The David Gillespie Blog

If you change nothing, nothing will change
October 21, 2013
1

Anzac Biscuits

By | Recipes | 6 Comments

FREE RECIPE FROM THE SWEET POISON QUIT PLAN COOKBOOK

Wholemeal flour adds a slight nutty taste to these traditional biscuits, but you can substitute it with plain flour if that’s what’s in your pantry. These are best eaten on the day they are made as they will soften a little when stored but they do freeze very well.

Makes 18

1 cup wholemeal plain flour, sifted
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup desiccated coconut
1/2 cup dextrose
125 g unsalted butter, chopped
1/3 cup rice malt syrup
1 tablespoon water
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

  1. Preheat the oven to 160°C (140°C fan-forced). Line 2 baking trays with baking paper.
  2. Mix the flour, oats, coconut and dextrose in a medium bowl.
  3. Put the butter, syrup and water into a medium saucepan and bring just to the boil over medium heat. Whisk in the bicarbonate of soda and allow the mixture to foam up. Pour the butter mixture over the dry ingredients and stir until well combined.
  4. Drop tablespoons of the mixture onto the prepared trays, leaving room between them for the mixture to spread.
  5. Bake the biscuits for 20–25 minutes or until golden. Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Store in an airtight container for up to 2 days.

» VARIATION:
If you prefer a more cake-like texture, roll the mixture into balls, then only flatten them slightly before baking. For a crisper result, squash the dough flat before baking.

October 20, 2013
0

Coconut And Lime Sorbet

By | Recipes | 2 Comments

Living in Queensland it gets very steamy during summer. It’s great to have a refreshing iced treat like this in the freezer to cool down on those balmy summer days – and nights.

Serves 4

1 1/2 cups dextrose
2 cups water
1 lime, zest removed in wide strips with a vegetable peeler
2 cups coconut milk

  1. Put the dextrose, water and lime zest into a medium saucepan. Stir over low heat until the dextrose has dissolved. Increase the heat to medium and simmer for 5 minutes. Stir in the coconut milk. Remove from the heat and cool completely.
  2. Pour into an ice-cream machine and churn according to manufacturer’s directions until frozen. Spoon into 4 glasses to serve. Store in an airtight container in the freezer for up to 2 weeks.

» VARIATION:
If you do not have an ice cream machine, use hand-held electric beaters to beat the sorbet every 2 hours, returning the mixture to the freezer each time, until the mixture is frozen.

October 20, 2013
1

Hot Cross Buns

By | Recipes | 2 Comments

Makes 12

4 cups plain flour, plus extra for dusting
1 tablespoon mixed spice
2 x 7g sachets dried yeast
1/4 cup dextrose
pinch of salt
40 g unsalted butter
300 ml milk
2 eggs, lightly beaten
olive oil spray, for greasing

Flour paste
1/2 cup plain flour
90 ml water

Glaze
1/3 cup water
2 tablespoons dextrose

  1. Sift the flour and mixed spice into a large bowl, then add the yeast, dextrose and salt. Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Add the milk, then heat for 1 minute or until lukewarm. Add the warm milk mixture and egg to the flour mixture. Use a flat-bladed knife to mix until the dough almost comes together. Use clean hands to form a soft dough.
  2. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface for 5–10 minutes or until smooth. Transfer to a lightly oiled bowl. Cover with a clean tea towel. Set aside in a warm place for 1 hour or until doubled in size. Line a large baking tray with baking paper.
  3. Punch the dough down to its original size. Knead on a lightly floured surface until smooth. Divide into 12 balls and put onto the prepared tray about 1 cm apart. Cover loosely with plastic film. Set aside in a warm place for 30 minutes or until doubled in size.
  4. Preheat the oven to 200°C (180°C fan-forced).
  5. For the paste, mix the flour and water until smooth, adding a little more water if needed. Spoon into a small snap-lock bag and snip off 1 corner. Pipe flour paste crosses on top of the buns.
  6. Bake the hot cross buns for 15 minutes or until they are golden and cooked through.
  7. For the glaze, stir the water and dextrose in a small saucepan over low heat until the dextrose has dissolved. Boil for 5 minutes. Brush the warm glaze over the warm hot cross buns. Serve.

» VARIATION:
If you like, knead some finely grated orange zest into the dough before baking.

