The David Gillespie Blog

If you change nothing, nothing will change
September 13, 2013
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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
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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

March 2, 2012
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It’s time to stop mainlining anti-cholesterol drugs

By | Big Fat Lies | 19 Comments

In Australia, statins (the class of drugs used to lower blood cholesterol) now chew up 13 per cent of the money paid out by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), and the amount shelled out for them by the Australian taxpayer (via the PBS) grew by a third in just the last year alone.

That’s a worry for taxpayers, but with one in three Australians over the age of 50 now taking them, a greater concern is that new research suggests statins significantly increase the risks of Type II Diabetes and dementia.

The United States Food and Drug Administration is worried enough about those little ‘side-effects’ to require that statins immediately carry warnings about diabetes and cognitive impairment.  But here in the land of nod, we’ve happily become the world’s biggest statin pill-poppers.

Don’t get me wrong.  Statins do work. The studies have shown that they do lower LDL cholesterol and they do reduce heart-disease in younger men who’ve already had a heart attack. But there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that the benefits for these folks had nothing to do with the cholesterol-lowering and quite a lot to do with their blood-thinning properties.

Unfortunately (for drug marketers) ‘younger men who’ve already suffered a heart attack’ (and lived to tell the tale) is a very, very small market. The only way to turn a buck from statins was to convince doctors to prescribe it (and the PBS to fund it) for ‘prevention’ (among people whose only sign of illness is being diagnosed with a higher than ‘normal’ blood-cholesterol reading).

A comprehensive review published in 2007 of all of the major high-quality trials on statins concluded that for these not-sick people (who make up the overwhelming majority) taking statins did not alter the overall risk of dying at all.

The studies showed that we would need to treat 67 otherwise healthy people with statins for five years in order to prevent just one of them suffering a heart-disease event. This puts the drugs in the category of being almost completely ineffective. By way of comparison, we need to treat 11 people with antibiotics in order to completely cure 10 of them.

When the data were broken down by gender and age, the results became even less impressive. Statins delivered absolutely no benefit for women at all. And men aged over 69 (those most at risk of fatal heart attacks) enjoyed no benefits either. The only people the drug appeared to help were men aged 30–69, and then only by a very small absolute margin.

The reason for the disappointing results may be that statin drugs work by shutting down the enzyme we use to manufacture cholesterol.  Unfortunately we also use that same enzyme to manufacture one of our primary anti-oxidants, co-enzyme Q10. Shutting down cholesterol production also means shutting down Q10 production (and thereby impairing our ability to fight heart disease and other types of inflammation).

This might be why (although these drugs have a big effect on cholesterol levels) they have very limited effect on heart-disease outcomes. It might also be that although statins lower cholesterol, this has nothing to do with why they lower risks for people who’ve already had a heart attack. Just like aspirin, statins reduce clotting. And just like aspirin, the people who benefit the most from statins are those who’ve already suffered a heart attack. But no one will make a fortune selling aspirin at 97 cents a box.

However they are not merely harmless profiteering.  A series of studies has suggested relationships between statin usage and increased diabetes and cognitive impairment (dementia to you and me). And a significant independent analysis of the trials, conducted in 2011 by the ever reliable Cochrane Review, concluded that becasue of this doctors to be cautious in prescribing statins to people who hadn’t already had a heart attack.

Statins are powerful drugs that alter the function of important liver enzymes, and the evidence suggests that the only class of people who benefit are younger men who’ve already had a heart attack. The only people who should be given statins should be this very small group (and then only if their doctor feels the benefit outweighs the risk of diabetes and dementia).

The US regulators are ringing the alarm bells.  But here the Australian Heart Foundation is more concerned that not enough people are taking preventative medication.  The Australian Medical Association is much more cautious.  They say statins should only be prescribed to high risk patients.  Good advice, but clearly someone isn’t listening.  Heart disease rates are high but don’t come anywhere near needing to put a third of the over fifties on statins.

Meanwhile millions of Australians continue to take a drug they don’t need and which the evidence says significantly increases their chronic disease risks.  We need to stop slavishly following the drug marketing agenda.  The practise of mass (and accelerating) prescription of statins must stop immediately.

Note: Parts of this blog post were ‘borrowed’ from my new book Big Fat Lies.

Image courtesy of Paul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

July 13, 2011
0

The Glycemic Index has passed its use-by date

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar | 16 Comments

The glycemic index (GI) is not just bad science, it has a dangerous loophole big enough to drive an ice-cream truck through. Its time it went to the place where old (and wrong) public health messages go to die.

