This post has been updated.

Last week I chatted to David Gillespie about some of the food myths he debunks in his new book Big Fat Lies. Today we have a quick chat about why the “lies” continue. I reckon you’ll like this one.

image via Marina Giller

It’s easy to conclude from what David exposes in his book and in the podcast that there is a conspiracy going on. I prefer – and so does David – to be more moderate and get informed as to why the bodgy science got off the ground in the first place. And how it then formed the basis of most nutritional thinking in the Western world – everything from our food pyramid to taglines in infomercials.

It’s almost comical. But understandable. The world wanted answers when rates of heart disease suddenly soared in the 1950s. A President had a heart attack. All that was available at the time was a silly study on rabbits from 30 years earlier that everyone had dismissed at the time as proving nothing of any worth.

But everyone latched on to the faulty science.  The lies kind of domino-ed from there.

David is careful to say “ignorance” and commercial reality is to blame. Perhaps. But a breakfast cereal company selling us sugary flakes with clever marketing is only one part of the problem.

The bigger problem, to my mind, is that some of the peak nutritional bodies here and in other parts of the Western world, and many of the doctors, “experts” and nutritionists who we trust to tell us the truth, are often actively peddling these lies – and in the face of conflicting evidence. What’s more…

Some of the more vocal and influential nutritionists are paid by breakfast cereal companies and the like.

And many of the peak bodies are funded by major soft drink and junk food companies.

I won’t draw conclusions for you. I’m not saying such funding (which is often necessary for some of these organisations to survive) results directly in vested outcomes. But it’s good to know the full picture, right? Sadly, we’re rarely given it.

Anyway. You make up your own mind…

David Gillespie Podcast [ 10:50 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

While you’re listening, you may like to check out these links. They highlight the various multinational sugar-based and low-fat companies that fund the major nutritional bodies in Australia and the US. As I say, make up your own mind…

• American Society of Nutrition
• American Dietetics Association
• Australian Dietetics Association
• International Diabetes Federation
• Australian Heart Foundation

Also, you might also be interested to read this article on how the sugar industry sugar industry muzzles journalists or those who speak out.

And here’s the original column from the Daily Mail on how much sugar there is in breakfast cereals. A quote from the article that I found pertinent: “It would take a very brave government to pick a fight with the corporations that have built such lucrative businesses on the back of our addiction to sugar.”

As I’ve commented before, there’s not going to be a major campaign any time soon to get us off sugar. It’s just not going to happen. We have to take the responsibility on ourselves.

Someone on twitter also sent me this one – a rundown of how PepsiCo do their spin, including this: “Hiring respected public health experts and medical doctors to represent the company, creating an illusion of having a health-oriented mission, instead of being driven by profit.” Sigh…

Oh yes. The book giveaway….

You may remember David Gillespie from previous discussions such as Why Sugar is Really Grim For You. He’s the author of Sweet Poison and over the past 13 months since I quit sugar we’ve been in regular dialogue.

image via Bon Appetite

Sometimes we talk about the fact that much of what we know about sugar and fat is a big fat lie. Wonderfully, David has now published a book on this very point. Today we’re chatting about his new book Big Fat Lies: How the Diet Industry is Making You Sick, Fat & Poor. If you’ve been wondering, if sugar is bad and saturated fat is actually good, then why are we not been told as such, then this is your weekend read.

But curl up now with a nice buttery piece of toast and enjoy our “fact or fiction” rundown of some common nutritional advice we all get fed…

David Gillespie Podcast [ 17:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The five myths we cover off are:

1. eating fat causes heart disease

(For a little more background on the bodgy science that tried to convince us of this myth, see my blog on Ancel Keys‘ fat study.)

2. cholesterol is bad

3. egg yolks are the devil!

This week in Sunday Life I eat like a caveman

Of all the self-imposed guinea pig antics I’ve subjected myself to for this column, this week’s might be regarded as my bravest. For it entailed eating, oh-glory-be-yes, fat.

