How to get lung cancer from a frypan

By | Vegetable Oils | 10 Comments

Vegetable oils are highly unstable. When they interact with oxygen, they release neurotoxic, DNA mutating chemicals which are known to cause cancer (at least). Recent improvements in measurement technology have now thrown a spotlight on the quantity of these chemicals released by normal use. And the results are truly terrifying.

Vegetable oil made from seeds (Canola, Sunflower, Corn, Safflower, Grapeseed, Rice Bran and Soybean for example) -seed oils – are a relatively new addition to the human diet.  Unlike oils made from fruit (Olive, Avocado and Coconut) and animal fats, they are very high in something called an Omega-6 fat.

They are also incredibly cheap to make, which is why you will find them in just about every food on the supermarket shelf and in every deep fryer in the land.

These Omega-6 fats are known to cause oxidative stress in humans.  Oxidative stress occurs when the reactions between these fats and oxygen overwhelm our anti-oxidant defences and a chain reaction gets under way.

That chain reaction results in the production of some highly toxic chemicals which include MDA (Malondialdehyde) and 4-HNE (4-hydroxy-2-nonenal).  They are dangerous because they interact destructively with our DNA and cause cancer.

But that is, by no means the least of it. Because of their neurotoxic capabilities, they are likely to be heavily involved in Alzheimer’s disease, MND, Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.  They are also implicated in chronic inflammation, stroke and heart disease.

While the MDA and 4-HNE we make ourselves (from consuming too much Omega-6) is devastating enough, it is now becoming abundantly clear that we can make them even more dangerous than they already are.  All we need to do is heat them before we eat them.

A study released late last year found that when oils containing Omega-6 fats are heated at a normal cooking temperature (of 180⁰C), they create significant quantities of MDA and 4-HNE (amongst other highly toxic chemicals).  And each time the oil was re-used the concentration increased massively.  The study showed that by the fifth day of oil re-use it had 5 times the concentration of these chemicals that it had on the first (which was already alarmingly high).

These premade cancer bombs are directly ingested every time we eat a food which was cooked in those oils (for example, anything fried in seed oils) or which used heated seed oils in the recipe (for example baked goods).   They are even lurking in products which are sold cold but were made using heated seed oils (like margarines).

But worse than that, the researchers also made the point that all they could measure was the amount of these chemicals left in the oil. Since they are highly volatile, they are constantly escaping into the air around us when the food is being cooked and even when it is being eaten.  It is likely that this explains the stubbornly high rates of lung cancer among women in Asian countries (where smoking is rare among women, but wok frying with Canola oil is a daily task).

According to a 2014 report from the WHO (World Health Organisation), more than forty three thousand Australians died from cancer in 2012. And despite huge advances in treatment, it is now the single biggest cause of death in Australia.

The report reveals that in the nine years the report covers, cancer diagnosis in Australia increased by an alarming 14 per cent. In 2003, 274 Australians per day were diagnosed. In 2012, it was 312 people. Per Day! Worse than that, the authors of the report expect that number to almost double in the next twenty years.

In countries exposed to the Western Diet for most of the last five decades (such as Australia), the number of new cases of Multiple Sclerosis recorded per year (after adjusting for population increases) has quadrupled and the numbers of people with the other diseases associated with these lethal chemicals has also been pushing steadily higher.

Prevention is clearly the key to changing a future full of untimely death from horrible chronic disease. Unfortunately those charged with advising us are blind to the real cause of these lethal epidemics.

Worse that that they are frequently the people responsible for us consuming the oils in the first place. McDonald’s for example switched from frying in Beef Fat to Canola oil in 2004 after incessant pressure from the Heart Foundation. And KFC followed suit in 2012

Every day there are thousands of teenagers standing over vats of frying canola oil for 8 hour shifts at every fast food restaurant in this country.  Every day, there are people cooking with high temperature seed oils in woks (seasoned with seed oil). And every day there are industrial quantities of heated seed oil being poured into commercial baked and frozen foods.

And that is set against background of terrifying increases in cancer incidence in this country.  Today’s 312 new cancer sufferers are not theoretical.  They are your neighbour, your sister, the kid next door.

That this is allowed to continue when the science is so clear, is not merely a shame or an embarrassment.  It is an outrage and a tragedy.

