About Second Opinions

The idea for this website first came about in about 1999. At that time, it was clear that most of the Western world was being misled over what was euphemistically called 'healthy eating'. This regime was introduced in the US by the American Heart Association in 1982, and in the UK by the COMA report of 1984.

Despite its title, I had realised by 1989 that 'healthy eating' was anything but healthy.

At that time the Internet didn't exist.

I was writing books and had been lecturing since 1971 on the evidence that we were being badly misled and let down by those we were paying through our taxes to give us good advice.

But they weren't doing it. They were feeding us dogma which was wholly unsupported by any coherent body of reliable evidence. And they still are!

I had to reach more people. The Internet allowed the expansion to this website, which went online in 2000, by which time I had written two books, The Calorie Fallacy in 1994 and Eat Fat Get Thin! in 1999.

In 1999, Dr Robert Atkins republished his 1972 book as his New Diet Revolution. It wasn't new at all, of course, William Banting had written about such a diet over century earlier, but 'The Atkins Diet' sparked a huge backlash from conventional dieticians and nutritionists that has seen the health of the Western world go from bad to worse.

By that time, I had been researching diet and its relation to the 'diseases of civilisation' for almost 20 years. I decided to publish what I had learned and Second-Opinions.co.uk was born.

Today, there is a plethora of information on the internet. As anyone can write and publish it, it's not surprising that there is both a lot of good stuff — but even more rubbish. It's a bit like the spam we get: for every page of useful information, there are 20 pages of unsupported nonsense. For this reason, I reference everything on my site, so that you can check it see that what I have written reflects what the published evidence says. I would suggest that whenever you see information without such references, you treat them with suspicion.

One more thing: Before continuing on this website - or any similar one - take a few minutes to read this short extract from Jerome K Jerome's book, Three Men in a Boat. Its message is worth considering, and it won't take long.

And you can read about me Here

Last updated 23 February 2009

When doctors won't tell . . .
Of all the online nutritional information, nutritional facts, medical and dietary sites there are to choose from, in an article entitled "How to ease the pain" The Sunday Times magazine, Culture, published a list of just five websites it considered reliable and informative.
This site was one of that five.