Press features
Sunday Star Times - New Zealand
Article: New Zealand Documentary To Age or Not to Age by Jo McCarroll
| A MATTER OF FAT | |||
|
Imagine an easy-to-follow diet that gave you limitless energy and kept you in the pink of health. One where even though your food wasn’t restricted you lost weight or maintained a healthy weight. A way of eating that helped strengthen the body, decreasing the risk of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease and slowing down or reversing the ageing process. That’s not so much a diet as a magic elixir. But how imaginary is it? Health writer and broadcaster Leslie Kenton says she’s discovered it. ------------- |
For the past 20 years, she says, we’ve been assured that for optimum health we should be eating lots of complex carbohydrate food, cutting down on fat and limiting protein. The "pasta and bagels brigade" has pushed the idea that the food pyramid is squarely balanced on bread, grains, rice and potatoes, she says.
"But over that same period, cancer has soared, coronary heart disease has soured, diabetes is off the wall and obesity is rising to an incredible degree," says Kenton, who’s written more than 30 books about health and personal development. -------------
|
That’s because, she believes, our diet has become too high in carbohydrates. Human beings are designed to eat more protein and "good" fat, she says, like our ancestors did. But we’ve come to reject those foods as unhealthy and have chosen instead a diet based around foods our body has difficulty handling. ------------- |
In this week’s Documentary New Zealand To Age or Not to Age (TV One, Monday, 8-30pm), American born, New Zealand based Kenton puts eight Kiwis on a different food and lifestyle programme. Lots of vegetables, protein and "good" fat, fewer carbohydrates. No processed food and no sugar. A little low impact weight or resistance training for half an hour a day, four days a week and a half hour gentle walk every day.This, Kenton claims, achieves miracles. ------------- |
|
|
|||
|
Medical checks before and after five weeks on her programme showed participants, aged between 33 and 59 and from all walks of life, lost weight (although that isn’t a primary goal of the programme) and gained fitness. Abnormal cholesterol, insulin, fat and blood pressure levels normalised. These biological and physiological measurements that indicate ageing – the biomarkers of ageing as they are called – had been stabilised or reversed for the participants. Effectively the diet had made people younger. ------------- |
"We really made medical history," Kenton says. "It was just amazing. All these things – things that could be medically and scientifically measured – changed…none of us dreamed this was gong to happen." Holding up youth as a goal isn’t a cosmetic, she says. "Ageing in the sense that most people talk about it is actually premature ageing. What you are talking about is degenerative diseases. The development of degenerative conditions. When you help the body re-establish proper functioning on a total body level then what you naturally do is rejuvenate it." -------------
|
"The goal is to help people die young late in life. You age, everybody gets older every year, but there’s no necessity for us to become immobilised, crippled or diseased." "You look at the amount of money the government spends on people over the age of 50 when something as simple as changing your diet and doing this particular form of exercise – it has to be resistance training not just aerobic – can make these sorts of changes." As well as better health, participants in the documentary reported their self esteem had increased, they were sleeping better and feeling more confident and positive. ------------- |
"That was what was exciting for me," Kenton says. "The changes that took place in their behaviour or their sense of self. You know how kids have that real ‘I can do anything’ attitude. But as people get older they lose it. But these people were all behaving like kids again. Because when you detoxify the body, you strengthen things in the body and you rebalance things. And when you rebalance things you naturally rebalance emotions. And you change people’s view on life and the reality around them. Because it is through the body that we experience everything." ------------- |
|
|
|||
|
But before you throw away the bread and spuds and embrace a new you, Auckland dietician, Nikki Hart, says she wouldn’t recommend cutting carbs and raising protein. "I think it’s good that this diet includes a better type of fat but I don’t think lowering the carbohydrate content of the diet is necessarily a good thing…I basically think these new extremes we see with diets are just low calorie diets dressed up." -------------
|
There’s no magic percentage of carbohydrates that is right, Hart says, but they are an important food group, the primary energy source of the body, stored in the muscles as glycogen. "Carbs don’t make you fat. And that’s the bottom line. I think a dietician’s role is to normalise food and say it’s not actually the composition of the diet we should be stressing about, it’s portion control…I think carbs have been made out to be the bad guy unfairly." -------------
