David Gillespie

May 20, 2014

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Whoops – Australia accidentally privatised its education system

By David Gillespie | Education | No Comments

Australia is sleep walking into a privatised education system that will deliver massive inequity, steadily declining results, and cost vastly more. Last week the Federal Treasurer gave us a giant shove further down that road. In deciding to remove $5 billion from the State Education budgets, he is telling the States (who run the government schools) to make do with less. The inevitable result of this will be to accelerate the rush to private education and ultimately, the destruction of our once great school education system.

According to the APC (Australian Productivity Commission) in 2012 Australian Taxpayers spent $8,546 per student per annum on educating children in non-government schools. And according to the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) taxpayers spent $11,980 per child in government schools. Neither number includes capital expenditure, which was about the same per child in both systems. In other words, the average non-government school student costs the taxpayer 71 per cent of the average public school student.

And therein lies the core argument for boosters of private education in this country (unfortunately including our Education minister). You see, the argument goes, children at non-government schools are actually saving the taxpayer money. They are transferring the cost of their education from the community to their parents (and church congregations presumably). They are choosing to participate in a user-pay community. And even if it does only amount to a 29 per cent saving, they are doing us all a favour.

But those average numbers hide some pretty big gotcha’s for the public system. The government schools are overwhelmingly the ones providing education to Australia’s most remote students. They teach 7 times as many students classified by the ABS as living ‘very remotely’ and 4 times as many students classed as being ‘remote.’ When it comes to children with special needs, once again it is the Government schools doing the heavy lifting, educating 3.3 times as many children with a disability as their non-government brethren. Unlike public schools, non-government schools are exempt from the provisions of Australia’s discrimination laws. They are permitted by law to pick and choose who they will and will not be bothered trying to educate.

Educating the hard-and-expensive-to-teach students is undeniably a task that is increasingly falling to government schools but strangely it is in the non-government sector that the costs (to government) are exploding. Over the decade prior to 2012, per student government recurrent spending on government schools increased by just 19 per cent. At the same time government funding for ‘private’ students increased by 28 per cent (both numbers after inflation).

That means that if current funding trends continue, it is inevitable that the taxpayer contribution to private schools overtakes the contribution to government schools. And that is notwithstanding that the Government schools are the ones educating the vast majority of the children with special needs, in remote locations or with behavioural difficulties.

The small and decreasing taxpayer ‘saving’ is the reward we have reaped for the decision to destroy the equity (and the achievements) of our education system. In the half century since Australian taxpayers started funding private education choices, our school education has been progressively failing.

Even though we now pay five times as much (after inflation) to educate a student, by the time that student reaches Year 9 they are 3 months behind where the same student was in 1964. And if that’s not bad enough, when we compare that same student to the world’s highest performing educators, we find they are more than two years behind. The leaders in education (a group that used to include us) have marched forward and we have slid slowly backwards.

Some people might be able to justify that destruction if the privatised part of the system was setting the world on fire. Unfortunately not even that is true. All Australian schools performed terribly in the latest round of international comparative tests. But our best private schools did even worse than everybody else.

And while (after adjusting for socio-economic disadvantage) all Australian schools performed equally badly overall, there were significantly less really high performing students in the nation’s private schools. There were no changes in the numbers at those levels in government schools. If private schools are supposed to cultivate the best and brightest, those results suggest they are failing dismally.

The privatisation of education, just like the privatisation of healthcare, results in islands of underperforming privilege amongst a sea of despair and it drags the whole system down. We have systematically created a school education system which performs worse for everyone (even the better off) than the system it replaces. That’s quite an achievement, but it is not irreversible. We can return to a high equity, high performance system. Unfortunately it appears the current Government is hell-bent on doing exactly the opposite.

Also published in The Courier Mail

Letters to the editor in response appear here.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

May 18, 2014

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The 2014 British Sugar Free Shopper’s Guide

By David Gillespie | Books, Sugar | No Comments

The 2014 British Sugar Free Shopper’s Guide is the must-have navigator for your local supermarket if you plan to buy anything in a package.

The guide contains comprehensive listings of the most commonly purchased categories of packaged food available in British stores. Each category has been scoured for brands that have less than 3 grams of sugar per 100 grams.

It’s a guide that removes all the bad products from the supermarket shelf and makes it easy for you to select simply and quickly from the good ones that are left.

