Dr Zoe Harcombe - The Obesity Epidemic: What caused it? How can we stop it?

[Music] Zoe Hart Combes in fact the star of the show at the moment because she published a paper last week showing that there was no evidence of which device that though fat guidelines which came in in 1977 and this paper has caused a major furor globally because now people have to say actually there is evidence when in fact there is no evidence Zoe will be talking about the information in her book the obesity epidemic what caused it and how can we stop it she is one of the principal proponents in the United Kingdom that the obesity epidemic is being caused by excessive carbohydrate consumption particularly by people who are instant resistant so we're going to talk about the obesity epidemic what caused it how can we stop it one of the things that the UK is quite well known for it's a model from the 1960s any of you know Twiggy Twiggy is now in her sixties looks absolutely fabulous is still a model for a high street chain in the UK and that's what the UK was known for what the UK is now known for is this and this is Georgia Davis and Georgia Davis comes from Wales so she's from my country and she has the distinction if that's something to be proud of of being the fattest teenager in the UK and that was how it was put to the national press in the UK by the Sun paper and the Sun has been following Georgia over a number of years and this is what's happened to Georgia's weight over that time so at 10 Georgia weighed 76 kilos at 15 210 you'll notice she then went on an American style boot camp where she was inspired to eat less and to do more and she then lost weight so for her 16th birthday the Sun were able to do different kinds of features showing that Georgia had indeed lost weight but by 18 years her weight had doubled and by 19 400 kilograms George was recently cut out of her house in Aberdare in Wales because she had become so seriously ill and yet she was unable to get to hospital through any of the normal entrance ways in the house how can we do that to a teenager how can we do that the gender I'd like to go for through therefore is the obesity epidemic just to give some basic stats and I'm going to connect it to a change in dietary advice I'll invite you to come to your own conclusions as to what caused the obesity epidemic but I'm going to present an argument for you here today where we right to change the dietary advice what did we change to what should we be eating if we want to stop this obesity epidemic and the obstacles that will be in our way to change now the references for all of these there's a lot of publications I don't write the full title at the bottom if you go on my website /z day one you've got all the references you just need to make a note of the slide number and the reference number and it's all there for you so sit back and enjoy and hopefully you won't have to make too many notes this is the obesity epidemic in the UK so the World Health Organization data from 1966 available to 1999 we then no longer able to measure the UK because it became devolved in terms of health care so Scotland Northern Ireland Wales and England separated all I've done here is to extrapolate back what obesity could have been but essentially when it's only 1.8 percent in 1966 you can pretty much extrapolate back as far as you like we didn't have an obesity problem but we then had an obesity epidemic so in 1972 2.7 percent of men and the same number of women were obese in the UK look what we managed to do in not even three decades we managed to eat for the UK at least increased obesity 10 fold that's for the women now it then starts making you think what happened around here to build on what Gary said did we just wake up one day and decide to become greedy and lazy or did something else happen this is the famous chart for the US and you've actually got a kink in this chart you can see that this is being driven by obesity and then you've got obesity and overweight at the top line just overweight is practically flat line so it's obesity Drive the overall stats and again you've got this thing here where it's just taken off almost like an aeroplane and you then have to say what happened about here well there was something that happened around the late 1970s early 1980s we had a senator in the US Senator George McGovern who wanted to introduce dietary goals for the United States he had actually been looking at malnutrition and decided he then wanted to look at guidelines for the population as the whole they then became the dietary guidelines from Americans which are published first in 1980 and then revised every five years so we're back in a dietary guideline year this year 2015 I think it would have been much quicker in today's age of the internet and technology but it took a few years before the UK essentially followed the American lead and we had the proposals from nutritional guidelines in the UK in 1983 and then a diet and cardiovascular disease policy in 1984 that then essentially embedded the UK policy and to all intents and purposes we did a u-turn in our dietary advice now we did a u-turn from and I credit Gary in my book for this quote I would never have found it without his weighty tome that did find it fantastic quote from Tanner 1869 the practice of Medicine considered the the gold standard of knowledge at the time