The David Gillespie Blog

If you change nothing, nothing will change
November 14, 2017
12

How the Healthy Eating Guidelines have destroyed our health

By | Big Fat Lies, Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 5 Comments

The first Australian healthy eating guidelines were published in 1982.  Its now been 35 years since our government became worried enough about our health to start telling us what to eat.  There is now little doubt that it has been an unmitigated disaster.

The guidelines told us to eat more fruit and vegetables and less animal fat and salt, moderate our intake of sugar and alcohol and exercise more.

And we pretty much did as we were told.

We eat less fat and the fat we do eat is vegetable oil. Between 1982 and 2012 we dropped our total fat consumption by 25% but our animal fat consumption plummeted by an incredible 85%.

We now add salt to our food a third less frequently than we did in 1982. And Between 1992 and 2011, we increased our consumption of vegetables by 15.4%, and our fruit consumption by 7.5%.

We also exercise more.  In 1995, 30.2% of us performed moderate or high levels of exercise every week and in 2012 that had increased to 32.4% with the proportion doing high levels of exercise almost doubling.

Between 1980 and 2012 we also cut back on the booze, dropping our consumption by 21%.

The only guideline we appeared to ignore was the one about ‘moderating’ our sugar consumption.  Data on that is spongy due to the Australian Bureau of Statistics discontinuing its monitoring in 1995 but based on comparable data in the US, we are likely to have increased the amount of sugar we consume by about 20%

So how have the Guidelines gone?  Have they reduced chronic disease?  Have they improved health outcomes?  Are we all pictures of glowing good health after a third of a century of politician inspired, food industry sponsored, dietitian enforced eating advice?

Not so much.

Chronic disease is now killing us at rates which were unimaginable in the 1980s.  Here are some of the most egregious examples, but they are just the tip of the ice-berg.

Weight

In the early 1980s, Forty percent of us were overweight including 10% who were obese.

Thirty-five years later, we would kill to only have that kind of weight problem.  Now almost 70% of us are overweight and obesity has tripled.

The science tells us weight gain is caused by sugar’s unique ability to dysregulate our appetite control.

Type II Diabetes

In 1989, less than 1% of the Australian population had Type II Diabetes.  By 2015, that number had more than quadrupled (to 4.4%).  As a result, every day in Australia around 12 people will undergo a diabetes-related amputation.

Type II Diabetes is caused by consumption of sugar.

Kidney Disease

Chronic kidney disease is now responsible for more than 1 in every 6 hospitalisations. And that rate has gotten very bad, very quickly. Between 2001 and 2015, hospital admissions for kidney dialysis alone more than doubled.

Chronic kidney disease is caused by consumption of sugar

Cancer

The incidence of all cancers has increased by 23% but some cancers have exploded.  Australians are now three times as likely to have Thyroid or liver cancer and between 2 and 3 times as likely to have Kidney, Anal or prostate cancer or melanoma.

Cancer is caused by consumption of vegetable oils and its growth is accelerated by sugar.

Allergies

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.

Impaired inflammation responses like these are caused by consumption of vegetable oil.

Fertility

Around one in six Australian couples now meet the World Health Organisation definition of infertility and this is due in no small part to the alarming drop in male fertility.  Since the 1980s, male sperm counts have dropped by at least 30% and if the trend continues, fertile men will be as rare as hen’s teeth within two decades.

Male fertility is destroyed by consumption of vegetable oils.

Those we trusted with health advice told us to eat vegetable oils, focus on the fat and calorie content of foods and exercise more.  They also had scant concern for sugar.  The food industry paid attention and pushed the ‘healthy eating’ barrow as hard and fast as it could.

Our food was filled with vegetable oil and sugar and that was ok as long as it was ‘low in saturated fat’.  The dietetics industry merrily accepted the sponsorship of the food producers and sung uncritically from the same hymn sheet.

But now we see the grisly consequences of that gormless obsession with saturated fat unfolding before our eyes (provided they haven’t been destroyed by vegetable oil induced macular degeneration).

The evidence that sugar and vegetable oil is crippling us is now abundant, but those in charge of health advice refuse to act.  These same experts who have presided over three decades of culpably negligent public health advice, now refuse to either acknowledge their error or change their foolhardy ways.

That advice must change immediately.  We cannot afford to throw millions more of us under the bus driven by the egos of academics and fueled by the blood money of the processed food industry.

April 10, 2017
7

Why buy Viagra when you can roll your own?

By | Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 6 Comments

Viagra is a drug which helps us get more out of the nitric oxide we naturally produce.  Besides its highly successful commercial use, a recent trial has shown it could make a significant difference to heart disease patients.  But it won’t because – money.

Nitric Oxide is a highly reactive gas created naturally by lightning strikes and less naturally by car exhausts.  It’s also somewhat of a superstar in the biological world.  It was declared molecule of the year in 1992, has its own scientific journal and its own fan club, the Nitric Oxide Society.  And every year about 3,000 new studies about its properties are published.

Biochemists are obsessed by the stuff because it is critical to the way some of our fairly important bits work (brain heart, lungs, immune system, genitalia etc.).  Nitric Oxide is used as a signaling molecule.  It tells one part of our body that another part wants it to do something.  Because it is a gas and it decays within seconds of release it is perfect for the job.  It easily and quickly gets through cell membranes passes on the message and then disappears.  This means we don’t have to go to the bother of having all sorts of mechanisms to clean it up afterwards.

We produce it in loads of places in our body, but critically in the linings of our blood vessels.  The Nitric Oxide produced there seeps into the muscles surrounding them and tells them to relax.  When they relax the blood vessels become wider and blood pressure decreases.