But wait. There’s more. It also includes a similar analysis of the popular fast food options on offer in most UK cities.

(Paypal also accepted just click the button above)

Also available for Kindle – click here

Use the buttons above to get the guide for the introductory price of £3.95 (normally £6). You’ll be emailed the PDF immediately so can have it on your smartphone, iPad or tablet or print it out if you prefer and have it with you all the time.

Alternatively you can subscribe to howmuchsugar.com and not only get the shopper’s guide (and updates as part of your membership) but also detailed sugar guides to the sugar content of all foods in a given category, great recipes that you can make at home, the members forum to share your experiences and extras such as the Vegetable Oil Ready Reckoners and other handy shortcut tools that I regularly create and share with members.

Like this product? Spread the word about it and earn 30% of the purchase price on sales you refer. Click here to join David Gillespie’s affiliate program »

April 30, 2014

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The 2014 Australian Sugar Free Shopper’s Guide

By David Gillespie | Books, Sugar | 28 Comments

It’s Finally Here!

The 2014 Australian Sugar Free Shopper’s Guide is the must-have navigator for your local supermarket if you plan to buy anything in a package.

The guide contains comprehensive listings of the most commonly purchased categories of packaged food available in Australian stores. Each category has been scoured for brands that have less than 3 grams of sugar per 100 grams.

It’s a guide that removes all the bad products from the supermarket shelf and makes it easy for you to select simply and quickly from the good ones that are left.

But wait. There’s more. I’ve also included a similar analysis of the popular fast food options on offer in most Australian cities.

(Paypal also accepted just click the button above)

Also available for Kindle

Use the buttons above to get the guide for the introductory price of $6.95 (normally $9.95). You’ll be emailed the PDF immediately so can have it on your smartphone, iPad or tablet or print it out if you prefer and have it with you all the time.

Alternatively you can subscribe to howmuchsugar.com and not only get the shopper’s guide (and updates as part of your membership) but also detailed sugar guides to the sugar content of all foods in a given category, great recipes that you can make at home, the members forum to share your experiences and extras such as the Vegetable Oil Ready Reckoners and other handy shortcut tools that I regularly create and share with members.

Like this product? Spread the word about it and earn 30% of the purchase price on sales you refer. Click here to join David Gillespie’s affiliate program »

April 25, 2014

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12 Ways Fructose Destroys Your Body

By David Gillespie | Sugar | 39 Comments

In the early 1800s the average person ate about 1.3 teaspoons of sugar a day. Now the average person eats somewhere between 35 and 45 teaspoons of sugar a day. But the irony is that the modern adult probably thinks they barely eat any at all. Our food supply has been so completely and totally polluted with sugar, that it is almost impossible to buy packaged food that doesn’t contain it.

One half of that sugar tsunami is a substance called fructose. It doesn’t matter whether the sugar is made from corn (called High Fructose Corn Syrup), beets (called Beet Sugar) or cane (called Cane Sugar or often just Sugar), it is all half glucose and half fructose. And because we have never before in our evolutionary history as a species been exposed to significant quantities of fructose, our bodies are incredibly poorly adapted to dealing with it.

Consume serious quantities (like that contained in 35-45 teaspoons of sugar a day) and the chronic diseases caused by the maladaptation start to pile up. The picture above shows the 12 biggest disease states that science has currently linked to fructose consumption.

April 14, 2014

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Time to focus on the private school elephant in the pool

By David Gillespie | Education | One Comment

Tony Abbott’s hand-picked head of the Audit Commission, Tony Shepherd wants to end middle-class welfare but the Family Tax Benefits he’s targeting are just a sixth of the value of the annual subsidy paid to ‘private’ schools. In 1963 Australian taxpayers contributed less than a brass razoo to private education. Now we pay over $10 billion per year in recurrent funding. On top of that we taxpayers build fabulous facilities on private property (with capital funding) that very few of us have the right to access. It’s time the Audit Commission looked at the real middle class welfare, private schools.

Educating the children of prisoners (or guards) was not a priority in the early Australian colonies. And because it was charitable work, it was left to the churches to do with as they pleased.

As the population changed from largely prisoners to largely free colonists and the demands for education increased, the churches were able to negotiate significant government aid for their efforts. Unfortunately this resulted in a large amount of competition (and school choice) for easy to reach students in the cities and no education for everyone else.

