A) Wow – there is almost a book’s worth to answer this question – I’ll try to give the headlines:

0) There’s a point before even getting to point (1), which is that we don’t actually have cholesterol freely floating around in our blood. Hence it is not even strictly accurate to say we have a blood cholesterol level! Cholesterol is not water soluble, so it is carried round the body to do its many functions in things called lipoproteins. We measure these as Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) and High Density Lipoproteins (HDL). LDL is called bad cholesterol – it is not. It should more accurately be called the carrier of fresh cholesterol, as LDL particles transport fresh cholesterol from the liver out to the parts of the body. HDL is called good cholesterol – it is not. It should more accurately be called the carrier of recycled cholesterol, as HDL particles transport residual cholesterol back to the liver to be recycled.

1) Cholesterol is a vital substance in the human body – so much so that it is actually made by the body (in the liver). Every cell needs cholesterol to survive and repair itself. Our muscles need cholesterol, our sexual functioning requires cholesterol and so on. This is why some of the side effects of statins (drugs designed to mess up the body’s own process by which it makes cholesterol) are muscle fatigue (and even wasting) and sexual problems. I would not allow any doctor to try to lower my body’s natural production of cholesterol for any reason – that’s my personal position – each of you need to have your own, but do your own reading and research to come to your own opinion. Don’t just take the view of your GP – or at least ask them if they receive any funds for performing your cholesterol test (they do – from the government of all places) and see if they or the surgery receive any funding or perks from pharmaceutical companies that make statins.

2) I do not believe that we even have a consistent and reasonable definition of “high cholesterol”. Doctors used to only even look at cholesterol levels in excess of 7, then it became 6 and now 5 is deemed the magic number beyond which everyone shall be put on statins and told to eat man-made, likely hydrogenated margarine. There is no science behind the number 5 – it has been driven down by pressure from pharmaceutical companies over the years. They would happily have the number at 4 – at which level almost everyone in the UK would need to be on statins. How can it be that a ‘normal’ reading is one that would require virtually every adult to be taking drugs?

3) I am one of the growing minority who do NOT believe that cholesterol causes heart disease (why on earth would the body make a substance that kills us? This defies everything logical about evolution). Even if you believe that cholesterol does cause heart disease, the next massive assumption is that anything we eat can have any impact on cholesterol. It is widely accepted (but not widely known) that eating cholesterol (in eggs and other animal products) has no impact on a human’s cholesterol levels. Eggs have been exonerated of any crimes they were alleged to have committed but no big announcement was made to tell people this.

4) The next allegation is that eating saturated fat causes cholesterol. The Food Standards Agency have admitted to me in writing that the study to prove this has not actually been done but, from a number of  studies of association, it is believed that eating saturated fat causes heart disease. I liken this to – we have observed a number of people in the bath who are also singing, so we will claim that taking a bath causes singing! To jump from association to causation is a school boy error and we have made it time after time with fat, cholesterol and heart disease.

Again – I do not believe that nature would put anything in real food that would kill us. I have no idea what sugar, emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated margarines, transfats and so on could do to us – I don’t put them in my body, so I don’t take the risk of finding out. (*)

5) The whole body functions better at normal weight. Hence you have are significantly more likely to have ‘normal’ cholesterol, ‘normal’ blood pressure, low risk of Diabetes etc when you are within the normal weight range. The single most important thing you can do for your overall health is to not smoke. The second most important thing is to eat well (real food, not processed food) and to be in the normal weight range.

Given that 98% of calorie controlled diets will fail (Stunkard & Hume 1959) and given what we know from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, The Harcombe Diet has to be good for someone with ‘high’ cholesterol (whatever that means) because it gives you a high chance of losing weight and maintaining a normal weight. The other diets that will do this (if you can stick to them) are the extremely low carb diets (like Atkins). Interestingly, a study for the 2004 Horizon programme on Atkins found that not only did people lose more weight on Atkins than on low fat/low calorie diets, they demonstrated a 10 fold improvement in cholesterol vs the low fat group! So, this study alone showed that eating fat will neither make you fat nor raise cholesterol – quite the opposite.

I personally think that The Harcombe Diet can only help with your health, weight and body tests. There can be no doubt that humans are better off avoiding processed food – we have simply had no time to evolve to adapt to the massive number of unfamiliar ingredients that go into our body every day, if we eat processed food. You may like to have more carb meals than fat meals (you will lose weight more slowly if you do this) and you may like to have lower fat versions of protein (lean meat, fish etc). If I tell you that the main fat in lard is monounsaturated fat, would you start to realise how much misinformation you have been given and how you shouldn’t worry about ‘fatty meat’?! The only meat you need to avoid is processed  Pepperamis and other manufactured horrors.

