Barry Groves, who lives with his wife, Monica, in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, can rightfully claim to be Britain's leading exponent of the low-carbohydrate, high-fat way of life as he has lived on, researched, lectured and written about it for 47 years.

He and Monica were overweight from 1957 to 1962, when he discovered the low-carb, high-fat regime for weight loss. It worked. This started his questioning conventional diets and, in 1982, he took up a full-time research into the relationship between diet and 'diseases of civilization' such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. As a result of his researches, he realised that the perceived wisdoms, both of low-calorie dieting for weight loss and 'healthy eating' for the control of heart disease, were seriously flawed.

Barry's first manuscript was for Diet and be Damned, a book about his findings and why diseases such as obesity and diabetes had increased since 'healthy eating' was introduced in 1984. A major publishing house was interested but said that it was too important a work to publish by an unknown author. They advised Barry to write a diet book to become known. This resulted in The Calorie Fallacy which was published in 1994. The Calorie Fallacy was difficult to advertise as magazines refused to take ads for a regime that was contrary to perceived wisdom. Despite this it sold well enough to interest a major international publisher. This resulted in the publication of Barry's best-selling book, Eat Fat, Get Thin!, in 2000. The next year, Fluoride: Drinking ourselves to death?, based on six years' research, was published.

In 2002 he won the prestigious Sophie Coe Prize at the Oxford Symposium on Food History and was awarded a doctorate in nutritional science for his fluoride work.

Barry then spent so much time helping people who were having difficulty with another well-known low-carb diet, that it was 2007 before Natural Health & Weight Loss was published. This was followed in 2008 by his original work, much expanded and brought up-to-date, now called Trick and Treat: How 'healthy eating' is making us ill.

Barry has been published in countries as far apart as Argentina and Russia, as well as all English-speaking countries.

Barry is a director of the Foundation for Thymic Cancer Research, (www.thymic.org), an honorary board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org), a founder member of The International Network of Cholesterol Sceptics (www.thincs.org), and a founder member of the Fluoride Action Network (www.fluoridealert.org). He also maintains three internationally respected health information websites.

Barry does not confine himself to medical and dietary research. With a long-term interest in energy conservation, he and Monica designed and built their own solar-heated house over three years from 1977 to 1980.

For relaxation, in 1982, Barry took up archery. He was a British Champion every year from 1987 to 2008 taking over 20 British Records in Target, Clout and Flight archery. He is also a six times World Champion with five World Records.

More about Barry's work will be found at www.second-opinions.co.uk