You can’t stop the food processors putting these carcinogens in your food and you can’t stop the Heart Foundation and the Cancer Council encouraging them to do so, but you sure can stop that food being put in you.  Isn’t it time you did?

 

Photo courtesy of 2006 advertisement of the British Heart Foundation

How much Imitation Food did you eat today?

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 9 Comments

In these days of regulated, well, everything, it is easy to forget that we are not far down the track from a time when food was regularly adulterated in search of profit.  Milk (and beer) was watered down.  Bread was padded out with Plaster of Paris and sawdust.  And jam was stretched with sugar and pectin to save on costly fruit.

Some of these changes were just plain dangerous.  Some were not likely to be immediately harmful, but did mean the consumer wasn’t getting what they paid for.  To deal with the grey area between adulteration (with, say, sawdust) and cheating (with, say, water or sugar), in 1938 US legislators introduced laws that required that ‘Imitation Foods’ be clearly labelled.

The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was authorised to create legally binding ‘standards of identity’ based on “the time-honored standards employed by housewives and reputable manufacturers”.  These were recipes which specified what well recognised foods such as cheese, or milk or bread or jam (for example) must contain and in what quantities.  The FDA attacked the task with gusto and by 1950 about half of all food sold in the US had a standardised description.

This meant that if you wanted to make a jam with less fruit than the standard you could do so but it had to be clearly labelled as Imitation Jam.

It also meant that if you wanted to sell low fat milk it had to be labelled Imitation Milk.  If you wanted to sell cheese slices made with milk solids and vegetable fats, it was Imitation Cheese. Or if you wanted to sweeten yoghurt with fruit juice instead of sugar it had to be called Imitation Sweetened Yoghurt.

You don’t have to be a marketing genius to understand that your product might not fly off the shelves with ‘Imitation’ stamped on the front.

The food industry wasn’t a fan in the 1950s but they became even less of a fan by the 1970s as the market for low-fat food really took off.  And they weren’t alone.  The American Heart Foundation was keen to get Americans to switch from animal fats to vegetable oils (to avoid cholesterol) and generally lower the fat in their diet.  But vegetable oils were rarely part of the traditional descriptions of these foods and the amount of fat was specified by law anyway.

Sustained lobbying by the food industry and the Heart Foundation resulted in the laws being changed in 1973.  From then on a food did not have to use the word “Imitation” as long as it had the same level of nutrients as the original.  Calories and fat were excluded from the requirement.  So as long as your Cheese like substance wrapped in plastic had the same vitamins and minerals as the real deal, it could be labelled as Cheese.

One of the most obvious results of that twisted logic is now available in your local supermarket.  There you can purchase a substance which describes itself as having “The protein, energy and fibre of 2 Weet-Bix and milk”.  The actual ingredients of Up&Go are (in descending order by weight):

  • water,
  • skim milk powder,
  • cane sugar,
  • wheat maltodextrin,
  • soy protein,
  • vegetable oils (sunflower, canola),
  • inulin,
  • starch,
  • corn syrup solids,
  • fructose,
  • cocoa (0.5%),
  • oat flour,
  • mineral (calcium), food acid (332), flavours, vegetable gums (460, 466, 407), stabiliser (452), salt, vitamins (C, niacin, A, B12, B6, B2, B1, folate)

You might be tempted to call that ‘Imitation Weetbix and Milk’ but as no Weet-bix appear to be involved, ‘Imitation Sweetened Milk’ is probably closer to the mark.

I’m sure that does add up to the same amount of protein, energy and fibre as Weet-bix and milk but I suspect that an appropriate amount of sawdust and offal would too.

I say bring back the Imitation label.  If your Mayonnaise is made with sugar, emulsifier and water rather than eggs and olive oil, it should be labelled Imitation Mayonnaise.  If your chocolate is made with sugar and vegetable oil rather than sugar and cocoa butter, it should be labelled imitation chocolate.  If your bread has added Fructooligosaccharides, then it’s Imitation Bread.  And if your Weetbix and Milk is made from skim milk powder and sugar, it should be called Imitation Sweetened Milk.