I have this little factoid that I’ve developed:

“If we have been eating food in the form that nature intended for 24 hours, agriculture (large scale access to  carbohydrates) developed four minutes ago and sugar consumption has increased twenty fold in the last five seconds. I wonder which food is more likely to be responsible for obesity, diabetes, or indeed any modern disease…”

(*) I consume no more than 10g of sugar a day in a 85/90% cocoa bar of chocolate. I don’t consume any sweeteners, emulsifiers, transfats, hydrogenated fats etc .

A) Great Q on the dairy/Natural Live Yoghurt – I can’t believe I haven’t had that one before!

Phase 1 came about by looking at the ‘perfect diets’ for Candida, Food Intolerance and Hypoglycaemia and then trying to design a diet that would be optimal for all 3. The diets were very consistent in some areas and differed in others. (Even the diets for Candida vary – Trowbridge & Walker advise differently to Crook and Chaitow is slightly different again). The compromise I went for, in designing Phase 1, was to allow NLY as it is so beneficial for Candida and there is much evidence (see below) that even people with lactose intolerance don’t have problems with yoghurt. Add to this that I have seen 1 or 2 clients with lactose intolerance and about 99% with wheat intolerance and you decide that NLY is a very low risk. And it adds so much variety and enjoyment to those tough 5 days!

“Yogurt containing live active bacteria is believed to improve lactose digestion for the same reason that probiotics are thought to work. When yogurt is consumed, bile acids disrupt the cell wall of the bacteria in yogurt. This releases the enzyme beta-galactosidase (related to lactase) into the intestines, where it can enhance lactose digestion. Not any yogurt will do. It must contain live active bacteria.

Although yogurt is a milk product, many people with lactose intolerance do not experience symptoms after eating yogurt, even the kind that doesn’t contain live active bacteria.”

The original source for the above extract is here.

A) Yes – I just group all such things under ‘herbal teas’ – so everything from peppermint to chamomile to rosehip, blackcurrent, raspberry and vanilla – any such teas are absolutely fine in any phase of the diet. They always smell better than they taste I find!

A) Tahini is a sesame seed paste. I’ve checked my nutrition composition database and it only lists Tahini in a sesame butter form (it must be butter based, therefore).

It lists 100g of tahini as containing 53g fat and 22g carb (protein is 17g and the rest is water), so it mixes at source, just as nuts and seeds do (makes sense).

Not good even for Phase 2, therefore, but OK as a cheat for Phase 3.

A) If you cut all carbs out of your diet for a couple of weeks (assuming you have got some weight to lose) you will lose weight. It is one of the most effective ways of losing weight.

I research obesity and there is an ongoing debate about whether all calories are the same and I (along with Kekwick & Pawan, Atkins and many others) firmly believe that cutting carbs has more impact than cutting calories. (I just had to observe my brother develop diabetes aged 15 and he lost 20lbs in 10 days simply because he no longer produced any insulin). The only foods that make your body produce insulin are carbs – hence why cutting carbs can have such a dramatic effect.

To have maximum impact you probably want to do the first stage of Atkins, in effect. This allows no more than 20g of carbs each day so this would allow you a small portion of green salad or green vegetables with each of your 2 main meals and NO other carbs. No fruit, rice, pasta, bread, potatoes, coloured vegetables etc.

How will you feel? Possibly not great! Bad breath and constipation are the 2 most commonly reported symptoms. You may well (not certain) suffer low energy in the short term, as the body finds it easier to get energy from carbs, so your body will have quite a shock and may struggle to make energy in the first few days. Some people, however, report feeling quite bright and clear headed (after all – you are also avoiding all processed foods and sugar and other stuff that you are much better off without). So it really varies per person – you could always try it?!

How much you will lose will depend on how much you have to lose. If you are just 7lbs above your natural weight (your natural weight is likely to be somewhere around 20-21 BMI most likely), you will probably lose this in 2 weeks. If you have 100lbs to lose, you could lose 10-20lbs.

The first weight lost in a diet like this is water. This is because the body will raid its store of glycogen the minute you deny it carbs and every gram of glycogen is accompanied by 3-4g of water – so you will lose a few pounds in the first couple of days.

The key challenge will be – can you stick to this? If you can, you will lose weight.

