By: David Gillespie

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'Diets and exercise won't help us lose weight. Vitamins and minerals are a waste of money and sometimes downright dangerous. Sugar makes us fat and sick. And polyunsaturated fat gives us cancer and works with sugar to give us heart disease. This book exists because I desperately hope that with a little knowledge we can all vote with out feet and change the rules of the game before the game kills us.'

For decades we've been told to eat less, exercise more, eat less saturated fat, eat more polyunsaturated oils, and take vitamin and omega-3 fatty acid supplements. For decades this is what we've done, but the rates of obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancer have never been higher.

The real culprits, David Gillespie tells us, are sugar and polyunsaturated oils. Analysing the latest scientific evidence, he shows us why the outlines a plan to avoid them both without missing out or 'dieting'. Gillespie exposes the powerful role the multibillion-dollar food, health and diet industries have played in promoting the health messages we follow – or feel guilty about not following.

Discovering the truth about diets, exercise, supplements and processed food is your first step towards improved health, greater happiness and a longer life for you and your family.

'Gillespie is an informed and entertaining writer who makes his subject fascinating, and inspires with his passion and logic.'
G MAGAZINE

About the Author

David Gillespie is a recovering corporate lawyer, co-founder of a successful software company and consultant to the IT industry. He is also the father of six young children (including one set of twins). With such a lot of extra time on his hands, and 40 extra kilos on his waistline, he set out to investigate why he, like so many in his generation, was fat. He deciphered the latest medical findings on diet and weight gain and what he found was chilling. Being fat was the least of his problems. He needed to stop poisoning himself.

Reviewed By Toni Whitmont, Booktopia Buzz Editor

Are you one of the thousands have people who have read Sweet Poison or the Sweet Poison Quit Plan ? Are you like me now so much the wiser when it comes to sugar and additives in our food? Well, let me tell you, Big Fat Lies is going to really make you sit up and take notice.

Author David Gillespie

Diets and exercise won't help us lose weight. Vitamins and minerals are a waste of money and sometimes downright dangerous. Sugar makes us fat and sick. And polyunsaturated fat gives us cancer and works with sugar to give us heart disease.

This book exists because I desperately hope that with a little knowledge we can all vote with our feet and change the rules of the game before the game kills us.

At last - someone who calls it like it is.

Introduction

Diets and exercise won't help us lose weight. Vitamins and minerals are a waste of money and sometimes downright dangerous. Sugar makes us fat and sick. And polyunsaturated fat gives us cancer and works with sugar to give us heart disease. The evidence for all of these statements is abundant and unequivocal, but you won't hear anyone in the food and diet industries tell you so. If they did it would have an immediate impact on their sales, and when it comes to a choice between their money and your health, three guesses (oh, okay – one, then) which of these wins.

The sad truth is that people like you and me are uniquely vulnerable in a world of chronic disease caused by 'improvements' to our food supply. A choice between corporate profit today and your health in three decades is no choice to a drug or food company or their shareholders. A choice between a government bureaucrat staying 'on message' with what they've said for the last four decades and your future health is no choice to them if they want to keep their job. A choice between a charity (such as the Australian Heart Foundation) attacking the source of its corporate sponsorship and how well you might be in 2041 is no choice to the people whose jobs depend on that sponsorship.

Even your doctor, the one person paid to have your health uppermost in their mind, is protecting you with both hands tied behind their back. At least one new medical journal article appears every 26 seconds. Just to keep up, your doctor would need to read 3300 journal articles a day (and that's before they started on the backlog). Obviously, even the most studious and dedicated doctor is doing nothing of the sort – doctors report spending about four hours a week reading journals, which is still a fair bit of time. This means they rely on the same sources of information (only with more detail) as the rest of us: drug companies, food manufacturers, charities and government employees.

This is a book about truth. I'm not a nutritionist or a doctor. I don't have a diet or a magic food to sell you. I'm just a lawyer who's worried about my health and the health of my family and who has a lot of time on his hands. This book exists only because I want you to know what the evidence actually says. Lawyers are trained in only one useful thing – evidence. This book sets out the evidence about our food. That evidence could not be more clear-cut, and what to do about it could not be more obvious.

I've chosen to lay out this evidence in a book because books are the only form of mass media available to me that are not influenced by advertising. The companies that benefit from our continued consumption of sugar, polyunsaturated vegetable oils, statin drugs, vitamins and diet plans spend more on advertising (by a country mile) than all other businesses combined. A book it must be – there's no other way to communicate in detail the information it contains without the story being influenced by someone whose job depends on advertising.

What can we do?

Apart from this book, you don't need to buy anything. You just need to stop consuming foods containing two substances introduced into our diets in the 1850s – sugar and polyunsaturated vegetable oils – and avoid the 'cures' introduced after World War II. The inconvenient fact is that this means eliminating almost all processed foods from your diet.

The good news, however, is that saving yourself from the insidious damage being done by sugar and polyunsaturated vegetable oils is as simple as knowing what you're eating. The even better news is that it will cost you nothing. You don't need to pay a diet guru to become thin. You don't need to subsist on a diet of Tibetan cantaloupes infused with dolphin tears. You don't need to pay a muscle-bound fitness fanatic to abuse you in a public park. And you don't need to go to weekly meetings for a dose of group humiliation. By doing nothing apart from avoiding two ingredients, you'll lose weight, skip past a list of chronic diseases you couldn't jump over (even if you were being yelled at by a lycra-clad trainer) and save yourself a bucket of money while you're at it.

