Telegraph's Charles Moore CriticisesGordon Brown's Leadership

In the Comment pages of the Telegraph today, 06 Mar 2009, he writes:

"When there is a really big disaster, those responsible for it say that it could not have been predicted. After the pound fell out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism on September 16, 1992, the then Prime Minister, John Major, took refuge in the fact that central bankers, all political parties and most newspapers and economists had supported Britain's membership. How was he to know that they were all wrong, he asked.

Now that our credit is crunched, our house prices are collapsing and our government spending and borrowing are out of control, Gordon Brown suggests that no one could have foreseen such things. The crisis, he implies, is like some terrifying new disease. It was incubated in America and reached our shores through no fault of our own, just as rats off ships once brought us bubonic plague.

But it is surely a function of leadership to question a theory more strongly the greater the consensus about it. It is proverbial that when every taxi driver advises you to buy a certain stock, you know it is oversold. The same herd stupidity infects elites. It is when the powerful all agree that they are least likely to be thinking straight.

This, indeed, is the basis of an entire theory by the late economist, Hyman Minsky. "Stability," he said, "is destabilising." Times seem good: the watchmen sleep: the enemy swarms over the walls, unnoticed. That is exactly what has happened to the Western world's economies today."

Charles Moore is one of my favourites on the Telegraph - an intelligent writer with a historical perspective, a moral and independent viewpoint, and a fluent command of language that is not larded with buzzwords. And I often, as I do today, agree with his argument.

I too distrust consensus among experts. In my case, the 'experts' I distrust are those highly-paid doctors and nutritionists who give advice about obesity. Like the financial experts who failed to see disaster as it grew and spawned, so the obesity experts continue to exhort their overweight/obese victims to 'just eat less and exercise more', continue to preach the Calorie Myth, continue to inveigh against eating fat, continue to sneer and disbelieve the truthful people who assure them that they are gaining weight despite eating less and taking more exercise, continue, in fact, to close their minds to the truth (that excess calories and fat are not the problem and that calorie and fat reduction are not the solution to the problem) and continue to give the catastrophic advice that is damaging the health and happiness of millions of innocent people the world over.

Overwhelmingly, dieting does not work! - Look on the internet. - Write appropriate words into your searchbox and you will find literally millions of people saying that they have tried them and they do not work. (There will be no shortage of experts telling them that they have done it wrong and they must diet more stringently and take more exercise and then - yes then - it will work. - But they are wrong.) - You may be surprised, though I am not, to learn that there has never been a shred of scientific evidence to support the diet advice. - It's never even been put to the test! - So confident the experts have been and are that they are right, they have never bothered to set up trials to test the theory; the theory is just an untested assumption, and most dieters know from sad experience that it is wrong.

The 'obesity epidemic' is caused not by 'overeating', but by fluid retention, caused in turn by salt sensitivity, a growing problem in the developed world, occasioned by a clutch of modern baddies: - too many prescriptions for pharmaceutical drugs which too often cause salt sensitivity, too much salt in bread and convenience food, and far, far too many experts giving the wrong advice and a dieting industry and a pharmaceutical industry for whose workers and shareholders a real cure for obesity would be a disaster!

If you need to lose excess weight, I advise you to give up dieting forever. It makes you tired, cold and hungry, but it does not make you slim. (I am not a doctor or a nutritionist or a dietician, by the way, as you have probably guessed. I am not a highly-paid expert, wreaking disaster, such as Charles Moore criticises in his excellent article.)

The safest, easiest way to lose excess weight is to cut down on salt and salty food.

Margaret Wilde www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk