Original subtitles

VO SG: Ditching the processed food is a good idea but there’s so much food available, it’s hard to know what’s healthy and what isn’t.

Is dieting the answer?

17.21

NM: Going on a diet will make you gradually lose weight but at some point your survival mechanism in your brain is gonna kick in and it’s gonna think we’re now starving and if there’s any food about we’d better eat it pronto because we’re going to starve to death.

That’s the inbuilt subconscious mechanism that’s going on and what tends to happen with dieters and we know the term yo yo dieting – when they go back on eating or splurging out on foods and eating the way their brain is telling them to eat, they’re going to put on weight very quickly.

17.56

VO SG: There are other factors that cause dieting to fail like stress.

18.01

SJG: Some people when they’re stressed will overeat.

Other people will actually eat less when they’re stressed but one interesting thing is that almost everyone will change the types of foods that they select when they’re stressed.

Almost everyone will go and shift toward more calorie dense, so called comfort foods, when they’re stressed and those tend to be fattening, unhealthy foods.

18.23

LF: A lot of people eat use eating as a stress reduction technique so if you can’t learn a different and more effective or hopefully more better mechanism for dealing with stress then you’re gonna have a very hard time following any diet for any period of time.

18.44

VO SG: But if you’re overweight and want a lifestyle change which of the diets out there is the best one to take up?

18.51

RM: One of the most interesting studies on this was the Mediterranean diet in a predimed study where about 400 people were randomised to the usual American guideline diet versus a olive oil supplemented group or a nut supplemented group which were both called the Mediterranean diet.

What the study showed that people in those nut supplemented group and the olive oil group actually got diabetes at half the rate at what the people on the traditional American recommendation diet got.

So it suggests to me that a Mediterranean diet may have particular benefits for promoting less fat spilling over into the pancreas and the liver and protecting against type 2 diabetes.

19.40

VO SG: Our modern western diet is also out of touch with out gut bacteria.

19.45

JS: If you look at these hunter gatherer populations that have no western disease, no obesity and you look at what they eat, its primarily plants in large quantities.

They eat 150 grams of dietary fibre per day, we eat 15 grams of dietary fibre per day – a 10 fold decrease in the food that feeds our gut microbiota.

We’re actually starving our microbial selves to some degree because we’re not eating the dietary fibre that the microbes in our gut rely upon.

20.18

VO SG: So a healthy diet starts with plenty of plant foods which have less calories, are filling and have added benefits.

20.26

FJ: Plant foods are high in fibre, they’re high in antioxidants and vitamins and minerals so this is your vegetables of all different colours.

It’s your legumes so your chickpeas and your lentils and your beans and your nuts and your seeds, your whole grains, quinoa – those sorts of foods.

The foods that we know are good for us.

20.51

VO SG: We also need protein which is missing in starchy, processed food and is helpful as it reduces hunger.

20.58

SJG: Protein, as you’re losing weight, can make your brain think that you’re not starving.

Normally your brain would think you’re starving as you’re losing weight – you’d get hungry, the way your body burns calories would start to diminish but if you eat a high protein diet it can attenuate those things so you feel more comfortable, you’re maintaining more lean mass and you’re maintaining your calorie expenditure as you’re losing weight.

21.27

VO SG: I’ve been watching what I eat and exercising but what makes the biggest difference?

21.25

NH: Last one.

21.31

SG: It’s hard, there’s a bit of weight to lift up.

21.34

NH: Nutrition is the most fundamental thing but I don’t see it as a pie graph where you’ve got one percentage on one side and one percentage on the other.

I see it as what you’d call a Venn diagram where they very much overlap and are complementary so if you’re exercising in the right way and you’ve got your nutrition pretty well sorted, those 2 things together are incredibly powerful and a lot more powerful than simply doing one or the other.

21.58

GS: This only happens once a week but the everyday reality for people is that they’re bombarded with unhealthy options.

