6 minutes | Thursday, 10 May 2018
Approximately half of the British population are on a diet at any one time, however calorie-restricting diets don’t work long-term and are a waste of time and money, according to one of Britain’s leading young neuroscientists.
Public Health England says the nation needs to go on a diet, but Dr Jason McKeown disagrees – he claims that merely cutting down the calories, the basis for most diets, is a practise which will nearly always fail.
Dr McKeown is the youngest ever Visiting Scholar at the University of California’s Brain and Cognition Centre in San Diego. Weight, metabolism and hunger levels, he says, are all controlled by the brain.
He claims we each have a range of weight at which our brain is happy, that this range is negatively influenced by a poor, high sugar diet and the only way to influence weight in the long-term is to reset the range, via stimulating the brain.
Dr McKeown was joined by GP Dr Monah Mansoori.