Wendy’s Chocollo (with waffle cone), Bulla Light vanilla ice-cream, Nestle Milo, Uncle Toby’s Choc Chip Crunchy Muesli Bar and CSR LoGiCane Sugar all have something in common. Yes, they’d all look pretty good on the dessert menu, but they also share something else. The owners of each of these products (and almost a hundred others like them) have paid for the right to display a GI Symbol.

Much like its more famous cousin (the Heart Foundation tick), the GI Symbol is designed to guide confused consumers towards “healthier choices” in the supermarket.

The symbol alerts us to foods which have a low glycemic index. The GI is a measure of the amount that a food affects our blood sugar levels. Our body converts most of the carbohydrates in our food to blood glucose. This causes a spike and then a decline in the amount of glucose we have in circulation.

But not all foods are equal. Some (like glucose) spike our blood sugar levels more quickly than others (like potatoes). This is because the carbohydrates in some foods are more quickly converted to blood sugar than others.

The glycemic index of a food is measured by comparing the way a healthy person’s blood sugar level responds (over a 2 hour period) to 50g of glucose and how they respond to 50g of carbohydrate in the food being tested (let’s say boiled potatoes). If the tested food produces an effect which is 70% of the one measured for the glucose then it is said to have a GI of 70. A low GI food is one which has a GI of 55 or less (meaning that the blood sugar response is 55% of that of pure glucose over a two hour period).

The theory goes that if we could make sure we were eating just the foods which have a low impact on our blood sugar, then we would keep our blood sugar levels more even (and presumably somehow be more healthy as a result). I say presumably because there is a real scarcity of credible evidence that the GI of a food has any measurable (positive) health impact.

GI may be a pointless academic exercise but it is not a harmless one. It has a hidden danger in that the carbohydrate it assigns the lowest (and therefore the best) rating is fructose (it has a GI of 19). Fructose is a very sweet tasting (almost twice as sweet as sugar) carbohydrate that does not produce a significant blood sugar response.

When this little quirk of fructose was first discovered (in the early 1980’s) it was pronounced a miracle sugar for people with diabetes. They could have sweets just like everyone else and their blood sugar would never spike as long as the sweets were made with fructose. Even some sugar was ok too (because, being half fructose, it also has a low(ish) GI).

Diabetes organisations the world over happily advised diabetics they could eat sugar or, even better, pure fructose. Unfortunately for sweet tooths everywhere, by about 2001, it was becoming abundantly clear that the ‘no free lunch’ rule applied (or was it no free pudding?). Fructose was even more dangerous for diabetics than sugar.

It turned out that the reason fructose didn’t have a big glycemic index was because it is converted to fat (by our liver) and not circulating blood sugar (like just about every other carbohydrate). Telling diabetics (or anyone else, but particularly diabetics) to consume a substance that was immediately converted to fat was a very bad idea (verging on the culpably negligent).

The American Diabetes Association quietly withdrew its recommendation in 2002, but the message never got through to Australia. The Australian Diabetes Council tell us they “want to end the myth that sugar causes diabetes”, apparently because sugar-free diets aren’t “much fun.”

And the folks selling the Low-GI stickers (the GI Foundation – a collaboration of University of Sydney, Diabetes Australia and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) still tell us it is “best to ignore the sugar content of a food and instead focus on the food’s GI.” A director of the GI Foundation (Sydney University nutritionist Jennie Brand-Miller) even went so far as to say recently that “Unlike saturated fats, trans fats, salt and alcohol, sugar doesn’t actually do any direct harm to the human body.”

For the last decade (at least), the research on fructose (and sugar) has shown again and again that exactly the opposite is true. Fructose consumption is a causal factor in obesity, heart disease, hypertension and Type II Diabetes. It is implicated strongly in cancer growth and it is highly likely to be behind the explosion in the number of cases of chronic kidney disease and fatty liver disease.

That all sounds pretty harmful to me. So perhaps that is why the American Heart Association recommended (after reviewing all the evidence in 2009) that Americans needed to dramatically reduce their sugar consumption. Men should consume no more than 9 teaspoons of sugar a day (about a can of soft drink’s worth). That’s less than half the current (vague) Australian recommendation (of about 23 teaspoons a day).