We’ve known since shortly after it was discovered in 1846 that nitroglycerin (yes, the stuff that goes bang) helped a lot with heart disease.  But we didn’t know why until we discovered that when ingested it increases Nitric Oxide levels.  The chaps who made those connections picked up the Nobel prize for medicine in 1998.  Ironically that prize is funded by the estate of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, the safe form of nitroglycerin.  He had heart disease and was prescribed nitroglycerine for it in the late 1800s.

During the 1990s researchers from Pfizer were beavering away on a new drug which helped Nitric Oxide work better.  They wanted to come up with a better way of lowering blood pressure than asking people to suck on explosives.  But when they got to human trial stage of their drug, Sildenafil, they discovered a very lucrative side effect.

The heart wasn’t the only place that Nitric Oxide increased blood flow.  It turned out that it was extraordinarily effective at temporarily fixing erectile dysfunction.   Needless to say, the market for what became Viagra was significantly more tempting than just another blood pressure med.  Financially it was a very good call.  Viagra quickly became a license to print about $2 billion a year for Pfizer.

Rather unsurprisingly a long term study released last year showed just what a good thing they were on.  The study followed 5,956 men with type II diabetes who were taking Viagra.  After almost 8 years, the study found that when compared to matched men not taking the pills, they were 5% less likely to die from anything, 38% less likely to have a heart attack and 15% less likely to die if they did have one.

The heart attack risk reduction makes every other anti-blood pressure or cholesterol lowering medication look like a placebo.  And the reduction in death after heart attack was roughly 8 times as effective as the next best option (a surgically inserted stent).  The Viagra was unbelievably effective and they weren’t even taking it for their health.

That is just one of the, now thousands of, studies on the power of Nitric Oxide.  We now know that if our ability to produce it is in anyway impaired then besides heart disease, we much more likely to also suffer from hypertension, preeclampsia, Type II Diabetes, kidney disease, obesity, and of course erectile dysfunction.  It also plays a part in our learning and long term memory and supercharges our immune system. Obviously then, being able to increase our ability to produce Nitric Oxide should be something we strive for.  Likewise it’s a really good idea to avoid things which impair it.

Besides explosives and Viagra, eating garlic or green leafy vegetables like spinach (yes, Pop-eye was right)or lettuce for example increases Nitric Oxide production.  Exercise and living at high altitudes also does the trick.  But none of that will matter in the least if you also consume fructose or omega-6 fat.

Cane sugar (sucrose) is one half glucose and one half fructose.  The fructose half is unique among sugars we eat in that our liver processes it to fat without any feedback or control.  It was so rare in our evolved environment (there were so few coke machines in Paleolithic times) that we never bothered to develop the capacity to regulate that process.

A waste product from converting fructose to fat is uric acid, a substance that we are very poorly evolved to deal with in the quantities produced when we eat sugar.  Unfortunately for us uric acid reacts with the nitric oxide we produce and disables it.

The omega-6 fats that dominate seed oils (canola, soybean, sunflower, grapeseed, rice-bran and cottonseed) produce highly reactive compounds.  Those compounds directly impair our ability to produce nitric oxide.

Our food supply is now stuffed with sugar and seed oils.  There is barely a product on the supermarket shelf that does not contain one or, more usually, both.  If your aim was to impair our production of nitric oxide you’d struggle to do better than create a food supply which looked like the average supermarket.

Given that, it is little wonder that we are now drowning in the flood of chronic diseases that flow automatically from impaired nitric oxide – heart disease, hypertension, preeclampsia, Type II Diabetes, kidney disease, obesity, dementia, communicable infections and of course erectile dysfunction.

Sadly Viagra is not an option.  It is not approved for use as a heart medication and never will be.  Pfizer will not spend the $100s of millions required to do the required trials now that it is off-patent.  That leaves us with just one solution and it is the same one as always.  Self-medicate with real food that contains neither sugar nor seed oils.

March 23, 2017
2

How fathers avoiding Vegetable Oil can prevent Childhood Cancer

By | Vegetable Oils | 5 Comments

We know a smoking father damages sperm and seriously increases childhood cancer risk. But the vegetable oil in that tub of margarine or that splodge of mayo works the same way only many times worse.

Childhood cancers are defined as those diagnosed before the child turns 15.  Together, leukaemia (blood cell cancers), brain tumours and lymphomas account for more than two thirds of all childhood cancers, but leukaemia is by far the most common.

One in 500 Australian children will develop cancer.  That’s 2 new cases every day.  Two children every day!  That is one of the highest rates in the world and it is getting much worse very quickly. A child born in the UK in 1911 was six times less likely to suffer from leukemia than one born today. Australian statistics show identical trends.

The genetic damage that lies behind most childhood cancer is caused by oxidative damage to sperm DNA.  Oxidative stress produces highly toxic and reactive end products which attack the integrity of the DNA carried by sperm.  We normally deal with heavily disrupted cell DNA by repairing it or killing off the damaged cell.  Unfortunately, this is not always the case with sperm.  Human sperm sometimes retain the capacity for fertilization even when their DNA are severely damaged (and this is even more likely with modern assisted reproduction techniques).

We know this for certain because of studies done in men who smoke. Even though those studies have shown smokers are much less fertile than non-smokers, they are not always infertile. The sperm of smokers who remain fertile have DNA that has been damaged by oxidative stress.  This is caused by the inhalation of aldehydes which promote oxidation.

Because DNA-damaged sperm are still able to create viable embryos, the consequences can be cataclysmic.  We have known since at least 1997 that the children of fathers who smoke heavily are four to five times as likely to develop childhood cancers.

Intentionally inhaling toxic aldehydes by smoking is therefore obviously a bad idea for men thinking about having children.  But in the last 50 years Australia’s male smoking rates have been diving almost as fast as the rates of childhood cancer have been increasing.  Now less than 1 in 5 men smoke (down from 3 in 4 after WWII) and more than half have never smoked.

