A Diet for those who love to eat and wish to lose weight

The 5:2 diet – feasts for fast days

With its flexible approach and simple rules, the 5:2 diet has become the calorie-control plan for people who like to eat

• 
• • Felicity Cloake
  • The Guardian, Sunday 5 May 2013 19.30 BST

The fasting diet, otherwise known as the 5:2, restricts calories for two days a week. Photograph: Felicity Cloake

For the first time since university I am on a diet. Somehow, I've become a calorie-counter, someone who weighs out porridge oats and drinks herbal tea. In other words, the kind of person I've always pitied.

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The thing is, I'm actually quite enjoying it – enjoying being a relative term, of course. In an ideal world, I'd boast the kind of robust metabolism that laughs in the face of cooking six bakewell tarts an afternoon, but I don't. And since I started my Perfect recipe column a couple of years ago, I've noticed the pounds slowly creeping on. There's a lot to love about my job, but it does make it almost impossible to eat healthily.

The fasting diet, otherwise known as the 5:2 because of the format – five days of normal eating a week and two in which you restrict your calories (500kcal for women, 600kcal for men) – seemed to offer a glimmer of hope for my hips. It's basically the diet for people who like food. Everyone from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstallto wine writer Fiona Beckett has been boring on about fast days, and if they could do it, well, so could I.

So far, I've managed two months. As someone who's never made a habit of weighing themselves, I can only tell you that I think I've lost about 10lb since I started, which includes a two-week period over Easter where I gave myself a bit of a break, but only put back on 1lb.

The odd thing was, after Easter I was impatient to get going again. The 5:2 already feels like a long-term project. It's not difficult to stick to either. After all, if you really want a biscuit, you can always have one tomorrow – a thought I find extremely cheering.

Many people I've spoken to seem to avoid cooking at all on a fast day, reasoning perhaps that it simply puts temptation in their way. Indeed, in her book, the Fast Diet, co-authored with Dr Michael Mosley, whose 2012 BBC Horizon programme on fasting kickstarted interest in the idea, Mimi Spencer advises preparing food in advance, and keeping it simple, "aiming for fast-day flavour without effort".

I couldn't disagree more. For me, the challenge of devising satisfying recipes that fit within the daily 500-kcal limit has kept fast days interesting, and frankly, if you're only going to be eating two small meals a day, heating them up in the microwave makes things even more depressing. Here are a few tips I've found useful so far, and three of my favourite fast-day recipes …

• Low-calorie cooking is all about strong flavours: pungent spices, zesty lemon juice and salty soy sauce will all help to distract your attention from the missing calories, as will lots of garlic and big handfuls of fresh herbs.

• Don't be too hard on yourself. Usually I sniffily avoid artificial sweeteners, but a cold glass of slimline tonic with a slice of lime and plenty of ice goes down a treat when everyone else is glugging wine. I've even been known to indulge in a low-calorie pot of jelly when I'm feeling particularly wild.

• Carbs are rarely worth the calories. A paltry 50g of brown rice takes up over a third of your daily calorie count. Save them for tomorrow and fill up on vegetables and berries instead.

• Pickles such as gherkins (14kcal per 100g) and miso soups (20-30kcal a cup) are your friends for snacks.

• Drink lots. Sparkling water, evil diet drinks and weird and wonderful teas will keep you occupied mid-afternoon.

• Embrace your inner nerd and invest in a set of electronic scales and a calorie-counting book or app, or you'll find it impossible to measure your intake accurately.

The Herbalife saga is practically a made-for-Hollywood script

Herbalife is a diet company that excels at drama. It has Wall Street titans sparring, KPMG resigning and investors confused

• 
• • Heidi Moore
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 April 2013 20.45 BST

Bill Ackman (right) traded insults with fellow hedge funder Carl Icahn on television over Herbalife. Photograph: Reuters

There is something about diet company Herbalife that makes very rich men act very strangely. The weight-loss company should be relatively unremarkable. Instead it's been in the center of a dramatic story that should have Hollywood calling.

It has everything – intense, dashing hedge-fund titans embroiled in a public war, allegations of pyramid schemes, billions of dollars riding on on the outcome and now, as of today, a rogue auditor who risked his entire career by allegedly squirreling away inside information to make himself a profit. The Herbalife scandal even features Carl Icahn, one of the 1980s corporate raiders who reportedly inspired the timeless capitalist character of Gordon Gekko. If Wall Street wars got Oscars, Herbalife would be a top contender.

With so much heady money and power surrounding Herbalife, it's no surprise that the wafting scent of greed would envelop one of the people whose virtue should have been above reproach: the company's auditor, the prestigious accounting firm KPMG.