Just like skinny leather ties and big hair, the glycemic Index seemed like a good idea in the eighties. It held out hope (for a dessert filled future) to millions of diabetics everywhere. But science eventually found out what was really going on (as it usually does) and the world moved on.

In Australia we got stuck on the notion that GI should work (and to this day stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the fructose loophole). The food industry leapt on the marketing power of a ‘healthy label’ that meant they could still use as much sugar as they wanted. Positions became entrenched. Reputations were built. And as a result we now have folks like the GI Foundation and the Australian Diabetes Council telling us there’s nothing wrong with eating sugar.

This would all be mildly entertaining if we weren’t talking about real people with very real (and very life-threatening) problems. Every day in Australia nine people lose a limb to Type II diabetes (and 275 more people develop the disease). Every day the number of obese children grows like never before in human history. Every day the number of new cases of chronic kidney disease sets a new benchmark.

The science says all of this misery (and lots more) can be traced back to eating sugar. So how about we stop playing ducks and drakes with quaint scientific notions (that protect the processed food industry from having to face reality). How about we start caring about the people who follow the advice they see on a packet of food. How about we face the truth about sugar and demand that those we pay to care – do.

May 23, 2010
7

Why the first law of thermodynamics has no place in human nutrition

By | Big Fat Lies | 60 Comments

The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can’t be created or destroyed. Many people (wrongly) think Sir Isaac Newton worked this one out, but it seems it was more likely a Welsh lawyer (score one for the lawyers!).

It’s a law about physical forces that unifies a lot of previous theories that related to heat and mechanical energy. In the nutrition and diet industry, it usually looks more like “energy in must equal energy out” or just “the energy balance equation”. They will even sometimes do an actual equation (I guess to make it look more scientific).

Weight Gain (Energy Balance) = Energy In (Food) – Energy Out (Exercise).

The First Law has been hijacked by the nutritionista because it kinda sounds like it should apply to dieting. As a result it is used more today in human nutrition than in any other domain of human endeavour. The First Law is quoted every time you watch or read any information on diet products, exercise or weight loss programs. And the government throws it your face even more regularly than that.

We are told the only way we can lose weight is to either consume less energy (calories) or burn more energy (by exercising). Fat has almost twice the calories per gram as protein or carbohydrate. This is why fat is often the target of calorie restriction hysteria. Gram for gram you can eat almost twice as much of a carbohydrate and not unbalance your equation.

Sounds logical, right? And I guess that’s why this simple message has so much traction with advertisers.

The only problem is that it is utter nonsense.

The First Law certainly says that when we gain weight there will be an accompanying increase in the number of calories consumed (or decrease in the number burned). It is an equation and in equations each side must equal the other, but that does not necessarily mean that increased calorie consumption causes the weight gain.

It is equally logical to say that gaining weight is the driving force in the equation. In other words, weight gain causes us to consume more calories.

When a child grows they increase their body size and weight. These growth-hormone driven changes cause the child to consume more calories, not the other way around. Not even the most rabid nutritionist would suggest that feeding a 10 year old like an 18 year old would help you get past those awkward teenage years more quickly.

Growth happens because our hormone clock says it should. Calorie consumption just keeps up (so that the energy balance stays, well, … balanced). We are perfectly happy to explain the equation that way when we talk about people who grow vertically. We’re even happy to accept that pregnant women gain weight (other than the baby of course) because hormones tell their bodies to fill the baby-pantry.

Eating is the way we put on weight, it isn’t the reason we put on weight. When a car accelerates, it does so because it has access to more petrol. The petrol doesn’t cause the acceleration, but it does enable it.

But for some reason when Norm grows horizontally, causation is magically reversed. Nutritionists lurch from physics into psychiatry and the cause suddenly becomes greed or sloth (or both).

Just like height gain, weight gain is caused by hormones, but this time it is hormonal dys-function. The fructose half of sugar causes us to become resistant to our main appetite suppression hormones (insulin and leptin). When this happens our appetite is not shut-down when it should be and we just keep eating. And just like a Toyota with a stuck accelerator, our weight accelerates out of control.

Once we understand that weight gain is caused by hormonal dysfunction (a stuck accelerator) many (previously) mysterious things become clear.

A diet that asks you to consume less calories by exercising willpower is doomed to failure. Imagine how successful you’d be if you asked a child to exercise some willpower and stop growing. Fighting hormones with willpower is about as effective as paddling upstream with a barbed-wire paddle. Perhaps this is why the best indicator that you will be heavier in five years is being on a diet now.