22.05

VO SG: But we live in a world where we’re constantly presented with tempting, sugary, processed food.

22.13

NM: There are a few things we could be doing, a number of them our Government authorities are trying to do already to various extents.

We’re trying to educate people, that’s the first thing.

Educate people what are the right foods to eat and what aren’t.

22.26

SG: What have you guys got?

22.29

Child: We’ve got a snowman and Coke.

22.32

SG: And Coke.

22.33

Child: Yeah.

22.34

VO SG: Education is one way forward but not everyone agrees it will work.

22.35

SG: Sugar’s bad.

22.39

Child: Sugar’s good.

22.40

WW: If you educate people mostly the message only goes to the people that are already fairly healthy so we find it just increases the gap so that the people who are already healthy, they get healthier because they want to be healthy and they’re interested in their education.

Then the people who are not so interested, they are not yet changing their behaviour because of the education.

23.02

VO SG: Dr Wilma Waterlander wanted to test the effect of price on people’s food buying decisions.

She set up an experiment in a computerised virtual supermarket and sent people grocery shopping.

23.15

WW: The virtual supermarket really looks like a real supermarket so it’s three dimensional and people can shop with their trolley, they go around the shelves and click products with their mouse.

We ask people to do a shop as they would do normally for their households but what we can do in the backend is that we change things without telling people.

Say 100 people go in, they have normal prices, 100 other people go in they get a fat tax and then we can see how that influences their purchases.

23.46

VO SG: Wilma manipulated the price of products to see if it would encourage people to make healthier food choices.

23.52

WW: We have done about four different experiments in the virtual supermarket – subsidy on fruits and vegetables, we’ve done one where we did taxes on unhealthy food and subsidies on healthy food.

One where we changed the prices and changed the labels and one where we did a soft drink tax.

We found that in all experiments that changing the price is very effective in changing consumption so if you introduce a subsidy people buy more healthy food and if you introduce a tax on unhealthy food people buy less of the unhealthy food.

24.27

SG: [indistinct 24.27].

No sugar, right?

24.31

Man: Yeah.

24.

VO SG: Should our government be subsidising healthy food and taxing things like sugar?

24.37

ST: Yeah, I think we’ve got to go down the same track as tobacco with sugary products.

They’re causing us all kinds of harm, most of us are having a truck load of sugar without even thinking about it.

It’s laced in the manufactured foods that we eat.

24.56

GS: A tax on sugary drinks has been shown to be effective in Mexico quite recently.

They bought it in in 2014 and it showed that with a 10% tax consumption reduced by 12%.

The reduction in consumption was greater for people of lower socioeconomic status, they reduced their intake of sugary drinks by about 17%.

25.21

SG: Lovely work, guys.

25.23

WW: It’s not just about introducing taxes or subsidies but also thinking about how can it be that unhealthy food is so cheap? Why does a Big Mac only cost $2.00 or $3.00 and how can it be that we have all these shelves of all these unhealthy foods? Thinking one step further into what are we doing at the moment? How do international agricultural subsidies and policies and commercial pressure influence the food system and how can we change that?

25.51

WC: I think we all need to make more active decisions about our lives, we are all quite passive.

It’s easy to be passive and become obese – you actually have to become much more active to prevent becoming obese.

26.07

VO SG: An “active” role is just what one south Auckland school has taken and they’ve seen huge changes for the better in their students.

26.16

SG: Dilworth Rural Campus has a real different way of feeding the kids.

26.22

JR: It started off we were really interested in getting kids fit when they came out here because they do a lot of outdoors and we do daily fitness, that’s an important part of what we do.

What we noticed was that in our first couple of years, really, that even though we did a lot of outdoor stuff and daily fitness that we had a lot of big boys who, I guess, had gained more muscle but they actually weren’t dropping a lot of weight and I was thinking, why is that because they’re eating pretty well.

Then I had conversation with my chef and said, “I think we need to maybe start to look at our diet.”