In Australia, the market can deliver most things efficiently in the cities. But huge distances mean no profits to private providers and consequently no services for the rest of us. That particular ‘market failure’ is exactly why Australia found it necessary to have a state funded bank, a state funded telecommunications company and a state funded broadcaster.

Towards the end of the 19^th century, the Australian colonies solved this problem in schooling by withdrawing their funding from church run schools and investing in their own ‘state schools’. The aim was to provide a free education to every citizen no matter where they lived (or what brand of religion they favoured).

The Catholics opted out and decided to run their own schools (on a shoestring) and there were a few Anglican secondary schools who continued to rely exclusively on private fees. But for almost a century, Australian governments refused to fund private choices about school education. And for almost a century we had a high equity, secular education system which was the envy of the world.

It was mostly fear of an electoral backlash that kept the politicians at bay. But when Sir Robert Menzies won the 1963 election with a promise to fund science blocks in non-government schools, the can was open and the worms tasted freedom. There was no backlash. The electorate no longer cared.

There is no better way to target a marginal parliamentary seat than selectively distribute largess among school communities. School funding is the laser guided vote buyer. The pollies had entered pork barrel heaven. And Australia has incessantly increased funding to ‘private’ schools ever since.

But the annual funding is just the tip of the money-berg. In addition to the cool $10 billion the taxpayer forks out every year to run ‘private’ schools, we are buying Olympic swimming pools, cricket ovals that the ICC would envy, fabulously appointed gymnasiums, fantastic science facilities and computer labs to die for.

The total bill for all this extra taxpayer generosity between 2005 and 2010 was just a smidge under $5 billion (on top of the $10 billion a year in running costs).

Over the same time frame we invested about $10 billion in government school infrastructure. And while those ratios are roughly in line with the respective numbers of each, they don’t take account of the fact that after the money is funnelled through the state government bureaucracies, $1 buys you about 60c worth of building work in a state school.

In 1964, DOGS, (the Council for Defence of Government Schools) was formed to protest the decision by the Australian Government to fund private schools. Their campaign against ‘schools with pools’ goes on to this day.

A favourite publicity stunt of the early DOGS protests was to turn up to the pools their money had purchased and ask for a swim. They were swiftly given the bum’s rush. These are not like other tax payer funded gyms, pools and libraries. These gorgeous facilities are not open to the public (that would be you).

Taxpayer funds have been used to significantly improve the value of private property and provide educational facilities that no government school could ever afford. Yet ordinary taxpayers are not allowed anywhere near them.

So the next time you peer over the hedge of the local ‘private’ school at the new Olympic pool, remember this was built using (upper?) ‘middle class welfare’. The Audit Commission will ruthlessly target all manner of what it deems to be unnecessary government spending but I guarantee you it will coyly avert its gaze from the ‘private’ school elephant wallowing in the pool.

Also published in The Courier Mail

Image courtesy of markuso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

April 12, 2014

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What Vegetable Oil is that?

By David Gillespie | Vegetable Oils | No Comments

Food Manufacturers are not required to identify the exact fats that they are using in a product, but they are required to tell us the Total Fat in grams per 100 g and the Saturated Fat in grams per 100 g. Using those two numbers and the chart below the trained seed oil detective can have a good guess as to the fat being used based on the amount of saturated fat in the product.

To obtain access to this graphic and a worked example of how to use it in the supermarket, become a member. You’ll also get access to loads of other premium content, such as recipes, detailed guides to sugar content and handy calculators to help you show for low seed oil foods.

April 11, 2014

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Every drop of vegetable oil takes us further along the path to Parkinson’s Disease

By David Gillespie | Vegetable Oils | 62 Comments

Michael J Fox has it, the late Muhammad Ali had it, Billy Connolly has it and more than 100,000 Australians have it. About 30 new cases of Parkinson’s disease are being diagnosed every day in this country. If you want to avoid adding your name to that list there is one thing you should do. Don’t eat seed oils.

James Parkinson, surgeon, geologist and palaeontologist first described what we now call Parkinson’s disease in his paper on shaking palsy in 1817. He was born on April 11, 1755, which is why April 11 is World Parkinson’s Day. Dr Parkinson described a condition which caused involuntary tremors when a limb is at rest, rigidity, slowness of movement and a propensity to bend forwards and slow gait when walking. There was no known cause or cure.