Lap band surgery restricts the fuel supply without the need for willpower. It’s like clamping a fuel line in the car analogy. Less fuel gets through for a given squeeze of the accelerator. But our bodies are nothing if not adaptive, so they just ramp up the demand for calories (they push harder and longer on the accelerator). Perhaps this is why a lap-band driven ‘remission’ lasts only 10 years (at best).

Exercise burns so few calories that very few people can commit the time (or willpower) required for it to seriously affect energy balance. But even if they could, using more energy just increases the demand for energy (any gym junkie could tell you that). Lumberjacks eat more than office workers because they exercise more.

Diets, surgery and exercise do not affect the cause of weight gain (which is the hormonal dysfunction created by fructose) and so, they don’t work. Yet they remain the only targets of the billions spent ‘combating’ obesity in this country. All because the nutritionista hold true to a law of physics which has been misapplied to nutrition for the past 60 years.

When nutritionists first started guessing what made us fat, only one of the four major appetite hormones had been discovered. Then, it was (almost) acceptable to squeeze the square peg of a physics law into the round hole of human biochemistry. But those days are long gone and so too should be our tolerance for that kind of guesswork.

Many careers have been built on propagating this nonsense and there are many who will fight hard to protect it. But that should not be an excuse for inaction in the face of a human health disaster of truly epic proportions (pun intended).

Image courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

February 17, 2010
0

Does saturated fat really cause heart disease?

By | Big Fat Lies, Conflicts of Interest, Vegetable Oils | 9 Comments

We’re not eating enough margarine and it really is starting to bother people who make it. According to Dairy Australia’s 2009 report, butter (and butter-like substances) have steadily increased from 30 percent of the spread market in 2001 to 43 percent in 2009. And the outlook to 2012 is even rosier with expected growth of almost 10 percent.

I blame MasterChef (and its ilk). You never see the latest quasi-celebrity cracking open a nice tub of marg do you? No, its great dollops of butter all the way. Of course it could just be that we’re getting wary of how many chemists were involved in creating the stuff we spread on our bread.

Goodman Fielder (the maker of Meadow Lea) has obviously decided not to take our growing disdain for manufactured spreads lying down. In the last few weeks a commercial has been airing featuring a smart young fellow by the name of Andrew Wilson chatting to us about the evils of eating butter.

Andrew ought to know what he’s talking about. He’s a cardiologist with the Department of Medicine, St Vincent’s Hospital in Fitzroy, Melbourne. I know this because, not only does his mug appear regularly on the teev, he features on a website called Spread the Facts.

Andrew tells us that “as a cardiologist he understands what saturated fats can do to your child’s health,” and illustrates this with a graphic of a “child’s artery” filling with saturated fats from butter. He then goes on to suggest that we should switch to a margarine spread made with plant seeds (tight shot of plant seeds in doc’s hands), “because most contain at least 65% less saturated fat than butter.”

The website (and the ad) are bought to us by Goodman Fielder and both appear to be in some (nonspecific) way associated with the Australian Heart Foundation (if the constant use of their logo is anything to go by).

On my telly, whenever Andrew appears in an ad break, you can put money on the probability of an ad for Meadow Lea materialising an ad or two later in the break. The Meadow Lea ad features children gambolling in a field. Mother then enters and the voice-over points out that Meadow Lea is made from plant seeds (tight shot of mother’s hands holding plant seeds) which contains 65 percent less saturated fat than butter. Enough dots for you to join there?

All that authorititive advice (followed coincidentally by an ad for a product that fits the bill) should have any self-respecting parent hurtling towards the margarine section of the supermarket before Hermione and Jeremy’s arteries are irreversibly clogged.

The only problem with all of this is that the science doesn’t appear to match the advertising spin. A study to be published next month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concludes that “there is no significant evidence that dietary saturated fat is associated with increased risk of [heart disease].” Huh? But didn’t Andrew show us pictures of children’s arteries being pumped full of saturated fat?

The study arrived at that conclusion after examining 21 previous studies of a total of 347,747 people. It was however supported by the National Dairy Council (who might like us to eat a little more butter).

Fortunately (for the suspiciously inclined), a comprehensive review (which has no dubious sources of funding) of the evidence was published in the British Medical Journal back in 2001.