26.53

VO SG: John asked AUT dietician Dr Caryn Zinn for advice.

She suggested cutting back on the carbs and removing sugar from the boys’ diet.

But when head chef Craig heard about the idea, however, he was sceptical.

27.09

CJ: I thought this is just bonkers so I thought, oh well, I’ve gotta do this myself before I take it to the kids and stand in front of 100 kid’s parents.

27.18

SG: You don’t look like you need to lose weight, mate!

27.21

CJ: This is 27 kilos later and a year and a half.

27.26

SG: Twenty seven kilos?

27.26

VO SG: Craig’s massive weight loss is an inspirational story in itself but he still had to convince everyone else that this was going to work.

27.35

CJ: First year talking to the parents, talking to the boys getting them to understand.

We started doing the pulled pork and the cereals went and the butter chicken, the boys like those sort of dishes.

27.45

SG: Sounds pretty tasty.

What did you used to eat before you came here for breakfast? What would you have at home?

27.48

Boy: KFC, McDonald’s and all sorts of fast foods at restaurants and sugary foods.

27.55

SG: Are you serious?

27.56

Boy: Yes.

27.57

SG: Really?

27.58

Boy: Yeah.

27.59

SG: What do you think about what you’re now eating when you’re at school compared to at home?

28.04

Boy: It’s a lot better, it’s a lot more filling and nutritional and it helps us get through the day and you have no sugar highs and sugar lows and all those sorts of things.

28.13

VO SG: The boys are rostered on to help make the evening meal.

Tonight’s dinner is lamb curry with fresh green beans and cauliflower rice – high in protein and vegetables and low in carbs.

28.24

CJ: We’ve got our nice grated cauliflower and again we’re gonna put that into our woks, little bit of oil, we’ll flavour that up, stir fry that up and we’ll put a cup of that with our lamb korma tonight.

28.36

SG: I’m working with a spoon.

28.37

CJ: You’re not bad, get in there, go.

We’ll keep building the flavours in it anyway but that’s a start, we’re gonna put more spice, put more seasoning.

28.48

SG: Delicious.

28.49

CJ: If we can keep these boys happy, keep them learning and teach them some good, healthy, nutritious meals, give them good, healthy, nutritious meals on the way it puts them in good stead, eh?

29.01

VO SG: Come dinner time, the students can’t seem to get enough of this wholesome food.

29.06

SG: How’s dinner?

29.07

Boy: Yum.

29.08

SG: Yeah?

29.09

VO SG: Both students and teachers eat from the same menu and everyone is enjoying the benefits of this nutritious, tasty meal.

29.16

JR: The main thing we’ve got rid of is a tonne of sugar.

29.20

SG: Literally a tonne?

29.21

JR: Yeah, it’s actually over.

Craig estimates it’s over a tonne of sugar out of the diet.

29.27

SG: That’s a lot of sugar.

29.28

JR: That’s a lot of sugar.

Last year we did the whole year on this new diet and we noticed a significant difference in our bigger kids, particularly in the waist measurements coming down to the point those boys were different body shapes altogether by the time they got to the end of last year.

We figured this is it – it’s not just exercise, diet was really the key thing that made the difference.

30.34

VO SG: I’ve been working hard for three months now and finally I’ve got enough confidence to go to the gym rather than just working out at home.

Luke: Keep the core tight, good.

[indistinct 30.47] good, jump back.

There it is, jump up.

Perfect.

Keep the weight over the hands, that’s good.

30.54

VO SG: Well, this is it, I’m ready to redo all the tests I did three months ago and it’s time to see if all the expert nutritional and fitness advice has paid off.

I’ve been working out three days a week.

I haven’t necessarily loved it but I’m pretty sure Luke has got me to the stage where I’ll be fit enough to show a marked improvement.

31.18

Avon: It looks like you missed your appointment with the beautician again so we have to …

31.22