Assuming anyone still wanted to sell food labelled that way, it would make the shopper’s task significantly easier.  There would be no chance you would accidentally buy food containing vegetable oils as they would all be labelled as Imitations.  It wouldn’t eliminate sugar but at least the foods which contained sugar would clearly list sugar as an ingredient (rather than things like juice concentrate or pear extract).  In fact all the ingredients would be recognisable and the list would be much shorter.

This kind of change would result in almost all the contents of a modern supermarket being labelled as Imitation Food.  Yes, I know there is no chance of this happening.  Industry would fight it tooth and nail.  Very real and very large amounts of money would be on the line.  And that just shows how much we have lost control of our food supply – in the space of less than one human lifetime.

The 20th century will go down as the century when mankind surrendered the ability to prepare their own food (or at least know the person who did).  We surrendered that right to corporations motivated by nothing other than profit.  And the result is mass epidemics of chronic disease, the likes of which humankind has never before experienced.  This is not a coincidence, it is a consequence.  And it will end badly for us and our kids.

Removing imitation labelling requirements did not cause the disaster but it certainly and massively accelerated it.  Don’t be a victim of the corporatisation of our food supply.  Eat Real Food, that is, food that is assembled from recognisable ingredients.  Oh, and ditch the sugar. It’ll kill you whether it’s labelled properly or not.

Also published on The Juice Daily

Oops, sorry ‘bout that – 5 Big Things Nutrition science got horribly wrong

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 10 Comments

Australia is in the midst of a chronic disease epidemic.  Kidney cancer, Melanoma, Prostate cancer and Anal cancer have all doubled since 1982, as has Chronic Kidney Disease since 1991. Type II Diabetes has tripled since 1989.  Multiple Sclerosis has done the same since 1961. Thyroid and Liver cancer has almost quadrupled since 1982.  And life threatening childhood allergic reactions (anaphylaxis) have almost quintupled since 1994.

In the same timeframe, we have become more health conscious than ever.  The science of Nutrition has moved from a back-room study of malnutrition to daily media coverage of what to eat.

The problem is most of what the nutrition profession has told us about food and its effect on disease has been horribly wrong.  So horribly wrong that, in many cases, we’d have been better off if we had done the opposite of what they said.

Here are 5 Big Things they’ve stuffed up.

  1. Fibre prevents bowel cancer

In 2002 the Cochrane Collaboration reviewed all high quality controlled trials (involving almost 5,000 patients).  They concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that increased dietary fibre would reduce Bowel Cancer.

That review was followed up in 2005 by a major evidence review by the Harvard School of Public Health.  The paper covered 13 studies which involved 725,628 people.  And again fibre drew a blank.  The authors concluded that high dietary fibre intake did not reduce the risk of Bowel Cancer.

Other recent research has also demolished many of the other claims around fibre.  It doesn’t prevent heart disease.  It doesn’t improve constipation (in fact it may be part of the cause).  And it likely increases our chances of getting diverticular disease.

  1. Cutting salt is good for the heart

When we consume salt, we retain more water.  More water means higher blood pressure.  A large Cochrane review conducted in 2004 showed that reducing salt intake does reduce blood pressure – but only slightly.

And while that’s nice, the real question is, does it prevent heart disease.  Unfortunately for the low salt brigade the answer (revealed in a 2011 Cochrane review) is a definite no.

There is no evidence that reducing salt reduces heart disease outcomes.  And worryingly one of the reviewed trials showed that reducing salt increase the risk of death in heart failure patients.

  1. Animal fat and Cholesterol are bad for the heart

Over the last five years a series of major reviews have all arrived at the same conclusion – Saturated Fat (the type which dominates fats from animals) does not cause heart disease.  The most recent review, published in August 2015, also adds that those fats are not associated with stroke, type II Diabetes or death from any other cause.

We’ve also been told for decades to avoid cholesterol.  It has been a major part of dietary warnings in the US (and eventually Australia) since 1961.  But this year the US government’s top nutrition advisory body released a review of the evidence which concludes dietary cholesterol is no longer a ‘nutrient of concern’.

No, we didn’t suddenly become immune to its evilness, the advice had been wrong all along.  And that dreadfully wrong advice stopped us consuming one of the most nutritionally perfect foods available – eggs (also vilified for their saturated fat content) – and had us falling victim to every marketer who wanted to plaster ‘low cholesterol’ on the front of a pack.

