Why I wrote Trick and Treat: How 'healthy eating' is making us ill

In 2007, the iconic 1960s ‘Go to work on an egg’ advert was banned because eating eggs went against official policy of encouraging people to eat a varied diet. Yet advertising nutritionally deficient, sugar-laden breakfast cereals is deemed acceptable.

In October 2008, Ceredigion Council in Mid Wales took Marmite off the menu at children’s breakfast clubs because of a ‘high level of salt’. Since when has a miniscule 0.05 grams per sandwich been ‘high’?

In the same month, pupils at Tonypandy Community College in South Wales were told they couldn’t put sugar in their tea or coffee because it’s bad for them. But they can eat any amount of fruit – and that not only contains a lot more sugar, the type of sugar found in fruit - fructose - is actually more harmful.

‘Healthy eating’ is a religion. And like all religions, it is founded on myth and wishful thinking rather than factual evidence. That is why our health has gotten so much worse since 'healthy eating' was introduced to us im the 1980s.

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‘Doctor, lawyer, cancer,’ began a Cancer Research UK TV advertisement. It demonstrated the fact that one person in three today will get cancer. That’s despite the billions spent on cancer since President Nixon declared ‘War on Cancer’ in 1971, when only half as many people got cancer. And the fact that, in many populations, cancer was, and still is, non-existent. Dr T.L. Cleave found that cardiovascular diseases began to appear early in the twentieth century only after the introduction of processed and refined foods. Before then, coronary disease was so rare that most doctors had never seen a case; today, it rivals cancer on the leading killers list.

These, and many other chronic diseases from acne to Alzheimer’s, all took off in the last century; they have increased even more dramatically since the Department of Health’s Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food Policy (COMA) reported on nutrition and cardiovascular disease, and introduced ‘healthy eating’ to us in 1984.

The most obvious example is obesity; diabetes the most worrying. Clinical studies, from Benedict and Carpenter’s study published by the USDA in 1909, right up to the present day, have consistently demonstrated that a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet is far superior for tackling obesity. As early as 1935 we knew that only carbohydrates caused the high blood glucose levels in diabetes; natural fats are beneficial. Yet ‘healthy eating’ bases its recommendations on the very foods that cause these conditions. Their spectacular increase over the past twenty-five years is not coincidence but a classic example of cause and effect.

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In 1962 I was overweight. A doctor advised me that, to lose weight and keep it off, I should eat more fat. To my surprise, it worked. That started me thinking about the value of conventional dietary advice. In 1982, I began a new career researching diet and disease. I spent every day reading medical journals and textbooks; I have been doing it ever since. I now have nearly half a century’s experience of eating a low-carbohydrate, high-animal fat diet, a doctorate in nutritional science, and the knowledge gleaned from 26 years of academic work.

Someone once said that the true experts on a lifestyle are those who live it successfully, not those who talk about it, but sometimes I had to consult such ‘experts’. The best-known ‘health’ mantra is: ‘eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day’ to prevent heart disease and cancer. I asked one registered dietician what evidence there was for it. She told me it came from the government; she knew of no study to support it.

However, studies of over half a million people published in the last five years have found no benefit whatsoever with five portions in respect of cancer, and no significant benefit in heart disease with more than two portions a week.

When asked by the Daily Mail about this conflict with the five-a-day guidelines, Professor Sir Charles George, medical director of the British Heart Foundation, answered: ‘There is some argument about how much you need; I think five may be an arbitrary figure’. And, so, admitted that this seemingly vital piece of dietary advice was based on nothing more than wishful thinking.

And it gets worse. Over this last year, fructose – the sugar found in the fruit we are told to eat so much of – has been shown to be a possible cause of the current epidemics of heart and kidney diseases, high blood pressure in young adults, diabetes, obesity and cancer. Not that the last was particularly new: Professor John Beard at Edinburgh University had shown that fructose might be responsible for cancers as long ago as 1911.

