Eddie Abbew's advice is f*cking sh*t
Posted on 25th June 2024 at 16:34
Wake the f*ck up!!!
Firstly, I apologize to my regular readers stood open mouth with eyes popping out of their skulls at the vulgarity of my article title.
Please excuse the profanity, and rest assured that my future writing will return to my clean-cut choir boy image with paragraphs you could confidently read out aloud to your dear sweet Grandma.
If you don’t get the reference to my title, then read on no more, you have no need to take heed of my advice on avoiding this guy and his increasingly popular nutritional bullshit.
I first became aware of these mad ramblings in January when a client asked me if I had heard of Eddie Abbew, when I watched his videos I just thought he was funny, he was basically going into various fast food establishments and filming their products whilst claiming they’ll give you diabetes, also he wore a disguise ( because apparently just the sight of him would cause a Greggs employee to leap from behind the glass counter and urge him out the shop lest he give away the secrets on their poisoned products)
As the months have gone by, Eddies audience has grown, and he now has 3.9 million followers at the time of this writing. Some of those followers are doctors who have endorsed him, not that this surprises me, since vegan diets, keto diets, raw food diets and just about any type of diet usually has someone with medical (but not dietetical) expertise endorsing it somewhere.
We’ve seen Guru’s like Eddie before, and after his five minutes of fame we’ll no doubt see another nutritional messiah before long, because as enthusiastic as his proponents are, at some they will fail in trying to follow his advice, and here is why.
His advice is to eat a miserable diet, he provides inaccurate information, and he relies a lot on bullying people into thinking they are weak, wrong and stupid for wanting nice tasting food.
Let’s start with the miserable diet, Eddies advice comes down to a lot of fasting, and then eating meat, eggs and avocados. Also, liver, he’s really keen on that.
I’ll move onto whether there is any merit in this advice at the end of this article, but for now I’ll just highlight a few things which he gets very wrong, very often.
According to Eddie, a lot of things give you diabetes.
Eddie goes into Greggs, Mcdonalds, Tesco and various other places, points at their food, says its f*cking shit, and it’ll give you diabetes.
People often critique him and say he’s demonising food, to which he responds that this stuff is not food, it’s just a bunch of chemicals with a long shelf life.
First, no single food is going to give you diabetes, in fact, even if your diet consisted solely of fast food, this still wouldn’t be enough to give you diabetes, so long as you kept to a healthy weight, and led a healthy lifestyle (lots of activity, a good night’s sleep, little alcohol etc).
In fact, many top athletes do just that, for example basketballer Chad Johnson eats a diet consisting mostly of McDonalds, baseball legend Babe Ruth lived of beer and hotdogs, Michael Phelps would fuel his high intensity training schedule with thousands of calories a day, sometimes coming from Ben and Jerrys and various fried foods, Floyyd Mayweather’s chef posted a video in which she spent over $300 on sugary snacks for him.
You could eat McDonalds three or four times a day, every day, and still live to a ripe old age in good health, and without diabetes, so long as you stayed within your calorie range.
But what is Eddie mostly getting at here? Unfortunately, he’s just one of many millions who’s fallen for the carbohydrate / insulin hypothesis, in short this goes as follows…
Excess calories don’t cause fat gain, insulin does, when your body consumes carbohydrates, insulin is released which increases fat storage, as people become more overweight, they become more insulin resistant, and your body goes to shit.
Eddie says you should avoid all sugar, even fruit, as it causes insulin to rise and will make you fat, if you have an ounce of intelligence, please feel free to take a moment now and bang your head against a wall.
As you can see from his Instagram post( right), Eddie demonises lots of food for its sugar content, but avoiding these foods will do nothing to eliminate diabetes risk, or improve health, in fact avoiding these foods means missing out on fibre, vitamins, minerals, an increased cancer risk and joy. Yes joy, I’m not joking with that last benefit, eating a diet with adequate carbs increases serotonin, makes it easier to sleep, increases happiness and makes you go for a number two on a regular basis.
