The Fire is Burning

I have a burning passion to help get this important information out to everyone about the absolute necessity to eat right. I want to do what I can to help others enjoy the same benefits that I have discovered over the past four months. However, a lot of people will find it difficult to go against the mainstream health advice they may usually receive from their GP, Dietitian, Nutritionist, Personal Trainer (I used to be one of them) or their favourite health/exercise magazine.

Also, the majority of information available to the population had been incorrect in the sense that it doesn’t usually help people fix a problem for good and it has done nothing in the way of turning around the upward trend of chronic disease including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, along with obesity. If it did make a difference to those health problems then why haven’t we seen a positive change in the statistics?

One of the most frustrating things is that many health professionals are treating these problems without ever addressing the cause of the problem. This is evident in the classic treatment of type 2 diabetes. Despite type 2 diabetes being an issue of chronic high blood glucose levels (hyperglycemia) through the over consumption of glucose rich foods (sugar and carbohydrates) causing insulin resistance in the cells and/or the pancreas not being able to produce sufficient insulin, sufferers are still told to consume a diet that contains predominantly high carbohydrate foods, usually in conjunction with medication. Why feed someone foods that cause an insulin response when their body cannot properly use that function to process the glucose? They should still be able to use the function of glucagon in the process of breaking down stored glycogen and fat for energy but the current advice is still avoiding that possibility by continuing to feed the problem with a carbohydrate rich diet. They also seem oblivious to the amazing energy benefits of eating fat.

Consider this: Fat contains at least twice the amount of energy/calories than that of carbohydrate but doesn’t cause glucose and insulin spikes resulting in high blood glucose. For example, 1kg of fat will provide twice or more the energy than that of 1kg of carbohydrate. That helps to explain why our storage of carbohydrate in the body is so small and virtually restricted to the muscles and liver, whereas fat is stored all around the body and can produce energy for many hours and even days. However, it does help a lot when your body actually knows how to access it.

For any number of reasons, you may get advice from a dietitian registered with the Dietitians Association of Australia. But, did you know this association has a variety of food companies and industries that provide support to them to help fund their ‘research’? They include Campbell Arnott’s and also Nestle.

You may recognise these names because Campbell Arnott’s produce a range of canned and packet soups, along with stocks and even V8 juice under the Campbell’s banner. Meanwhile, there are a wide range of biscuits, among other things, under the Arnott’s title.

Nestle have products like, Milo, Nesquik, Kit Kat and Wonka chocolates and confectionary while also having a large number of products under different brand names. These include the large Uncle Toby’s cereal range as well as their well known oats and muesli varieties. There are a few more strings to the bows of these companies but that gives you an idea of what kind of influential players they could be as a partner to an association which should only ever have the health interests of their patients and the public at heart.

Consider this: You’ve probably seen ‘Milo’ advertised many times claiming to be an amazing drink option for kids, or anyone for that matter, to give them energy to power their day and that it contains a whole range of healthy ingredients. Guess what? It contains 46% sugar. This is an example of both the poor moral being of big food companies believing they can con people into believing their products are good for us and also the lack of integrity in the marketing guidelines they get to work by.

There are big company ‘supporters’ for various different health organisations so how can we possibly believe that there wouldn’t be bias in the information distributed by these groups? They never tell us not to eat/drink anything with sugar in it, even though they should, because that would be demonising a substance which is present in nearly every food/drink produced by some of their supporters. This now raises the question of how can you fully trust a professional who is directly associated with these types of organisations, supported by big companies, and distributing their advice? I believe this gives greater importance to doing your own research and understanding that there are also some practitioners out there, who may also be a part of those organisations, but choose to operate more independently based on their individual research and views. They’re probably going to be the ones who can provide the best independent evidence to back up their advice and will be more than happy to provide that when asked by their patients. Don’t be afraid to do your research and question any health professional because they’re still human, after all, and may need a little encouragement to get some better information to back up what they’re doing.

I have read two incredible books recently which I think everyone needs to read. They are both written by David Gillespie who is a lawyer by profession. The first book is titled ‘Sweet Poison’ and the second is ‘Big Fat Lies’.

His writing came about by getting to a point in life where he weighed approximately 120 kgs and had 4 kids already, with twins on the way. He decided he needed to finally conquer his bulge once and for all but after trying various popular diets in the past and never being able to maintain it or keep the weight off, he knew he had to find out for himself why they didn’t work and what would be the answer. This kicked off a huge investigation into a world he had never researched before but that is what he is good at. As a lawyer, throughout his career, he has had to investigate and then fully understand a wide range of different fields to be able to serve his clients properly. So, he took that ability and set upon a road to discovering the truth about food.