Hope this helps
All the best – Zoe Harcombe

A) PLEASE don’t do this. At 5’4″ your current Body Mass Index (BMI) is 18.5 – right at the bottom end of normal. You are tiny! And you are only 13! If you try and lose weight now, you could stunt your growth for ever. If you achieved your ‘goal’ of no more than 98 pounds in weight, you would be seriously underweight and could end up shorter than you should be for life.

Take any advice that other people give you for toning up (swimming is fantastic for toning and building the 3 S’s – strength, stamina and suppleness) but please don’t do any diet tips that you may be given.

Enjoy your lovely body as it is now – I bet you can wear any clothes you like and your friends must envy you. I had anorexia at little more than your age – you really don’t want to head in that direction.

Sorry if this isn’t what you want to hear, but a lot of people on these pages really do care and we just can’t give you advice that would ruin you.
All the best – Zoe

A) All fats consist of chain-like molecules. In animal fats these chains are very flexible but the molecules in vegetable oils have rigid kinks, which make them less flexible. The animal fats, with the flexible chains, are solid at room temperature. The vegetable oils, with the more rigid chains, are liquid at room temperature.

About 100 years ago it was discovered that liquid oils could be converted to solid fats by a process called ‘hydrogenation’. Hydrogen was literally added to liquid oil until it became a solid fat (hence why these fats are also called hydrogenated fats). This was done because fat in the solid form is much more useful in food manufacture (you can’t spread sunflower oil on bread easily, but you can use sunflower spread).

After the Second World War the process for making hydrogenated fats from cheaper sources of vegetable oils was widely adopted. Margarines were developed and marketed as alternatives to butter, and vegetable shortenings increasingly replaced the animal fats traditionally used in cooking.

One of the key problems is that there are natural (real) foods and unnatural (artificial) foods for a reason. The artificial hardening of vegetable oils by hydrogenation leads to chains of molecules, which are not natural and cannot be properly digested by the body.

Back as far as 1975, in my local area of South Wales (at what is now known as the University of Glamorgan), a group of scientists (led by Leo Thomas) did some comprehensive research into transfats. They suspected that eating partially hydrogenated fats had a connection with heart disease and this hypothesis was further investigated at the Harvard School of Public Health in the US.

It is now generally accepted that trans-fats are actually worse for our health than the saturated animal fats that they were designed to replace.

In terms of The Harcombe Diet, this is all about real food, so we would never support the consumption of manufactured fats of any kind. Fats recommended in The Harcombe Diet are real fats that humans have been eating for thousands of years – meat, fish, eggs, milk, nuts, seeds and so on.

I hope this helps!
Kind regards – Zoe

A) I have researched overeating for most of my adult life and have concluded that there are 3 (very common) medical conditions that cause (insatiable) food cravings. If you find you can’t stop eating and have huge cravings for food, I would put money on you having 1 or all of these conditions. They are:

1) Candida – This is a yeast, which lives in all of us, and is normally kept under control by our immune system and other bacteria in our body. It usually lives in the digestive system. Candida has no useful purpose. If it stays quiet and in balance, it causes no harm. The problem starts if Candida multiplies out of control and then it can create havoc with our health and wellbeing. Candida has been shown to cause insatiable food cravings – particularly for all sugary foods, bread, cakes, biscuits, fruit/fruit juices and vinegary/pickled foods.

2) Food Intolerance means, quite simply, not being able to tolerate a particular food. Food Intolerance develops when you have too much of a food and too often and your body just gets to the point where it can’t cope with that food any longer. Food Intolerance can also make a person feel horribly unwell. The real irony is that Food Intolerance causes people to crave the foods to which they are intolerant. You are most likely to be intolerant to anything you have daily and feel you couldn’t live without (let me guess – cakes, biscuits, bread, cereal, pizza – all those are signs of wheat intolerance).

3) Hypoglycaemia is literally a Greek translation from “hypo” meaning ‘under’, “glykis” meaning ‘sweet’ and “emia” meaning ‘in the blood together’. The three bits all put together mean low blood sugar. Hypoglycaemia describes the state your body is in if your blood sugar levels are too low. When your blood sugar levels are too low, this is potentially life threatening and your body will try to get you to eat. Hypoglycaemia can cause cravings for any carbohydrate – even fruit.

If you are craving anything from fruit to pickled food to sweets to cereal – all cravings can be explained by these 3 things. I have literally written a whole book on these conditions and how you get rid of them (and therefore your food cravings) and what the best diet is to get rid of food cravings.

I hope this gives you a flavour (excuse the pun) of what’s going on and that it explains that you’re not bored – you’re a food addict (but you can overcome this).
All the best – Zoe