be one data point and a lot of speculation from the youtuber.

That is a thoroughly depressing playlist.

You avoid processed foods, but you add balsamico to your salad?

Balsamico is made by concentrating down grape juice through boiling, and then fermenting the resulting must for years. Isn't that processing, and far away from "whole food"?

And the oil thing is simply scaremongering. Of course oil is calorie dense, but as long as you keep that in mind, it's fine. The papers cited by the guy in the video you linked don't really back up your claims.

(Besides, something doesn't become true, just because there's a paper or two on it)

Counting calories works. A calorie can't become more than it is, just less if the body can't use it for some reason.

Worst case you will feel hungry if you eat the wrong calories, but you will definitely lose weight.

Sure, if you can manage it. And therein lies the rub! Food is emotional, and hunger corrupts our thinking processes. That's pretty much the whole game right there.

Yeah but you don't have to only eat vegetables to feel full. Just eating "normal" food in the right/limited amounts feels fine (at least after the first few weeks).

Also I doubt that people trying to diet would just eat a few candys for lunch and try to live with that.

And surprisingly the full-feeling does actually correlate with the amount of calories you eat. If you eat 2 strips of bacon (which doesn't seem much) and let it sit for some time (without eating more) hunger passes. Maybe not as much as with better food, but it still does to some degree.

Never said it did not work. Just saying that it's not y preferred route for teaching kids about food and health.

Food has many parameters and so does health. Reducing it to calories is... Hmmm. Over simplifying?

> Over simplifying?

Which makes it dead simple. Not easy, simple.

If you want obese people to lose weight you want instructions making it not complex.

"Should I learn a new way to eat food, new recipes or start cooking for real? No thanks."

"Oh! I can just eat less and switch to 0 sugar soda; no need to make my life harder? Let's try this"

Once they have learned to eat less you can add the trick which is you can stuff your belly with 2lbs of veggies and get less than 1k calories. But for people used to the 5mn in the microwave way of cooking it's an added hurdle.

>"real food (as it was growing on this planet before we evolved into humans)"

Do you mean that literally? Because almost every single fruit and veggie you bite into today was improved by humans, for nutritional value, taste and ease of growing.

The exceptions are basically some berries, mostly. And they're sour as hell without processing.

> Just learn to count calories, how much you need and avoid excesses.

Easy enough to say, but hard when you're trying to get a 6-7 year old (what this article is about) to adopt that lifestyle - that's an age where they eat what they're being served. Given this is in the UK, part would be the school lunch - which is directed by things like cost and preparation time/effort (Jamie Oliver did a series about this) - and part is the parents that feed the kids.

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