Did you watch the high fat versus high sugar Horizon programme recently? They set twin doctors up with different diets for a month and then assessed them at the end.
My view on this type of programme is that you must view them as exactly what they are: entertainment programmes and not much more. Interesting though it was, and I enjoyed watching it, you cannot take what happens as gospel because of the huge number of variables involved, let alone it only being for 30 days and on two people. To be fair, the programme did say several times you can’t extrapolate the experiences and test results of two people and apply that to people generally.
However, that appears to be what some people have done judging from the queries in my inbox! I’m not going to get into the debate about it all but Dr John Briffa has, and there is a heated conversation going on between him and Dr Mackenzie, the doctor on the programme which you can see here. I think it’s a little unfair to call the doctor out in this way; its a TV programme after all, but I can see Dr Briffa’s worry that people believe what they see and make health changes on the basis of it, which may actually not be right at all.
My view, for what it’s worth, based on clinical experience, is that anyone following either of those diets would have a health problem within a few months because they were both eating junk. The sugar diet is never going to be healthy. Had the high fat diet been a good high fat diet ie. avocados, wild-caught oily fish, nuts, seeds, grass fed meat etc with plenty of really good complex carbohydrate instead of rubbish, I think it would have been a very different story. In weight loss terms, the only diet I have ever really seen work consistently well is the lower carb, higher fat one as in the Belly Fat Plan.