Why do we treat booze as more hazardous to our waistlines than other carbohydrates? It just doesn't make sense, says John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me
If the popular press is to be believed, most women spend their days worrying about being fat, while most men spend them thinking about sex. There must be an interlocking, possibly quite literally, of these two groups – those who are worrying about being fat whilst actually having sex.
This can't be the whole picture though, surely.
I'm also pretty sure that men must also worry about being fat, and women think about sex, especially if they're all reading 50 Shades Of Shite or whatever it's called.
The point I'm making here is that the popular media and, by extension, society itself, boxes genders very neatly into stereotypes. Women are all about diets and body shape, men all about beer and bonking and never the twain shall meet.
This is crude stereotyping but to some degree such stereotypes become a self-fulfilling truth. Women worry more about being fat than men do because they're told women worry more about being fat. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if women are being urged to get messed up about food and fatness. 'You're not worried about your cellulite? Well you should be, sister!’
Ironic then that statistics suggest that men in the UK are actually fatter than women. More men are obese than women.
Speaking as an ex-lardass myself, I don't find this surprising. Fat blokes with massive bellies are accepted as a normal part of the male world and rarely frowned upon the way the chunkier female is. Indeed, sometimes it seems to be the very essence of the alpha male to lean against the bar and put a gallon of ale into an ever-increasingly massive bulging gut.
Ah yes, the beer gut. Now, this is what interests me. We all know what causes a beer gut don't we? Beer, obviously. Even a dumb doctor can tell you that with some certainty. They'll tell you to cut down or stop your beer intake in order to help you lose weight and shrink that vast frontal swelling. And good advice it is too.
But here's what I find puzzling. They'd never suggest you stop eating other carbohydrates for the same reason. No chance. But there is no significance difference between beer and bread. Beer is liquid bread in many respects.
Your body treats these foods the same way. The sugar in the beer and the starch in the bread are dealt with by your digestive system as sugar. They cause the release of insulin to wash it all out of your blood and store the excess energy as fat for future use. Clever thing the human body – it even does this when you are pissed out of your brains and have been arrested for putting a carrot up your arse and dancing naked in the street.
So by drinking a lot of beer, you usually lay down a lot of fat, and, on men, this often layers up on the belly. But the exact same thing happens if you eat a lot of carbs and sugar, even if you don't drink. Why wouldn't it? It's the same physiological deal. There is nothing unique about beer which makes you fat over and above any other carbohydrate. We should be calling many people's big gut a bread belly.
Once again the medical profession, happy to accept the negative effects of beer and advise against over consumption, simply turns the other way and puts its fingers in its collective ears and shouts "lalalalalalala I can't here you" when researchers and medical people who are not so blinkered as they, suggest that actually this is just further proof of what we've been saying all along – that fatness is rooted in carbohydrate consumption. The proof is in the pub. Trust me, I'm not a doctor.