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Medical Scribblings - 28 January 2004

Probably like the rest of the great British public I sit down in the evening and assuming that I don’t fall asleep, occasionally catch something on TV that seems interesting. There have been two programmes recently. Firstly the short series by Robert Winston on following up a group of children and secondly the results of the research on various types of diet.

Starting with the children there has always been this argument among Doctors, Psychologists, Educationalists etc about whether aspects of childrens personalities were inherent in their genes or a part of the culture in which we are brought up. It’s always been accepted that the colour of your eyes or the curlyness of your hair were inherited but it gets much more difficult when you move onto personality. The message that I took from the programmes was that underlying personality is inherited but can be modified by recognising that this was the case and deciding to do something about it. For instance there was one child who was very shy, as was his mother, but when she started to make the effort to mix with others so as to help him, it had a huge beneficial effect on her life as well.

This struck me as very much what good counselling is about, not telling people what they should do but helping them to get a better insight into their personality so that they can develop the self esteem to move forward themselves.

I think that they are planning to follow these children up for several years so it will be most interesting to see how their personalities come through.

The dieting programme was also fascinating as we are bombarded with ways of losing weight without any proper scientific trials. If a company wants to put a new drug on the market they have to show that it works but it seems that we are happy to accept all sorts of dieting regimes without questioning whether they work.

Of the four that they tried out all of them were quite successful in the short term. The problem has always been that once you stop the diet not only do you regain the lost pounds but you actually add on some more. It is as though your body interprets the lack of food as starvation and resets the thermostat to build up more reserves for the next famine.

The Atkin’s diet claimed to have broken this vicious circle by getting you to eat loads of fat and protein with very little carbohydrate such as bread, rice and potatoes. It actually works but the reason behind it seemed to not fit in with scientific theory. The programme showed that people on this diet actually eat less. It seemed as though this very rich diet turned off their appetite and so they lost weight. Playing about with the combinations of food the answer came out that it was the high concentration of protein that had the damping effect on appetite.

Life is never that simple though because we know that diets high in animal protein tend to make you more prone to certain cancers and may well cause many other problems. As with all these things you find out one thing only to be confronted with a host of new questions.

The best advise that I can give you on diet at the present time is to eat a well balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables. To lose weight probably the best way is to give up your car, walk everywhere and grow your own veg.

John Schofield