In a fat-fearful world, my no holds barred consumption of chicken skin, the crackling and the 3cm of subcutaneous tissue on my pork belly, several teaspoons of butter on my veggies, whole cups of full cream milk, chunks of ghee and avocado each day has freaked the innards out of most in my culinary orbit. And yet (boldly! fearlessly!) I’ve persevered with this particular experiment for three whole months.

Turn to the person to your left, and the one to your right. I’m betting one of you is making friends with your egg yolks right now, having picked up on what’s been dubbed the “paleo” or “caveman” diet. Images of loin clothes and bone gnawing aside, the diet boils down to something pretty innocuous: not eating anything fiddled with.

So, no grains, no additives, no sugar, no grain-fed meat, no mucked-around-with fat-reduced dairy.

And instead the unadulterated foods of our ice-age forebears. The subsequent claim is that doing so makes us healthier, thinner and live longer, a claim I had to test for myself.

You know I quit sugar, right? And you know I’ve stuck to it? And you know I’ve written an ebook on how to do it?

photo via pinterest

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, the main thrust of my 8-week program is replacing sugar with fat. It’s an approach I really find worked for me, and for many others. But I keep getting asked:

“is it really ok to eat fat?”

“how can you say saturated fat is OK?”

“how much fat do YOU eat?”

Alright. Let’s clear a few things up, then…

1. This short video sums up a fair bit of the misconception around saturated fat:

The gist is this: in the 1950s, a random scientist called Ancel Keys published a dodgy study that told us saturated fats were bad. The study was a total furphy. But we latched on to it. It’s important to realise that at that time the edible oil industry in the US seized the opportunity to promote its polyunsaturates. The industry did this by developing a health issue focusing on Key’s anti-saturated fat bias. With the help of the edible oil industry lobbying in the United States, federal government dietary goals and guidelines were adopted incorporating this mistaken idea that consumption of saturated fat was causing heart disease. This anti-saturated fat issue became the agenda of government and food industry groups around the world.

Another week, another “study” that shows we’re meant to be eating this instead of that. Yeah, I tire of them. But I found this one on the best and worst foods for healthy weight quite interesting.

It found yoghurt was the best food to eat to lose weight.

Below I’ve outlined the gist of the study, and then shared my favourite ways to eat yoghurt.

via pinterest.com

The study was based on three trials over 20 years. It found

• The quality of food matters more than calorie count!!! So eating organic makes you lose weight.
• The top five most fattening foods were sugar-sweetened beverages, red meat and processed red meat, each associated with half a kilo of weight gain every four years.
• The most fattening food of them all?

This week I’m (still) quitting sugar

Again, a quick note for readers of this blog who’ve been following my “I quit sugar” posts, this might seem like I’m repeating myself…I kinda did for my Sunday Life column readers. For those of you playing catch up on this topic, you can read other “I quit sugar” posts, like  my interview with David Gillespie here, the reasons why sugar makes us fat here, how I quit sugar here and some breakfast ideas here.

I quit sugar a few weeks back, to see if it made me a nicer, less cranky, agitated person, and wrote about it here in this column. I got a lot of feedback asking how I actually did it, so I thought I’d do a follow-up . I’m now able to report back from the sugar-free frontline that I’m doing OK. Many studies say it takes 21 days to overcome a habit. I’m over the hump. And the subsequent dip. And off the cranky, saccharin addicted rollercoaster for good, I reckon.

In the process, though, I’ve had to be really careful I didn’t become one of those bores who reads nutritional labels before accepting a potato crisp and who quotes guilt-inducing food factoids at dinner parties. As a colleague Nicole said, “I’d rather sit next to a funeral director than someone on a diet”. I don’t know, the last time I sat next to a dieter at a dinner I got to eat her leftover cheesy potatoes and the parson’s nose from her chicken (anyone else share my salivatory obsession with parson’s noses? No…?).

That said I couldn’t help myself and have been spurting startling “did you knows” all week. How about I share some of them with you now?

Did you know a glass of apple juice contains as much sugar as a glass of coke (about 10 teaspoons)? And did you know there’s more sugar in barbeque sauce (55 per cent sugar) than in chocolate topping?