flowery and vegetable interesting foods are fattening and sugary stuff especially so and what do we tell people to base their meals on starchy foods and at the same time that we told people to base their meals on starchy foods we said we've now got a different problem again it was beautiful how Gary put it women used to know that carbohydrates made them fat so they recognized in this statement we have a problem because we've been telling people to avoid carbohydrates and that's now counter to what we currently think so now we're going to tell him to eat carbohydrates because we've now decided that fat is instead the problem this is a really important point as well please note we do not tell people to eat carbohydrate because we know that it is healthy we don't even know that it's safe we tell people to have more carbohydrate because as I'll cover in a few slides it's what happens when you tell people to eat less fat now why did we change our dietary advice this is got to be one of the most important things and it will come up in presentations over the next four days because it's almost impossible to tell the story of how we got into this mess without mentioning a particular character this is Ancel keys this is a bunny rabbit and this is heart disease what of all of these got to do with each other we may wonder another thought do you ever wonder why perhaps you don't know loads of people who've died from heart disease we have this theory or we have this idea that one in three people is dying from heart disease at the time and silkies started looking at all of this it was one in four they were talking about the 40% number it's actually of the people who died one in four will have heart disease on their death certificate and I do think that's quite an important point because at the time this whole heart issue became so dramatic in 1950 the overall death rate in the US was one point four five percent and heart deaths were about four in ten of those so you could actually say you were likely to know six people in a thousand dying from heart disease or one in 4qc how it's very different positioning clearly the one in four plays into the hands of heart charities but also researchers trying to prioritize this field so Ancel Keys was the man of the moment having done the brilliant Minnesota starvation experiment published in 1950 he was the man of the moment and he wanted to turn his attention to heart disease now he remembered back in the early last century some russian pathologists had been studying animals they noticed when they did autopsies that they were finding fatty deposits in the arteries of dead people and they were asking questions how could they have got there can we do some experiments so they do some experiments first of all on rabbits and they fed rabbits foods high in cholesterol and of course the rabbits developed lesions and Scott it packs in the arteries what all but one didn't make a note off was the fact that rabbits are herbivores they cannot digest animal foods and you only find cholesterol in animal foods so it wasn't really surprising that poor Bugs Bunny clogged up he was eating the things that he shouldn't have been eating now the things that we hear far less often that's the bit that we hear we did the experiments on rabbits and we found eating cholesterol cause blood cholesterol to rise and that was the start of the diet heart hypothesis as guy called knack in 1915 who gave rabbits purified cholesterol but in foods that they could metabolize nothing happened other researchers at the time gave dogs and rats foods high in cholesterol of course they're omnivores they can digest foods with animal origins nothing happened but those two bits of information we missed so we developed this idea and that's what Ancel Keys had he just had an idea that there was something about cholesterol in food cholesterol in the blood heart disease and he wanted to explore it further so what he did for his first hypothesis was to say does dietary cholesterol raise blood cholesterol and this is really important because just this last week the American government looked like they were going to retract on the cholesterol guidelines that have been in place since 1977 thou shalt have no more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol on any single day if they'd have listened to the person that they actually got all of this from in the first place they need never have introduced that guideline because as the keys found that cholesterol in food made no difference to cholesterol in the blood whatsoever you may have heard one of the quotes saying unless you're rabid or chicken it just doesn't matter this comes from the symposium on atherosclerosis 1955 is the most definitive statement I found from keys on him saying that both from experiments and field surveys the evidence says that cholesterol content in itself of all natural diets has no significant effect on either the cholesterol level and this is really interesting or the development of atherosclerosis in man they come with me on this one because this is some logic that we can get in this audience now that they should have got back in 19 in the 1950s when they made this conclusion cholesterol only occurs in foods of animal origin so you only find cholesterol in meat fish eggs and dairy foods Kees knew that cholesterol only occurred in foods of