John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, has the lowdown on tonight's BBC documentary 'The Men Who Made Us Fat.'
While I was writing The Meat Fix, people would ask me what my new book was about. This was a difficult question to answer. People want you to say something short and snappy, so I came up with this phrase to sum it all up ‘It’s about why healthy eating really isn’t,’ I’d say, then stand back and watch the blank look on their faces.
I’d try and explain but I could tell many people were just thinking to themselves, ‘what does this hairy old git know about food?’ I do not trust anything he says over and above what my doctor tells me about healthy eating. He’s probably whacked out his gourd on space dust; after all, he does listen to albums by Tangerine Dream!
Everyone was far too polite to actually say this to me of course. They’d nod and pretend they thought it was all very interesting, but you can always tell those for whom it is an engaging idea which chimes with their experience and those for whom it all sounds like mumbo jumbo.
I understand why. The public cling onto what they’ve been told about food in all its low fat, high carb, fruit-laden glory. For 30 years we’ve been told a high fat, eggy, milky, meaty diet will make you fat and pretty soon, dead. And even though, self-evidently, the diet they told us to eat has made the majority of people overweight and ill in one way or another, people are reluctant to let go of the advice because nothing else seems to have any credibility, precisely because nothing else has had the weight of long term marketing investment behind it.
The propaganda about so-called healthy eating is what Hunter S Thompson, talking about the music business, once called, ‘a cruel and shallow money trench.’ What you and I might have assumed was independent, well-researched and safe advice on diet, simply is not. Rather, it is an extension of the marketing of various food stuffs, paid for by whichever industry wants to push the efficacy of their products. The conclusions and advice politicians dished out are inseparable from the lobbying budgets of the grain, soya, vegetable and shortening fat and pharmaceutical industries. That which comes down to us from on high as informed, intelligent advice, is usually paid for by whoever stands to gain most by it.
After researching The Meat Fix and discovering why I had got so brain-washed into what the idea of healthy eating really was, it was no surprise to me that people I talked to about it might well have been sceptical about my conclusions in the book.
But here’s the thing. It isn’t just me. I didn’t just make this shit up, and things are changing. The old orthodoxy is not sustainable, and the tide is slowly turning, so much so that a new three part series on BBC2 starts tonight, called The Men Who Made Us Fat. It shows just how what we have thought of as medically sound advice on food derives from little more than a mixture of best guessing, lobbying and political bribery. I hope our doctors take note. They have been duped and continue to pass on the false evidence of this scandal as though it is fact.
The author of this programme maintains it is sugar which has destroyed our health. While he does not yet extend this explicitly to carbohydrate, the way the body treats sugar and carbs is so similar that such a conclusion is inescapable. The dietary shift in the early 80s away from basing a diet on fat to basing it on carbs was the fork in the road which led us astray. As he illustrates, some scientists and researchers were always against it but the big money and their sponsored voices won the day.
I know if you’ve been reading these pieces for the last few months you may have thought they were the ramblings of a crazy man and that if the truth was really so clear cut and contradictory to the conventional wisdom then you’d have already been told so by people with more degrees and education than I. Well, watch and learn tonight.
I wrote The Meat Fix because it blew my mind how my health had been wrecked on the back of so much false principle and propaganda. It blew my mind that so many people already knew about this and had been trying and failing to fight the overflowing river of misinformation for thirty years. It’s been a long time coming, but a change is gonna come. Trust me, I’m not a doctor.