The British review decided that despite decades of research (and thousands of people participating in randomized trials), there “is still only limited and inconclusive evidence” that the amount or type of fat you eat makes any difference to your chances of death by heart attack. Not exactly resounding support for the line being pushed by Andrew, the Heart Foundation and Goodman Fielder, now is it?

These results are quite a contrast to a review published by the American Heart Association (AHA) last August. That review summarised the available research on the relationship between sugar intake and cardiovascular health. It noted that “sugar intake appears to be associated with increased triglyceride levels, a known risk factor for coronary heart disease,” and concluded that the average American needed to dramatically reduce their sugar intake.

The AHA was so concerned they recommended that an adult male consume no more than 9 teaspoons (5 for women and 3 for kids) of added sugar a day (about the same as a can of soft drink or a large bowl of fruit muesli for the man). Even worse, alcohol had to be deducted from the allowance, so one full strength beer would reduce a man’s sugar quota to zero.

I can’t blame Goodman Fielder for having a go. They’re not a charity and they’ve got a product to sell in a market populated by mini-me MasterChefs. But why is a cardiologist fronting up and suggesting something that isn’t supported by the research? And why is the Heart Foundation in there helping them both out? Why aren’t the Australian Heart Foundation telling us what their American cousins know about sugar? Surely it’s not because no-one is paying them to – surely not?

December 7, 2009
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Sugar, not salt, causes high blood pressure

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar | 11 Comments

A study published in last week’s British Medical Journal (BMJ) seemed to confirm what our health gurus already know. Apparently salt is not good for you.

The paper reviewed a series of studies on salt intake conducted between 1985 and 2007. The results were all over the map. But the authors said if you looked at them just the right way, they showed that if you ate more salt your risks of stroke and heart disease were much higher than otherwise.

The theory goes that if you eat less salt, less water will be drawn into your bloodstream and you will have lower blood pressure. And blood pressure is a known risk factor for heart disease and stroke. So they concluded we should all continue to try harder to reduce our salt intake.

Huh? Didn’t we already know this? Isn’t this old news? Why on earth would anyone need to confirm something that we’ve been told since at least 1979? Well it seems the dangers of salt are nowhere near as certain as we have been led to believe.

According to the salt industry, the results are questionable because two of the study’s authors are members of a strident anti-salt group, but didn’t disclose this to the BMJ. And it doesn’t take long to find major studies which flat out contradict those results. Just last year, a significant study showed that (at least in the US), low salt levels actually increase your risk of death from heart disease.

Some small salt studies have shown that decreasing salt will lower blood pressure (and quite a few haven’t). But the favourable results (of less than 2% decrease) are hardly earth shattering. In fact, it’s possible to get similar effects just by decreasing the amount of water someone drinks prior to having their blood pressure taken.

Whether salt really increases (or reduces) your risk of death from a heart attack is clearly far from settled. But that hasn’t stopped nutritionists, Food Standards Australia and the Heart Foundation lobbying furiously for decreases in our daily salt allowance.

Meanwhile the link between sugar (well, at least the fructose half of sugar anyway) and high blood pressure has been growing stronger by the day. A study released last month confirmed that fructose directly causes high blood pressure. The researchers were able to raise participants’ blood pressure by 5 percent in just two weeks by giving them the amount of fructose contained in 3.5 litres of softdrink per day (about 3 times the American average).

The blood pressures returned to normal after two months off the high sugar diet. The study is clearly not a real world example but the effect was pronounced and very, very quick. No study of salt intervention has ever produced anything like it.

Another study released last month backs up the link. In that one, the soft-drink consumption habits of 4,528 people were analysed. Participants who consumed more than 74g of fructose a day (about the same as in 1.3 litres of soft drink and bang on the American average) significantly (87%) increased their risk of having dangerously high blood pressure. Once again, no salt study has ever shown anything like that effect.

But while the Heart Foundation campaigns against salt, it hands out ‘ticks’ to high sugar products like fruit bars and fruit juices. And when salt concerns are put to food processors they respond with good intentions – oh dear, yes there is too much salt in food – we must do better. But try saying that kind of thing about sugar and you get letters from the legal department.

I wonder why that is? Perhaps it’s got something to do with the fact that reducing salt (from anything to anything) is a great marketing claim and it probably won’t affect the sales of the product. But reducing sugar (when your competitors don’t) will probably cost you serious money. Unlike salt, sugar is highly addictive.