September 30, 2013
0

Chicken Schnitzel

By | Recipes | 3 Comments

Free Recipe from Toxic Oil

Not everyone has, or wants, a deep-fryer. Before we discovered the joys of frying in animal fat, Lizzie would make this version of oven-baked chicken schnitzel for special occasions. It is a little time-consuming, but the schnitzels freeze really well after they’ve been cooked, so you can make a big batch and have some for another time; all you need to do is resuscitate them in a frying pan when you want to use them. Feel free to experiment with the recipe – try parmesan instead of tasty cheese, different herbs, garlic, some chilli, or both.

Serves 8

2 cups breadcrumbs
2 cups cheddar cheese, grated
2 teaspoons mixed (or dried Italian) herbs
2 eggs, lightly beaten
4 chicken breast fillets
60 g (1/4 cup) butter, melted

  1. Preheat oven to 180° C. Line an oven tray with non-stick baking paper.
  2. In a flat-based bowl or dish, mix together the breadcrumbs, cheese and herbs.
  3. Place the eggs in a separate bowl.
  4. Place the chicken fillets between two pieces of plastic wrap and flatten (bashing not rolling) with a rolling pin to a thickness of 1 centimetre. Cut the breasts in half (or smaller if you like).
  5. Using one hand (your ‘wet’ hand), dip each chicken piece into the beaten egg and place into the dry mix.
  6. Using your other hand (your ‘dry’ hand), cover the chicken in the breadcrumb mixture, then place on oven tray.
  7. Once all chicken is coated, spoon over the butter.
  8. Bake in the oven for 15–20 minutes until golden brown and cooked through.

Image courtesy of Apolonia / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

September 13, 2013
0

Want kids with allergies and asthma? Feed them Margarine.

By | Big Fat Lies, Vegetable Oils | 3 Comments

One in four Australians now suffers from an allergic and immune disease and the numbers are increasing at obscene rates. So on Monday, the Allergy and Immunology Foundation of Australasia was created to tackle the problem. They want money to find a cure for allergies, asthma and other immune diseases, but I’ll tell them the cure for free. Don’t let pregnant mothers and children consume vegetable oil.

Reported rates of Hay Fever, Asthma and Eczema have doubled in the last 15 years according to survey data. Hosptilisation rates for the most extreme form of allergic reaction, Anaphylaxis (life threatening acute inflammation usually in response to food) also doubled between 1994 and 2005. And the biggest overall change has been a five-fold increase in anaphylaxis admissions for children aged 0 to 4 years (as compared to just double for the rest of the population). Five times as many admissions in just ten years!

The thing that all of these diseases have in common is that they are part of our immune system’s inflammatory response. Any injury or infection causes an automatic and immediate inflammation. The swelling, pain, redness and heat are all functions of our inflammatory response. Without inflammation, wounds and infections would never heal.

Our inflammation response is almost entirely controlled by substances derived from polyunsaturated fats. So when asthma and allergy rates started exploding, the logical place to look for an explanation was the massive increase in polyunsaturated fats in the diet.

Vegetable oils such as canola, sunflower, soybean, grapeseed and rice-bran oils all contain large amounts of the polyunsaturated fats involved in controlling our inflammation response. But these oils are a very recent addition to the human diet. For the entirety of man’s time on this planet prior to the 20th century, the only fats we consumed were those derived from animals (like butter or ghee) or tropical fruit (like olives and coconuts). Those traditional fats have very small amounts of polyunsaturated oil.

Controlling that inflammation response is a very fine balancing act that is dependent on exactly the right amount and ratios of polyunsaturated fats being present in our diet. Small amounts of these oils are a critical component of our immune systems. But, because they are rare, overloading with them can push it way out of balance. Chronic (or uncontrolled) inflammation leads to a host of diseases including allergies and asthma.

Our bodies are very good at ensuring we have enough polyunsaturated fats to keep everything working. They were rare in our food supply before the last century so we store any we can get for later use. Unfortunately this scrooge-like approach means that now that they make up the majority of fats in the processed food we eat, most of us are storing vast quantities.

An easily identifiable source of vegetable oil in the diet is margarine. So scientists have conducted a number of large scale trials to see if there is any relationship between margarine consumption and allergic disease. And guess what, trial after trial has concluded that children who consume more margarine have double the rate of medically diagnosed eczema, hay fever, allergies and asthma. This is true in Finnish children, German 2 year olds and 3 year olds ‘liberated’ by the fall of the Berlin (and having the bad fortune to then be exposed to a diet containing margarine) to name a few.