Auditors are not glamorous people. If investment bankers are the popular, fratty jocks of the financial world, and traders are the kids who love to hang out with their Camaros, auditors are more like the bespectacled stars of the math team. They are accountants – precise and cautious by nature – and, as a result, they have all the usual attendant social insecurities that nerds do: they're so happy just to be invited to the party that they may not judge too carefully the underage drinking and drugs that are going on. When auditors get into trouble – as they did with companies like Enron and WorldCom – it's usually because they were too eager to please their clients that they kept quiet when they saw something wrong. They didn't want to lose their place at the party.

So the "rogue auditor" is a rare character to cast. Auditors are often guilty of neglect, or looking the other way; rarely do they do something really bold and reckless like trade on inside information. Yet, apparently prompted by the drama around Herbalife, this is what a partner with the company's auditor, KPMG, did, according to Herbalife.

KPMG fired the rogue auditor on 5 April and told Herbalife about the whole debacle yesterday. This morning, Herbalife's stock was halted for an unusually long time – two hours – as the company tried to decide how to tell investors.

During that time, traders and journalists took to Twitter to speculate on what could possibly be so horrible that it would require the company to completely stop trading its stock for most of the morning.

The answer, it turns out, was pretty bad.

The partner at KPMG was entrusted with combing Herbalife's financial statements for errors. Unfortunately, according to Herbalife's version of the story, he also shared the company's confidential information with someone else, presumably so they could make a profit of their own. That would give him an incentive to mess with the company's results to help his own financial interests. As a result, KPMG's entire opinion on the company is reduced to worthless chaos; the auditor said it had to withdraw its reports on Herbalife for the last three fiscal years.

Herbalife, already embroiled in months of wars between its investors, hastened to assure everyone that the company was still sound. It stressed that KPMG had resigned as its auditor purely because of the possible insider trading and "not for any reason related to Herbalife's financial statements, its accounting practices, the integrity of Herbalife's management or for any other reason".

Herbalife managed to contain the damage: by halting the stock for two hours, it had raised expectations that the news would be far worse. The stock fell only 1% on the news when it finally came out. However, there was still evidence of chaos. In the same statement, Herbalife said that KPMG had said the three years of financial statements could both be "continued to be relied upon" and "should no longer be relied upon".

So that clears things up.

This only adds another twist for the Herbalife saga that's been playing out on the larger Wall Street stage. It was only three months ago that the distinguished Carl Icahn was publicly trading insults on television with Bill Ackman, the silver-haired, baby-faced boy wonder of investing. Ackman has argued that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme and has bet against the company; Icahn took the other side of the bet. Daniel Loeb, who was previously a friend of Ackman's, shocked the investing world by switching allegiances and taking Icahn's side.

There's a lot more information that has yet to come out about the problem with KPMG and Herbalife. That's good if you're in Hollywood. It means there's enough time to run through the casting. What do you think of Alan Alda, Elliott Gould, or Frank Langella to play Carl Icahn? John Slattery to play Bill Ackman? Michael Sheen as Dan Loeb? Philip Seymour Hoffman as the rogue auditor?

Now who's going to call John Grisham and tell him about all this?

Alzheimer's could be due to junk food

There is evidence that poor diet is one cause of Alzheimer's. If ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, this is it

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 September 2012 20.30 BST

Because regulation is light, the industry can kill off the only effective system for telling us how much fat, sugar and salt food contains. Photograph: Brownstock Inc/Alamy

When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies who appear to delight in other people's problems.

When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it may be driven by similar forms of addiction.

I suspect that much of this mockery is a coded form of snobbery: the strong association between poor diets and poverty allows people to use this issue as a cipher for something else they want to say, which is less socially acceptable.

But this problem belongs to all of us. Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.

New Scientist carried this story on its cover on 1 September; since then I've been sitting in the library, trying to discover whether it stands up. I've now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I've tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. Though the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.

About 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer's disease worldwide; current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050. But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain's impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the United States, the percentage of the population with type 2 diabetes, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years. If Alzheimer's, or "type 3 diabetes", goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.

Insulin is the hormone that prompts the liver, muscles and fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Type 2 diabetes is caused by excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its signals by the organs that would usually take up the glucose.

The association between Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes is long-established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more likely to be struck by this form of dementia than the general population. There are also associations between Alzheimer's and obesity and Alzheimer's and metabolic syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies).

Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer's was another form of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged to people who had died of the disease. They found that the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in the brains of Alzheimer's patients were much lower than those in the brains of people who had died of other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain most affected by the disease.

Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions: as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and affects their growth, plasticity and survival.

Experiments conducted since then seem to support the link between diet and dementia, and researchers have begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex, involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein and the transformation of another. I would need the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you're interested, please follow the links on my website).

Plenty of research still needs to be done. But, if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer's disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, seem to be incapable of responding.