animal origin and that's a statement from a paper in 1950 so if feeding animals has no effect if cholesterol has no effect then the foods of animal origin have no effect do you see that to give the human subjects the dietary cholesterol that he needed to give them to come to the conclusion that it made no difference he fed them animal foods and he therefore exonerated animal foods but he did not make that connection what he should then have gone on to study of the three macronutrients we know them as carbohydrates fat and protein he should have gone on to study carbohydrate because animal foods are rich in protein and fat and very very sparse or none at all in carbohydrate but he didn't he went on to study fat he was convinced that it was fat so next thing he did was the seven countries study published in 1970 it started in 1956 involved about 13,000 men who were post war survivors so any heart disease that they went on to develop particularly in areas like Finland we do need to be aware of what was happening in the years preceding them taking part in this experiment and the conclusions of the seven countries study often overstated there were only three conclusions published in the final summary and he even uses these words tends to be related so coronary heart disease tends to be related to cholesterol cholesterol tends to be related to saturated fat and therefore coronary heart disease saturated fat and cholesterol all tend to be related to each other now he quantified this in the 25 year follow-up paper where he said the Pearson correlation coefficient is about 0.72 for heart disease deaths at 25 years they carried on monitoring it past the 1970 publication and the cholesterol level the blood cholesterol level of the men at the start the experiment and so when I was looking at that to test that he had in fact used the Pearson correlation coefficient and to just understand what he was doing with the numbers I noticed that there seemed to be a much stronger association with another variable and that variable was latitude and for those of you who value vitamin D and we have some vitamin D experts in the audience you're gonna really like this because the Pearson correlation coefficient used in Keyes's original data but running with the latitude of either the country or the cohort came out at point nine six which is an almost perfect relationship now you can see on the r-squared you've got the strength of the relationship so he's actually trying to use this as a predictive tool he said if I had known the cholesterol level of the guys at the start of the experiment I could have predicted who's going to die well actually you could have predicted as much as you couldn't have predicted because that's so near the 50-50 however this one because the R is so high the R squared stays fantastically high not that you can use correlation in that way but if you were looking for a predictive tool all you needed to do at the start of the experiment was to ask the guys for their postcode no blood tests no here's the follow-up no medical teams none of the dietary analysis just ask them their postcode and it correlates almost perfectly but does that make sense well yes it does because if you know how vitamin D is made by the synthesis of cholesterol on the skin you've got people in Finland hardly seen the sunshine who will have higher cholesterol levels but they will have lower levels of vitamin D where the heart deaths were very low in the seven countries study the southern regions of Japan Crete the Mediterranean countries getting a lot of sunshine a lot of vitamin D being made and cholesterol much lower now what if the harm is done by the lack of vitamin D not by the presence of cholesterol the cholesterol is just the marker that it hasn't yet been turned into vitamin D now were we right to change our dietary advice I'm so pleased that this was finally published last week it was approved in December we were getting very very when by Monday it was it was still not on the stack but the question to ask as Tim said earlier on is if we had been around at the time that we changed those dietary guidelines would we have been right to change now what we should have done is to take the seven country study which would have been epidemiological which can suggest an association it claims an association between saturated fat cholesterol and heart disease then you're supposed to do the randomized controlled trials to perform interventions to see what then happens we didn't it was almost like people were tripping over themselves to join in on this cholesterol heart fat whatever was going on bandwagon so in parallel we had the first study up here in 1965 the rose corn and olive oil studying on this slide I just want to present these were the only six studies that were available at the time the Dietary Guidelines were changed and they were not referenced by either the American dietary guidelines committee or the UK dietary guidelines committee they were not referenced at all the American one for real experts in the audience rieflin referenced the Finnish mental hospital study which is about the only one you shouldn't refer to and the British one did mention the seven countries study but they had trial evidence available and it was all ignored you can read into that what you will but we have here in the table you've got the number of