‘Sweet Poison’ is all about sugar and how it affects us. It talks about various functions and hormones of the body and, particularly, how sugar completely stuffs up those vital processes. Essentially, it illustrates how sugar consumption – which has increased by at least 10 times over the past 100 years – is playing a pivotal role in the increasing rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

It showcases the bio-chemical processes in the body involved in digestion, hormonal response, brain activity and suppression and interruption of these processes through the consumption of sugar. It dispels many of the myths behind what we have been told by product advertising, big food companies and industries and even by government representatives and agencies as well as what we even get told by the various medical professionals who are supposed to be helping us to lead healthy lives.

There is some terrific insight into the world of artificial sweeteners and how dangerous they appear to be. Basically, they’re chemicals that were never meant to be consumed by humans yet, somehow, they are deemed safe to put in our food. The fact that they are 100s of times sweeter than regular sugar rings alarm bells to me and there is even strong reports that will contribute just as much, if not more so, to the issues of obesity and metabolic disorders and even cancers.

Importantly, it also explains why popular forms of dieting don’t work and that the classic ‘calories in/calories out’ mentality is flawed when it comes to long-term weight loss and/or control because calories that come from different sources behave very differently in the body. It goes onto to explain why simply exercising more will not be the answer to weight loss and/or control which is something I have discovered for myself in a big way in the past few months.

All of his findings are fully referenced at the end of the book. In fact, 7% of this book (on my kindle, so I estimate about 25 pages in the paperback) lists the huge range of medical journals, clinical trials, public health information sources and many kinds of medical literature presented by professionals in a wide range of medical fields including Endocrinology, Biochemistry and Physiology, just to name a few.

Having these references so clearly listed allows for any reader to cross-check his information. This means there’s no hiding anything. He’s taking the bold leap to find the truth and ignore what he had been lead to believe by health professionals and food marketing during his battle with bodyweight and failed dieting.

He then had the tremendous advantage of having a father-in-law who is a retired doctor with the lengthy title of “Dr. Tony Morton RFD, MBBS, MS, MD, MScAppl, FANZCA (retired)”. Dr. Morton was “the only person who has read every draft of this book since it was 10 pages long, and fastidiously corrected (almost) all the split infinitives along the way”, and David went on to say, “he was a good person to make sure I didn’t get too crazy with the conclusions I was drawing and the sources I was using.”

He has a follow up to this book called ‘The Sweet Poison Quit Plan’ which helps you to negotiate the supermarket for hidden sugars in food, so not to be influenced by food marketing, and some tips for helping you quit sugar for good. He then went on to write further books focusing on the myth surrounding dietary fats and cholesterol.

‘Big Fat Lies’ tells of the complete myth surrounding the ‘dangers’ of fat consumption and how that thought process came about. It explains how there is absolutely no definitive proof that dietary intake of saturated fat and cholesterol is the cause of heart disease and heart attacks. It, also, goes on to explain how unbelievably dangerous the recently invented unsaturated fat alternatives are which come in the form of seed oils, aka vegetable oils, (namely canola, sunflower, cottonseed, soybean and rice bran oils).

He discovered that these seed oils have highly unstable chemical bonds which can become dangerously reactive to oxygen in the body causing a wide range of inflammatory effects contributing to cancers and myocardial infarction (heart attack). The problem is, seed oils have become a major ingredient in a huge variety of foods including many packaged foods, cakes and pastries, even most bread you find on the shelf.

This book explains the vital role that saturated fats and cholesterol, consumed in the form of animal fats (fatty meats for example), dairy (butter, cream, full cream milk, natural yoghurt), coconuts (oil, cream, milk), eggs, just to name a few, have in the vital processes effecting your cells and brain, among other things. He presents information from an array of studies and research which shows the inadequacies of some findings, including that of Ancels Keys and his followers, and provides the information that shows why fat is necessary for our health and what it does inside our body.

Again, his findings are fully referenced at the end of the book and his father-in-law, the retired doctor, has kept a very close eye on things.

Both of these books contain quite a bit of scientific information that has been explained in a way that even the least scientific minded of us out there are able to understand. They also illustrate the various trends we have seen over many years in the consumption of different types of food, particularly sugar and polyunsaturated seed oils, and how certain things have been marketed to us to lead us to believe they are what we should be consuming.

One overwhelming theme I took away from these books is that, unless something is shown to kill you or cause a major disease instantly or in an extremely short space of time, it will be deemed to be safe for human consumption or as the food industry and governments like to say ‘GRAS’ – generally regarded as safe. The facts shown in these books indicate that if you consume any or all of the following; sugar, artificial sweeteners, seed oils or a low fat diet, in a manner which is currently recommended to the population, you are extremely likely to encounter a chronic illness and/or cancer at some point in your life.

I can’t recommend these books highly enough and, as I read more and more books to continue building my knowledge on these topics, I look forward to bringing you further recommendations and book summaries. One book I am very much looking forward to reading is ‘Grain Brain’ by Florida based Neurologist, Dr. David Perlmutter. This book will be explaining the relationship between grain consumption and the negative effects it has on the brain. Obviously, that is quite a vague description but once I have read it, I am very keen to provide some extra detail to entice you all to pick up a copy for yourself.

Cheers,

Lincoln.