Smoking is clearly not the only source of toxic aldehydes in our environment. We also manufacture them ourselves if we consume too much Omega-6 polyunsaturated fat.  And we can be significantly exposed to them if we inhale the vapours from heating those fats.

These fats dominate oils extracted from seeds like Canola, Rice-Bran, Grapeseed, Sunflower and Almonds or legumes like peanuts and soybeans.  And we are eating too much of them (usually without even being aware of it) because these incredibly cheap oils dominate the 21st century food supply.  We now consume four times as much of these fats as we did a century ago.

If you purchase anything to eat, almost all the fat components will be these oils. The mayo on your takeaway sandwich will be made from sunflower oil, as will the margarine.  Anything fried will have been cooked in cottonseed or canola oil, no matter how flash the joint you purchased it from.  All the breads and other baked goods will have been made using seed oils and so will all the dressings, dips and sauces.

It is no surprise then that as oxidation fuel increases in the form of vegetable oil in our food, then so too will the rate of childhood cancers. If we do nothing about the presence of these fats in our food, we can expect to see the rate of those cancers continue to climb dramatically.

But there is a surprising lack of interest in the science of oxidation from those who campaign hardest on the issue of childhood cancers.  The Leukemia Foundation for example, raised $26 million dollars last year, spent $11 million doing so, put $8.5 million towards patient support and spent just over $2 million on research focused on cures.  It did not spend a cent on prevention.   The Childhood Cancer Institute raised $36 million, spent $7 million doing so, and spent $25 million on research focused on cures.  It did spend money on prevention but this was focused on finding drugs to stop cancer developing in the embryo.

A look through their websites quickly explains their focus.  As far as these organisations are concerned, we don’t know what causes childhood cancers.  But that is not the state of the evidence.  We know oxidative stress causes sperm DNA damage of the sort which results in childhood cancer.  We know that cigarette smoke induces the required state of oxidative stress by inhalation of toxic aldehydes.  And we know that consumption of seed oils does exactly the same thing only worse.

There is clearly an accelerating need for the patient care options funded by these charities.  But if we don’t want them to have twice as many customers in a decade, they need to focus of prevention as well.

When they have the national spotlight with something like ‘World’s Greatest Shave’ they need to do more than ask for money.  They need to do as Red Nose does and tell us how to reduce our risk of harm.

They need to tell us about the danger of seed oils and we need them to be campaigning hard to stop those substances being put in our food.  Until they do that they are no better than a band-aid on a cut that grows wider and deeper by the day.

March 14, 2017
35

Why vegetable oils are much more deadly than cigarettes.

By | Big Fat Lies, Vegetable Oils | 24 Comments

Smoking and vegetable oils cause disease via exactly the same mechanism. We don’t force our children to smoke, so why are we forcing them to consume vegetable oils?

People who smoke are up to six times more likely to suffer from heart disease than non-smokers. So it should not be surprising that researchers have concluded that the significant reduction in smoking over the last 50 years has been a major driver behind the parallel reduction in heart disease rates. Though you might be surprised to discover that until very recently, scientists have had no idea why that might be.

Cancer accounts for less than a third of deaths attributable to smoking whereas heart disease and stroke accounts for almost half. Lung cancer is an obvious consequence of inhaling a cloud of chemicals intentionally. But figuring out how that might be related to ‘clogged arteries’ has been a little tricky. And it hasn’t been made any easier by a fundamental error in our understanding of heart disease.

If your base assumption is that dietary saturated fat clogs up the arteries and causes heart disease, then it’s hard to see how smoking would make the slightest bit of difference. But in the last 15 years that simplistic explanation has been turned on its head. Yes, the immediate cause is blockage, but that blockage is the result of a process of inflammation and immune responses, not because a lump of bacon fat got stuck.

We now know that heart disease is caused by oxidative stress provoking an immune response which starts as damage to the arteries and can ultimately end in heart disease. And thanks to a decade of significant research in the area, we know that chemicals contained in cigarette smoke directly cause exactly the required state of oxidation, inflammation and immune response. Specifically, those chemicals are α,β-unsaturated aldehydes (aldehydes for short).

It turns out that burning tobacco is a really excellent way to produce aldehydes in seriously dangerous quantities. And inhaling the smoke produced is an almost perfect way to get them into our bloodstream. Once aldehydes are in our body, the damage they can cause extends way beyond heart disease. They are powerfully toxic carcinogens as well and likely (via sperm mutation) to play a primary role in the development of childhood cancers.

This is why the US surgeon general found in 2006 that smoking impacts nearly ‘every organ of the body’ and that there is ‘no risk-free level of exposure’ to cigarette smoke (even if you aren’t the one doing the smoking).

But intentionally sucking in aldehydes from burning grass isn’t the only way to come across them, we can also make them ourselves if we have too much omega-6 polyunsaturated fat in our diet. Vegetable oil made from seeds (Canola, Sunflower, Corn, Safflower, Grapeseed, Rice Bran and Soybean for example) -seed oils – are very high in omega-6 fats. When we eat those fats they are incorporated into every cell membrane in our body and create a state of oxidative stress which results in the production of these highly toxic aldehydes.

Ironically, the Heart Foundation’s misguided understanding of how heart disease worked has led them to tell us to consume more of the very substance which we now know causes it and most of the cancers which now afflict us. These seed oils are exactly the substances that the Heart Foundation has been telling us to consume instead of ‘artery clogging’ saturated fats for the last five decades. And we have dutifully done as we are told.

McDonald’s for example switched from frying in Beef Fat to Canola oil in 2004 after incessant pressure from the Heart Foundation. And KFC followed suit in 2012. Seed oils are now the primary source of fat in almost all food on the supermarket shelf, at the local snack bar and served in every restaurant.

While the aldehydes we make ourselves (from consuming too much seed oil) are devastating enough, it is now becoming abundantly clear that we can make them even more dangerous than they already are. All we need to do is heat them before we eat them.