  1. ‘Vegetable Oil’ is good for the heart

One of the more recent demolitions of the ‘saturated fat’ is bad for the heart, myth also looked at whether vegetable is good for the heart.  We have, after all been told to replace butter with margarine for exactly that reason.

The study, sponsored by the British Heart Foundation, looked at trials involving over half a million people and concluded “Current evidence does not clearly support [heart health] guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated [fats – the ones found in vegetable oils].”

But these vegetable fats are not benign additions to the diet.  Increasingly the science is demonstrating  that the fats contained in vegetable oils (like Canola, Sunflower, Soybean, Cottonseed, Grapeseed, Rice Bran and Safflower oil) are a significant part of the disease process for Motor Neuron DiseaseParkinson’s DiseaseMacular DegenerationMultiple Sclerosis (and other auto-immune diseases) all cancers and lethal allergic reactions.

  1. Sugar doesn’t cause Type II Diabetes

Most nutrition authorities still maintain that nothing about sugar (other than the calories) is associated with Type II Diabetes.  And perhaps that is why the Heart Foundation is happy to endorse high sugar foods like Milo and a low-fat Mayo that lists sugar as its primary ingredient.

In June 2015, the latest in a long line of research once again concluded that sugary drink consumption (yes, even juice) was associated with Type II Diabetes even after adjusting for the weight of the people involved.  In other words the calories weren’t the problem.  Something else about the sugar was causing the diabetes.

It turns out that ‘something else’ is the fructose half of sugar and it is not merely responsible for Type II Diabetes but for many of the other chronic diseases that now plague us, including Fatty Liver Disease and Chronic Kidney Disease.

When nutrition science was in its infancy (in the 1960s and 1970s) it made some bad guesses about what makes us sick.  It guessed that eggs and animal fat gave us heart disease.  It guessed that salt caused heart disease and stroke.  It guessed that sugar was harmless.  And it guessed fibre was good.

These guesses were not illogical.  They were just naïve.  And, as it turns out, wrong.  But science has moved a long way since then and guessing is no longer required.

We now know that Heart Disease is caused by chronic inflammation and cancer risk is significantly elevated by oxidative stress.  And we know that loading our diets with man-made fats (labelled vegetable oil) and sugar will ensure we have both.

We no longer need to speculate.  Science has provided the answers.  The sooner those in charge of our dietary recommendations put their pride behind them and admit that, the healthier we will all be. 

But don’t wait for the apology.  Take control of your own health and (at the very least) ignore the nonsense they tell you about Fibre, Animal Fat, Salt and Sugar.  Good Health.

Health Star or Death Star?

By | Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 13 Comments

The Federal Government’s Health Star Rating system (HSR to its friends) is being heavily promoted as a solution the nation’s out-of-control obesity and chronic disease problem.  But it has turned into a food industry marketing stunt that is part of the problem not part of the solution.

This week HSR turned 1.  And as any one year old might expect, it got some lovely presents.  The government committed to spending $2.1 million telling everybody what a jolly good idea it is.  And they also cut a cheque to the Heart Foundation to look after the little fella for the next 2-5 years.

It seems everybody has been celebrating.  Sanitarium has been spending up big telling us that Up&Go (20% sugar) has 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Uncle Toby’s have also had the ad makers working round the clock, reminding us that you don’t have to drink your breakfast or have boring old oats.  Your kids can have their terrific 4 star sugar-loaded (25% sugar) oats instead.

The new multi-million dollar ad campaign helpfully tells us the more stars there are (to a maximum of 5) the healthier the food.

The government must be using a different definition of healthy to the World Health Organisation, the Canadian Heart Association and the British Medical Association, (to name just a few), because I doubt any of them would be likely to describe a ‘food’ that is 25% added sugar as healthy.  And yet that is exactly the type of ‘food’ getting the 4 and 5 star ratings in Australia.

Meanwhile, food that has sustained humans for millennia, like butter, coconut oil or yoghurt is flat out breaking the one star barrier.  Even strawberry liquorice (42% sugar) does better than that (2.5 stars).

They all score badly because they contain saturated fat.  For decades that kind of fat has been painted by nutritionists as the dietary villain.  But recent reviews of the science conducted by the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommends dropping saturated fat (and cholesterol) from its list of nutrients of concern because there is no evidence connecting it with heart disease.

