The Restaurant That Burns Off Calories will have you sweating over dinner

Hardly a day passes without an opportunity to enjoy a vicarious guzzle, through a cake bake-off, a hungry man eat-off, some blind-date dining, a mastercheffing competition or just a plain, old-fashioned cookery class. But these programmes have had a profound influence in other ways too, changing the nation’s baking and cooking habits, and to an extent therefore on our collective rocketing calorie intake. Dr Giles Yeo at the Institute of Metabolic Science at Cambridge tells her about the genetic variants that influence appetite and weight gain. Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, talks about how the diversity of our gut microbiome influences our abilityto process fat. His top tip, by the way, is to eat at least 30 different plant-based foods a week, which include nuts, seeds, herbs and spices. And then, most pertinently, there is what Susan Jebb, a nutrition scientist at Oxford, has to say about how the constant bombardment of food-related content from advertising, and the growth in fast-food outlets on the high street makes us scoff more.