participants those in the intervention group and the control groups the S or the S P is very important because you've got us for secondary study P for primary study you can see only the LA veterans Dayton study from 69 actually included any healthy subjects all males and you've just got a summary of the dietary interventions there so what that told us as a research team and that was based at University of West of Scotland we know that the guidelines introduced were 30 percent total fat ten percent saturated fat what we didn't know at the time was that no randomized control trial had actually tested either of those recommendations before they were introduced if you remember back from the previous slide wood Hill which came off the American guidelines were introduced tested the 10% saturated fat as one of the options and there were 18 there was an 18% all cause mortality death rate in the intervention group vs. a 12% in the control group I think at that point malcolm kendrick usually says oops because that wasn't what was intended but that's what happened in the only one that was in that was checked there were 370 deaths from all cause mortality in both the interventional control groups absolutely identical numbers of all cause mortality which gives you a risk ratio of so close to one it's not true 0.996 completely spanning the line of no effect that 95% confidence interval death rate obviously high 30% if you'd have told those two and a half thousand men at the beginning of the trial 3 and 10 of you are going to die during the duration of this trial they may not have been too thrilled but it tells us another important thing that one of the biggest risks for dying from heart disease is having had a heart attack now that may seem a bit obvious but it is important to point point out some of these even obvious findings in terms of deaths from coronary heart disease no significance risk ratio zero point nine eight nine completely spanning the line of no effect this is really interesting because the mean sarin blood level cholesterol levels decreased in both the intervention and the control groups the reductions were significantly when I say that word I mean statistically significantly higher in the intervention group but this did not result in significant differences as you've just seen in either all cause mortality or coronary heart disease mortality now the first and main criticism that we got of the paper last week was but we know that saturated fat causes blood cholesterol levels rise and blood cholesterol levels cause heart disease we know that well what we were saying in this paper was first of all that call those AB&C so a saturated fat B cholesterol C coronary heart disease we showed that there was no association in the gray I'd won evidence which is a meta-analysis of randomized control trials no association even between a and C so it actually doesn't matter much what B is doing because you've still got no association between a and C I could also argue that perhaps we've undermined the lipid hypothesis because if it is supposed to work with cholesterol as an intermediary we've just shown that it didn't work with cholesterol as an intermediary so there will be more on this subject I think I suppose one of most striking revelations of findings on the basis of two and a half thousand not terribly healthy men we changed Dietary Guidelines at the time for the inhabitants of the UK and the US and by now we're probably up to a billion people who are impacted by these guidelines Senator George McGovern I understand was a failed presidential candidate arguably he left more of a legacy with his Dietary Guidelines than had he gone on to be President very interesting again no single study recommended change not one of those six Artie T's the corn oil and the olive oil study actually said we don't think corn oil particularly is going to be beneficial and it could be harmful my favorite one is the low-fat diet the 1965 Research Committee for batum conclusion a low-fat diet has no place in the treatment of myocardial infarction and yet we did what we did so I think with fair to favors one line the RCT evidence didn't support the introduction of dietary fat guidelines now for those of you just like seeing that visually you've got the this is the meta-analysis bit the forest plot with the six trials and the confidence intervals note one trial is significant I don't know if you can see there they're all touching the line one which is the line of no effect you've got wood Hill here and the corner Nala Voyles saying it was you much better off being in the control group and you've got nothing much saying that you are much better off being in the intervention group because the big blob does carry the most weight and the long the largest studies the Dayton and the slow carried the most weight very very slight differences to the left counter any major differences over there to the right you can take any one of those studies out and it has no different thought so ever so there's just no way you can put the data together to have it make a difference and the same in terms of coronary heart disease death no one study makes the difference taking one out makes no difference whatsoever now you also then do want to look and I did this about four years ago I did it because Malcolm Kendrick looked at saturated fat and heart disease