We now know that Parkinson’s is caused by the death of cells in our pars compacta –the part of our brain which controls motor function (the Substantia nigra pars compacta if you want to get all technical). That part of the brain is a central switching room for movement, attention, learning and reward-seeking (which makes sure we keep eating and having sex).

The pars compacta exerts its control using dopamine. When everything is working well, our bodies are inhibited from moving by the part of our brain which contains the pars compacta (the basal ganglia for Latin freaks). When we decide to move something (our eyes or limbs etc), the pars compacta squirts out dopamine to take the brakes off.

If the neurons responsible for producing the dopamine are damaged, Parkinson’s disease is the result. Our brain is pretty durable, because we lose around 50% of our dopamine manufacturing neurons before there are any symptoms. But once they are gone, these neurons are gone forever. As the numbers decrease, a Parkinson’s sufferer has to exert greater and greater effort to produce movement.

The only effective treatment is medication which can increase dopamine production by squeezing a little more out of the remaining neurons (we can’t just give dopamine as it isn’t able to cross the blood-brain barrier). Obviously if the destruction of the neurons continues (as it does in most) that is only a temporary solution. Before medication was introduced in the 1970s a Parkinson’s patient was expected to live 9.5 years after diagnosis. The drug assisted life expectancy is now 15 years.

Because the disease is the result of cumulative destruction, it is most prevalent in people over 50 but 20 per cent of cases are diagnosed between 20 and 50. Michael J Fox was diagnosed when he was just 30.

There are very few places in the world where accurate long term statistics have been kept on the incidence of Parkinson’s disease, but they have done just that in Olmstead County, Minnesota (pop: 100,000). There, researchers have concluded annual new cases almost doubled between 1944 and 1984 (using consistent diagnostic rules). And like Type II Diabetes, other studies tell us that Parkinson’s occurs much less frequently in populations not exposed to a Western Diet (processed food).

The official position on the cause of Parkinson’s disease is that nobody has the slightest clue what causes the dopamine producing neurons to die. The only official risk factor is age. But I think some dots need joining and when that is done the culprit becomes very clear.

We know that a diet high in seed oils causes the levels of Omega-6 fats in our cell membranes to rise rapidly. Those fats react quickly with oxygen and push the body into a state of cascading cell damage called oxidative stress. We also know that a major product of the oxidation of omega-6 fats is something with the charming name of 4-Hydroxynonenal (I’ll just use its street name of 4-HNE). And we know that 4-HNE, whilst generally dangerous, is especially toxic to the neurons responsible for producing dopamine in our brain.

There, dots joined (it wasn’t that hard was it?). Eating seed oils (or anything which contains large amounts of omega-6 fats) induces the production of a molecule which we know kills the neurons we depend upon for dopamine production. Kill enough of them and you have Parkinson’s disease.

Thanks to the efforts of the processed food industry (aided and abetted by the Heart Foundation), our diet is now completely saturated with omega-6 fats. Everything in a package uses it. Every deep frier uses it. Every baker uses it. And every little bite of it is taking out the neurons you depend on to keep you from the ravages of Parkinson’s disease.

Nothing I can say will restore the neurons you’ve already killed but I can stop you killing any more.

Don’t eat seed oils.

Image: A man with Parkinson’s disease displaying a flexed walking posture pictured in 1892. Photo appeared in Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpètrière, vol. 5. By Albert Londe (1858-1917) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

April 5, 2014

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Magda proves commercial diet programs are a waste of money.

By David Gillespie | Big Fat Lies, Sugar | 5 Comments

According to the Australian Women’s Weekly actress and comedian Magda Szubanski was paid $32,692 per kilo to lose 26 kilos in 2009 ($850,000). It appears the solution was temporary so now Magda is reportedly receiving $1.25 million to have another go.

Magda joins a long list of celebrities who’ve fallen off the Jenny Craig wagon. But continuous failure doesn’t seem to harm their brand at all. Indeed failure seems to sell more, Magda’s first attempt increased Jenny Craig sales by 307 per cent.

So, does Jenny Craig work (for people who are not celebrities)?

The Jenny Craig diet has been tested in only one randomised, controlled trial. That is a little surprising (and dare I say, suspicious), given it is one of the largest diet programs in the world.