The HSR is a marketing program developed by and for the processed food industry (but paid for by the taxpayer).  Its development panel includes the Australian Beverages Council (whose members include Coca-cola and Pepsi) and the Australian Food and Grocery Council (whose membership list is the phone directory for the processed food industry).

It, like the Heart Foundation tick (which coincidentally appears on all the ‘healthy’ products I mention above) should be used as a guide to what foods to completely ignore.  The less stars a product has the less likely it is to do you harm.

But this isn’t an amusing little sideshow.  People are being actively told by their government to consume products that will unequivocally harm them.  They are being told that high sugar, high seed oil products like Up&Go are the best thing they can eat when the evidence says the exact opposite.

We wouldn’t tolerate a Government sponsored program that actively encouraged children to smoke (for their health) so let’s not tolerate our money being used to market sugar laced, seed oil as health food.

Don’t tolerate you and your family being treated like processed food dump sites.  Write to Sussan Ley (the Minister responsible for this abomination) and tell her you don’t want your money spent on a labelling system designed by Big Food’s marketing department.  And tell her you want your government to base its dietary advice on evidence, not what Big Food needs to sell this week.

Two things you can avoid to take yourself off the chronic disease treadmill

By | Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 3 Comments

Australians are sicker now than at any time in our history and it is getting worse unbelievably quickly.  We are almost four times as likely to have thyroid cancer than just three short decades ago.  We are more than three times as likely to have Liver Cancer or Type II Diabetes.  We are twice as likely to have Anal cancer, Chronic Kidney Disease, Melanoma, Kidney cancer and Motor Neuron Disease.  And Fatty Liver Disease, something that barely existed in the eighties, now affects 1 in 3 adults and 1 in 8 children.

Men are more than twice as likely to have prostate cancer and 60% more likely to have testicular cancer.  Women are 43% more likely to have breast cancer.  And children are more than four times(!) as likely to suffer from a life threatening allergic reaction.

These are not comparisons to the 50s or the turn of the 20th century.  These statistics are comparisons with 1982 (and in the case of allergies, with 1994).  The chronic disease tsunami is upon us. If we are not already affected by one of these diseases (or the many others steadily getting worse), we most certainly know someone who is.

So, when something happens that reminds us of this, we pay attention.  The Ice-Bucket Challenge for Motor Neuron Disease and the Beanie for Brain Cancer campaign strike a chord with us because, like never before in human history, we are likely to have a very personal connection with chronic disease inexplicably striking down those we love.

We are intensely interested in knowing all we can about these diseases.  We don’t believe they strike randomly, no matter how many times we are told they have no known cause.  Even if we don’t know the exact numbers we have a sense that we are a population in serious disease trouble. We desperately want to know if there is something we should be doing or not doing to avoid adding ourselves (and those we love) to the statistics.

The problem is, we are never told.  The organisations tasked with telling us about these diseases tell us nothing is known about their cause.  They offer us no hope.  They ask us for money for research and they leave us to live with our fingers crossed.

But we do know some important things about these diseases.  We know that sugar consumption causes Type II Diabetes Fatty Liver Disease and Chronic Kidney disease and is likely to be part of the disease process for Liver, Kidney and Pancreatic cancer.  We know that the fats contained in vegetable oils (like Canola, Sunflower, Soybean, Cottonseed, Grapeseed, Rice Bran and Safflower oil) are a significant part of the disease process for Motor Neuron Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, Macular Degeneration, Multiple Sclerosis (and other auto-immune diseases) all cancers and lethal allergic reactions.

Deleting sugar from your diet will not bring a destroyed pancreas, liver or kidney back.  Deleting vegetable oil will not reverse Parkinson’s, Motor Neuron Disease or cancer.  But removing those modern additions to our diet will take you off the high risk path for all of those diseases and more.

This is the message we should be given the next time our national attention is focused on a beanie, a ribbon or a bucket of ice-water.  We should be told what we can do to avoid the disease.  Those asking us for money should be doing their level best to ensure they never need it.

 

 

Photo by Kyle Nishioka. Distributed under the Creative Commons License.

