A healthy diet is so important

Many people in Germany are overweight. Nutritionist Andresen explains what a healthy diet looks like and how you can get rid of bad habits.

tagesschau.de: What needs to be on a plate to ensure the healthiest and most balanced diet possible?

Viola Andresen: A magic word is definitely always: diversity. You should eat as diverse a diet as possible and eat lots of vegetables, fiber and little red meat. These are some key topics. It is also important to prepare everything yourself, no ready-made meals. This means you save on additives and sweeteners and eat little sugar.

Overall, it’s about being aware of nutrition. Sugar, for example, is not fundamentally bad, but of course we consume far too much sugar because there is a lot of sugar hidden in food. An example is sweet drinks. You really should minimize them.

Overweight in Germany: “Dramatic figures”

tagesschau.de: How do you assess the situation in Germany – do we generally eat well or not?

Andresen: Unfortunately, the numbers suggest that we are not eating well overall. For example, we have a growing obesity problem. Around half of all adult women and almost two thirds of adult men in Germany are overweight. Almost 20 percent of them are even morbidly overweight. These are dramatic numbers, because this excess weight brings with it serious health problems.

tagesschau.de: What happens in a body when we eat poorly?

Andresen: The biggest problem is the so-called belly fat, where a lot of inflammatory substances can collect. This means that the body receives many inflammatory signals. This increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases, heart attacks, strokes, but also cancer, inflammatory and rheumatological diseases, and type 2 diabetes. All of this is exacerbated by excess weight and can have dramatic consequences.

To person

Viola Andresen is a specialist in internal medicine, nutritional medicine and palliative medicine. She has been head of the abdominal center at the Hamburger Medizinicum since November 2023. Previously, she worked in a leading position at the Ikaneum, the specialist institute for intestinal health and nutrition at the Israelite Hospital in Hamburg. Diseases of the digestive tract and malnutrition are among the main focuses of her work.

The distribution of body fat is crucial

In addition, most people notice in everyday life that they are becoming less mobile. They get joint problems, pain, arthrosis and quickly run out of breath when they have to climb stairs.

tagesschau.de: Is the sentence true: “Those who are overweight have a shorter life expectancy”?

Andresen: On average, definitely. Statistically speaking, all of these diseases occur more frequently in overweight people. You have to make a very clear distinction: On the one hand, how pronounced the excess weight is. And above all, this famous belly fat, the visceral fat, is risky. Women in particular often have a few kilos on their hips – that’s not a health risk. When it comes to bodies, we differentiate between apple and pear types. The apple type is, so to speak, the most dangerous to health and the pear type is less problematic.

“It’s better to change things slowly and then sustainably”

tagesschau.de: There are different types of diets – do they help?

Andresen: Experience has shown that all short-term diets are only associated with short-term weight loss, and then we have the famous yo-yo effect. The body adjusts to starvation metabolism, and everything we then eat is stored twice as fat. That means we don’t actually want diets, we want long-term dietary changes. It’s better to change things slowly and then make sustainable, long-lasting changes to your lifestyle – which isn’t that easy!

For example, there are these famous insulin breaks that you can use. For example with insulin food combining. That would mean that you don’t say “Never again pasta!”, but that you eat pasta for lunch and avoid carbohydrates in the evening. It is also better to reduce your sugar consumption in small steps. Because experience shows that people can get used to it this way.

Unfortunately, we have been spoiled by the food industry: things all taste so sweet that you get used to it. But you can also break the habit again. And the people who try it realize after a short time: I don’t like it at all anymore, it’s far too sweet for me! And they then reduce their sugar consumption sustainably in the long term.

Insulin breaks are important for fat loss

tagesschau.de: What about intermittent fasting – can it help?

Andresen: All methods that have longer eating breaks or, above all, longer insulin breaks are beneficial. Insulin is the messenger that creates the fat deposits and also keeps the fat in the fat deposits as long as we have elevated insulin levels. And they increase after short-acting carbohydrates and sugar. As long as they are high, we cannot break down the fat at all. And that’s why all methods that keep insulin down are cheap. You can do this through intermittent fasting by simply not eating anything for many hours. Or through something like insulin combining, where you have some meals without insulin release, for example only eating salad and fish.

Even children should learn something about healthy eating

tagesschau.de: In your opinion, what would be important for Germany to eat healthier in the future?

Andresen: An important step would be for children to learn a lot more about healthy eating at school. And I think the food industry should also be more involved so that it can reduce the sugar content of food. And we should start now, because the increase in obesity rates shows that we are moving in the wrong direction.

The interview was conducted by Anja Martini, science editor tagesschau. It has been shortened and edited for the written version.