Sugar does not cause diabetes, being overweight and living an unhealthy lifestyle will eventually lead to diabetes (type two to be clear).
In fact there are studies where people have lost weight through a high carb diet and improved their diabetes, if you read my four part series on low carb diets you’ll remember fondly the example I gave of a 1975 weight loss study with 106 participants who were put on a high carb low calorie diet, they ate mostly rice, fruit juice and sugar and yet still managed to lose considerable weight (average 63.9kg) and improve their blood sugar making it an effective treatment for diabetes.
The big problem with the insulin/ carbohydrate hypothesis is that low carb diets have been proven time and time again to be similar to, or often less effective than low fat diets.
I know links to studies still won’t convince some people, but I’ll post a few here for those with the intelligence to check this out, if these still don’t convince you, message Eddie and ask him to give peer reviewed studies backing up his claims, or ask him to debate an actual dietician or evidence-based nutritionist.
Study links
And even if Eddie is right (he isn’t) the theory still doesn’t make sense, because lots of foods increase insulin, in fact whey protein (which he condemns for containing poisons and toxins but then sells at his gym and puts in peoples diet plans) cause a higher insulin spike than white bread. Also, you can store fat without insulin, a crappy low carb diet still causes weight gain.
Eddie also makes other claims, and these are cast iron guaranteed to be more harmful than helpful, for example he claims that a “clean diet” such as the one he advocates, will eliminate acne, I shan’t go off on another rant, but the truth is that it won’t, and lots of people will be disappointed when they try this and find that out for themselves.
He also says that any parents who gives their kids pick n mix should be ashamed of themself, which is just one of the ways in which he tries to guilt trip and shame people into eating the way he says they should eat.
For all those who try and follow his advice, you will fail, and because you believe him that all processed food is shit, you’ll feel weak and bad about yourself for this inevitable failure.
But Weetabix, bread, pasta and even crisps are actual foods, protein yoghurts are not harmful or likely to cause weight gain, and having a takeaway, a few drinks every now and then, will probably do you some good if it helps you relax and enjoy life.
Does Eddie have a point?
I couldn't help it ,whilst watching his videos I began to like Eddie, he can be quite funny and he seems genuine in his beleifs, he's also in awesome shape, and game can appreciate game.
The obesity crisis is real, and it’s in no doubt related to an excessive intake of processed and ultra processed foods, along with a lack of exercise. Consumers are to some extent at the mercy of multi-billion-pound food producers who can design food in such a way that it becomes hard to manage portion control, or prevent you from over consuming, these companies also have large teams of very clever marketers trying to get you to buy more and more of this stuff.
But there is more to obesity than junk food, weight gain is emotional, stress related, inherited genes, your peer group influence, its a ton of stuff that can't be solved by simply eliminating processed food.
I know it isn’t easy, but everyone should be eating a diet consisting mostly of healthy low to non-processed foods, and if they did, a little sugary goodness really wouldn’t do them any harm. The fact we have these foods so easily available makes it a great time to be alive, I don’t want to demonise these foods, even the term “clean foods” could potentially be harmful, and I do actually mean harmful, one of the problems with these kinds of diets, is that they can lead to food disorders, especially in the very young, when so many social media influencers are telling them that the food their Mum and Dad buys is bad, and is causing them to have acne, and will eventually lead to them having diabetes, they believe it, and are unable to fact check and get to the truth.
Fasting might be good for some people, but it’s not for everyone, and certain groups will have a hard time trying to fast (menopausal women especially), there are lots of good ways to lose weight, and lots of them don’t involve a diet of misery, I have no problem with a short term big weight loss attack consisting of just a handful of non-processed foods (spinach, chicken, eggs broccoli etc), it works, but at some point people want to enjoy their lives, celebrate birthdays, relax on holiday etc, there needs to be a plan in place for when the short term fat loss has finished and people want to lead some kind of normal life.
People don’t fail diets, bad diets fail them.
below is the before and after pics of the fruit juice, sugar and rice weight loss diet I mentioned earlier on in this article.
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