It’s time we suspended the phoney war on salt and started a real war on the real culprit: sugar.

Image courtesy of Mister GC at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

June 12, 2009
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Why Iodine is being added to your Daily Bread

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar | 7 Comments

You may not know it but you need iodine in your life. No, I’m not talking about the brown tincture that your mum smeared all over your bloodied knee, although it’s closely related. The iodine you need even more than that is the kind you eat as part of your diet. You don’t need a lot (about one teaspoon over your lifetime) but it is vital, particularly in the few months before the world is blessed with your presence.

Iodine is used by your thyroid gland to manufacture a couple of hormones (with inconsiderately long names which have thankfully been abbreviated by the research community to T3 & T4). If a pregnant woman’s thyroid gland can’t get enough iodine to make these hormones then there will be disastrous consequences for her baby.

Thyroid hormones are critical for the creation of the protective coating of nerves (called myelanation) which is most active in the period from 22 weeks gestation to just after birth. A range of recent studies show conclusively that even if the mother is only moderately iodine deficient, the child will suffer a reduction in IQ of between 10 and 15 points. Severe iodine deficiency will result in significant mental retardation.

The research on iodine deficiency is well established and is the driver behind the creation of ‘iodised salt’. But in the last decade or so we’ve become a bit too good for plain old salt (rock salt only please) and the alarm bells are starting to ring. Iodised Salt is now less than 10% of all salt sales.

But even if you have a perfectly adequate amount of iodine in your diet you may still be unable to produce enough of the thyroid hormones. Guess how (c’mon it’s not that hard, you’re reading a blog about fructose)? That’s right, just make sure your diet is high in fructose (sugar for the newcomers).

A series of studies published in the eighties by the US Department of Agriculture show that fructose creates a copper deficiency. And a bit more research (from Russia) in the nineties shows that a fructose induced copper deficiency sharply decreases iodine hormone (T3 & T4) production by the thyroid gland.

So even if she has plenty of iodine in her diet, if a pregnant woman’s diet also has plenty of fructose, she’s playing Russian roulette with her child’s IQ (‘scuse pun).

The combination of a high fructose, low iodine diet is starting to have a real impact on Australian women. A recent update to 2001 research out of Westmead hospital in Sydney suggests a 50% increase in thyroid hormone deficiencies in Australian pregnant mothers.

But don’t worry, the Government is on the case. Are they banning fructose? Are they suggesting pregnant mothers take iodine supplements? No, of course not. Their solution is exactly the same as the solution for tooth decay. They’ll mass medicate. From October 2009 all bread sold in Australia will come with a free dose of iodine.

Now don’t get me wrong.I don’t know any mother that wouldn’t give both her arms to ensure her baby had the best possible start in life.And as far as I can discern there is no downside to having too much iodine (at the levels we are likely to be getting).But the research suggests that if we keep increasing fructose in our diet, then no matter how much iodine we put in the bread, we won’t be able to convert it to the hormones pregnant mothers need.

The problem is that, just as with fluoride and now with iodine, the knee jerk response to problems created (at least in part) by overconsumption of sugar is to pull the ‘mass-medicate’ lever. How long will it be before the Government decides the best option for high cholesterol or blood pressure or diabetes is to mass medicate. How about depression? Before you know it there’ll be more medication than bread in our daily bread.

Why is the Government so reluctant to take a proper look at what the research says is the common cause to all of these ailments? I hope it’s going too far to suggest that Big Sugar is pulling the strings. I believe firmly that you should not ascribe to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. But I think all the good marketing work Big Sugar is doing (just to move product) may be operating to muddy the waters for those charged with looking after our health.

It’s time to cut through the spin and look to the underlying cause before we once again reach for the band-aids.

October 13, 2008
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Low Fat Diet = Heart Disease?

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar | 2 Comments

I know most of you will have already read Fructose intake is a predictor of LDL particle size in overweight schoolchildren (published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last October for those of you who missed it), but dust off your copy because I want to take a closer look. Grab a coffee, this is a long one.

I think the schoolchildren paper explains exactly why many things we have been told about Cholesterol could be wrong and why many of the people taking medication to lower it may be simply doing so for no better reason than to line the pockets of some underprivileged drug companies (a noble cause in itself, I admit).   The current treatment of arterial disease is based on restricting the intake of animal fat, with or without drugs.  But, there is mounting evidence that fructose plays an important role in modifying the fats in the blood in ways that block your arteries a lot more quickly.

