The Mail on Sunday, You magazine, 14 April 2002

Paula's toxic shock treatment

Dr Paula Baillie-Hamilton's investigations - prompted by her own maternal weight gain - have led her to a remarkable discovery, which could revolutionise our approach to dieting

'Look at this!' Dr Paula Baillie-Hamilton croons delightedly, cradling her new baby, Lucy, in one arm and flapping her waistband with the other. 'That's three inches off my waist in the past two weeks.'

The battle of the baby bulge is a depressingly familiar experience for most new mothers. And Dr Baillie-Hamilton, 37, mother of three, was no exception. While pregnant with Lucy last year she put on a stone. But now, standing in front of the shiny black Aga at her home in Scotland, she pats her flat tummy with glee. Lucy is just nine weeks old, yet blond Paula is as svelte as if she had never gained a pound.

After Lucy was born, most of Paula's 'baby weight' simply 'fell off', she says - the fruits of her own painstaking scientific research in the years following the birth of her second son, Bruce, in May 1997. Now she has written a book, The Detox Diet, about her findings, which she believes could not only help other new mothers, but could also contribute to solving the ever-increasing problem of obesity.

'I put on two and a half stone when I had Bruce, and I couldn't shift it,' she explains. Finally she tried a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet, which only made things worse. 'I got very ill, and there wasn't enough milk to feed Brucie.'

Then came a serendipitous moment. 'I had just fed Bruce,' remembers Paula. 'Angus [her elder son, now six] was asleep, so I snatched a few moments to myself. I sat down in a comfy chair and read a newspaper article about how we are surrounded by so many different chemical toxins in our environment. They're known as xenoestrogens and they act like fake female hormones - they make animals less fertile, in some cases sterile.' Paula's brain started buzzing. 'I thought, "If these toxins are affecting our wildlife, then they must be affecting us too, because we live in a soup of chemicals." And I had heard about how these fake hormones could also affect body weight.' She decided to investigate.

Don't be fooled by her slightly ditzy manner (her friends call her Party Paula because of her penchant for entertaining) - Paula is a fully qualified doctor and respected medical researcher. After training as a hospital doctor in the mid-80s, she began researching MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans, and two of her papers were published in eminent medical journals. Now she's a visiting fellow in occupational and environmental health at Stirling University.

In her quest for an explanation of her weight gain, she sifted through thousands of academic papers worldwide. She found research which convinced her that the root cause of much of our weight gain is the chemicals in our environment. Paula has also written her own 'potentially explosive' paper summarising her theory which appears in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

Her husband, Scottish laird Mike Baillie-Hamilton, has supported her all the way. They met through a shared passion for long-range rifle shooting - she has a full blue from Oxford; he's also a crack shot - and married in 1994, with Paula moving up to Mike's ancestral estate near Stirling. Angus was born in January 1996; Bruce - and Paula's weight problems -followed 16 months later.

'For the next four years, the only things in my life were my family and my research into these chemicals which appeared to be making us fat. I read through all the academic papers to identify the chemicals which appeared in levels high enough to affect us. The obvious place was food and packaging, then our home environment - furniture, carpets, textiles, etc.'

Paula discovered that the problem wasn't just xenoestrogens. 'I looked at all the chemicals used in food and how they affected the hormones which control our weight. There are more than 30 groups of pesticides deliberately added to foods, and that doesn't include a large number of toxic industrial and environmental chemical pollutants which are also found in our environment. On some single foods, such as apples, strawberries and pears, I found up to ten or 12 different toxic chemicals.'

As the evidence built up Paula started to develop her theory about weight gain. 'Our bodies have very highly developed ways of controlling weight - consisting of different hormone systems that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. I believe that the reason so many of us are putting on weight is because these chemical toxins are gradually damaging the most important aspects of our slimming systems and we are less able to burn off fat. What we need to do is to reduce our exposure to toxins - and get rid of as many as possible that are already in our bodies.'

Switching to organic food, which is grown with the minimum of unnatural chemicals, was a logical step. 'I bought an organic apple in a supermarket and it was phenomenal. It tasted of…well, apple. There was no funny aftertaste, it was sweet and juicy and wonderful.'

Meanwhile, Paula was proving her own theory. 'My weight started decreasing gradually, though I wasn't making any effort to diet. Over a couple of months, I lost about a stone, then more went, until I was back to normal.' As well as eating organic food, she advises taking vitamin and mineral supplements, plus linseed oil. 'You need them to boost your metabolism. These toxins put an increased burden on our detox systems and that gobbles up extra vitamins and minerals.

'I am passionate about this issue,' Paula says of her anti-chemical crusade. 'People have to know about it because it affects their whole lives.'