Even when the kids themselves are not chomping on margarine or vegetable oils, if their mother did during the last four weeks of pregnancy, they have at least a 50% greater chance of having eczema, hay fever or allergies for life. To get to the bottom of why that might be, scientists have recently been comparing the amounts of polyunsaturated fats in a pregnant mother’s cord blood supply (the unborn baby’s food) to the likelihood of the child going on to develop chronic allergic disease.

They’ve found that there is a very direct relationship between the level of polyunsaturated fat in that blood supply and the risk of allergic disease. Not only that, the relationship is clearly dose-dependent. Want to give someone allergies or eczema or hay fever or asthma for life? Just increase the polyunsaturates. Want to decrease the risk? Just decrease the polyunsaturates. Simple.

Chronic allergies are not a case of the sniffles and a mild rash. They can be (and increasingly are) lifelong sources of extreme danger. We now live in a society where a growing array of foods can kill us on contact and where asthma can snuff out a life just as efficiently.

We don’t need more foundations to waste money on research. The research is done. We don’t need nutritionists telling us this gunk is good for us. The research says it’s very bad for us. And we don’t need our doctors helping sell it. They should be counselling us to ditch it. There are no good reasons to consume vegetable oils, but there is a growing list of reasons to avoid them like the plague.

It is very rare that science (particularly nutrition science) provides an answer that is this unequivocal. Vegetable oil consumption before or after birth causes lifelong allergic disease and asthma. The cause is obvious and the cure is even more obvious. We just need to stop eating vegetable oils, if not for us then to at least give our kids a chance.

Image courtesy of Sura Nualpradid / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

August 21, 2013
0

Is the Heart Foundation’s advice killing us?

By | Big Fat Lies, Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 13 Comments

This week the authors of a major ongoing assessment of our health released their 12 year update. It’s a sobering document. We are all getting fatter and very much sicker at an alarming rate. But the really disturbing thing is that the Australian Heart Foundation’s advice is making things worse not better.

The AusDiab (Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle) study has been monitoring the health of a random selection of 11,000 Australian adults since 2000. The results of the 12 year follow-up were published this week.

The update shows that the number of us with Type II Diabetes has increased by 41%; that obesity has increased by 22%; that almost half of us now have chronically high blood pressure (this is despite a 30% increase in the use of medication to control it); and that the average 25 year old gained 7 kg on the scales and 7 cm round the waist; all in just over a decade.

During all of the period of the study (and for many years before that), the Heart Foundation has campaigned for changes to our food supply that they say would combat exactly those problems. They wanted the saturated animal fats removed from our food and replaced with seed oils (described on the label as ‘vegetable oil’, ‘canola oil’, ‘sunflower oil’, ‘safflower oil’, ‘soy oil’, ‘rice bran oil’ or ‘grapeseed oil’). And they have had considerable success. All fast food outlets now fry in seed oils. There are no products on the supermarket shelves which use animal fat. And in every food category there is at least one major brand that has been certified by the Foundation (with a Tick) as being low in saturated fats.

They have won the war on animal fat and ensured that it has been almost completely replaced by oils extracted from seeds. There is just one remaining bastion of saturated fat, butter. But don’t worry, the Foundation has a plan there too, eat more margarine. They reckon that once you overcome the taste of margarine you’ll soon be enjoying the “great benefit” of more “omega 6.” Omega 6 fats are a significant component of seed oils (vegetable oils) but are very rare everywhere else in nature. The only problem is that research is telling us that they the Heart Foundation has gotten it very, very wrong on these fats.

One of the key pieces of research they rely on for the supposed benefits of margarine (and seed oils in general) has recently been reanalysed. This new analysis has turned our understanding of the heart health benefits of margarine (and in particular the omega-6 fats which are a primary ingredient) upside down. The researchers were able to recover lost data about the exact fats fed to the volunteers in the original Study and then apply modern statistical techniques to that data.

What they found was truly disturbing. Not only was there no benefit to the people substituting margarine for butter, doing so significantly increased the risk of death from heart disease (by 70%) because of the huge increase in omega-6 fat consumption in the margarine chomping group.

The margarines used in that trial have similar levels of omega-6 fats to those (and just about everything else) being promoted by the Heart Foundation for the last three decades. Based on this research, the Foundation is actively encouraging people to consume something that almost doubles the risk of death from heart disease. Let me say that again just so it’s clear. The research says that following the Heart Foundation’s advice almost doubles your risk of death from heart disease.