In this kind of trial, the participants are randomly assigned either to a group following the diet or a group not following the diet (the controls), and the progress of each group is directly measured against the other. The trial compared Jenny Craig with what they called a ‘self-help group’. The self-helpers were given information on losing weight and offered a follow-up counselling session with a dietitian, but otherwise left to their own devices.

The study was funded by Jenny Craig, who also provided all the meals and counselling sessions free of charge. Participants also had access to free weekly one-on-one counselling sessions with a Jenny Craig consultant. If they’d had to pay for all this luvin, it would have cost them $718 for the counselling and $6,240 for the food. Because of all these factors, the study is not a completely real-world example. Throw in $1,500 a month for a personal trainer and a million dollar pay day and you might almost replicate the experience of a celebrity dieter.

In the real world, we’re supposed to pay for the diet, not the other way around. Given that, this study probably represent the best possible scenario in terms of keeping people motivated and sticking to the diet for the entire length of the study, which was two years. Even so 9 per cent of participants had dropped out by the end.

After two years of free Jenny Craig meals, intense calorie restriction (the diets were between 42 and 68 per cent of their normal calorie intake) and weekly counselling, the average dieter managed to drop from 92.2 kilograms to 84.8 kilograms (which means they were still obese – in this trial defined as anything above 81 kilograms). Even the self-helpers managed to drop 2 kilograms!

The good news is that if you can convince Jenny Craig to pay for your food and weekly counselling (don’t hold your breath), you can expect to lose about 7 kilograms in two years. If you started out obese, you’d still be obese and you’d have been starving for two whole years but your pants might fit a little better.

And it seems this astounding lack of success is not a one-off observation.

A 2007 UCLA review of 31 credible long term weight loss studies found that most people on calorie restricting diets (such as that promoted by Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers) initially lost 5 to 10 percent of their body weight. But they also found that the majority of people regained all the weight (plus a bit more) within 12 months. Sustained weight loss was found only in a very, very small minority of participants.

Clearly Jenny Craig understand that since their diet doesn’t work very well, people need to be assured that their inevitable failure is something shared by the best and brightest (by that I mean celebrities, in case it wasn’t obvious).

All of this relies on the punter buying into the myth propagated by the Health and Diet industry that being fat is a character defect. They need us to believe that we put on weight because we are weak willed or lazy (or both). This means that any failure of a diet product is those character defects overcoming our willpower and not that the product was a load of rubbish.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. We are fat because we are addicted to a substance (sugar) which makes us fat. This addictive substance is embedded in everything we eat by the processed food industry so they can move more product (if they could use nicotine they would, but sugar will have to do). We are not fat because we are gluttonous or slothful (or any of the five remaining deadly sins).

If a product doesn’t actually work as promised and the company selling it knows this, then we are well on the way to outrageously unethical (if not downright immoral) corporate behaviour. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for any corporate regulator to do anything about it. Luckily we don’t have to. We have a choice. We can buy into the latest Jenny Craig (or any other diet program’s) weightless yo-yo. Or, we can just stop eating sugar.

Image by Eva Rinaldi from Sydney Australia www.evarinaldi.com (Magda Szubanski) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

April 1, 2014

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The Bottom Line: why you should listen to your gut

By David Gillespie | Sugar | 8 Comments

One in every 250 Australians suffer from a severely debilitating disease but no-one (especially those who have it) dare to speak its name. The annual rate of new diagnoses has at least tripled since 1990 and hospitilisations caused by it have doubled in the last decade alone. This is a disease which is clearly out of control but the worst news is that it is likely to be just the proverbial canary in the coal-mine for much worse epidemics lurking in the background.

IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) is chronic inflammation of the bowel and lumps together two main diseases, Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s Disease. IBD is a life-long condition that is generally first diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 40. The chronic inflammation results in recurrent bouts of abdominal pain, diarrhoea, vomiting, fever, weight loss and rectal bleeding.

Doctors are careful to distinguish IBD from IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). IBS is characterized by chronic abdominal pain, discomfort, bloating, and alteration of bowel habits but no bowel abnormalities are detectable using routine clinical testing. Evidence is however beginning to emerge that suggests that IBS may in fact be a low-level pre-cursor to IBD.

