ABSOLUTELY FED-UP WITH 'SATIETY'

Oct 4 2004: What was that famous saying again. Oh yes! - "If we fail to learn from yesterday's failed diets, we are doomed to swallow them afresh".......or something like that.

So it's "Satiety" now. It used be plain old guar gum, without such a fancy sounding pseudo-psychological name. Or fibre. Or drinking lots of water. Or eating more or less as much of anything you fancied so long as it was low calorie (there have been a lot of variations played on this game!).

Satiety is the Food Industry's next new thing for the desperate and the credulous. You'll be seeing a lot written about it in the media by unquestioning advertorialists and huge amounts spent promoting it by the diet dream pedlars.

It's basically that old sweetie of something-you-can-eat-between-meals warmed over....it's now to fill you up between small sensible meals, rather than the meal replacements themselves. Blink and you'll miss the subtlety.  Another way of putting it is that the difference this time is that it is meant to spoil your appetite. (By filling you with liquid, or guar gum, or fibre etc. Plus ca change.) Lord save us from such crass disingenuousness. The only true viewpoint is that you are being ripped-off yet again.

If you want to understand just a little about the inevitably flawed dynamics of this new Satiety panacea, just watch an average man dieting. On D (for diet) Day he gets up and has a decent sized bowl of cereal, with plenty of semi-skimmed milk just to "put himself on" for the day of heroic dieting ahead. He follows this with a couple of slices of wholemeal toast, just to make sure. And as he's on a diet, he tries not to let himself get hungry (and risk pigging out) by having a couple more bits of fruit mid-morning and a big milky coffee. He ladles on extra pasta salad at lunchtime and has a side order of garlic bread - hey, you can't be too careful about stopping yourself starving when you're on a diet, can you?

- SATIETY - I'VE HAD IT UP TO BLOODY HERE WITH ALL THE 'FILL YOURSELF UP SO YOU DON'T GET FAT' TWADDLE