Seaweed bread 'key to obesity'

Here's an article I found on yahoo news today (22 March) This is another idea I think probably misses the mark. What people are looking for is a way to eat exactly the same & yet not get fat. I think the basic premise is wrong. The idea should be to find food that offer maximum nutrition & find ways to make them appealing to the public (price & availability being 2 obvious measures). What we need is a way to make food that does not work towards improving health cost more than food that increases health. I would tend towards subsidising fruit & veggies. I would actually use taxes on food other than fruit & veggies to fund the cost of lowering the cost of these basics. I would also drop subsiding meat & dairy. Really, in this day & age we don't need those things subsidised, what we need is to encourage healthier food choices. The problem today is too many nutritionally empty calories in the western world, not a need to prop up these industries.
I would start with healthy free school meals for kids, so they get at least one healthy option a day (how many kids never even see a green leafy veggie in a week!).

I think trying to create ways to eat the same old crap & somehow trick the body, so you can 'get away with it' is the completely wrong approach & will not solve the lack of overall health in the western world.

Anyway I'll post it below for those that don't wish to go to the article itself:

Quote :

Seaweed bread 'key to obesity'

Seaweed bread could be the answer to the obesity epidemic, scientists have said.

Researchers found seaweed fibre could reduce the body's fat uptake by more than 75%.

A fibrous material in Sea Kelp called alginate was better at preventing fat absorption than most over-the-counter slimming treatments, laboratory tests showed.

Dr Iain Brownlee, who co-led the University of Newcastle team, said: "This suggests that if we can add the natural fibre to products commonly eaten daily - such as bread, biscuits and yoghurts - up to three quarters of the fat contained in that meal could simply pass through the body.

"We have already added the alginate to bread and initial taste tests have been extremely encouraging. Now the next step is to carry out clinical trials to find out how effective it is when eaten as part of a normal diet."

The scientists used an "artificial gut" to test the effectiveness of 60 different natural fibres by measuring the extent to which they affected the digestion of fat.

They presented their findings at the American Chemical Society's spring meeting in San Francisco, US.

Dr Brownlee said the aim was to see if the same effects modelled in the laboratory could be reproduced in living volunteers.

"Our initial findings are that alginates significantly reduce fat digestion," he said.

The research is part of a three-year project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).