Eat Real Food now available

By | Books, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 17 Comments

Enter the great Book #1 Give-away. David will give away the first copy of Eat Real Foodsigned and personally inscribed as Copy #1 – to the winner of this competition. Enter below.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

In the last 100 years, we’ve become fatter and sicker with millions of people developing serious diseases from diabetes to cancer. Health gurus confuse us with complex diets and expensive ingredients; food manufacturers load their products with addictive and destructive ingredients causing our increasing weight and declining health. But help is at hand. Health and consumer advocate David Gillespie shares the simple secret of weight loss and wellbeing: swap processed food for REAL FOOD. Eat Real Food features:

  • An explanation of why diets don’t work and a provides a focus on what does
  • Information on how to lose weight permanently, not just in the short-term
  • Evidence-based science explaining the real culprits of ill health and weight gain.
  • Advice on how to read food labels.
  • Easy recipes to replace common processed items and meal plans that show how simple it is to shop, plan and cook Real Food.
  • Tips for lunchboxes, parties, and recipes for food kids actually like.

Eat Real Food is the safe, effective and cheap solution to lose weight and improve our health permanently

Buy Now Read an Extract

How Margarine and its seed oil filled brothers give us Multiple Sclerosis

By | Big Fat Lies, Charts, Vegetable Oils | 26 Comments

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) was once a rare disease that mainly affected Scandinavians or people who otherwise didn’t get much sunlight.  But that has all changed.  Its prevalence is accelerating wildly and sunlight is much less relevant than what you shove in your gob.  If you’d rather not get MS then it is vital you avoid consuming the Omega-6 fats found in most processed foods.

Our central nervous system is our electrical wiring.  If our brain wants to tell our fingers to move, an electrical signal is sent along the nervous system and the fingers move.  Just like electrical cables nerve cells have an insulating cover (called myelin).  Electrical signals travel much faster (and are much more certain to get to the destination) in insulated nerves than in non-insulated nerves.

Seventy percent of the insulation is fat and a fair chunk of that is polyunsaturated fat.  Unfortunately this means that the insulation is prone to damage from oxidation.  But not to worry, we have a perfectly good repair system.  The cells which make myelin (called oligodendrocytes for those who want to get all technical) are very handy at continuously patching up any damage.

MS is disease caused by our immune system attacking and destroying the myelin insulation.  This damage disrupts the ability of parts of the nervous system to communicate and it results in an array of symptoms which range from fatigue, physical incoordination, spasms, partial blindness as well as learning and memory problems (depending on which part of the nervous system is damaged).

Unfortunately people with MS can’t completely repair the damage being inflicted by their immune system and over time the cumulative damage means that the symptoms become progressively worse.

According to the World Health Organisation the biggest risk factors for MS are living in a place with little sunlight or a place exposed to processed food (the Western Diet).  In the 1950s the biggest risk factor by a country mile was latitude, but as processed food has infiltrated the diet of more and more countries, those countries have caught up to the rates in countries with low sunlight exposure.   In Iran for example the incidence rate quadrupled in just the two decades between 1989 and 2008.  But there is (and always has been) plenty of sunlight there.

In countries exposed to the Western Diet for most of the last five decades (such as Australia), the number of new cases of the disease recorded per year (after adjusting for population increases) has also quadrupled.  Make no mistake MS is an epidemic on the march.

Our immune system attacks parts of the body largely because the component (T regulatory cells or just TRegs) which is supposed to stop that happening becomes disabled.  One of the most efficient ways to disable TRegs is to consume too much omega-6 fat.

The Western Diet is stuffed to the brim with Omega-6 fat courtesy of the steady replacement of animal fats with seed oils (such as canola, sunflower soybean etc).  So every time you eat processed food or tuck into fried food you are taking on a massive dollop of omega-6 fat.

For example if you were drop a serving (20g) of Praise Mayonnaise onto your bacon and egg sarnie you would be consuming around 5 grams of Omega-6 fat (just from the mayo).  That’s about three times what your body needs for the day (and that’s before we take into account the margarine, the bread, the grain fed bacon, the factory farmed egg or anything else you eat that day).