in Europe using the Monica data and he showed that the countries with the highest saturated fat intake actually have the lowest rates of heart disease France is the absolute classic it's the single lowest rate of heart disease in Europe the single highest rate of saturated fat intake and I thought well there's got to be quite a lot of data in the world if we want to look at cholesterol and this time cardiovascular disease and there's an incredible amount of data available from the World Health Organization there's a blog the link you've got there there's a blog on how I did this any of you can repeat it takes a couple of hours you go to the World Health Organization and you put in the average cholesterol levels for a hundred and ninety two countries that's all of them that they've got data for and this is men and overall death rates and cardiovascular disease so you can see a very slight downwards gradient I've stuck in a blob the South Africa I don't even see the red where it is there no it's just quite near the line there and I've put in one for the UK just if you're interested but that's a very very slight damage trend the R and the r-squared nothing to get excited about so it's now looked at women and cardiovascular disease deaths now remember this is supposed to be going up that's what we've been told okay so the more that cholesterol goes up the more likely you are to die and this is from any cause well it's the exact opposite the higher your cholesterol the lower the death rate the higher the death rate the lower the cholesterol now starting to become quite interesting as the correlation coefficient at 0.5 then take it to all deaths and cholesterol for males you've got an even steeper are going on here the strengths the relation ship is strengthening and you've got a very clear downwards trend and then finish it off with women and women for all deaths you've got a strongest relationship of all that is significantly telling us the last thing we want to be doing is lowering cholesterol now when people have shown these to physicians and Malcolm and if you ravenous cough I've had the same experience they don't get it they don't get that the graph is the wrong way around and their first instinct is to say oh it's even worse than I thought that the paradigm in the head is so strong that cholesterol causes heart disease that when you present them something and to say okay that's an association I'm not claiming causation here but again as Malcolm Kendrick says Association does not prove causation but lack of Association disproves causation if you haven't even got an association between saturated fat and heart disease or cholesterol and heart disease or cholesterol and cardiovascular disease you're gonna be on really shaky ground trying to claim that one causes the other so what did we change to this is something that I call the eat badly plate this is the role model healthy eat and advice in the UK we've seen the food pyramid which was the us advice this is not going to differ dramatically in different countries it's just about how can we promote carbohydrates essentially so we've got here they eat well plate as it's called in the UK and you can see the sugary cereal you can see white bagels you've got tins of fruit in syrup you've got sugary baked beans you've got all kinds of stuff going on here this is the just inexplicable segment for a role-model plate of healthy eating where you've got Battenberg cake sponge cake chocolate sweets biscuits there's even a can of cola I don't if you can make that out in the original plate which was called the Barents of good health 1994 it was a branded can of coca-cola and it was branded cornflakes Kellogg's of course so we took the browns away but we didn't actually change that much now for those of you who are familiar with the impact of calories on density this is supposed to be by weight so if you have 8% that purple segment of your diet in the form of those foods as junk foods essentially they end up becoming over 20 percent of your calorie intake so that junk segment really has no place the starchy carbohydrates similarly because of their energy density end up taking up 50% of your calorie intake when they were intended to be 33% of your plate now we tell people to avoid shock rose but sucrose is essentially a combination of fructose and glucose so we're at the same time telling people to avoid shock roast but essentially to have crows as the basis of their diet the body doesn't know where glucose came from it doesn't know that you had a banana or you had a sweet it just knows that it has to deal with the sugars that come in and so we're telling people to eat the foods that we know cause these kind of conditions diabetes cancer non-alcoholic fatty liver disease why are we seeing that in children when they are clearly not consuming alcohol but they are consuming fructose in an extraordinary quantity and unprecedented quantity and there's only a couple of foods on the entire plate there's a vegetable here much would be better as coconut oil and I think there's one of the protein meat fish options that isn't actually breaded and the protein would have a slight impact but to all intents and purposes two foods would not have an impact on blood glucose levels and we only need about 4 to 5 grams of glucose in our bloodstream at any one time and this is what we're