It’s the new year, you aren’t happy with how you look, how you feel and your lack of fitness. Or maybe you are quite fit and can’t seem to get rid of those last few kilos. Or maybe you are obese and don’t know where to start. You switch on the television and hear about how red meat causes cancer, that you should be eating whole grains, that saturated fats cause heart attacks and a myriad of other pieces of “evidence”.
Becoming truly healthy is more difficult now than ever before. It should be easy considering the scientific advancements we have made as a species and how much we know about the past. The reason it is so hard, however, is because there is always money to be made. Welcome my friends to the murky world of the nutrition industry. Have you ever wondered why people that go to certain diet companies seem to lose weight but always put it back on? They never seem to get it all off do they, and when they do it’s only temporary. Every time we hear something on the news, it seems to contradict what we were told last week, which then becomes outdated a week later. How is one to make sense of all this? We can make sense of it by employing something that 90% of the world’s population doesn’t use: critical thought. I’ll give you an example and tread on a few toes while I’m doing it.
No doubt you have noticed dieticians and nutritionists recently getting on the no processed foods bandwagon. This in itself is a good thing. However, the first thing they say after this is “be sure to eat wholemeal pasta and bread, and low fat dairy”. Um…what? This is where alarm bells should be going off in your head. A degree qualified person tells you to eat unprocessed foods, and immediately after recommends processed foods. Yes, you are right to be skeptical. I don’t recall ever seeing pasta grown on trees, or bread come up out of the ground, or cows squirting out low fat milk. Far better would be for them to say “if you have to eat pasta, choose wholemeal, but you are better off not eating it”. They don’t say that though do they? We also have that good old nutritional advice of staying away from butter because it is so bad for us (yet comes to us only from adding salt to milk and churning it) and instead consuming margarine which is pretty much made in laboratory.
You see, it isn’t that there is some sort of big conspiracy theory of the government and big business trying to give us bad nutritional advice, it is basically just people trying to make money. When people are trying to make money, they will tell you just about anything to do it which is why you need to start putting thought into what you read, see and hear. When you hear something on the news about new evidence showing this is bad or good for you, you would be better served turning the television off than actually listening to it. Let’s think about it, do you want a journalist, that knows nothing about science, interpreting research findings for you on the 6pm news? I didn’t think so. Another great example would be a certain television show where people lose lots and lots of weight and guess what, the ad breaks are full of companies selling their products and telling you how healthy they are, people believe it because it is associated with the show. Companies pay top dollar for advertising time on that show for this very reason – it is instant credibility for them without any proof.
By now I sense there are light bulbs going off in your head, you are questioning things you have never questioned before and perhaps even more questions are occurring to you. This is what it’s all about – questioning things. If more people questioned things we wouldn’t have what is known as conventional wisdom. CW is when people are told something for long enough that they naturally believe that that is the best course of action. A great example is the lipid hypothesis. The lipid hypothesis has never been proven scientifically (in fact all recent research refutes it) but it is taken as fact. In layman’s terms, this is the notion that fat is bad for you, that saturated fat in particular causes heart attacks and bad cholesterol. This really took off when Dr Ancel Keys published what was called the Seven Countries Study, which claimed, based off the data from seven countries studied, that saturated fats increased the risk of heart disease. We are still seeing the effects of this today by constantly being told “saturated fat causes heart attacks”. What you wouldn’t know is that it wasn’t a study of seven countries, it was a study of twenty one countries. Yes, you read correctly. The data from the other 14 countries completely contradicted his hypothesis but he chose not to publish this (these other countries included people like the Masai of Africa, who ate a diet consisting of only meat and meat products with a lot of saturated fat in them, who live long and healthy lives). This is what is known in science as cherry picking – only showing that which supports your hypothesis, which is piss poor science. Why would a doctor do this? Money, ego, fame? The guy got his face on the cover of Time magazine and was hailed as the father of nutrition.
Was his plan machiavellian? Who knows, perhaps he just wanted more prominence. Whatever his reasons, no one cares now, we are just left with the conventional wisdom that “saturated fats are artery clogging bad”. Question this and most people will call you a whack job. There is an ever growing avalanche of evidence against this outdated, poorly conducted research, yet somehow we never see it in the media. Why is that? Could it be that there are too many food industries with too much at stake and too much influence over politicians? Before you roll your eyes have a listen to this story. At the school my wife was teaching at last year (kindergarden-year 12) they had “C…..burger” and “D.m.no” days. These two companies were able to sell their fast food products directly to students. Not only do they earn money from the kids buying their food, they get free advertising because every kid that doesn’t eat it has to watch the others eat it, all the while getting a great big refined carb-sugar laden-trans fat soaked feed into them. It would be a no brainer for the principal of said school to have said it wasn’t appropriate, but there you go. I don’t know what deals are being done at a higher level to allow fast food giants into schools, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out it is a terrible idea.
Sadly dieticians and nutritionists (degree qualified professionals) are even giving us bad advice nowadays. I have heard a dietician discredit high protein diets, when someone pressed her as to the research proving her wrong, she replied that she didn’t like them because she didn’t think they were “realistic” for people. So, since when do I want advice based on what you think is realistic? I want advice backed up by scientific evidence (which even then can be corrupt, I’ll get to that), not by what you think is a “realistic” diet. So, scientific evidence. This isn’t entirely trustworthy nowadays either. Let’s give a classic example, vegetarians having lower incidence of heart disease. We have been told and told to cut intake of meat for this very reason, but there is more than meets the eye here and it can be summed up in one word: confounders. These nasty little things infect such studies. What they are are variables that are not controlled. In this case, a wide cross section of meat eaters would be studied, including no doubt plenty of people that lead terrible lifestyles with fast food, lack of exercise, drinking and so on. Vegetarianism on the other hand is generally a life changing regime, with many cleaning out not just their diet but their whole life and living healthier. So as you can see in a study like this, it’s not just about eating or not eating meat. When you add in factors such as: smoking, exercise, work, stress, drinking, fast food and so on, the findings of the research get murkier and murkier. How can you narrow it down to eating meat gives you a higher risk of a heart attack when those people have so many other health problems?
When you don’t control for these other important factors, you basically null and void your findings (although the tv news will still happily report that you have made a breakthrough discovery). Check out this page and see what happens in this case when the factors are taken into consideration – the outcome is very different. For good measure, have a look here as well. Now, I could do this all day, I really could. I could write a whole website about nutritional advice, but thankfully others already do so I can point you there instead. What I really want to re-iterate is that if you want optimum health, you are going to have to start doing the research yourself. Don’t believe the first thing you hear, and put that critical thinking hat on! If something doesn’t sound logical, it is probably bad advice or at the very least misleading. All I can say is good luck and don’t stop questioning.
I’ll leave you with 3 great links that will take you a long way on this:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com – You want to bookmark this one
http://www.rawfoodsos.com – This is a woman who interprets nutritional advice and research and puts it in layman’s terms, it truly is fantastic.
http://www.pubmed.com – For the real hardcore. Pages and pages of the latest scientific research in all its raw and untouched glory
The Men's Domain 