Supporters of the ‘5-a-day’ campaign are always outraged by such findings, repeating their mantra that eating the recommended number of fruit and vegetables has numerous health benefits – without specifying what those benefits might be.

It’s the same story with cholesterol. The idea that raised cholesterol levels are dangerous and that a fried breakfast is a heart attack on a plate, was based on just one flawed rabbit experiment – and it’s still unproven after 58 years. Cholesterol is an essential compound in our bodies with a multitude of vital jobs to perform. More recent research demonstrates that having low blood cholesterol is far more hazardous than ‘high’. Today, the battle against cholesterol has reached the ridiculous. In the USA, zero LDL actually falls within the ‘normal’ range. But LDL is the vehicle that carries cholesterol around the body to where it is needed. No animal on this planet could survive with no LDL.

The word ‘paradox’ frequently crops up throughout the medical literature. It is used where people live an ‘unhealthy’ lifestyle yet don’t get the diseases that current dogma says they should. There are many paradoxes: French, Italian, Greek, Alpine, Spanish, Albanian, Israeli, Japanese, Northern Irish and Indian. But these are not paradoxes at all. They merely demonstrate that our ideas of what is ‘healthy’ are wrong.

With all this evidence against ‘healthy eating’ one has to ask: Why is it promoted so strongly? The answer emerged in 2006.

Every year we hear ever more complaints about falling levels of service, lengthening waiting times and worsening levels of hospital-borne diseases. With the billions of pounds we pump into the NHS every year, have you wondered why we don’t get a better service? The reason seems to be because we do pump billions of pounds into the NHS every year. According to Transparency International’s influential Global Corruption Report 2006*, which is sponsored by the German government, medical care is one of the most corrupt industries in the world – precisely because of the huge amount of money involved.

The pharmaceutical industry not only produces prescription drugs; it also advises government and controls what doctors are taught and how they practise medicine. Medicine, a business just like any other, derives its income and profits from the sale of treatments for disease, which in most cases means the sale of drugs. To prosper, this industry needs people to be ill; it cannot make money if people are healthy. For this reason, research into the prevention of disease is strongly discouraged. And this, according to the 13 August 2004 edition of the British Medical Journal, with: ‘About 850 000 medical errors [occurring] in NHS hospitals every year, resulting in 40,000 deaths’, has put hospital doctors in the unenviable position of being now the fourth leading cause of death in Britain.

It’s a similar story with a burgeoning food industry. Animal proteins and fats are expensive both to use as ingredients and because they have a shorter shelf life. Aided by the ‘healthy’ message allowing the industry to call cheaper-to-produce cereal- and seed oil-based foods ‘healthy’, their products could be sold at prices which rival the price of real food such as fresh meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. While this is healthy for the food producers’ bank balances, it’s not for us.

For, example, prostate cancer has been blamed on dairy products. What we don’t hear is that only low-fat milk and yogurt have been implicated in increased prostate cancer risk; full-cream dairy seems to prevent it. One fatty acid in animal fats, butter and cream helps to prevent cancers, while ‘healthy’ polyunsaturated vegetable margarines and cooking oils increase the risk.

The fact that health advice today has little basis in science hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed by the medical profession. Dr Barnett Kramer of the US National Institutes of Health said of ‘healthy eating’: ‘A lot of the public is completely unaware that the strength of the message is not matched by the strength of the evidence.’ And Professor Sylvan Weinberg, past president of the American College of Cardiology and formerly a staunch supporter of ‘healthy eating’, stated that: ‘healthy eating can no longer be defended ... by rejecting clinical experience and a growing medical literature suggesting that the much-maligned low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet may have a salutary effect on the epidemics in question.’

The health industry has tricked us into an unhealthy lifestyle so that they can treat us. But they can’t make us comply. If we take responsibility for our own lives and health, and eat only real food, we stand a much better chance of living a long, disease-free life without the threats of the unpleasant conditions that often make old age a misery. And we won’t need the drug companies.

* The Global Corruption Report 2006 can be downloaded from http://www.transparency.org/publications/gcr