That having been said, nothing in this post (or on this blog) should be taken to be medical advice.  Don’t rush out and cancel your medication (or your prescibed diet) unless your doctor tells you to.  But do by all means discuss the studies presented here with your doctor.

Ok, disclaimer over, let’s start from the start. Contrary to popular belief there is only one kind of cholesterol. There is no good, bad or even ugly cholesterol. There’s just cholesterol. Cholesterol is a fat and is therefore not soluble in water. Since our blood is a water-based solution this presents a bit of problem in the logistics department. Cholesterol needs to be transported from the liver (where it is made) to the places where it is needed (pretty much everywhere in the body – it’s used to make cell membranes). That’s where lipoproteins come in. The body packages the cholesterol with some proteins in a bundle of molecules ready for shipping.

Lipoproteins are the transport system for cholesterol (and other fats). There are five major groups of lipoproteins but I want to focus on the group that the doctors sometimes call ‘bad cholesterol’.

Lipoproteins are grouped by size. Low Density Lipoproteins or LDL particles are loosely packed (hence ‘low density’) and as a result, relatively large. LDL particles transport cholesterol manufactured in the liver out to the cells.

When a doctor says you have a bad cholesterol reading, she is talking about LDL being outside a target range (2.6 to 3.3 mmol/L). If you get too far out of that range (greater than 6.5 mmol/L), out will come the ‘script book and there is a good chance you will be prescribed a class of drugs called Statins (more on them in a later post) to lower your LDL cholesterol levels.

LDL particles also come in a range of sizes and people can be divided into two main groups according to which size is most common. Some people have mostly large LDL particles and some people have mostly small ones. The folks with the large particles are called Pattern A and the others, Pattern B. Whether you are Pattern A (large) or Pattern B (small) is largely a matter of genetics. If both your parents are Pattern A then you are more likely to be Pattern A and vice versa if they were both Pattern B.

Which pattern you are matters because if you are Pattern A, your LDL reading is not an indicator of the risk of heart disease. But Pattern B people are at considerable risk. It seems the small size of the Pattern B LDL particles means they are more easily embedded in the walls of blood vessels and this ultimately leads to the development of blockages.

In June 2000, Dr Krauss and his team over at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Department of Molecular Medicine at UC-Berkeley published some very interesting results on experiments they had been doing on low-fat diets. What they found was that if you put a Pattern A person on an extreme low-fat diet (less than 25% of the Calories come from fat – the Pritikin diet for example, is 10%-15% fat), they change to Pattern B.

Let me just restate that because it is important. In June 2000, a study was published which showed that if you put some people on a low fat diet you INCREASED their risk of heart disease. This happened because you convert them from Pattern A (large) LDL to Pattern B (small) LDL particles. Did the media health experts forget to mention this as they merrily recommended low-fat foods?
As far as I can tell, Dr Krauss wasn’t concerned what else was in the diet, just that it was low fat. And this is where the article that started my little detour comes in. The schoolchildren paper from 2007 concludes:
“In school-age children, greater total and central adiposity [fatness] are associated with smaller LDL particle size and lower HDL cholesterol. Overweight children consume more fructose from sweets and sweetened drinks than do normal-weight children, and higher fructose intake predicts smaller LDL particle size.”

In other words, a child on a high fructose diet will have small (Pattern B) LDL particles and a child on a low fructose diet will not. Maybe the reason that Dr Krause’s low-fat diet was so destructive was not because of the fat itself but because the diet was by definition high carbohydrate (and therefore high fructose in our modern world)?

There’s a double whammy in all this. Most Low-fat foods you will encounter in the supermarket are higher in fructose than their full-fat equivalents. So whether it is the low-fat or the high fructose part of the diet that is causing the LDL particles to shrink, foods low in fat and high in fructose are probably not a good idea.

Unfortunately there are no cheap and easy tests for LDL particle size. But if this latest study is to be believed, maybe you don’t need to know.  Maybe all you need to know is that you can significantly reduce your risk of heart disease by not eating fructose. This is because this most recent study suggests that the amount of fructose in your diet so accurately predicts your LDL particle size (at least if you are a school age child).

This post has droned on for long enough so I won’t go into the studies that suggest that once again pre-menopausal women are protected from the effects of fructose on particle size. I’ll leave that for another day.

Image courtesy of Nutdanai Apikhomboonwaroot / FreeDigitalPhotos.net