Needless to say, IBD has a significant impact on a sufferer’s emotional well-being and it’s something they generally like to keep very much to themselves. Most will suffer enormous discomfort for most of their lives and just try to soldier on. But a person experiencing a ‘flare’ of the symptoms requires near-continuous care. And hospitilisation and surgery is often required. In 2010, over 27,000 hospilitizations occurred for IBD treatment in Australia. A decade earlier there had been just 13,000.

IBD is caused by the body’s immune system attacking the bowel. The standard treatment is to prescribe anti-inflammatory (immune suppressing) drugs. Beyond that, the official position is that IBD is idiopathic (meaning we don’t know what causes it or therefore how to cure it other than by chopping out bits of inflamed bowel).

Our intestine is a glorious piece of machinery. Its job is to extract every bit of stuff we can use from whatever we shove in our gob and avoid any nasty bacteria while doing it. In order to perform this magic trick we have specialist filtering cells that extract the good stuff and drop it into our lymphatic system (fats) or our blood stream (everything else). To do this we need an enormous surface area in contact with potential food. If we uncrinkled it all, our intestine would have the surface area of a football field. With all that space to cover, our immune system naturally concentrates a lot of its resources on defending the parts of our gut responsible for absorbing stuff from the outside world.

We know that IBD is not an auto-immune disease. It is not the body attacking itself. It is our immune system reacting to a foreign body. That reaction, the inflammation response, is our body’s way of defending itself against agents of harm from the outside world.

One of the key shortcuts our immune system uses is to react viciously to something called endotoxins. An endotoxin is a key part of the cell membrane of some of the nastiest critters in the bacterial world. Cholera, Salmonella, Helicobacter (responsible for stomach ulcers and cancers), Legionella, Gonorrhea and Meningococcus are among the very long list of bacteria who carry endotoxins. So it won’t come as a surprise that our immune system goes on high alert when it spots an endotoxin in our bloodstream.

The correct number of endotoxins in our blood is zero. If the number in the blood stream is any higher than that then we know there is a problem with our gut. The gut is usually impermeable to endotoxins, but it can become ‘leaky’, that is, it can become more permeable to endotoxins and they can start to leak through into our bloodstream.

We know that three very common substances will cause our gut to become more permeable, fish oil, alcohol and fructose. Animal studies have convincingly shown fish oil to increase endotoxin leakage into the bloodstream. And animal and human studies have also shown that both acute bingeing and long term exposure to both alcohol and fructose will increase (up to 20-fold) the amount of endotoxin in our blood. Unfortunately both alcohol and fructose also appear to increase the populations of bacteria which produce endotoxins in our intestines (something charmingly termed bacterial overgrowth). So we get the double whammy of more endotoxins in our gut and doors left ajar (gut permeability) to let them into our bloodstream.

These endotoxins of course send our immune system into a killing frenzy which we experience as inflammation of the intestinal tract. We also know that just like any other inflammation response it is made worse if we are consuming too much omega-6 fats found in seed oils (vegetable oils).

Much more disturbingly, the inflammation response does not end at the intestine. First stop for portal blood after the intestine is the liver and there is convincing research which tells us that our inflammation response to endotoxins is what converts a ‘mere’ fatty liver (caused by overconsumption of fructose) to an inflamed fatty liver (steatohepatitis). Worse than that, it is looking increasingly likely that our immune response to endotoxins is implicated in a raft of diseases associated with inflammation in other organs (such as the heart, pancreas and kidneys).

Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease now affects 6,203 people but Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease afflicts a massive 5,538,677 Australians. Even more worryingly, up to 13% of Australian children now have this chronic liver disease. If those numbers are anything to go by, we’re bingeing an awful lot more on fructose (or fish oil) than we are on alcohol. So when we go hunting for the cause of the massive rise in IBD in Australia, I’d be looking in the breakfast cereal, health food and soft drink aisles a long time before I’d be checking out the bottle shop.

When we suffer the symptoms of IBS and quite possibly, eventually, IBD. It is our gut sending us a message. It is saying you are consuming too much fructose (or in rarer cases, alcohol or fish oil). It is the visible warning that far more scary things are going on in organs that don’t throw off symptoms (until it is way too late). So if you are getting those messages from your gut – listen.