Extraordinary though that is, it is not the worst of it. These are also exactly the same fats that other research has repeatedly shown to double our risk of breast cancer. And I’m not just talking about rat studies here (although there are more than enough of them). I’m talking about at least 7 major human population studies and 2 long term controlled trials (human again) which all come to exactly the same conclusion. The more omega-6 fat (found primarily in vegetable oil) you consume the more likely you are to suffer from breast cancer.

Worse than that, the rat studies are showing up something that (thankfully) no-one dare try on humans. When you feed pregnant mothers this stuff, their female pups have double the rate of breast cancer – even though they don’t consume any vegetable oils after birth.

This makes the heart Foundation’s chosen marketing vehicle especially horrific. You see, rather than simply run an ad telling us to eat margarine, they’ve decided to create a social media storm with the express purpose of getting mums to consume the exact substance that the research resoundingly shows doubles the rate of breast cancer and nearly doubles their risk of death from heart disease. And if the rat studies are right, those mums (trying to do the very best for their families) may be making very dangerous choices for their unborn daughters.

As if this were not bad enough, the Foundation continues to persist with a bizarre stance on the question of sugar. Last Thursday, the ABC’s venerable science program, Catalyst ran a special feature on the dangers of sugar. It detailed the, now well established, evidence that sugar is not only responsible for the obesity epidemic but is also strongly implicated in a long line of chronic disease including Type II Diabetes and Heart Disease.

Part of the program examined the very high levels of sugar embedded in foods which bear the Australian Heart Foundation’s tick of approval. Professor Michael Cowley, a physiologist and obesity researcher from Monash University expressed surprise that the Heart Foundation would endorse breakfast cereals (for example) that were almost a third sugar. In response, the Heart Foundation said that they ignore the sugar content of foods because (despite abundant evidence to the contrary) they believe it doesn’t make us fat or give us diabetes or heart disease.

The Australian Heart Foundation has spent the last 54 years working to gain our trust as an adviser. Our trust is something you can’t buy, but the processed food industry has found a way to rent the Heart Foundation’s healthy halo. It’s called the Tick Program. Processed foods can gain endorsement from the Heart Foundation by doing what they were going to do anyway. They wanted to use seed oils instead of animal fats because they are loads cheaper. Tick. They wanted to use tons of sugar because food with sugar sells better than food without. Tick.

The only problem is that, through the Tick Program, the Heart Foundation now finds itself in the position of having endorsed hundreds of products that the science says are very dangerous to our health. And it receives a nice chunk of change from the program every year ($2.9m in 2011).

That, girls and boys, is what we lawyers call a conflict of interest. When doctors experience a conflict of interest (say by accepting gifts from pharmaceutical companies), the regulators tighten the rules and (no matter how much it hurts the doctors) puts the brakes on the gravy train.

The same thing happens in just about any profession we depend upon for expert knowledge. We have to be able to trust people we pay to know more than us about a specialist subject. And no matter how morally astute they believe they are, we cannot allow them be led into temptation by conflicts of interest. If we do, we can never be sure if they are giving us advice based on the best evidence or on their own financial interest.

There are now very persuasive reasons to worry about the Heart Foundation’s advice that we should consume seed oils (vegetable oils). And there is just as compelling evidence that ignoring sugar is taking a daily toll on the health of all Australians.

I know it’s embarrassing that the Heart Foundation got it wrong on omega-6 fats and sugar. But they need to suck it up and change their position. Because it is much better to admit being wrong and do something about it than let another 40 women contract breast cancer or another 270 people contract Type II diabetes (and that’s just the toll today – the same toll will be exacted tomorrow and the day after that too).

We don’t need the guardians of our health defending the indefensible. We need them, well, guarding our health without fear or favour (especially without favour). This is not about pride. It’s about doing the right thing and stopping the appallingly dangerous advice – now.

