God bless the Daily Mail, which pauses in its project of dividing the food chain into things that give you cancer and things that prevent cancer, to give you the tale of a bad food that’s good for you specifically Mark Haub, who lost two stone in 10 weeks on a diet of cream cakes and sugary foods.

The professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University also found his ’bad’ cholesterol dropped by 20%, as part of an experiment to prove that pure calorie-counting matters more than the nutritional value of the food when it comes to weight loss. Daily calorie intake was cut from 2,600 to less than 1,800 by replacing meals with a mini-sponge cake with cream filling every three hours. This was supplemented by crisps, sugary cereal and biscuits, a double espresso, a multivitamin pill, a protein shake and vegetables. "It may be an issue of portion size rather than total removal," he said.

I hope the Department of Health, in its Responsibility Deal on calories (see pg 8), is taking note... so long as they don’t forget to cross-check their facts with the Daily Mail archive, which has previously suggested that biscuits and cakes cause cancer, while coffee and cereal cause and prevent cancer. See: bit.ly/9jfV3H