being told to chuck in on a daily basis now the consequences of that are and this is studying the actual UK official data for our food intake the consequences of that are that we have in the UK about 1,500 of our daily calories in the form of processed food and many of those have taken up in the form of white flour and white sugar now what has gone up during the period that we've become obese 1975 to 1999 cereals cereal products soft drink consumption ice cream processed potatoes oven chips all that nonsense what has gone down real meat X we half the number of eggs we used to a fifth of the butter that we used to a fifth of the whole make whole milk and far less fresh green vegetables so you cannot implicate meat eggs butter and green vegetables the kind of basis of how I eat and how a lot of people down the front eat and hopefully most of the audience eats you cannot implicate those in the obesity epidemic when they have fallen through the floor you can implicate the cereals and the cereal products that have risen in parallel with obesity and I do love pointing this one out we have this is from industry data 1.4 kilograms of flour consumed by the average brit per week 731 grams of sucrose and about 39 grams of butter and we have the absurdity to say that butter is making us fat could it possibly be the 2.1 kilograms of the white stuff that could be having a bit of an impact instead so what should we eat if we want to solve this obesity epidemic what should we be eating well it's glib to say let's just go back to eating what we had before we had an obesity epidemic but that's essentially what we're saying and it does seem incredible to this group of people that we're the ones seen as the heretics the radicals the revolutionaries it's like we had a way of eating depending on your belief system for a few thousand years three and a half million years we had a way of eating and it was only in the last thirty years that we changed that so surely the radical thing was that change when we asked the human race to have that extraordinary level of carbohydrate never having previously tested it on the human race well we've now done the test we've done the test 30 years on up to a billion people and I think we've seen the consequences so it'd be quite good if we could stop that experiment and maybe go back to eating how we used to eat what should we be eating it's really simple we shouldn't even have to have the word real in there we should be able to own the word food back they should have to call their food fake and we can earn the term food but I'll call it real food for now they should only then be one nutritional debate should that real food be mostly plants or animals or mostly carbohydrates or fats and we'll see how they become connected here's a great chart that I've developed some of you will be very very familiar with food and macronutrients for those that aren't I just want to speed through this I do think it's really interesting there is one food group on the planet that is entirely carbohydrate actually it's not a food it's shook rose 100% carbohydrate shouldn't be called a food but that is the only pure carbohydrate that we do ingest at the other extreme we've got that 100% fat and that's our category of oils now interestingly protein is in virtually everything so we tend to have in nature and this is just how food tends to come naturally when we're eating real food we tend to have carbohydrate proteins and we tend to have fat proteins and you'll notice that those tend to be plant foods and those tend to be animal foods so that's where the debate on real food tends to get into the plants animal kingdom or the fat carbohydrate world you've got this very interesting group in the middle foods naturally rich in all three macronutrients carbohydrates fat and protein nuts seeds and avocados but they're quite rare and as you get closer to the center so meat and fish zero carbohydrate eggs a trace dairy up to about 5 percent particular if you're going for the more fluid dairy hard cheese very little carb content fruit and veg very little - next you know fat content and as you head in here you'll turn into more of a fat content so they start to merge at that middle point but that essentially is food now what happens when you put in a macronutrient target which is what the governments of the UK in the US did and the other countries followed we said let's have 15% or sorry let's have no more than 30% of our diet in the form of fat because protein is in everything it tends to be fairly constant at around 15% and by the law of maths you're then left with 55% and in case we couldn't work it out the American nutritional guidelines spelled it out have 55 actually they said to 60% of your diet in the form of carbohydrate now as soon as you mandate that you start people making poor food choices and we're going to see that on the next slide now in terms of the low carb high fat debate I'd like to approach this in two different ways because I think there are a number of people but I think that they're still thankfully the minority who need to take this kind of approach and I think they do need to take a macronutrient approach to their diet and it's essentially got to be driven by that little segment there and if your obesity has not responded to just eating real food and managing your carbohydrate intake and or if