While you wait for the Heart Foundation to do the right thing, here is some simple, free, advice for anyone wishing to avoid heart disease, cancer and Type II Diabetes:

  1. Do not eat any processed food (food in a packet) which has a Heart Foundation Tick – it is more than likely full of sugar or seed oils or both
  2. Do not eat anything that has been deep fried unless you know it was done in olive oil, coconut oil, macadamia nut oil or animal fat.
  3. Avoid any other processed food that contains seed oil.
  4. Avoid any other processed food that contains more than 3g per 100g of added sugar

Warning: following this advice may cause you to live to a very old age, so make sure you’ve got some superannuation

July 10, 2013
0

Why Angelina Jolie’s breasts matter a lot less than what you spread on your bread

By | Vegetable Oils | 5 Comments

In April this year Angelina Jolie had both her breasts removed because she had a mutation in a BRCA (tumour suppressor) gene.  Jolie’s genetic mutation meant that she had five times the risk of contracting breast cancer and significantly increased risks for other cancers.  The good news is that it is a rare mutation (responsible for less than 5% of all breast cancer cases).  The bad news is that we are being force-fed a substance which disables the BRCA defence system for the whole population.

We need fully functioning BRCA genes because oxidation is a critical part of the biochemistry that keeps us alive.  This oxidation inevitably results in reactive by-products which have the potential to cause DNA damage leading to cancerous mutations.    Even when we are perfectly healthy, each of our cells is fighting offhundreds of hits a day from oxidative damage to DNA.

But we are well equipped to deal with normal levels of oxidation.  We come complete with our own little fire-brigade (antioxidants) and our own little repair crews (proteins created by BRCA genes) to run around patching up the fire damage.  Angelina’s repair crews were disabled which is why her risk of cancer was so high.  But people with that problem are a very small part of the cancer tsunami that is engulfing us.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in Australian women and the numbers being affected continue to accelerate at an extraordinary rate.  Today 40 women will be diagnosed with disease. Tomorrow another 40 will be added to the list.  By 2020 that number will be closer to 50 a day.  But this is not happening because of an explosion in BRCA mutations like Jolie’s.  This is happening because people with perfectly functional BRCA genes and antioxidant defences are having them disabled by seed oils.

Omega-6 fat dominates oils extracted from seeds (such as Sunflower, Canola, Soybean and Ricebran oils).  And we know for certain that, in rats, dietary Omega-6 fats rapidly accelerate the growth and spread of breast cancers.  In humans, study after study is coming to the same conclusion.  Higher Omega-6 fat consumption usually doubles the risk of breast cancer.  That’s true in the US (80% increased risk), Sweden(83%), Mexico(92%), Israel(100%), China(106%), France(131%), and Singapore(145%).

And it’s not just breast cancer.  A randomized controlled trialin US men reported a near doubling in deaths from all cancers in the group that consumed 15% of their diet as Omega-6 fats when compared to a control group that only consumed 5%.  And a similar study in France showed that when the trial group reduced their Omega-6 fats (from 5.3% of calories to 3.6%), cancer rates were also reduced (by 61%).

Before you tell me you’re ok because you always cook in olive oil, you should know that the oil we add is a very small part of the fat we actually consume.  Seed oils are much cheaper than animal or fruit fats (such as Olive, Avocado or Coconut Oils).  Because of this, they are now an integral part of margarine and baked goods and bread and salad dressings and pestos and meal bases and frozen food and, well, every other product (with a label) in our supermarkets.

It is also increasingly a significant component of grain fed meat (most of the meat in a supermarket) and even farmed fish (most of the fish in a supermarket). And it is just about the only fat used to fry take-awayfood in 21st century Australia.  In other words, it is almost impossible to avoid unless you grow and assemble your own food.

Clearly those dispensing healthy eating advice find the evidence on seed oils unconvincing (or are wilfully ignorant of it), because they are actively advising us to increase our consumption of these lethal fats.  But when I see trials which show causation in other mammals, backed up by repeated and consistent human population studies and nailed down with randomized controlled human trials, I’m convinced.

I know there is a lot of money at stake here.  Removing seed oils from the food supply would devastate the processed food industry overnight.  Fortunes would be destroyed and our food supply would need to be fundamentally rebuilt.  But I’d much rather see a few corporate empires burn than see one more woman diagnosed with breast cancer because it was cheaper to use seed oils than traditional fats.

Photo: Georges Biard [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

March 30, 2013
0

We owe our kids more than a future full of transplants

By | Sugar | 10 Comments

According to a report released this week, liver disease now affects more than six million Australians.  The doctors who commissioned the report want the taxpayer to give them more money to manage sufferers.  Fortunately we now know what causes the vast majority of liver disease and that it can be reversed simply by telling people not to eat sugar.  But I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that to become the recommended treatment.

