My letter to Dame Sally, our Chief Medical Officer, UK

Dear Dame Sally

I am writing to you about the obesity crisis to ask for your help in changing the national paradigm on healthy eating. If this letter is being read by a member of the Department of Health and not by you personally I urge you, the reader, to somehow help this letter find its’ way to Dame Sally.

I am one of a handful of GPs nationally working with real food, LCHF (low carbohydrate, high good fat) ways of eating with great results. We use international sites like www.dietdoctor.com and the UK site www.lowcarbdiabetic.co.uk. Drs. David Unwin and Rangan Chatterjee are also working on this, and have been published in the print media and well as appeared on TV.

The national message from the DOH preaches calorie theory and “Eat Less Move More”, which clearly is not working with the vast proportion of overweight and obese people. I have tried challenging the EatWell plate on the grounds of lack of safety for overweight people and children as a Safeguarding GP, but nobody is listening, even though it is against the law to deliberately harm children. Portion size with carbohydrate is pointless and analogous to trying to maintain smokers on 4 cigarettes a day rather than teaching the value of abstinence.

The Obesity Nice group and Dr Susan Jebb are experts on obesity and know all about managing people in obesity but this does not translate into improvements on the ground. We need NICE guidance in Normal Weight and how to achieve it. Beyond weight, LCHF ways of eating cause improvements in health and save money on medication, and health service time in terms of appointments.

I am writing to you in the hope that you already know this and have a plan. I have set out my views on my website www.healthylivingsite.me

and follow mainly nutrition experts and doctors on Twitter @JoanneReynold14

I recommend www.dietdoctor.com, www.lowcarbdiabetic.co.uk as sensible alternatives to the current UK DOH advice. The changes happened in Sweden first and it is time we joined them.

If the DOH do not act we will have to do it for ourselves, bearing in mind the harm caused to people by the current advice, and the lack of efficacy for the current DOH advice, our old adage- first do no harm, and the fact that harming children with the current advice would be against the law, when we know it to be incorrect.

I hope to hear that you are leading on positive change in relation to this.