A study released late 2015 found that when oils containing Omega-6 fats are heated at a normal cooking temperature (of 180⁰C), they create significant quantities of aldehydes. And each time the oil was re-used the concentration increased massively. The study showed that by the fifth day of oil re-use it had 5 times the concentration of these chemicals that it had on the first (which was already alarmingly high).

This is why we are now seeing lung cancer (for example) affect large numbers of people who have never smoked but who do cook with seed oils. And it also likely to be the reason why, even though the average smoker now smokes much less than the average smoker in the 1960s, they are much more likely to die from smoking related diseases.

The science has converged on a single unifying truth. Many cancers and heart disease are caused by aldehydes. And whether we encounter them by smoking, inhaling other people’s smoke, inhaling vapours from food frying or by eating the food cooked with those seed oils, the damage is the same and it is devastating.

None of this is speculation. It well established science that is being ignored by those we trust to advise us about our health. They are happy to accept that exposing us to cigarette smoke will cause heart disease and cancer. They are even happy to accept that it is a major risk factor for childhood cancer in children who have never been exposed to smoke. But when science tells us that seed oils work by exactly the same mechanism, they tell us to consume more. They might as well force us and our kids to have a 3 pack a day habit – and offer us a light.

 

Image Credits: Risks from Smoking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Toxic Oils from The Telegraph.

 

February 14, 2017
5

How Big Food is using our health system as a marketing tool.

By | Big Fat Lies, Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 6 Comments

Nestle, Danone and others like them, use our health system as a tool for flogging cheap and addictive powdered milk products.  Regulators have clamped down on them doing it with baby formula, now it is time to stop them doing it to our elderly.

In the early 1970s Nestle decided to exploit mothers in developing countries.  The plan was to convince breastfeeding mothers that using Nestle formulas was healthier for their children than breastfeeding them.

Nestle had realized that many mothers in Africa, Asia and South America had a strong desire to imitate Western culture.  So they leveraged this by implying that formula was the modern way to feed babies.  Anything else was old fashioned and primitive.

The aggressive marketing was extraordinarily effective. Formula sales took off like a rocket (the market is now worth $25 billion a year) but so did the incidence of childhood diseases in the developing world.  Drinking water was often unsafe and mixing it with milk powder and sugar didn’t do anything to fix that.

Breastfeeding protected children from the vagaries of the local water supply.  It is also free and doesn’t drain critically important money away from families who can least afford to buy formula.  The cost often results in mothers using less powder than required to make the tin stretch further.  So even if the water is clean the child is undernourished.

Nestle’s aggressive marketing led, in 1977, to a worldwide boycott of Nestle’s products.  And as a result, in 1981, the World Health Organization (WHO) created guidelines on the marketing of formula, but to this day there are continual breaches in the developing world and many of the groups who started the boycott continue to fight against Nestle and others.

The message was equally effective with Australian mothers.  Manufacturers provided formula ‘donations’ to Hospital nurseries and in hospital promotions often delivered by healthcare workers. And it worked.  Breastfeeding in Australia fell to record low levels in the 1970s.  In 1972 just one in 20 children was breastfed for 12 months.

In 1992 the Australian government finally implemented a voluntary code (based on the WHO rules developed more than a decade earlier) which severely restricted the way infant formula could be marketed and include a requirement that mother’s be told breast is best in all marketing material.  Promotion cannot occur at all on healthcare facilities and healthcare workers cannot receive any form of inducement to promote the products.  If formula is donated to an institution, it can only be used for children who a doctor has determined requires formula.

The code is voluntary but all the major manufacturers has signed on and breastfeeding rates are now 6-fold what they were in 1972 (although they are still just a third of the WHO recommended level).  Even so, Nestle and others continue to circumvent the ban on marketing by advertising unregulated toddler milks with exactly the same packaging and branding as the infant formulas.

But that is just fiddling at the edges compared to the latest gold mine for medical formula reps – the elderly.

Doctors are rightly concerned that older people not suffer from under-nutrition. They take weight loss among the elderly very seriously and therein lies the opportunity for Nestle and others (such as Danone, the maker of the Fortisip range).  These companies actively markets the use of food supplements for elderly patients, whether they are losing weight or not.  Hospitals and dietitians are encouraged to use things like the Nestle Nutritional Assessment tool to assess the need for supplements. Using that tool it would be almost impossible not to be assessed as requiring supplementation.

These powdered milk concoctions are offered as drinks with (or even instead of) hospital meals and patients are provided with order forms (often by dietitians employed by the hospital) for discounted purchase after they are discharged.  The products themselves are usually just hideously overprice powdered milk, sugar and a multi-vitamin and sometimes a dab of seed oil just for good measure.

The ingredients are very similar to Up&Go except they can have loads more sugar and sometimes a pile of seed oil as well.