Liver diseases fall into two main groups, those caused by viruses (Hepatitis – currently afflicting about 518,000 Australians), and, accounting for the other 90 odd per cent of cases, those caused by ‘lifestyle’ (5.5 million people).

The lifestyle group is usually further divided into drinkers (who have the same symptoms but have a history of consuming  more than 2 standard drinks per day for women or 3 for men) and everybody else.  According to the report, Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease now affects 6,203 people but Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) afflicts a massive 5,538,677 Australians.  That’s a pretty big number for a disease was first identified just 30 years ago.

As the name suggests, NAFLD starts out as an accumulation of fat in the liver.  It can then progress through various disease stages and ultimately end in cirrhosis requiring a liver transplant (if you’re lucky enough to find a donor).   There are very few symptoms until the later disease stages, so most people are unaware that they have it all.

NAFLD is frequently described as the liver component of the metabolic syndrome (elevated blood fats, insulin resistance and obesity), because it’s rapid growth has paralleled the same runaway growth in each of the diseases which are a consequence of the syndrome.  More than 90% of obese people and up to 70% of people with Type II Diabetes have NAFLD.

The number of people with NAFLD is accelerating at a tremendous rate.  Even worse, the age of onset is declining rapidly.  A study published last week revealed that the number of US teenagers with the disease more than doubled in the last 20 years and now affects almost 11% of US children aged 12-19.  If those rates translate to Australia (and there’s every reason to think they might) this means the average high school classroom now contains three children suffering from chronic liver disease.  Every classroom.  Three kids.

Even though one of the liver’s functions is to make fat from any excess carbohydrates we consume, the fat is normally exported for storage in all the places that make our jeans too tight.  NAFLD starts when the liver’s ability to export fat is overwhelmed.  The excess fat remains in the liver and begins to create the human version of foie gras.  The best way to make this happen in ducks and geese is to overfeed them (by shoving a metal tube down their throat) with carbohydrates (like corn or dried figs).

Humans get a little twitchy if you reach for the tube and corn, so overfeeding us has to be accomplished with a little more finesse.  In people, all but one carbohydrate triggers an insulin response which (unfortunately for those expecting to make a bit of human foie gras) shuts down appetite and stops us eating too much.

The one carbohydrate which subverts this handy appetite control feature is fructose.  So you might expect that a bit of effort has been put into seeing if fructose (and its primary modern delivery vehicle, sugar or sucrose) might be the source of the sudden explosion in NAFLD.

And you wouldn’t be disappointed.  In the last five years research that proves that sugar is the culprit has been pouring in.  Scientists have of course shown that you can give ducks (hmm, I wonder why they chose that experimental animal) and rats NAFLD using fructose.  And a recent series of human studies have also shown that the consumption of soft drinks is strongly associated with the onset of NAFLD (and I don’t think we can blame the water or the bubbles).  But if that wasn’t enough, a pair of very recent trials from Scandinavia have put the icing on the cake.

The first trial involved feeding four groups of people four different drinks (Coke, skim milk, Diet Coke and a still mineral water).  After 6 months of this, the Coke group had massively (140%) increased liver fat (as well as significantly increased blood pressure, cholesterol and blood triglycerides).  The folks knocking back Diet Coke and water were pretty much the way they were at the start (just in case you thought it might be the water or the bubbles) and the milk drinkers had even slightly improved their liver fat status.

A similar story unfolded in the second trial.  Some very unfortunate volunteer humans were put on the path to NAFLD (27% increase in liver fat) in just three weeks by overfeeding them chocolates, pineapple juice, soft drinks and sports drinks.  The good news is that the disease was easily reversed with diet (although it did take 6 months).

The trials are done, the evidence is clear.  Fructose consumption causes NAFLD in exactly the same way that alcohol causes Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.  NAFLD’s alcoholic cousin can be usually be reversed by ensuring the patient avoids alcohol.  So are the experts demanding that GPs be told to adopt a similar practice for fructose?  Nup.

No, what they want is for the government to spend more money on, well, them.  This week’s report calls for a $6 million dollar a year program (run by the doctors who commissioned the report) to increase awareness of liver disease and a $7.5 million dollar a year community care program to help people who are suffering with liver disease.

