- Discover why the food industry minions are beginning to fail
- This common sense advice really is all that you will need
- This required holiday reading might shed more informed light
As a nation we should be chewing a block of lard a day.
Chips should be on the dinner table as a staple food…
…and corn oil is now to be the diet and energy drink for every teenager.
Hurrah!
Except of course, this isn’t a good idea at all; in fact it is a recipe for clogged arteries, bulging waistlines and an early death.
As the beloved Molesworth would say “any fule kno’ that!”
But the great and good in public health services all reacted as if one of Britain’s leading charities was actually advocating this type of diet last week.
When the latest report by the National Obesity Forum was published saying that perhaps we weren’t eating enough fat and that this was contributing towards heart disease and diabetes, the heavy mob were dispatched from Public Health England to challenge them.
I love a good debate.
Especially when it is one about health and a topic so divisive as whether fat in our diet is good for us or not.
And I particularly loved the clash between cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhortra and Oxford academic Prof Susan Jebb.
You see Dr Malhortra is a major player in the Action on Sugar campaign and Prof Jebb a powerful advisor to Public Health England – a sort of immovable object and irresistible force meeting if you will.
I listened with interest as Prof Jebb savaged the report for failing to offer the ‘correct’ advice, using poor science in developing their ideas and potentially damaging the entire nation with their foolish beliefs.
And she had poor Dr Malhortra on the ropes as she hammered home her points that too few Randomised Controlled Trials were used and as a result their hypothesis was badly flawed…
…right up until the good doctor pointed out that she received massive funding from Weight Watchers and that one of her major research studies was wholly funded by Coca-Cola!
The airwaves went quiet apart from a slightly strangulated whimpering from the once strident professor…
“I er…well…you see…the facts are…” stumbled Prof Jebb, before rallying weakly with “The Coca-Cola study was to test the claims of one of their products and we found it didn’t do what they were claiming actually.”
But by then her whole credibility had been shot.
More importantly the truth about the way Public Health England sets its advice has been laid bare in that one exchange.
Know the truth about who pays the advisors
The last thirty years has seen health professionals demonise fat as the cause of poor health, whilst casually overlooking the true culprit.
In 2009 a leading paediatric consultant, Robert Lustig, gave a talk entitled ‘Sugar:The Bitter Truth’, which followed warnings sounded by the British scientist John Yudkin in 1972 in his book Pure, White & Deadly – both trying to alert us to the dangers of sugar.
Both men were savaged by the food industry, health officials and leading nutritionists from Europe and America.
Their careers were blighted, their funding curtailed and their work treated as pure fiction – however, they have been proven right again and again.
This didn’t stop the influence and power of the growing sugar companies in America though who, in 1980, pushed and cajoled the Government into issuing dietary guidelines that the UK followed in 1983.
Both governments’ policy then became one where eating less fat and cholesterol was the most prominent advice – incidentally the first time any government had instructed its people to eat less rather than more of a food group.
The producers of synthetically over-sweet foods had won their day, and vociferously defend their right to huge profits ever since – happily blaming the fat component of any meal for the rise in obesity and heart disease. The fat scapegoat had been born.
The statistics bear this out too.
Rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease rose dramatically in both the US and the UK from the early 1980s: in 1980 only 6% of Britons were obese, today it is treble that.
But there are still powerful voices locked into the fat makes you fat mantra, their principle point being that the amount of calories per gram of fat is treble that of carbohydrate or protein – and that is where the issue I raised at the beginning of this letter comes into play.
If we are eating a properly balanced diet with fat, protein and carbohydrate in it along with vitamins and minerals then we will be healthy and leaner in our frames – gorging on one foodstuff will damage this balance.
Fad diets where the body is deluged in cabbage, whole grains or protein always get an immediate weight loss response due to the fact you are being harsh on yourself and sticking to a restrictive food regime…
…you are also getting bored with food so your appetite is suppressed.
Then you get to celebrate the ‘new’ you with a biscuit and some cheese and ‘whammo!’ your weight bounds on again and your bathroom scales spin like a top.
Dietary advice is misleadingly biased by those who are giving it – even governments – so what should we be thinking about?
What the food advisors should really say
Well let me begin by saying what the National Obesity Forum actually proposed rather than what the slavering anti-fat brigade thought they said.
First they identified that the focus on low-fat diets is failing to address Britain’s obesity crisis, while snacking between meals is making people fat – the point being that low fat often means high carbohydrate and increased sugar.
Second they call for a return to ‘whole foods’ such as meat, fish and dairy, as well as high-fat, healthy foods including avocados, arguing: “Eating fat does not make you fat”. Perhaps the most controversial part of the report taken in isolation, however, is their rationale is based upon good science.
The statement they made is as follows:
“Eating a diet rich in full-fat dairy – such as cheese, milk and yoghurt – can actually lower the chance of obesity.”
“The most natural and nutritious foods available – meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, nuts, seeds, olive, avocados – all contain saturated fat. The continued demonisation of omnipresent natural fat drives people away from highly nourishing, wholesome and health-promoting foods.”
They must have been reading the Good Life Letter!
For me the most damning part of their research is what undermined the good professor in her radio interview, the fact that the science of food has undoubtedly been corrupted by commercial interest.
Just as the insidious influence the tobacco companies had over governments has been exposed recently, so the way food manufacturers and retailers are being identified as the scourge of dietary advice now.
Watch this space…