The State of Food

What constitutes a healthy diet is a total minefield.

There is so much conflicting advice.

So many government initiatives, diet books, telly programmes, online resources, slimming products and businesses.

We’re constantly having a finger wagged in our faces.

Constantly told to eat less, move more.

It’s calories in, calories out. Right??

Sounds so simple.

And yet, as a nation, we are still getting fatter.

And sicker.

Obesity, heart disease, cancers and diabetes are all on the rise.

But why?

Are we all feckless, ill-disciplined, greedy wastrels?

No, I don’t think we are.

I just think we are getting really, really bad advice.

Advice from governments in the pocket of the processed food and pharmaceutical industries.

From politicians just as confused, fat and metabolically unwell as the rest of us.

Sadly many doctors and nurses are no better informed, knowledgeable or metabolically healthier themselves.

Hospitals are filled, from the lobby to intensive care units, with processed food.

The powers that be are all telling us to eat “wholegrains” as the main staple of our diet.

They all are engaged in promoting the huge lie dreamt up 50 years ago that saturated fats and red meat are bad for us.

But they are not.

They are what nourished, sustained and helped evolve our species for millennia.

Traditional ruminant meat and fats eaten for many thousands of years simply cannot be blamed for modern diseases that have sky rocketed in recent decades.

When you think about it, it seems totally bonkers to try to do so.

So what is it that has changed in our diets in the time that these diseases have flourished?

What instead might be responsible for our declining health?

Drumroll please…

Vegetable oils, grains and refined sugars.

All of which exist together in the packaged, processed foods and sauces that line the vast majority of our cupboard and supermarket shelves.

We aren’t being greedy.

We just aren’t eating foods that nourish us, so we are still hungry for more after eating them.

In fact, calories are a total red herring.

All calories are NOT created equal.

There are empty, bad, processed ones and then there are highly nutrient dense, good ones.

Like butter, which I think is best eaten with a spoon.

Counting calories is also the most mind numbingly dull thing to do.

And we all have way better things to be doing with our time.

Like eating delicious, nutrient dense meals to our natural satiety.

So we can get on with doing the things.

When so much research into nutrition and government guidelines is sponsored by Big Food…

How can we trust our sources?

The brutal truth is, we can’t.

We need to trust our instincts, our bodies and our history instead.

Working in this area with clients and devouring as much information about food as I can get my greedy hands on, there is one thing I have learned for sure.

Government nutritional guidelines are woefully out of date.

And just plain wrong.

But no one has the guts to admit it.

Or maybe worse, they are financially motivated by a Big Food lobby not to tell the truth.

Better to please another huge lobby – the Big Pharma one – by buying drugs that mask the symptoms of our metabolic ill-health, rather than prevent the metabolic ill-health in the first place.

The good news is we have the freedom and power to make our own nutritional choices.

To nick a phrase from the Man himself, we can ‘take back control’ of our own health.

My own dietary guidelines are pretty simple.

Instead of the NHS food plate, I have three Ps:

1. Protein – make this the main focus of your meals (seafood, red meat, organ meat, eggs, chicken, high fat dairy) and get your carbohydrates from vegetables, not from…
2. Processed Food – refined grains and flour, refined sugar, vegetable oils. Just don’t touch ’em
3. Period of time – eat your food in an 8 hour window and fast the other 16 hours (more on this in another post coming soon)

Given I will never be elected Prime Minister…

There are just too many pictures of drunken, naked me knocking about the place…

We’re going to need to do this from the ground up.

Please do get in touch if I can help you make these changes for yourself.

I can point you in the direction of the medical literature and community that will back up what I’m saying with the science.

And help you feel the incredible health that is possible, and dare I say easy, on a natural human diet.

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