John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, thinks that, when it comes to diet, following the Swedish example is the way forward
Banging your head against a brick wall is a lifestyle choice that is pretty much guaranteed to give you a headache, but it’s one that is somewhat unavoidable when you jump into the world of food, diet and health. When I wrote The Meat Fix I had no idea what I was getting involved in. Naively I thought I was ‘just’ writing about food but it quickly became obvious that I was dealing with huge global industries, government, politics and environmentalism as well. Blimey.
This is where the head/wall interface comes in. It seems that no matter how many people such as myself undergo huge transformations of health and well-being by changing our diets to one higher in natural animal fats and lower in carbohydrates and sugar – and there are many thousands, if not millions, of us – the official healthy eating advice ploughs on regardless, as though we have not experienced what we have self-evidently gone through, as though our bodies are lying to us and we are idiots.
I was shown a healthy eating advice leaflet someone’s husband had been given by their doctor – never a good source of dietary advice, by the way – and it was a shocking litany of rubbish; the usual low fat, wholegrain story which had already made the person who got this leaflet ill in the first place.
Thrillingly it suggested having ‘a scrape of low fat spread’ on your toast – they’re so cared of fat, y’see as well as eating low fat and skimmed everything. Oddly, they also advise eating cornflakes with skimmed milk and ‘less’ sugar, regardless of the fact that cornflakes are full of sugar without even adding more. The diet suggested was full of carbs, sugar, fruit (also a carb don’t forget) and almost no fat. It was so far wide of the mark for healthy eating that it looked like it had been written to take the piss.
This is the diet that ruined my health so when I see it dished out as NHS advice it makes me very mad and I have to beat my head against a wall to relieve the anger. OK, that’s just a metaphor but it’s like this every bloody week. The evidence that this approach does not work in any way at all, and certainly not as a sustainable lifestyle, is all around us. The fact that it has failed is indisputable and understandably less and less people believe it any more.
So it was with great joy that I read news of Sweden’s new found love of higher fat, lower carb diets, against the wishes of their government. Butter sales in Sweden are up 8% this year and, consequently, sales of margarine and factory made grease down 8%.
I would expect the industries which lose most by this major shift in diet to come out with all guns blazing soon. The wheat, grain, vegetable oil and shortening fat lobbies will, as I write, be paying for science to be done to ‘prove’ that the shift to higher consumption of grass-fed natural animal fats such as butter, at the expense of carbohydrates, is a really, really bad thing which will unleash all sorts of hell. This is what they do. They want to muddy the water and give their marketing departments a chance to re-infect people with the idea that eating their processed food filth is normal and natural and good for you.
The Swedes – phlegmatic and sensible people in my experience – seem to be rejecting this in increasing numbers, not least because a diet higher in butter and such, will reduce your appetite and will feed you much better than stuffing your face with man-made contrived low fat products. No doubt those following this revised regime feel much better. The change in health, well-being and even mental outlook is so profound once you start eating a natural diet rich in that which we are set up to eat, and cutting out all the made up shit which we’re brainwashed into thinking is natural and normal, is so profound that no amount of government leaflets would make you change back to the idiot, low fat, healthy eating crappola that has too long been the orthodoxy.
So let’s all go Swedish – well, any excuse to sit in a shed, naked and sweaty.