Sunshine (or, at least its ability to make us make Vitamin D) is a partial remedy to this problem because Vitamin D boosts the numbers of TRegs.  This gives us a fighting chance at stopping our own immune system in its tracks.  And that is why, before the advent of a seed oil filled diet, the exposure to sunlight, more or less determined your likelihood of having MS.

We aren’t born with a completely myelinated nervous system.  It takes us about 20 years to finish the job.  This means that when people move from a place with low rates of MS to places of high rates of MS (or the other way round), their age when they move is an important factor.  If they are over 15 when they move they will have the same risk of developing MS as the place where they were born.  If they are 10 or younger it will be the same as the place where they move to.

It’s likely that this strange age-related phenomenon is because of another characteristic of our seed oil filled diets.  Overconsumption of omega-6 fats causes the body to enter a state called oxidative stress.  This is where the highly reactive omega-6 fats overcome our anti-oxidant defences.  Oxidative stress is known to be lethal to the cells which produce our nerve insulation.

It is therefore probable that constant exposure to omega-6 fats while a child is growing those very cells, will result in insulation which is not up to spec.  And a weakened insulation makes them much more susceptible to the immune system attacks which will almost inevitably happen if they stay on that diet.

MS is a truly horrendous disease that is striking more people, younger.  It is clear that the cause is the massive increase in the use of seed (vegetable) oils in our food.  MS was once a disease that struck only susceptible people who were not exposed to enough sunlight.  Seed oils are now ensuring it is something that all of us must fear.

If you have MS, I’m sorry.  If you can stop eating seed oils (and get some Sun), it may help with symptoms.  If you don’t have MS, stop eating seed oils (and get some Sun) and you will dramatically reduce your chances of getting it.  If you have children, don’t let them anywhere near seed oils, ever, but especially not before they’re 20.

Graphic from:  WHO – Atlas multiple sclerosis resources in the world 2008.

Meadow Lea adds sugar to margarine to entice kids

By | Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 7 Comments

Just when you thought margarine was about as dangerous as any ‘food’ could get, Goodman Fielder have released their new range with added sugar.

That’s right, now you can get margarine with added sugar.  And not just a smidge, one fifth of the product is sugar (sugar content ranges from 17.8% to 20.5% depending on the flavour).

The omega-6 fats which dominate ordinary margarine are implicated in (at least) osteoporosis, male infertility, rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson’s disease, allergies, asthma, macular degeneration, impaired intelligence and cancer.

But now with twice as much sugar as an equivalent quantity of Coke, Meadow Lea Breakfast Twists put the unwary consumer on track for an even more spectacular array of chronic diseases including Type II Diabetes, Kidney Disease, Fatty Liver Disease, Heart Disease, Erectile Dysfunction and Alzheimer’s.

If I tried to think of a way to combine the very worst of a processed food diet in a single product, I don’t think I could do any better than this.  Besides the obligatory preservatives, flavours and colours there’s really nothing in this product but seed oils and sugar (with a pinch of salt and a dash of ‘milk solids’).

Ingredients: Vegetable oils 45% (containing 36% Canola & Sunflower oil), water, sugar, salt, milk solids, emulsifiers (soy lecithin, 471), preservative (202), food acid (lactic), colour (beta-carotene), flavour, vitamins A & D.

But perhaps the very worst thing about this stuff is that it is being marketed to (and for) kids.  The site proudly proclaims

“And because it’s been taste tested with kids, you know they will love it!”

This is especially appalling because the evidence is clear that many of the diseases associated with omega-6 fat consumption develop in childhood.  Worse, the damage is cumulative and likely to be irreversible.

None of the research on the harm done by sugar and seed oils is a secret. No-one should ever eat margarine, but children especially should be kept as far away from it as possible.  And yet, Goodman Fielder appear to have explicitly designed this product to make it more appealing to kids (by adding a ton of sugar).

It is despicable behaviour of the highest possible order and it should not be rewarded with commercial success.  Please tell everyone you know to avoid this product like the bubonic plague.

Margarine makes your kids stupid enough to eat margarine

By | Big Fat Lies, Vegetable Oils | 3 Comments

A significant component of what makes us intelligent is created from our mother’s fat stores.  Unfortunately the fats which dominate margarines and processed food stop that absorption happening and impair intelligence in children to a greater degree than was ever caused by lead. If you want your kids to be as smart as they can be then they (and you) need to immediately stop eating those fats.

