About Second Opinions

One must attend in medical practice not primarily to plausible theories but to experience combined with reason.
Hippocrates

Can you remember when food was something you could eat and enjoy — without having to worry about it?
    Health today has become an obsession. Because of that we are beset by intolerant beliefs that at best are unproven hypotheses, and at worst, fraud.

For example: if a fatty diet really does cause heart disease, why has none of the fifty or so studies published to date managed to demonstrate any convincing evidence of it? And why, when we are eating 20% fewer calories than we were 20 years ago and slimming and exercise clubs are mushrooming, are we getting fatter?
     Although the 'healthy' or 'prudent' diet to combat heart disease is probably the most widespread deception today, there are other equally important schemes designed to delude. The online nutritional information and nutritional facts explained in the articles on this website explore some of them.

Most have gained a foothold because modern medicine and dietary advice have given people less than their expectations. Others because the media, in exploiting to the full any story of disaster, and tending to blow it up out of proportion, give a base from which commercial concerns, anxious to protect and increase their share of the market, and ever mindful of their profit margins, can exploit our confusion to the full.
     I have written these works because:

"On the large scale, history shows that an uncritical and misinformed populace is a breeding ground for all manner of intolerant beliefs and practices. The discovery that truth has to fight for its survival is not a pleasant one, but is an essential realisation in maintaining civilisation. And in a society as open and susceptible to fraud as ours is, truth needs all the help it can get." Anthony Garrett.

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 February 2009