In this country, as in many others, the government's answer to the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed much of the responsibility for improving the nation's diet to food and drink companies – a strategy that would work only if they volunteered to abandon much of their business.

A scarcely regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating. It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedom granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools. It can kill off the only effective system (the traffic-light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war, a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.

We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer's disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It's not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies – both those who mock people for their pathology and those who spread the pathology by peddling a lethal diet.

Having cancer is an education, and this is what I have learned

Illness introduced me to a beautiful network of dependence – and a struggle for autonomy I can't win on my own

• 
• • Mike Marqusee
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 July 2011 22.00 BST
  • larger | smaller

The discipline of nursing converts science into care. Photograph: Bert Hardy/Getty Images
Now entering my fifth year of living with multiple myeloma, a haematological cancer, I reflect back on a roller-coaster ride of symptoms, treatments and side effects. Whatever else this experience has been, it's been an education. But what exactly have I learned? To begin with, that any glib answer to the question misses the core of the experience – the complex dialectic of being ill, which is a social as well as physical condition. For me the experience has led to a heightened awareness of both our intricate dependence on others and our deep-seated need for independence. Sitting with my IV drip, I like to think about all the human labour and ingenuity that come together in this medical moment. I could dedicate the rest of my life to this exercise and still not complete the inventory. The first circle of dependence is immediate and sometimes intimate. Partners, friends, doctors, nurses, cleaners, porters. Beyond them is a vast network of people I never see: pathologists, pharmacists, IT engineers, appointments managers. Everyone who has anything to do with maintaining the supply of medications or the functioning of equipment or getting me to and from hospital. Everyone who makes sure the lights are on and the building safe. The whole intricate ballet that is a functioning hospital. One misstep, and the whole breaks down, with potentially dire consequences. Beyond that, I'm dependent on a long history of scientific development to which individuals and institutions in many countries have contributed. From the British chemist Bence Jones identifying the protein associated with multiple myeloma in the 1840s to the pathologist and one-time film star Justine Wanger developing the IV drip in the 1930s; from the first experiments with chemotherapy (a byproduct of chemical warfare) in the 1940s, through the protracted struggle to master the art of toxicity (a dialectic of creation and destruction, if there ever was one), to the discovery of proteasome inhibitors in the 1990s and the creation of new "targeted therapies", like the one I'm currently receiving. Without innumerable advances in immunology, biochemistry, chemical engineering, statistics and metallurgy, to name but a few, I wouldn't be where I am now – in fact I wouldn't be at all. The drip flowing into my vein is drawn from a river with innumerable tributaries. It is an entirely rational, intelligible process but no less miraculous for that. And it's not just a story of science. Alongside that – and necessary to it – is the long history of the hospital, of the discipline of nursing, of the social developments that made it possible to convert raw science into practical care. I'm acutely conscious of how dependent I am on those who built and sustained the NHS – including, pre-eminently, generations of labour movement activists and socialists. And as I sit with my IV drip, I'm mindful of those in government and business who would smash the delicate mechanism of the hospital and shatter the network of dependence that sustains me. I'm being kept alive by the contributions of so many currents of human labour, thought, struggle, desire, imagination. By the whole Enlightenment tradition, but not only that: by older traditions of care, solidarity, mutuality, of respect for human life and compassion for human suffering. The harnessing of science, technology and advanced forms of organisation and information to compassionate ends is by no means automatic. It leans on and is only made possible by the conflict-riddled history of ethical and political development. Beautiful as it is, this network of dependence is also frightening. Restrictions in capacity and mobility are hugely frustrating, and relying on others to supplement them is not a straightforward business – for patient or carer. I often feel I'm engaged in a never-ending battle for autonomy. I fight it out in relation to institutions, experts, medications, means of mobility, forms of diet. Not to mention the vital effort to live a life beyond illness, to hold on to that kernel of freedom that makes you who you are. Paradoxically the struggle for autonomy is one you can't win on your own. You need allies, and part of being a carer is being an ally, not a nursemaid or controller. Independence is the stuff of life. But you can achieve it only through dependence on others, past and present. That's a truth driven home to the cancer patient but applicable to all of us. Illness is not an ideology-free zone. Certainly not for the government, which aims to divide sufferers into acute cases deserving of support, and less acute ones that must be forced back into the labour market, where our only function will be to undercut wages. This is one reason why resistance to the attacks on benefits for the disabled ought to be a central plank of the anti-cuts movement. The crisis facing the ill is an extreme form of the crisis facing the majority of the populace. We don't want charity – the form of dependence that makes independence impossible – but rights, and the resources to exercise those rights. Speaking for myself, taking part in anti-cuts activity is some of the best therapy available, an unashamed acknowledgement of social dependence and at the same time a declaration of political-spiritual independence.