Fortisip Vanilla Ready to Drink Sustagen Hospital Powder UP&GO Vanilla Ice Ready to Drink
water, maltodextrin, milk protein, sucrose, vegetable oil (canola oil, sunflower oil), tri potassium citrate, emulsifier (soy lecithin), flavour, magnesium chloride, acidity regulator, tri calcium phosphate, carotenoids, choline chloride, calcium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, sodium L-ascorbate, ferrous lactate, zinc sulphate, colour, magnesium hydroxide, nicotinamide, retinyl acetate, copper gluconate, DL-α tocopheryl acetate, sodium selenite, manganese sulphate, calcium D-pantothenate, chromium chloride, D-biotin, cholecalciferol, thiamin hydrochloride, pterolylmonoglutamic acid, pyridoxine hydrochloride, cyanoccobalamin, sodium molybdate, riboflavin, sodium flouride, potassium iodide, phytomenadione Non Fat Milk Solids (63%), Corn Syrup Solids, Whole Milk Powder, Sugar, Minerals (Magnesium Hydrogen Phosphate, Ferric Pyrophosphate, Zinc Gluconate, Copper Gluconate, Manganese Sulphate, Sodium Molybdate, Chromium Trichloride, Sodium Selenite), Vitamins (C, E, Niacinamide, A, D3, B6, B1, B2, Folic Acid, K1, B12), Stabiliser (414), Flavour. water, skim milk powder, cane sugar, wheat maltodextrin, soy protein, vegetable oils (sunflower, canola), vegetable fibre, hi-maize™ starch, corn syrup solids, flavours, fructose, oat flour, mineral (calcium), acidity regulator (332), vegetable gums (460, 466, 407), stabiliser (452), salt, vitamins (C, niacin, A, B12, B6, B2, B1, folate).
Sugar: 13.3% Sugar: 45% Sugar: 7.6%
Polyunsaturated Fat: 2.8% Polyunsaturated fat: 0.8% Polyunsaturated Fat: 0.7%

The sugar in Sustagen had until May 2016, been glucose.  But then Nestle decided to ‘improve the nutritional profile’ by replacing the much of the glucose with cane sugar.  Effectively this means they replaced half the nutritionally harmless glucose with toxic fructose.  Yep, the same fructose that has been nailed as causing Type II diabetes, Obesity, Fatty Liver Disease and probably Alzheimer’s disease (just to name a few of its greatest hits).

I can’t see how introducing a confirmed source of chronic disease improves the nutritional profile (and they have refused to respond to my written requests for an explanation), but I can see how it improves the financial profile of Nestle.  Sustagen’s competition all use it.  Fructose is highly addictive, so products that contain it always sell better than products without it.  And since the aim of this game seems to be follow on sales after the patient leaves hospital, an addictive product would be a better choice. Commercially its a no-brainer.

The seed oils in many of these products cause cancer, heart disease, Parkinson’s Disease osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis (just to name a few of the greatest hits). Seed oils are cheap as chips, so using them instead of milk fat increases the profit margin.  Another commercial no-brainer.

These products are being directly promoted and marketed to patients within our healthcare system, something which would be prohibited if they were infant formula.   Nobody, but especially not a sick elderly person, needs sugar and (often) seed oil, loaded milk powder.  Nestle and their mates were barred from using hospitals as a sales tool for infant formula and its time the same thing happened for this garbage as well.

August 12, 2016
1

Why you need to keep seed oils out of your dog’s food.

By | Vegetable Oils | 9 Comments

Human sperm quality has been in a nosedive over the last half century. Now a new study proves exactly the same thing has been happening to dogs. And the likely cause is seed oils in their feed (for humans and dogs).

Last week a very strong study was released that showed consistently plummeting sperm quality in a large controlled dog breeding program. Quality dropped by 2.5% a year from 1988 to 1998 and then 1.2% a year from 2002 through to 2014. The reason for the improvement was that between 1999 and 2001, dogs that were not producing viable sperm were removed from the breeding program. Something you can do with dogs but potential fathers are a bit persnickety about.

These results are very close to those we already have in humans, the other omnivore that shares the diet and the living space of dogs. Similar rates of human sperm quality decline are now being reported in all Western countries (although alarmingly at a decline of 3% a year, Australia is at the high end).

Humans don’t normally eat dog food (well, I don’t), but there is one ingredient both dogs and humans eat now that neither ate before the early 20th century.  And that’s seed oils.

Pick up your favourite packet of dog food and peer closely at the ingredients. Here’s a typical example (from Pedigree, one of the most popular dog foods on sale in Australia):

Cereals &/or cereal by-products, meat & meat by-products (poultry, beef &/or lamb), poultry palatant, beet pulp, salt, minerals, sunflower oil, vitamins, amino acid, antioxidants

The Cereal (husks and small cereal particles left over from milling as well as whole grains as filler) and Meat by-products (lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, fatty tissue, stomachs and intestines) are in dog food precisely because they are hard to sell to humans.

The ‘Palatant’ is flavouring to make it taste like food (and so the owner thinks it smells like food). If it weren’t there a dog wouldn’t eat it.

And Beet pulp is the fibre left over after they extract sugar from sugar beet plants. It makes dog poop firmer and this apparently pleases those who do the scooping.

Aside from the vitamins and minerals, there is only one ingredient in this ‘food’ that also appears in human food. In this brand it is sunflower oil but it often just described as vegetable oil.

These oils are not made from vegetables at all. Rather they come from seeds (like Canola or Rapeseed, Soybean, Sunflower, Safflower, Rice Bran and Grape). The dead give-away is often that they will make claims about the food containing ‘essential fatty acids’.

Omega-6 fat is the dominant fat in the ‘vegetable oils’ used in every processed food and in most dog foods. And there is ample evidence in both human and animal trials that omega-6 fats degrade sperm quality.

These Omega-6 based seed oils are the fat of choice for the processed food and the pet food industries because they are a lot cheaper than fats from animals and exotic fruits like olives, avocados and coconuts. As a result, human consumption of Omega-6 fats has at least tripled in the last century.  We have no long term data on vegetable oil consumption by dogs. But it is not unreasonable to assume it is similar since, packaged dog food has only really been available since the end of the first World War and only the cheapest possible ingredients are used in most pet food.

While sperm quality is important to dog breeders (and humans who might want kids), I suspect it’s not of much concern to pet owners in general. Sperm quality is however an early warning for a much nastier set of diseases increasingly linked to consumption of these oils. Chief among these is cancer.

In humans we have high quality evidence that people fed these oils are twice as likely to suffer from cancer as people who are not. And there is strong evidence that as the amount of it in our food has accelerated, so too have the numbers of us affected by cancer.