Now I’m sure these are admirable programs and I’m sure they’ll go some way to alleviating a little bit of the suffering caused by the overwhelming epidemic of chronic liver disease.  But when the cause is clear and the solution even clearer, we can do much better than throw a bit of cash at some liver doctors.

NAFLD currently has at least a quarter of the population on an expressway to a liver transplant (if the rest of the metabolic syndrome doesn’t get us first).  Yet it can be easily and effectively reversed with a pathetically simple piece of advice – don’t eat sugar.  Those charged with keeping us well, need to immediately start giving that advice rather than lobbying for a better ambulance  to park at the bottom of the cliff.

January 31, 2013
0

A day late and a dollar short? – Australia’s peak health bodies decide sugar is unhealthy (but only when added to fizzy water).

By | Conflicts of Interest, Sugar | 20 Comments

The week before last the Heart Foundation, Cancer Council and Diabetes Australia declared war on sugar. But before you break out the party poppers you should know that it wasn’t so much an all-out assault as a slap with a wet tram ticket. And the Dietitians Association couldn’t even be bothered getting out the tram ticket, moist or otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see such august bodies uniting behind an anti-sugar campaign. It’s just a pity the message is so riddled with caveats, exceptions and contradictions as to render it almost completely ineffective. Or was that the point?

The campaigning trio called for action on sugary drinks by “governments, schools and non-government organisations such as sports centres.”

Kellie-Ann Jolly, acting CEO of the Heart Foundation urged the Federal Government to “implement restrictions to reduce children’s exposure to marketing of sugary drinks.” She went on to suggest that State governments should also limit the sale of sugary drinks in schools and sporting grounds.

The CEO of Diabetes Australia, Greg Johnson, wanted even more direct action, calling for a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.  The call to action was because these drinks are “associated with a range of serious health issues including weight gain and obesity, which in turn are risk factors for diabetes, cardiovascular (heart) disease and cancer.”

The sugar in soft drinks must be magic. You see when it’s mixed with water it apparently makes you fat and gives you diabetes, heart disease and cancer. But when the very same sugar constitutes 72% of a children’s lunch box snack it is so healthful that it deserves a great big Heart Foundation Tick of approval. And when it makes up almost a third of Uncle Toby’s Oat Gourmet Selections or Kellogg’s Just Right breakfast cereal it gets a tick as well.

But the real sign of its magicness is that it is not always dangerous even when the only other significant ingredient is still just water. Fruit Juice is sugar and water but that is not on the radar of the newly minted crusaders against sugary drinks. Apparently sugar molecules that were once part of a piece of fruit are not evil but those that were once part of a piece of sugar cane (despite being chemically identical) are deserving of taxation and prohibition.

Soft drink is an easy target. No-one is suffering under the impression that a can of Pepsi is health food and not even the Beverage Association at its most brazen would attempt to convince us that it is.

Confected rage on the part of the magnificent three is token (at best) for as long as they continue to ignore (or endorse, in the Heart Foundation’s case) the vast majority of sugar we are sold under the label ‘health food’.
Sugar is sugar. It’s just as dangerous when it’s the primary ingredient in a Heart Foundation approved children’s snack as it is when it’s sloshing around in a bottle of Coke. The Heart Foundation in particular robs this campaign of any shred of credibility for as long as it accepts payment from the processed food industry to endorse their sugar filled ‘health’ food.

The evidence supporting the campaign has been available to these organisations since at least 2007. Despite this, the Heart Foundation in particular has publicly and actively denied that sugar presented any health problem at all. Indeed as recently as 2011 they said“based on the current level of evidence, sugar is not directly linked to [heart disease], diabetes, or obesity.” That’s right, the exact opposite of what they now say about the sugar in soft drinks.

They must have found their library card because now it appears they’ve finally caught up with decades of research and mustered the gumption to acknowledge (some of) that evidence – albeit in half-hearted and non-revenue-endangering fashion.

The research on dietary sugar intake is just as damning as the evidence that has now convinced them to act on soft drink. Sugar doesn’t suddenly become dangerous when combined with water and bubbles. It’s dangerous all the time.
How many people million more people need to suffer from the lifelong debilitation (of Type II Diabetes) caused by the sugar added to everything we eat before Diabetes Australia is prepared to accept that evidence. How many more deaths from Heart Disease need to occur before the Heart Foundation is prepared to bite the corporate hand that feeds it?

