Ordinary Gweilo

TVB has recently finished showing the first series of Channel Four’s "You are What you eat". The concept behind the show is that "leading nutritionist" Gillian McKeith advises an individual or family on adopting a healthier diet and lifestyle. It’s all good knockabout stuff – fat people meet a stern Barbara Woodhouse type who bullies them into giving up their chip butties and eating spinach and mung beans instead, and they lose weight.

The shows I have seen all seem to follow the same pattern. "Dr" McKeith (she’s not a real doctor and her PhD was acquired through a correspondence course) visits her victims, rifles through their kitchen cupboards and berates them for eating deep-fried Mars bars, burgers and chips, and washing it down with litres of fizzy drinks. They are horrified to discover what they are eating (having presumably not noticed what was in their shopping baskets) and are then presented with a table laden with the healthy food that they are to eat for the next eight weeks. Some looks OK, some doesn’t. After a few weeks they have a confrontation with "Dr" McKeith because they don’t like the food (or in one case because "avocados are too dear"). She puts them right, and they carry on with the diet.

After eight weeks they have lost two stone (it’s always two stone). They’re healthier and happier and have loads more energy.

In truth, how could they go wrong? Replacing junk food and fizzy drinks with fresh fruit and vegetables is bound to bring about an improvement, especially for someone who is seriously overweight. Adopting a healthier diet for a couple of months (especially with the incentive of being on the telly) is not that much of a challenge.

The problem is that a show where overweight people start eating fruit and vegetables is hardly gripping television. Hence we have the showpiece of confronting the victims with the bad food they eat, the engineered drama of their rebellion when the new food isn’t entirely to their liking, and the final triumph of losing two stone (did I mention that it’s always two stone) and having so much more energy.

For me, there’s always some entertainment to be had from the hilariously unwise eating habits of many of the participants. Several fried breakfasts a day (all swimming in fat), white bread plastered with butter, home-made fudge, all those fizzy drinks (or energy drinks), doughnuts, every conceivable type of fast food, and goodness knows what else. I mean, do they really need a nutrionist to point out that this may not be such a good idea?

The show also features "Dr" McKeith’s pseudo-science. There’s the tongue inspection, the poo analysis ("this programme contains disturbing scenes") and the blood test, all of which enables Ms McKeith to explain to her obviously over-weight victims that they are, er, not very healthy. What a revelation.

Another problem here is separating common sense from pseudo-science. Ms McKeith gushes enthusiastically about the healthy diet she advocates, but in many cases her explanations make no sense:

[Ms McKeith claims that] Chlorophyll is "high in oxygen". And the darker leaves on plants are good for you, she explains, because they contain "chlorophyll – the ‘blood’ of the plant – which will really oxygenate your blood." Here we run into a classic Bad Science problem. Chlorophyll is a small green molecule that uses the energy from light to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen. Plants then use this sugar energy to make everything else they need, like protein, and you breathe in the oxygen, and maybe you even eat the plants. You also breathe out carbon dioxide. It’s all so beautiful, so gracefully simple, yet so rewardingly complex, so neatly connected, not to mention true, that I can’t imagine why you’d want to invent nonsense to believe instead.

Ms McKeith has, of course, written a book to accompany the TV series. Needless to say, a book telling you to eat more fruit, vegetables and pulses would be thin (and rather pointless), so there is plenty of unhelpful and impractical advice to be offered as well. Private Eye reviewed the book (unfavourably) last year, complaining that it advocates Ms McKeith’s "Diet of Abundance", which is a collection of esoteric roots, herbs and algae that (luckily enough) you can purchase through the author’s website, and pointing out (as noted above) that some of the science in the book is dubious at best.   

There’s also a second series of the TV programme, which I suppose TVB will be showing us in due course.  One can only hope that they find some subjects who are bit more of a challenge than those from the first series.  Or some new gimmicks.  Fat people not eating junk food is really not that interesting!