Similarly, in dogs the rates of the most common cancers have tripled since the late sixties. Cancer is at terrifyingly high levels in most pets now, affecting 1 in 4 dogs. And those are just the ones we know about (because they are insured).

Dogs don’t get to choose not to eat seed oils. But their owners can. And surprisingly it is the extremely cheap brands that are often seed oil free. Woolworths Homebrand dry dog food, for example, uses ‘Animal Fat’ rather than seed oils. If you avoid dog foods which include seed oils you’ll give your best friend his best chance at avoiding cancer.

August 10, 2016
7

What seed oils are really doing to your body

By | Books, Cookbook, Recipes, Vegetable Oils | 9 Comments

VEGETABLE oils are highly unstable.

When they interact with oxygen, they release neurotoxic, DNA mutating chemicals which are known to cause cancer (at least).

Recent improvements in measurement technology have now thrown a spotlight on the quantity of these chemicals released by normal use. And the results are truly terrifying.

Cheap vegetable oil made from seeds (canola, sunflower, corn, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran and soybean oils) is a new addition to the human diet. Unlike animal fats and oils made from fruit (olive, avocado and coconut oils), they’re very high in polyunsaturated fats and in particular something called an omega-6 fat.

A recent study found that when seed oils containing these fats are heated at a normal cooking temperature (of 180 degrees celsius), they create highly toxic chemicals known to be involved in cancer causation.,

And each time the oil was re-used the concentration increased massively. The study showed that by the fifth day of oil re-use, it had five times the concentration of these chemicals that it had on the first (which was already alarmingly high).

But worse than that, the researchers also made the point that all they could measure was the amount of these chemicals left in the oil. Since they are highly volatile, they are constantly escaping into the air around us when the food is being cooked.

According to another recent study, it is likely that this volatility explains the stubbornly high rates of lung cancer among women in Asian countries (where smoking is rare among women, but wok frying with Canola oil is a daily task).

Those toxic molecules are dangerous because they are interact destructively with our DNA. This significantly increases the chances that cancer will develop.

These seed oils are now a core component of our food supply and Australians are sicker now than at any time in our history.

We are almost four times as likely to have thyroid cancer than just three short decades ago. We are more than three times as likely to have liver cancer. We are twice as likely to have melanoma, Motor Neuron Disease, kidney or anal cancer.

Men are more than twice as likely to have prostate cancer and 60 per cent more likely to have testicular cancer. Women are 43 per cent more likely to have breast cancer. And children are paying even more dearly.

A child is 6 times as likely to suffer from leukaemia than at the start of the 20th century. And they are more than four times as likely to suffer from a life threatening allergic reaction than they were just 20 years ago.

The chronic disease tsunami is upon us.

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

A century ago, exactly none of these fats were added to our food supply.

Every day 312 new cancer sufferers are diagnosed in Australia. That this is allowed to continue when the science is so clear on the likely cause, is not merely a shame or an embarrassment. It is an outrage and a tragedy.

It is reasonably safe to assume all the fat in processed food comes from seed oils. The good news is that this only applies to food made by others (and usually shoved into a packet with a picture of real food on the front).

Nobody can stop you making and eating real food. All you need is a little know-how.

Also published on news.com.au

Eat Real Food Cookbook Launch Offer

Cookbook bundle540Get the new Eat Real Food Cookbook OR the Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook OR BOTH for 25% OFF.

Just Enter the discount code ERFCB25 at checkout

Both books are of course signed by David

Buy Now

Offer ends 31 December 2016

July 21, 2016
2

Why we need to eat real food

By | Books, Cookbook, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 8 Comments

It turns out that avoiding Type II Diabetes, Obesity and Fatty Liver is the easy bit.

Sugar is very bad news. It destroys (in this order), our teeth, our gut, our liver, our ligaments, our pancreas, our kidneys our blood vessels, our heart and eventually our brain. The science on all of this is now so uncontroversial, that many countries (including the UK) are implementing sugar taxes to help pay for the accelerating damage. But sugar is the lesser of the two dietary evils that have infiltrated our food supply. The other is vegetable oil. And it makes the consequences of sugar consumption look like a mild case of the sniffles. This stuff doesn’t just destroy our lives, it takes out the next generation as well.

Twelve years ago I removed sugar from my diet. I didn’t change anything else. Yep, I still ate meat pies (just without sauce). I still drank beer. And I still didn’t exercise anywhere near enough. I did it because I was obese and the evidence told me that the reason was my sugar consumption. So I stopped eating sugar. It changed my life permanently. I lost 40 kilograms and regained a passion for participating in the lives of my six kids, something that up until then was fading as fast as my weight grew.

Then, a few years into my sugar free life, I discovered something that made it immeasurably harder. Sugar isn’t the only thing that’s been added to our diet in large quantities by the food industry. The other is oils extracted from seeds (usually described as ‘healthy’ vegetable oil).  It isn’t the occasional splash of oil you add to your salad or fry your steak in.  It’s the industrial quantities of the stuff added to your bread, your biscuits, your frozen meals, your sauces and dressings and everything you buy in a restaurant or your favourite take-away.

Cheap vegetable oil made from seeds (canola, sunflower, corn, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran and soybean oils) is a new addition to the human diet. Unlike animal fats and oils made from fruit (olive, avocado and coconut oils), they’re very high in polyunsaturated fats and in particular something called an omega-6 fat.

When omega-6 fats are heated (in a deep fryer or in the human body) they produce highly toxic molecules. Those end-products are dangerous because they are incorporated into every cell in our body and interact destructively with our DNA. This significantly increases the chances that cancer will develop.  But that’s by no means the least of it. Because of their neurotoxic capabilities, these molecules are likely to be heavily involved in motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. They’re also implicated in chronic inflammation, the massive recent increase in allergies, stroke and heart disease. And, less predictably, they probably lie behind the sudden mass decline in male fertility and the massive increases in childhood cancers, Down syndrome and Autism.