Until those who are supposed to care, stand up and acknowledge the obvious, the suffering will continue. Until the Heart Foundation are prepared to say no to corporate sponsorship and demand action on all sugar, their gormless flailing at the easy targets will render them less and less relevant. In this age of profit driven, processed food we need real, independent advocates not corporate flunkies.

Image courtesy of Paul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

November 11, 2012
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Act on Sugar before it’s too late.

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What do you do when a strategy you’ve been executing for almost 30 years is plainly not working? If you’re the nutrition hierarchy in Australia, apparently the answer is you just keep doing what you’ve always done.

In 1981, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) published the very first set of guidelines aimed at making Australians healthier. Fat was blamed for the increasing rates of obesity and heart disease, so the guidelines were focused on fat consumption. In short, fat makes you fat and sick and you should eat a lot less of it. Sugar was also mentioned but only because it rots our teeth but it was ok to consume ‘in moderation’ (whatever that means).

I very much doubt that anyone actually pores over the guidelines while they fill their shopping trolley, but many of us use them without realising it. They are the basis for the nutrition (daily intake) recommendations on every packaged food we buy. They form the foundation for every piece of advice any government agency or nutritionist gives us (from school canteens to hospitals). And every meal for our military forces is created using a policy based on the guidelines.

Because of this, the eat-less-fat message got through to us loud and clear. Between 1980 and 1995, the average Australian successfully decreased the amount of fat they were eating by 5% and the amount of cholesterol by a whopping 18%. We replaced the fat with carbohydrates (bread, cereals and sugar), increasing our consumption by 16.5%.

Unfortunately the obesity statistics went in exactly the opposite direction to our fat consumption. In 1980, two in five (39%) Australian Adults were either overweight or obese. By 2011, only two in five weren’t (63.4% were overweight or obese). In just 28 years, all that low-fat eating (or was it the high-carbohydrate eating?) had managed to increase the number people with a weight problem by 64 per cent!

Heart disease sufferers didn’t fare much better. The percentage of the population afflicted doubledbetween 1989 and 2011 (despite significant advances in health care for heart patients in that period).

Evidence that fat makes you fat and sick was suspiciously lacking by the time the revised guidelines came out in 1992. And the evidence that the theory was nonsense was there in spades by the time the third release hit the streets in 2003. Increasingly sugar was being fingered as the culprit but that evidence was suspiciously absent from the reviews undertaken at that time.

The guidelines are currently being reviewedahead of publication of new version (hopefully next year). So can we expect a sudden change of heart from the nutrition elite? History suggests pigs may be approaching the runway before that happens.

The draft update to the new NHMRC dietary guideline on sugar suggests they plan to change from this


“Consume only moderate amounts of sugars and foods containing added sugars.”

To this:


“Limit intake of foods and drinks containing added sugars. In particular, limit sugar-sweetened drinks.”

Again, no actual limits or recommendations will be included.

The reason for this momentous change (go on, I bet you can spot a difference if you look hard enough) is that the NHMRC has unearthed very high quality evidence which tells it that consuming soft drinks makes us fat. Apparently sugar is dangerous when combined with bubbles and water but is otherwise ok.

Last week I was invitedto Canberra to explain why that was just plain daft. I submitted that a refusal to consider any evidence produced beyond 2009 made for a very weak review. I pointed out that the American Heart Association had reviewed the evidence on sugar in 2009 and come out with a position statement which recommended dramatic reductions in consumption. I presented the mountain of evidence that has accumulated since 2009 including high quality human trials. And I highlighted some of the startling conclusions from the current NHMRC evidence report such as “three of the four cohort studies reviewed showed positive associations with fructose[half of sugar] and pancreatic and colo-rectal cancer”

I concluded that given that even their own review (limited and defective as it was) was throwing up high quality evidence of very real harm from sugar consumption, the anaemic recommendation to ‘limit intake’ just isn’t good enough.

It’s a long time between drinks with these guidelines (it will be a decade between reviews by the time this lot are published) and we already have powerful evidence of very real harm from sugar. But millions of real people are making daily decisions about what to shove in their mouth based on this advice (whether they know it or not) with the direct result that they are significantly fatter and sicker than they were the day before.

Let’s not wait until 2023 to get tough on sugar. Let’s not let millions more perfectly healthy children suffer the lifelong destruction of amenity which is type II diabetes. Let’s not stand by and watch the heart disease, kidney disease and pancreatic cancer rates double again. Let’s do something about it now.