Another terrible famine occurred during the Biafran War (the Nigerian Civil War), between 1967 and 1970. Researchers looked at over 1,300 babies born before, during and after the war. They had similar findings when they compared the health of the offspring born during the war forty years later. Babies born during the famine were more likely to

What about the remaining 30 per cent of the energy that we normally use? This is made up of two parts: Passive energy expenditure – the energy that we use to get on with our everyday lives. This can be anything from walking to work, doing the cleaning, moving around the office or doing a hobby. For most of us – those who don’t go to the gym or have

different. Instead of dieting, we are going to change the environmental signals that our body is picking up. These signals will reset your weight set-point at a lower level and then the hormonal and metabolic signals will drive your weight downwards (towards the lowered set-point). As a consequence, you will notice a natural decrease in your

Now that we know that the set-point is the master controller of our weight, we need to find out how our brains calculate where it is set. Various factors in our environment, our history and our family background determine our individual set-point – whether it will be set as slim, obese or somewhere in between.

The first step will focus on decreasing your average daily insulin levels – but at the same time you can eat really well.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist who proposed an evolutionary theory fifty years before Darwin. His idea was that animals evolved in direct response to their environment, and not, as Darwin later suggested, as a side effect to natural selection.

The changes in the expression of obesity genes – those that occur in response to famine – are due to epigenetics. This new understanding of genetic adaptation offers fresh perspectives on the interaction between our bodies and our environment. It also poses new questions about evolutionary processes and who we really are.

Among the UK population, approximately a quarter of adults are now obese; in the US this figure has reached 30–35 per cent; in the Gulf States, among the adult female population we now have obesity rates approaching 50 per cent.5

To make things simpler, we could separate anyone exposed to processed food as falling into one of three categories. These would be: Obesity-resistant – still normal weight and able to maintain this weight easily. Obesity-vulnerable – normal weight/overweight. Aware that if they consume too much processed food or don’t go to the gym regularly they