|
Lowering the carbohydrates in the diet effectively dehydrates the body, she says. That equates to weight loss but not a healthy or permanent one. It’s a good idea to choose food at the lower end of the glycemic index (see sidebar), she says, and that can regulate your insulin levels. Increasing protein has been shown to decrease your appetite, Hart says, which could also contribute to weight loss. ------------ |
But all protein contains nitrogen which has to be "buffered" out of the body with calcium. For women particularly, a diet that is too high in protein risks stripping bone density. "Dieticians who are medically registered like me, there’s no way we would recommend a diet like that," she says. "I don’t think you can maintain that kind of eating for the rest of your life. I don’t think it’s a lifestyle." ------------- |
|
|
|||
|
Today for breakfast she had a drink made with microfiltered whey protein a type of dairy protein that has the highest "biological value" of any protein and is used by athletes to build lean muscle mass. Tonight she’ll have organic lamb and a "huge salad made with all different kinds of fresh herbs and whatever is there." She’s only human she skipped lunch today but yesterday she had chicken soup, "made with lots and lots of non-starchy vegetables and organic chicken" organic food whenever possible, she says, for the flavour alone. -------------
|
And at 60 she looks? She consults her 20 year old son "He says that’s a horrible question. Forty five no wait 42, he’s changed it." At 60, many people might be thinking about slowing down ("Hold on," Kenton says, "I just have to tell my son that"). ------------- |
How old does she feel? "How old do I feel? I don’t know. But I’m still learning. I have a whole new career ahead of me, I am learning film making because I want to make movies next. I guess I have a fair amount of energy. I guess I feel pretty good." ------------- |
"I have no intention of slowing down. I have raised
four children on my own by four different men. I have earned a living and
sent them to university. And now I have done that bit I am free to do all
sorts of things I’m dying to do. I have no intention of slowing down. I
will have to speed up, if anything."
------------- |
|
|
|||
|
Eat more fresh, non-starchy vegetables. "Things like broccoli and cauliflower and pumpkin and all different kinds of salad vegetables." Leslie Kenton says you can’t eat too many of these as they contain "the best sort of fibre in the world" as well as having amazing anti-oxidant properties. Kenton recommends fruit with a low glycemic index berries, melon and apples. "There’s something called the glycemic index for carbohydrate foods fruit is a carbohydrate and that measures how quickly the food turns to sugar in the bloodstream," she says. ------------- |
Eat lots of quality protein. "We have the best fish in the world in New Zealand and New Zealanders just don’t appreciate it the steak is good too, the lamb is very, very good and eggs." But this doesn’t require a filet mignon budget, she says. "You can make big soups out of very cheap meats and fish with lots and lots of non-starchy vegetables in them. I do this a lot." And for vegetarians? "Beans are pretty good and tofu and soy has its own benefits because it is full of plant hormones that help protect us from destructive hormones in the environment from herbicides and pesticides." ------------- |
Stay away from processed food. Our ancestors didn’t pick up ready-made meals from the supermarket, Kenton says, and they were better off for it. Such food is full of transfatty acids and what she calls "golden oils". They’ve been processed in a way that makes them highly dangerous to the body." ------------- Eat less carbohydrates. You don’t have to give them up, Kenton stresses. But ideally she believes carbohydrates would make up 30% of the human diet (with "good" fat making up 30% and protein making up 40%). Also go for carbohydrates with a low glycemic index. "Opt for non-starchy food," she says. "Bread, potatoes, sugar and breakfast cereal are very high. Beans are lower, all of the other vegetables and fruit are lower." ------------- |
Eat more fat. But only "good" fat, Kenton says, such as omega three fats from oily fish and flaxseed oil. Olive oil and coconut oil also has health giving properties, she says. Basically there are two essential fatty acids – omega six and omega three. Paleopathologists have found that our ancestors typically had two parts omega six to one part omega three. The average ratio now is 22 parts omega six to one part omega three. Omega six fatty acids are found in processed, "golden oils", Kenton says. "So we get far too many of them because they are cheap so they are in all our junk food."
------------- |