The myth of the middle-aged spread

I plead guilty as charged m’lud. For the last four decades I have been telling patients who have been losing the battle with waistline spread that it’s their body’s metabolism causing all the problems. This was conventionally believed to start to steadily slow year on year from the mid-30s onwards, meaning it became trickier to shift those stubborn pounds as time went by. It was also assumed that hormonal changes such as occur in pregnancy or the menopause further impacted on how quickly we burnt off calories, all adding to the struggle to keep weight off.

Well, it now seems that, along with the rest of my medical colleagues, I was probably doing those patients a disservice. A landmark international study just published in the journal Science looked at more than 6,000 people from 29 countries over 40 years and found that our metabolism peaks around the age of one, when babies burn calories 50 per cent faster than adults.