Australians are sicker now than at any time in our history and it is getting worse unbelievably quickly.  We are almost four times as likely to have thyroid cancer than just three short decades ago.  We are more than three times as likely to have Liver Cancer.  We are twice as likely to have Melanoma, Motor Neuron Disease, Kidney or Anal cancer.

Men are more than twice as likely to have prostate cancer and 60% more likely to have testicular cancer.  Women are 43% more likely to have breast cancer.  And children are paying even more dearly.  A child is 6 times as likely to suffer from leukemia than at the start of the 20th century. And they more than four times as likely to suffer from a life threatening allergic reaction than they were just 20 years ago.  Sperm counts halved in the 50 years (to 1990). Pregnancies are three times as likely to be affected by Down syndrome over the same period and a child is twice as likely to be autistic.  The chronic disease tsunami is upon us.

These unbelievably cheap sources of fat are even more deadly than sugar and have now infiltrated everything on the supermarket shelves. If I avoided the 99% fat free but high sugar mayo, I was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. The full fat version had no sugar but was made using sunflower oil.

A century ago, exactly none of these fats were added to our food supply. Now unless you made it yourself, it is reasonably safe to assume all the fat in your food comes from a seed. Avoiding these fats is several orders of magnitude harder than avoiding sugar. Our food supply is stuffed with two ingredients that are more likely than not to cause a slow, lingering and painful death. The good news is that this only applies to food made by others (and usually shoved into a packet with a picture of real food on the front). Nobody can stop you making and eating real food. All you need is a little know-how. And that’s what the Eat Real Food Cookbook is all about.

It’s an odd sort of a cookbook. It explains the science and gives you an easy guide to navigating the supermarket and your local eatery. It’s not the kind of cookbook you’d give to your best friend for her to put on her coffee table (and that neither of you having any intention of reading). It doesn’t show you how to cook flash cakes that look like Darth Vader. And it most certainly doesn’t show you how to make a salad in a jar.

My wife, Lizzie, and our six kids have been living off the recipes and tips in the book for the better part of the last decade. Don’t let the beautiful photography fool you. This is an intensely practical book designed to solve an intensely practical problem. How to create high quality food – simply, inexpensively quickly and every day – that’s completely free of the twin evils of fructose (the dangerous part of sugar) and seed oils (the man-made fats recently added to our food supply).

Eat Real Food Cookbook Launch Offer

Cookbook bundle540Get the new Eat Real Food Cookbook OR the Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook OR BOTH for 25% OFF.

Just Enter the discount code ERFCB25 at checkout

Both books are of course signed by David

Buy Now

April 19, 2016
2

The Rise and Rise of Assisted Reproduction – Stealing our Future – Part 5

By | Vegetable Oils | One Comment

Assisted Reproduction

40 is the new 21.  Half a century ago, the average kid was done with school by 15, married and settled into their first house by their early twenties and producing their own kids shortly thereafter.  Now if you have had your first child by 30 you are doing well.  But when it comes to fertility we are constrained by biology.  21 is still the new 21.  And it’s a pretty good age to have kids (from a purely biochemical perspective).

Human reproductive systems work best when they are young.

fert

A woman is born with the last egg she will release before menopause.  This makes that egg one of the oldest lived cells in the human body (at the time it is released) and as such, one of the cells most likely to accumulate damage to its DNA.  Two of the body’s defense mechanisms against this sort of damage are infertility and miscarriage.  As a woman’s age increases, her chances of becoming pregnant decline rapidly and her chances of having a miscarriage increase dramatically.

A similar defence mechanism is at work in men.  As a man ages the quality of the sperm he produces drops significantly.  Men over 40 have three times the DNA damage and consequently are less than half as likely to conceive (when compared to younger men).

We can accelerate the rates of DNA damage with oxidative stress.  And vegetable oil consumption is a powerful driver of that.  Vegetable oils made from seeds and legumes (Sunflower, Canola, Rice Bran, Grapeseed, Soybean, Peanut and Cottonseed) are very high in a type of fat (omega-6 polyunsaturated fat) which drives oxidation in the human body.

That oxidation destroys sperm quality and causes massive damage to sperm DNA. But our defences will normally kick in and the defective sperm are killed off.  If those defenses fail (or are circumvented), sperm with damaged DNA can get through.

As parental age and vegetable oil consumption increases and fertility decreases, couples are increasingly seeking help with conception.  This involves the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART).  In particular, the use of ICSI, the method used to address male infertility, has exploded.

icsi640

ICSI injects one sperm directly into an egg and so overcomes low sperm count and poor motility (movement and speed) problems.  In other words, it works around the very things which the body is using to eliminate sperm which are less likely to produce healthy babies.

Of course ICSI doctors only select sperm which look healthy but at the moment there are no reliable tests for the type of damage to sperm DNA caused by oxidative stress. So when we deliberately circumvent our failsafe systems, the chances of childhood diseases (attributable to DNA damage) increase considerably.

One recent large study in Sweden demonstrated that the risk of Autism in ICSI births was up to 4.6 times as high (and mental retardation 2.3 times as high) as with an unassisted pregnancy.  Similarly, a large Norwegian study published in February 2016 revealed there is a 67% increased risk for childhood leukemia in ART children. And a 2014 study showed there was 33% increase in schizophrenia in ART conceived children.

These studies are all from Scandinavia, because, unlike Australia, Northern Europeans keep high quality long term statistics on birth outcomes from ART.  The exception here is Western Australia, the only state with a statutory register of ART treatments and outcomes.  And even accounting for the relatively small size of their datasets, the same patterns are emerging.  The risk of serious birth defects in ART children is approximately double that in unassisted conceptions.