you have type-2 diabetes you may seriously want to think about how small you want to make that blue segment because it's then the carbohydrate intake that's going to drive your health and your energy and your fitness and all those other kind of things anyone can go that route but what I want to do is to make this an inclusive approach to show that anyone can end up at low carb high fat although some people should choose it at the micronutrient level now you see the minute you set the blue segment because protein tends to be in everything and because protein tends to be in everything you cannot eat a naturally high protein diet if you are eating a high protein diet you are doing something unnatural you are having daffy things like egg white omelets do I have in Whitefish you are having skinless chicken breasts you can't eat protein alone there was no column just yellow saying this food is protein alone so if that stays around 15% fat has to fill up the rest it's not that your nest load choosing to go high-fat you have to if you go low-carb because it's the healthy thing to do and I want to take the rest of us maybe that's going to be too far for some people I want to show how it's still how you end up because if you make your nutritional choices on the basis of I'm gonna eat real food and then I'm going to look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves cents dollars take care of the micronutrients so if you eat to get the vitamins and that you need for optimal health there is only one decision in that plants animals carbs fat you are going to be driven and I apologize to vegetarians vegans in the audience you are going to be driven towards the animal foods you have the single most nutritious food on the planet on the left hand side here liver this is per hundred grams of product the protein quality calories vitamins in a selection of foods and I've put in red for each row the winner in that rose so brown rice wins on calories 400 grams that's probably not the one you want to win but liver wins on protein quality and then liver pretty much cleans up on everything else you've got a rare thing here where a plant food is actually providing more but again if you want to then compare that by calorie versus by gram liver is going to be competing calorie on calories straight away look at some I've got to highlight this one before moving on because liver is actually the utterly complete food if you notice their and their liver actually has four times the vitamin C of an apple we don't often get told that you'd have to eat it raw but then that's entirely possible and my husband has testified to that so it really is the complete food let's look at the minerals we've just looked at the vitamins a selection of some of the most important minerals okay as you would expect plants come from the ground minerals come from the ground the plant foods start doing okay here so you've got brown rice that does quite well on magnesium and you've got lentils that do okay on copper and zinc and if you've ever wondered why low carb high fat people are chocoholics this is why because if we swap out a different plant food and putting cocoa in the left-hand column we wipe out all the ate brown rice apples lentils and all the rest of it because cocoa powder is apps there's a lot of women going completely wild in the audience no like I've just given them the reason to eat chocolate for the rest of their life but I doing a huge amount of very very dark chocolate and cocoa powder is a phenomenal source of those minerals so if we ask the question again what should we be eating real food no debate should it be plants or animals I think it was Michael Pollan who famously said eat food mostly plants not too much I would say eat food mostly animals quite a lot because thank you you actually do have to eat quite a lot to get all the nutrients and that's before you factor in half we depleted our soil with too many plants options in our fields and even if the maximum nutrition we can get was that shown in the table you've got to be eating a pretty sizable steak just to be getting your zinc intake for the day and of course that then drives the Michael Pollan side down the whole grains beans pulses fruit it drives sort of our side if I can talk on behalf the team towards the pasture fed meat we're not talking about you know grain fed staff for factory farmed whatever eggs dairy fish and berries we'd agree on things like vegetables and salads low carb high fat then becomes an outcome so you can either choose it upfront and it's highly recommended or if you just want to stay take a step along this journey go for the real food choose it for the nutrition you will end up eating less carbohydrates and more fat and you will be on that journey of lower carbohydrate higher fat and the further down the journey you go the better you'll feel and the lowering carb you'll go and the higher in fat you'll go so if you're not doing this now please don't be daunted by it and just dip a toe in the water now obstacles to change I just want to start getting towards the close here and it's important to look at what may stop us going back to the dietary advice that we had and that we should return to and I'm sorry to say but the number one obstacles changes the public health authorities because they just seem so intransigent and there's a great quote that