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Are chemical calories making us fat?
If one in three women in Britain are always on a diet and billions of pounds are spent on slimming products, why on earth are we all getting fatter?
This is the puzzle that led Dr Paula Baillie-Hamilton, author of The Detox Diet: Eliminate Chemical Calories and Restore Your Body's Natural Slimming System, to research some of factors that might explain our failure to get thinner. Her conclusions are shocking. The solution to our ever-expanding waistlines is to be found in the form of 'chemical calories', which 'lurk in every bite of food we eat, every sip of liquid we drink and in the very air we breath'. Sounds pretty scary.
Why chemicals are making us fat
Baillie-Hamilton gives a detailed explanation of why chemical calories are responsible for wide-scale weight gain. Farmers feed their livestock growth-promoting additives that force animals to gain weight fast.
These chemicals improve the efficiency of food by changing the animal's metabolism in such a way that less food goes further. Our metabolism is then affected by the animal products we consume. According to Baillie-Hamilton, synthetic chemicals impact on our bodies in a variety of ways.
They damage the natural appetite 'switch', which tells us when to stop eating, and they make us store fat more effectively. If any vegetarians out there are breathing a self-satisfied sigh of relief, then prepare yourself for some bad news: it's not just meat that's contaminated.
The same chemicals that promote weight gain in animals and humans are sprayed on vegetables and used in medicines, cosmetics, toiletries, metals, plastics and household products.
The Detox Diet is full of terrifying-looking graphs that show the 'fat epidemic' moving in tandem with the increasing use of chemicals in food production. It is estimated that each of us has roughly 300-500 industrial chemicals in our bodies. The presence of chemical calories means that we can no longer diet according to the conventional rules; the normal calorie content of food is distorted by the presence of chemical calories. Lettuce, for example, can be more fattening than the high-calorie avocado because it is a fragile crop that is sprayed often with preservatives and pesticides.
The omnipresence of fat-inducing chemicals begs the valid question, if everyone is absorbing these dangerous chemicals, why isn't everyone fat? Baillie-Hamilton argues that all bodies are different and some people have a more pronounced reaction to these chemicals.
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