John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, has had enough when it comes to conflicting diet advice. Stick to real food and you'll be just fine.
Writing The Meat Fix has had a lot of surprising consequences for me, not least ending up on Irish talk radio talking about my bowels. But perhaps equally surprising has been how aware it has made me of the sheer volume of media there is every day about food and health.
I suppose I had always tuned it out previously, or at least, only heard the stuff I wanted to hear - that backed up my own prejudices. This isn't surprising because every single day there are people telling us what to do and what not to do in order to live a long, happy life. Often it is contradictory. In the last month alone I've seen coffee declared as both very good for you and really bad for you. You know how it works.
Obviously, this is counterproductive. Obviously, it confuses people and obviously it leads to us all saying sod the lot of you, I’ll eat what I bloody well like, you're all full of crap.
This is an entirely reasonable response. Two fingers, right up.
While health and food has always been on interest to humans, for obvious reasons, the proliferation of media has turned it into a massive industry, of which I and The Meat Fix are a tiny part. We're another voice in the white noise telling you what is right and wrong. There's no reason to take notice of what I write about in The Meat Fix any more than there is to take notice of anyone else, I can see that all too clearly. I would have felt like that myself for most of my life.
However, the problem with just tuning out everything as so much hysterical rubbish is this; people are ill, and they're ill because of their diet. You may be one such person. The route to health does not seem clear, precisely because there's so much conflicting advice, but for all the cynicism about this diet and that diet, people do still want to get well and be fit and healthy. Ignoring the advice won't make the problem go away.
So what to do? Well, when I utterly transformed my health, life and body eating a diet higher in good quality animal fats and meat and lower in grains and carbs, I read and read and read book after book about the science and biology of how and why this had happened, and I highly recommend Zoe Harcombe's The Obesity Epidemic and Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint. Both tell you exactly why such positive changes occur.
So I learned the science but in doing so I realised that actually, the real problem is that we have got away from understanding how ancestral relationship with food. We have drifted into a contrived world of factory-made processed food which is dressed up as natural and we have become unable to distinguish between the dirt and diamonds in our diet. So much so that somehow, in my madness, I thought eating soya burgers, low in fat and with zero cholesterol was part of a healthy eating regime and that soya milk was a superior form of nutrition. Clearly my mind had been warped but hey, it comes in a green box and has a picture of a field on it. What am I supposed to do?
I found decluttering my mind helped me focus on what was really important. In The Meat Fix I do this by considering what my Grandma, born in 1901 would have thought of various modern foods that we take for granted. It was a way to try and see the modern diet from a perspective not blinkered by two generations of marketing and pseudo-science. Her generation didn't have a clue about the science but knew from generations of experience what food to eat to fuel their hard, brutal lives. And interestingly, as I subsequently discovered, her parent’s generation lived as long as most people do today. The working class who survived childhood and childbirth between 1850 and 1900 lived into their mid 70s and didn't suffer from the degenerative illnesses we do now. They didn't have magazines or TV programmes telling them how to eat and were not paranoid about food the way so many are today.
How much progress have we made in regard to food and health since then? None. We've gone backwards. All we need to do to understand how to eat is to revisit that mentality and reconnect with it. Eat pure food, not processed food. Eat a diet which suits our energy levels and lifestyle. Stop worrying about fat and calories and all the other bullshit that is pushed at us. That's really what The Meat Fix is all about. Breaking out of this mental stranglehold that has been put onto us by government, doctors and food processors and reconnecting with what is real. Once you do that, things will improve massively.
Trust me, I'm not a doctor.