Horrifically, in treating the obvious symptom of oxidation – declining fertility – with technology, we are end-running our body’s attempts to stop the suffering that sperm oxidation can cause.

Unfortunately, there are strong financial incentives to keep doing so.  The Australian ART market is worth $400 million dollars a year and is generating strong and growing profits.  Which is surprising given ART doesn’t work that well for most of its customers.  More than 72% of fresh cycles for women under 30 (and 98.8% for women over 44) will not result in a live birth.  Combine the accelerating profits from ‘treatment’ with the profits to be had from using cheap vegetable oils in our food and we are caught in a pincer movement of market forces working against a solution to the disease epidemics we now face.

The ART industry’s response to those statistics, and the increasing risks our children face, is that schoolgirls should be told to freeze their eggs when they are young.  But I reckon if we’re going to be telling schoolchildren (of both genders) how to manage their fertility then how about we start with – Don’t Smoke, Don’t Eat Vegetable Oil and don’t delay having children (once you decide you want them).

 

Photo by Ⅿeagan. Distributed under the Creative Commons License.

This is the final part of a five part series.  To see Part One click here.

Get all the studies mentioned in this series here

 

April 1, 2016
0

Down Syndrome and Autism – Stealing our Future – Part 4

By | Vegetable Oils | 7 Comments

Part 4 – The Male Biological Clock

In Part Three of this series I showed how the rapid increase in our consumption of vegetable oils lies behind the explosive growth in childhood cancers during the last century.  In this part I look at the other genetic diseases of childhood which research indicates are caused by eating foods containing those oils.

Sperm membranes need to be made from polyunsaturated fats to do their job well.  This means they are also highly susceptible to damage from oxidation.  The solution is to make them in huge numbers and kill off any that are damaged. Normally that works well enough, but occasionally a sperm with damaged DNA will escape the cleanup process and go on to fertilize an egg.

There are three known ways we can significantly increase the risk of damaged sperm getting through.  We can use the sperm production system beyond its best-before date, we can significantly increase oxidative stress on the system and we can bypass the defences using reproductive technology.

Sperm from blokes that are too old

DNA damage accumulates with time.  The older a man is, the more damage to his reproductive DNA will have accumulated.  He can continue to produce semen until his last gasp, but the quality of the sperm contained in it declines dramatically after his 35th birthday.

The amount of DNA damage in sperm of men aged 36–57 is three times that of men under 35.  A man more than 40 years of age is much less than half as likely to conceive as a man under 40.

Childhood diseases related to DNA damage are significantly increased in line with the age of the father.  These diseases include childhood cancers, Down Syndrome, Schizophrenia and Autism.  This is the reason why the age of sperm donors is limited to 40 years in in both the UK and the US and 45 in Australia.

There is now a strong trend towards older fathers.  By 2010 the median married Australian father was 34 years old (30 for an unmarried father) and had increased by 3 years since 1990 alone.

That trend is undoubtedly driving part of the growth in the diseases, but it alone cannot account for the rapid recent acceleration.

Sperm damaged by Oxidative Stress

We can significantly increase DNA damage by ramping up oxidation in the body.  Smoking is a well-studied source of increased oxidation. But the research is now telling us that oxidation of the polyunsaturated fats we eat (in the form of Vegetable Oils) are a much more significant concern.   When these fats inevitably become part of the cell membrane of sperm, they provoke a state of oxidative stress at least as bad as that observed in smokers.

Only 13% of Adult Australians smoke but all of us eat Vegetable oils (whether we know it or not). Vegetable oils are the cheap oils extracted from seeds and legumes which now make up almost all of the fat in processed food.  They include Canola (Rapeseed), Sunflower, Cottonseed, Grapeseed, Rice Bran, Peanut and Soybean oils.  We are consuming more of them now than we have ever consumed before in the entire history of humans on this planet.

PUFAsm

The oxidative damage caused by consuming vegetable oils is random in its effect.  It is not just the genes involved in childhood cancers which suffer harm.  Damage can, and does, occur throughout the entire DNA carried by the sperm.

The most common genetic abnormality in infants is Down Syndrome. And the occurrence of Down Syndrome have been steadily rising in line with our consumption of vegetable oils. In just the two decades between 1985 and 2004, the percentage of Down Syndrome affected pregnancies doubled in the UK.  In Western Australia (the only Australian state which keeps reliable data) the rate over a similar period almost tripled.

down640

Down syndrome births, stillbirths, and terminations of pregnancy (TOP) per 1000 births in Western Australia 1980–2004.

The next most common genetic abnormality in infants is Autism (a group of developmental diseases associated with damage to over 100 genes).  Autism rates in the UK have increased ten-fold since the 1950s and similar increases have occurred in the US.  In the US the rate of autism spectrum disorders more than doubled between 2000 and 2010 alone.  There is no reliable Australian data on this, but researchers estimate that Australian rates are similar.

autism

While it is likely that changes in the definition of autistic disorders are partly responsible for some of this growth, detailed analysis of the data has revealed that the increase is, regardless, very real and very large.  We aren’t just getting better at diagnosing autism, there is a lot more of it to diagnose.

Childhood cancers, Down Syndrome and Autism are the diseases which affect the most children (and therefore the ones for which we have the best data), but the trends are starting to become visible for all similar genetic diseases (and there are very many of them).

We are in the midst of a massive acceleration of diseases driven by oxidative DNA damage (and to a lesser extent by age-related mutations).  It is getting worse day by day and it has truly appalling consequences for everybody who is affected.

But there is a glimmer of hope.  We can turn these horrible trends around.  We just need to do three things, don’t smoke, don’t eat vegetable oils and don’t delay childbearing.

There is just one other thing we need to do.  Be very careful about circumventing our body’s attempt to destroy defective sperm.  That is the subject of the next part in this series.

 

Get all the studies mentioned in this series here