About 10% of our brain is made from an Omega-3 fat called DHA (docosahexaenoic acid for the biochemists amongst us).  We can make DHA from a simpler omega-3 fat called ALA (alpha-linolenic acid).  That’s the form of omega-3 which exists in most of our food.

Unfortunately we are not very good at converting dietary omega-3 ALA into DHA.  Less than half a percent of the ALA we consume ends up as DHA.  This means that relying on mum to eat enough omega-3 ALA while she’s pregnant would be a disastrous strategy for baby brain building.

Luckily we have a plan.  As soon as a woman reaches puberty her body starts storing up as much Omega-3 fat as it can.  Uniquely among animals (because we are the only ones who need to build relatively gigantic brains), female humans store all that omega-3 ALA in a baby pantry located at the top of the legs and in the buttocks.

Unfortunately for girls who wish to become Supermodels, the body cannot tell the difference between the various sorts of fat, so it just stores all the fat it can find in the hope that enough of it will be the good stuff.

Since the point of storing the fat is to ensure there is enough (ALA to make) DHA to make a baby’s brain, the body will not easily let go of it.  That is, until the third trimester of pregnancy.  Then the floodgates are opened and the fat is released.  Because brain construction doesn’t finish when a child is born, it’s also important that the supply of DHA continues after the baby is born.  Breast milk (and now formula) contains large amounts of DHA.  In total, 80% of the fat used in construction of a child’s brain comes from the mother’s stores (rather than her current diet).  So perhaps the old saying should be ‘A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips in your child’s brain’

We know from animal studies that if there is not enough DHA, animals end up with brains that don’t have enough neurons, the cells that do all the work in our brains.  That lack of basic circuitry in turn impairs the child’s development and intelligence.   And it looks like the results hold in humans as well.

Just last month, a study in humans was able to show that the amount of DHA in breast milk was the strongest predictor of test performance across samples drawn from 28 OECD countries.

But before you start force-feeding teenage girls, mothers and kids fish oil tablets, you should know that there is a little twist in this tale.  Omega-6 fats stop us using DHA to make us brainy.  So it doesn’t matter how much Omega-3 you have if you also consume too much Omega-6.

Omega-6 fats are the dominant fat in seed oils (canola, soybean, grapeseed, corn, sunflower etc).  These are the fats that margarine is made from.  These are the fats which are now used in every packaged food on the supermarket shelf.  And these are the foods in which every fried food is boiled.  We now eat 10-20 times as much omega-6 fat as omega-3 fat.

Omega-6 fats compete with Omega-3 fats for the same enzymes.  Critically one of those is the enzyme which turns garden variety omega-3 ALA into DHA.  If we have equal amounts of omega-3 and omega-6 in our diet, just the right amount of DHA is created and all is good, but if we have too much omega-6, we fail to make enough DHA.

You might predict from that, that countries that eat a lot of seed oils loaded with omega-6  would tend not to do so well in tests and you’d be right.  The researchers in the most recent study found that there was a very strong correlation between the amount of omega-6 in the diet and how poorly 15 year olds did on standard international benchmark tests.

This confirmed the findings of five previous human studies which showed that higher omega-6 intakes impaired cognition (made us dumb – translation provided in case you’ve been hitting the margarine).  Indeed one 2011 study determined that the impairment was greater than the effect of lead!! (double exclamation points are well and truly warranted on that statement)

Just like omega-3 fats, omega-6 fats are stored in the baby pantry, ready to use when needed.  So the fats used to construct a baby’s brain are not just the fats a woman is eating when she’s pregnant or breastfeeding.  They are every fat she has stored since puberty (or since the last baby used them up).  Babies being constructed today are having brains built from the fats used in processed food for the last 20 years.

We now use unleaded petrol because of the damage lead in petrol did to developing brains. If we want the next generation not to be ‘cognitively impaired’ by seed oils, we need to act now.

We need to ensure that (at the very least) young women are not consuming foods overloaded with omega-6 fats.  This means no margarine, almost no processed food and no commercially fried food.  In other words they need to eat real food and they need to do it now.

If they do this their children will be smart enough to thank them for it.

Image courtesy of Phaitoon at FreeDigitalPhotos.net