Anthony Leeds

Title
MB, BS, MSc, CBiol, FRSBiol
Position
Honorary Senior Research Fellow

Anthony Leeds is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Parker Institute. He is also visiting adjunct professor at the School of Health Sciences, International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Visiting Research Fellow, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing, University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is a UK registered medical practitioner who has specialised in bariatric medicine and is a chartered biologist registered at the Royal Society of Biology. He graduated from the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, London, where he had studied trans-placental malaria transmission in Nigeria as a senior student in 1970. Following junior medical posts and a short spell as medical officer in Sierra Leone he held a research fellowship at the MRC Gastroenterology Unit, with David Jenkins who defined the ‘Glycaemic Index’, contributing to studies on dietary fibre in health and disease. From 1977 to 1985 he was at Queen Elizabeth College which then merged to become part of King's College London and remained there until 2007. There, he developed an intercalated BSc course in nutrition for medical students, chaired the college research ethics committee for 18 years and continued studies on dietary fibre, mycoprotein, glycaemic index and formula foods.  He chaired the Royal Society of Medicine’s forum on food and health for ten years and was seconded to the United Kingdom’s Department of Health as head of the nutrition unit and secretary to the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy (COMA). He is a member of the Society of Authors, and a charity trustee director of the All Saints Educational Trust. An occasional speaker on Radio and Television he has an interest in the diet of ancient man and made contributions to the TV series 'Ray Mears Wild Foods' aired on BBC2. His current research interests concern the use of low energy diets, particularly total diet replacement in the management of obesity and obesity-related co-morbidities. He chairs the European industry group TDMR Europe working with the European Commission and its agencies to optimise legislation determining composition of total diet replacement products for weight loss and weight maintenance that have been shown to deliver diabetes remission, reduced pain in osteoarthritis, improvement in obstructive sleep apnoea and improved and maintained cardiovascular risk factors. Anthony Leeds has worked on projects in Denmark since 1983 and at the Parker Institute since 2013. He was a sponsor of the construction of the sail-training Aalborg dinghy ‘Peder Most’ launched in Svendborg during the October 2007 Æbleræce, and is an admirer of Danish Golden Age paintings and the work of the Skagen painters.

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