NHS Eatwell Guide: Well Plate or Hell Plate?

Why the NHS Eatwell Guide Won’t Curb Hunger or Support Hormones and Feelings of Wellbeing ... 

From the Balance of Good Health of 1994 to the Eatwell Plate of 2007 to the Eatwell Guide of 2016, this hell plate has had a few guises but has never changed the fundamentals of its unevidenced message that high dietary fat means high body fat and we should use carbohydrates for fuel.  Meanwhile, obesity and Type 2 diabetes figures remain on a rising trend.  Yet, it’s a message that, thirty unsuccessful years on, still says lowering dietary fat fixes these problems, if only we had the determination to follow the advice (and here you would do well to imagine a wagging finger telling you off).  Following suit of all narcissists, government policy will not be countenanced since the idea that the guidance itself has been fundamentally wrong would leave those in ‘authority’ with nutrient and good fat rich egg on their faces.  

• Eat five fruit and veg a day
• Lean protein should make up a third of your food intake
• Get 38% of your calories from carbohydrates
• Keep sugar, salt and fats out of your diet
• Women need 2000 calories and men need 2500 calories a day
• Choose low fat dairy products or their alternatives
• Choose unsaturated oils from vegetable sources and use in small amounts 
• Have two servings of fish per week, of which one should be oily

It’s NHS and government guidance so the Eatwell Guide must be good for us, right?  They’ve a vested interest in keeping us a) healthy and, subsequently, b) out of the GP’s surgery, surely?  They have to understand the link between what we eat and hormones, right?  And they must get that people are living complex twenty-first century lives, yes?

It’s time for a cautionary tale on authorities.  Until the 1950s, doctors recommended smoking.  Apparently, it calmed nerves, soothed throat irritation, provided emotional support, whatever suspect claims the tobacco companies dreamed up:  I’m your best friend; I’m your Lucky Strike or Switch to Kools and you’ll be alright - Kools being menthol cigarettes which were considered more ‘ladylike’ and beneficial for throat ailments but most certainly weren’t alright.  Nicotine alone was the enemy, cigarette manufacturers purported, and doctors concurred, not the myriad of toxins in cigarettes.  With nicotine being an addictive stimulant, and cigarettes being full of carcinogenic toxins, what could possibly go wrong?  It was a horrifyingly rude awakening for doctors, and more so their dutiful patients, when, in the ‘50s, scientists established the irrefutable link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer.  The doctors were wrong.  Hippocratic oaths were up in smoke, just like a patient’s killer Woodbine.  In short, the ‘experts’ were wrong.

We challenge that Public Health England’s simplistic policy of nutrition being a matter of chew-to-poo is inadequate.  We’re not flatworms.  Yes, we consume nourishment from the external environment through our GI tract, but what we choose to bring in, how it affects the body and how the mind is engaged in those choices of food is complex and, at WillPowders, we don’t pretend they aren’t.  We eat to facilitate eleven vital life systems, which is physically stressful for the mind and body in itself.  Amongst all this is our sense of our physical form, not just our physical form, and this comes from the mind - an immaterial part of us produced through the relationship between the brain, the body, socialisation and our deepest sense of awareness of existing.  Unfortunately, the way the Eatwell Guide treats our eating habits is akin to treating us at best with little more complexity than a car engine: put the right fuel in and we’ll just rev(el).  But, alarmingly, if we run with the idea that we are merely feeding a physical machine for a moment, with a greater than one third carbs and keep fats low-fat approach, WillPowders consider the policy’s advice to be like putting high octane petrol in the tank of a diesel car.  Worse still, because we do have minds and brains as well as bodies, no acknowledgement is made of the driver of the car and their experience of sitting in the driving seat negotiating stressful traffic daily!  There is not one piece of gentle compassion forthcoming that recognises eating with the rigidity of the Eatwell Guide’s ‘balance’ takes its toll because we are likely to be on Route Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity Highway.  The review of the evidence on which all the low fat nonsense was based is now widely known to be considered sketchy at best.  

At WillPowders, we disrupt the idea that physical health can be divorced from mental health and vice versa.  This is why we link body and brain in our supplements.  We also engage in a dialogue with you about how you live, how you want to live and your relationship with wellbeing through our Facebook community and asking for your help in our research.  Hello to the whole of glorious you - mind, body and life spark!  If you are looking to start somewhere in terms of changing the potential destination of your long term health and wellbeing, and suspect that the concept of ‘eating well’ that you’ve been served up is turning out to be one very long running con, Davinia’s book It's Not a Diet is an excellent place to start.  With wit, humour and evidence, it takes you through how to begin to unpick the ‘education’ on healthy eating you’ve been spoonfed and it helps you to understand why that ‘education’ made you feel pretty crap all round.  Once you understand how good fat, lower carbohydrates and avoiding unnecessary chemical loads from ultra processed food can be the start of a real wellness odyssey, you’ll wish you’d bought the Beginner’s Bundle so that you can set sail immediately!  It contains some handy travel sized magic to help you step away from unhealthy snacks with MCT Keto Creamer to feed your brain and curb carb cravings via your favourite hot drink, Bovine Collagen to start providing you with the the building blocks to repair from essential amino acids (that your body hasn’t been getting from that 38% carbohydrate balance) and the potential to help smooth out your blood sugar roller coaster and L-theanine via Calm to help you stop with feelings of panic and the jitters, the brain’s way of encouraging your body to take on even more carbs, and allow you to get on with what your brain-body system can do perfectly well when fuelled correctly - get on with its business without turning you into a carb hunting creature.  All the while, you can feel happy in your tummy for longer and get on with creating a fabulous day, undistracted by those siren-like creatures The Callings of the Carbs.  Now you’re on the road to turning Eatwell into BeatHell!

Before the work day has finished, it all gets horribly complicated and starts to smell like a maths test.  If Sophia eats wheat bricks, grapes, strawberries and pears for breakfast, sweet potatoes and beetroot with lean chicken for lunch, brown toast with low fat spread mid-afternoon, how many marbles does she have left by high tea?  WillPowders plump for option D: Zero!  Could the problem be the lack of good fats and an excess of sugars are what makes up an Eat‘well’ plate?  Definitely.  The Eatwell plate has a good fat proportion of ≤ 5 minutes before you’re reaching for a biscuit!  It’s seemingly a case of looking the other way with this pie chart as some of those fruits and veg are also carbs.  Maybe they'd have been better off using a Venn diagram with sugars right in the middle to illustrate how it’s really not as simple as this plate attempts to make it seem, if, of course, we are good at reading pie charts as percentages, fractions or proportions.  With all this numeracy nonsense, it’s like someone’s deep frying our brains in reduced fat vegetable oil- yuck!