John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime Of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, has had enough of the conventional wisdom on healthy eating. You should trust him; after all, he's not a doctor...
So for the latecomers, let's have a little recap. For the last six weeks I've been telling you how and why what we are all told is healthy eating really isn't; how it wrecked my health and how I discovered that not only was the science not settled on these matters – rather, there always had been many researchers, doctors, nutritionists and scientists who had been vehemently against this healthy eating advice all along, since its inception in the late 70s and early 80s. Those voices have been cries from the wilderness at times, as big money and big propaganda from various vested interests cranked up their investment in making the 'healthy' way the only way.
Just eating what our ancestors have always eaten doesn't seem like it should be that radical an idea really. Eating natural, pure, unprocessed food; is that really so weird?
No, it isn't.
Any divergence from the conventional wisdom on food is often pushed out to the margins as though we're all whackos who sniff lighter fuel and are not to be trusted. Yeah because eating low fat spread, low calorie salad dressing and reclassifying pizza as a vegetable is obviously more sensible and natural isn't it? Yeah, sure, I'm the crazy one!
Eating a diet that our ancestors thrived on shouldn't be portrayed as some kind of food fad. But it is. It's lumped in with Atkins and other low carb regimes which are the fodder for those tabloid stories which feature someone holding out a large pair of trousers in order to show how much weight they've lost or to base a scare story around. It's all fluff; part of the news churn. It's not taken seriously; indeed, various medically qualified people are often wheeled out to solemnly advise us why it is a bad idea – usually the same people who advocate the sort of diet that made me fat and sick. Well freakin' done. How proud they must be.
This is a way to marginalize alternative ways of eating and it makes it easier for the status quo to keep pushing the same old rubbish that has so destroyed our health.
It's insidious and ever present; a constant stream of black propaganda. I firmly believe a diet based on carbohydrate and not fat has made many people ill. If you do the research there is plenty of evidence that this is so. For some accessible science on this get Zoe Harcombe's excellent The Obesity Epidemic and Gary Taubes’ seminal book Good Calories, Bad Calories. These are not books written by some new age groovy gurus living in a tepee, massaging their dream catchers. They offer a biological approach as to why and how the kinds of degenerative diseases that afflict modern western man have happened and why a diet lower in carbs and higher in good, natural animal fats will make us healthier. Their work and others explained why I was ill and why I got so healthy and strong when I changed what I ate. Doctors and all their education couldn’t, didn't and never even got near. So who would you trust? The dude behind the plywood door in the health centre? Nah, 'course not. You've got more sense than that.
But getting this way of eating to have any traction in the mainstream outside of freak show stories is tough. There are billion dollars industries with a lot to defend. They don't want us punks messing with their profits by suggesting and proving that the very thing their industry is based on might be destructive to health. Hell no. They'll pay whatever and whoever it takes to make sure that doesn't happen.
But I'd argue there is only so long this trick can be pulled off. The failure of healthy eating to make us healthy is self-evident but rather than blame the advice, the status quo blames the public for not following their advice properly – for being a pig-out slob, a dissolute porker with an appetite for destruction. They’re right, we’re wrong. Suck it up. That’s their philosophy.
We see this trend so often. When the so-called wisdom fails to deliver, they suggest the regime be even stricter. You’re just not trying hard enough!
For example because many people die with low cholesterol there is talk of lowering the cholesterol level at which statins are prescribed, effectively bringing more and more people into the statin producers profit margin to try and make it work.
A more sensible approach would be to say hey, if people with low cholesterol are having heart attacks and older people who have high cholesterol don't – both provably the case – then maybe cholesterol isn't the problem at all. But no, that doesn't happen because there's no money in that for anyone. It's not a coincidence. Whenever you hear any healthy eating advice always follow the money. Yes people like me and others have books to sell, but Jesus, we don't own billion dollar, multi-national corporations – we make so little from books that we have literally almost nothing to lose. So who to trust? The writer or the board of a transglobal soya, wheat or corn producer?
Whenever I tell people about The Meat Fix and what I now eat, it all makes common sense to them in a way that all the low fat healthy eating just intrinsically doesn't. That's because it's simple and easy to understand and has biology and history on its side. If any of what I've written strikes a chord of truth in your soul, go with it, no matter what you're told is right and wrong – trust your instincts. I bloody well wish I had done earlier. A strong, fit and healthy life was much closer than I ever knew and I was only kept from it by my deluded belief in healthy eating. Don’t be like that. Trust me, I’m not a doctor.