Does John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime Of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, believe that the government should legislate on healthy eating? Where does he even start on everything that's wrong with that idea?
Hey it’s another day and there’s another news story about how and why the government should be tackling obesity in the UK. Today it's doctors who want our rulers to do something about the fat people who waddle through their doors. They’ve been telling the population what is and isn’t healthy eating for 30 years and look what has happened – 22-24% of men and women are now obese and the majority overweight. It seems to me, through my experience, that doctors do not want, or are unable, to accept that this is in large part their fault. They would rather blame you or me for this turn of events. Blame us for being fat greedy pigs who are slaves to our appetites. Couldn’t be them could it? Nooooo. They’re the educated ones. Well are they? What do they really know? The doctors I saw knew embarrassingly little all about nutrition and were well behind the curve when it came to current research. And these are the people who are telling the government to do something about the population’s health. Hey buddy, try this on for size; physician heal thy self. Think about this; people are eating the wrong diet, but they do not know what is the right diet and your advice over the years has only made matters worse. By telling us, for 30 years, to base our diets on carbs and not fat, you have made people fatter and fatter. Yes, the people should wake up and realise what is going wrong but don’t try and pretend you are not implicated.
But the nation is bloating up at an alarming rate, so something must be done! Get the government to ban or tax something or preferably both ban and tax something simultaneously.
Can we really legislate the population into a healthy diet? There is so much wrong with this idea. Firstly, when it comes to food, the government are bloody idiots and can't find their own arse with both hands. Who are the relevant ministers, who draw up healthy eating legislation, going to get their advice from? I'll tell you where; from various advisory boards that are stuffed full of people from the processing food industry, the grain lobby, the sugar sellers and the vegetable oil and shortening fat lobby, as well as other researchers whose funding relies on their version of the status quo about what is healthy eating prevailing.
Don't believe me? Look at the members of any NHS advisory board and you'll find people who work from all the big corporations on there. You think they're going to be objective? Hannah Sutter’s book Big Fat Lies exposes these conflicts of interest brilliantly.
As you will know if you've read The Meat Fix or any of these blogs, there is a sizeable alternative community of researchers, scientists, nutritionists and doctors who don't accept what the mainstream insist constitutes a healthy diet. Will any of them get to advise the government? No. I'll tell you why. Because there is a status quo about healthy eating, that everyone who is involved with relies on for a living. For example, what would happen to everyone whose job it is to tell you to eat five fruit and veg a day if such advice was proven to be a waste of everyone's time?
What if I told you there is no science to prove that eating five a day is any better for you than eating just two. This is true by the way. Five is an arbitrary number that has just been made up. There is no measured improvement in health relating to volume and number of vegetables and fruit you eat over and above eating two. More isn't better, more is just more and in the case of fruit, may be adding to the increased fatness rates. Too much sugary fruit triggers insulin release, which in turn can lead to increased fat deposits. Eating good quality animal fat on the other hand, does not do this. Thus eating fruit can make you fatter than eating fat. Obviously if you hose in your body weight of lard every day you'll be taking on board more energy than you are ever going to use. However, this is quite hard to do because eating fat makes you feel sick when you eat too much. This does not apply to fruit. I used to eat up to six or seven portions of fruit a day when I was at my heaviest and consumed almost no fat. Clever me, eh!
But of course, any government advice is always going to be on super healthy fruit and not boo-boo-it will-kill-you fat. That is the status quo. So much so that Denmark now has a Fat Tax on foods high in fat, such as butter. Well bloody done Denmark. Do you think that Viking predecessors got to travel the world raping and pillaging on a diet that excluded fat? Did they bollocks. They ate fatty meat and lashings of fatty milk.
This is just typical when governments get involved and try to impose legislation to tell you how to behave. In Denmark's case they are making the situation worse. The world has somehow got turned upside down. Everything we should be eating and have always eaten for health and vitality; meat, fish, eggs, animal fat and unprocessed food have been demonized, while all the modern shit that passes for food, such as vegetable oils, low fat spreads and skimmed milk is being hailed as the saviour of our health. Yet as the population eats more and more of these 'healthy' foods, they get sicker and fatter. Obviously, it is the wrong advice.
Eating to keep you lean and strong is not hard if you think about it logically and shed all the marketing mantras. Don't eat any processed food, don't eat sugar, restrict your consumption of grains radically. Make sure you eat plenty of organic or good quality fat in the form of lard, butter, coconut fat and olive oil. Make all your food yourself. Stop worrying.
Eat like its 1860 and you won't go far wrong. After all, the working class in 1860 lived as long as we do today (once they reached age five or didn't die in child birth) and didn't die of degenerative diseases like we do.
In short then, listening to the government can make you fatter and sicker, so why the hell should we ask them to draw up legislation to makes us all healthier? Trust me, I'm not a doctor.