IBD is a life sentence of debilitation. It won’t kill you but it will make every part of your life awful from your mid-teens onwards. The science suggests the fastest, bestest, way to avoid it is to not binge on fructose (or booze or fish oil). The only problem with that is that the processed food industry is lacing everything we eat with fructose and just for good measure chucking in a pile of seed oils (vegetable oils) loaded with omega-6 fats to ramp up our inflammation response. Pay attention to what you eat, or preferably construct it yourself from basic ingredients and you will be a long way towards not suffering the horror story which is IBD.

Image courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

March 27, 2014

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Is 16 cents a loaf worth filling our bread with cancer causing oil?

By David Gillespie | Vegetable Oils | 19 Comments

Most of our kids like a bread roll to munch on at school. The trouble is, it’s slightly easier to find discarded money in the average supermarket than it is to find bread or bread rolls made without ‘Vegetable Oils’. It’s perfectly possible to make bread using Olive Oil or even (gasp – don’t even think it) animal fat. But nobody does.

When you decide you no longer wish to consume ‘Vegetable Oils’, bread presents a bit of a problem. Almost all breads sold in Australian supermarkets are made with canola oil, sunflower oil or soybean oil (or sometimes all three). And that even includes the ones in the Fresh Bakery bit of most of them.

So the cheap options are out straight away. But even before you reconcile yourself to going top shelf at the bakery you won’t find an abundance of options. Sure, you can get the fancy European bread range at Baker’s Delight (which doesn’t use any kind of fat). But if you’re buying for 6 kids, that gets really expensive, really fast. If you want ordinary old white bread there, at Brumby’s or at most bakeries, you’ll find ‘Vegetable Oils’ are the fat du jour.

As a result we had reconciled ourselves to buying outrageously expensive bread (we make our loaf bread at home) for the foreseeable future, until one day we had a bright idea. Why not just ask the local bakery if they could do a batch of bread rolls and use olive oil instead. To our complete and utter amazement, the Brumby’s we asked agreed to do it as long as we gave them a day’s notice and ordered at least 30. Figuring 30 was about a week’s worth and they probably freeze well, we immediately ordered a batch.

They were manna from heaven. Normal hamburger rolls that tasted exactly the way they should but without toxic oils. They froze perfectly and, if anything were better after being thawed than before. Our problems were solved – until we went to pick up our next batch. Brumby’s had decided in the interim that it was too much hassle to do a separate batch and point blank refused to do it again. Bugger.

Plan B was to approach Baker’s Delight and they were delightful indeed. Not only are they happy to do it, they’ll do it in whatever quantity we want as long as we give a day’s notice. Now we pick up our 30 hamburger rolls every Sunday and not a single canola flower was harmed in their manufacture. They cost exactly the same as the bog standard toxic variety but ours come with olive oil instead.

Now you might think I’m getting my undies in a twist over nothing. The average bread contains something less than 1g of omega-6 fat per 100g if it’s made with canola oil. But omega-6 fat consumption is an insidious thing and the effect is cumulative. It’s in everything and frankly there are some times when you can’t avoid it. So my theory is that if you can avoid it, even in the smallest way, they you should definitely take that option.

If you agree, then all you need to do is ask, you might be surprised at the answer.

All this does of course cause me to wonder why Bakers don’t just use Olive Oil all the time. Not even the most rabid supporter of vegetable oil, the National Heart Foundation has any problem with us consuming the old olive juice, so it can’t be for health reasons (not that I’ve ever seen a bakery make a health claim about the oil it uses anyway). So that just leaves cost.

According to my local catering supply shop, I can get a 20 Litre tin of Canola oil for $45.95, but that much dosh will only buy be 4 Litres of Extra Virgin Olive Oil (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that’s what they’ll be using).

I can see that an ingredient costing 5 times as much might give pause for thought, but only if it were being used in significant quantities. A loaf of bread weighing 700 grams will contain about 15 grams (16 mls) of fat. If that fat is canola oil it will cost 4c. If it’s Olive Oil, it will cost 20c. Yes it’s more, but in the almost $4 price of a loaf of bread at the local bakery, it really is irrelevant. And if it is likely to break the bank, then, what the heck, add 16c to the price of the loaf for me.

Are we really being sold bread full of vegetable oil for the sake of 16c a loaf in oil? And the trade off for that is bread that (in combination with the rest of the processed food we eat) significantly increases our risk of cancer, macular degeneration, rheumatoid arthritis and life-threatening allergies. Come on bakeries of Australia, surely that’s not worth the 16c. Put the Olive Oil back in our bread.

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