I found from Alexander Pope we should never be ashamed to say that we've been wrong because that is merely admitting that we know more today than we knew yesterday but it's seems to be such a block to say I was wrong and so many of us on this team were wrong we were carb loading for exercise I was a vegetarian many people who are in this field were at one point vegetarians we got it wrong but we've been big enough to say we got it wrong and this is what we now believe so I wish some public health authorities would come along their economic factors are massive I think the government should be getting together to hold a dietary review meeting and the dietary review bit should take about 30 seconds we were wrong we need to change back right what's next on the agenda what's next on the agenda is that we don't have 60% of our populations working in the food system in the way that we used to before we changed all of this their big dilemma for the rest of the meeting needs to be what do we do with all the employees of the fast-food chains the fake food manufacturers the Pizza Hut's the muffin makers whatever coca-cola Pepsi what do we do with all of those employees because them being employed by those organizations is killing our populations it's making them fat and sick we need them not to be employed in those outfits but then we don't want 2030 percent unemployment whatever would happen that's what they should be talking about and the final one conflicts of interest the world's largest food and drink company PepsiCo if you put it on a table of the GDP of the countries in the world it's larger than 65% of them it's the size of Sudan so when you take on the government and the dietary advice and a can of red pop on a government plate of role-model healthy eating you're actually declaring war on Sudan that's what you're effectively doing the money in this is just phenomenal and don't think that the money is separate the money is so integral to how our governments are working I assume is going to cover this over the next few days beautifully it's so integral here's the sponsors of the American Dietetic Association and you can see their Pepsi so they've basically got the backing of Sudan and we're the ones trying to say guys I think we should just be eating the real food again I was going to put up some of the the British Dietetic Association sponsors they're actually not so bad they've got down own Abbot nutrition Birds Eye the sugar Bureau you'll notice that a lot of the dietitians are in bed with sugar but this one was even better this is the British nutrition foundation I could hardly get all the logos on the slide they're in bed with just about everyone you'll start to see the familiar ones Unilever PepsiCo and the rest of them and then I put together something for South Africa this combines sponsors that we're aware of sponsors that were a recent conference where they were partnering with nutrition foundations they have Nestle as one of their diamond sponsors there is an American sorry an association for Dietetics in South Africa and the South African sugar Association they have a joint award that they give out I mean that's just fabulous isn't it and then of course you know sugar up here we should have our dietary authorities nowhere near the organizations that are trying to make us consume their products when we know that their products are so bad for their health not only are they close they're partnering they're sponsoring they're working very very closely together so here's the summary we changed our dietary advice in 77 in the u.s. 83 in the UK the rest of the world has followed suit we changed with no evidence we change to the wrong advice which we can summarize this low-fat high-carb and obesity in the UK at least the America's already had a head start increased tenfold in the decades around that change was that a coincidence or is there something that we should be looking at there at the very least and Association I believe it to be a cause and I don't think I'm alone in believing that if you eat real food and to get the nutrients that you need for optimal health low carb high fat becomes an outcome and then it similarly addresses obesity type 2 diabetes cancer coronary heart disease metabolic syndrome the things that you're going to hear about over the next couple of days this is the final slide has just gone to zero I heard this for a presentation I was privileged to hear berry Grove speak before he sadly passed away last year and berry pointed out that civilized man so-called is the only chronically sick animal on the planet there are no national health services in the jungle there are no doctor's appointments you know these animals are not current queuing up to be made better in some way and I remember driving away from the presentation and it was actually the presentation that ended my lifetime of being vegetarian and the thoughts that I had when I was driving away were twofold could this be because man is the only species clever enough to make his own food and stupid enough to eat it thank you very much

Channel: Karen Thomson

Views: 50,410

Rating: 4.8676186 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: tPjKJfajhAw

Length: 45min 31sec (2731 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/hefftv]

The last 15-20 minutes of this video is intense... Eye opening for sure...