Our food supply

It might seem like our supermarkets are full of newfangled products that weren't there a week ago, let alone last century, but when we brush aside the marketing, very little has changed about our food supply in thousands of years. We're still mammals that require carbohydrates and some fats for fuel. And we still need protein to make our muscles and other bits. They can dress it up in a pretty box and claim it's new or better or healthier than it was last week, but our bodies have very simple food requirements. Our metabolism can't read labels and our biochemistry is what it is, no matter what a marketer might tell us.

There have, however, been two very important changes to our food supply in the last hundred years. These changes weren't introduced to make us healthier or better people, but for two very simple commercial reasons: increased sales and lower costs. Commercial quantities of sugar were added to food because food with sugar sells better than food without sugar (yes, it really is that simple). And man-made fats were introduced because foods made with polyunsaturated seed oils are cheaper than foods made with animal fats. This means, of course, that there are powerful financial incentives to keep both in the food supply for as long as possible.

Why sugar and polyunsaturated fats are bad for us

In my books Sweet Poison and The Sweet Poison Quit Plan I went through the evidence against sugar in detail. When I first started to look into things, I was motivated by a very simple plan – to be less fat. And it worked. But along the way I discovered that science says much more about sugar than that it induces a fat tummy. In fact, sugar bypasses delicately balanced systems that tightly control our appetite and blood-sugar levels. Once our system is out of balance, we career like an out-of-control car towards the cliff face of obesity and a list of other chronic diseases that grows with the publication of each new study. Oh, and just for fun, sugar is highly addictive and therefore impossible to eliminate from our diet without conscious effort.

As I read the evidence against sugar, I kept coming across studies on fat. It was clear that fat could not possibly do the things the nutrition dogma suggested. It was also abundantly clear that once we fix the appetite-control system broken by sugar, fat will take care of itself. Once we're back in possession of a functional appetite-control system, we can and do tightly regulate our fat consumption automatically. But under the surface of the studies I read was a worrying line of evidence that suggested it matters very much what type of fat we consume, because although our body can't detect whether fats are saturated or unsaturated, these fats can still make a dramatic difference to how our body functions.

Strange as it sounds, to most cells in our body, oxygen is a dangerous substance. Oxygen is highly reactive. When it reacts with iron we get rust. When it reacts with wood, we get fire (if the temperature is right). And when it reacts with fat, it breaks that fat down into a range of dangerous chemicals and destroys the integrity of any cell made from fat – which is every cell in our body. We have two defences against this process of oxidation. First, most of the fat we make (and until a hundred years ago, most of the fat we ate) does not oxidise much – saturated fat is the stainless steel of the cellular world. Secondly, for any fat that is oxidised, we have our own little fire brigade – a bunch of homemade chemicals called anti-oxidants.

Polyunsaturated fats are exactly the opposite: they react quickly with oxygen. This is a very, very bad thing in a body that needs to be as oxygen-resistant as possible. Oxidated fats can lead to the random destruction and out-of-control cellular growth otherwise known as cancer. And they can create the lesions that lead to heart disease. Both processes are helped enormously by the huge quantities of sugar in a normal Western diet. In the last hundred years we've gradually and systematically replaced all the saturated fats in our diet with destructive polyunsaturated fats. And just for good measure, we've added huge quantities of sugar to make the destruction happen quickly.

Sugar has given us diabetes, dementia and obesity. And polyunsaturated fats have given us cancer. Together they've combined to give us heart disease. Both were added to our diets in bulk long before ingredients were tested for their health impacts or safety. And both have combined to create seemingly untreatable epidemics in just three generations.

What's a seed oil?

We've been told that the secret to curing heart disease is to consume unsaturated vegetable oils rather than saturated animal fats. So now all the fats in our processed foods are labelled 'vegetable oil' and the labels are rarely more specific than that.

The irony is that there is no such thing as oil from a vegetable. The products being pushed to us as vegetable oils are fruit oils (coconut, palm, olive or avocado), nut oils (macadamia, peanut, pecan, and so on) or seed oils (canola, sunflower, soy or rice bran).

There's nothing much wrong with the fruit oils (I'll go into why later) and some of the nut oils are okay, too. But the seed oils are extraordinarily dangerous. And unfortunately they make up almost all of the 'vegetable oils' in our food.

The diet, exercise and supplements industries

Cashing in on the confusion and misinformation about the causes of obesity, heart disease and cancer, a group of huge industries has come of age. The diet, exercise and supplements industries did not exist before World War II, but in 60 short years they've built an empire that rivals those of sugar and seed oils themselves. At first the sugar and seed-oil sellers were happy to encourage these growing healthy-living sectors – after all, they made sure everybody was looking in exactly the wrong direction – but now the sugar and seed-oil mega-corporations are scooping up those sectors, too.

There's never been any evidence that counting calories (or fat or carbs) will make us thin. The evidence has never suggested that exercise will have any effect on our weight other than to increase our appetite. Nor has it given credence to the theory that we're functionally deficient in any of the substances in a multivitamin tablet or any other supplement. But this complete lack of evidence has not slowed the exponential growth of the diet, exercise and supplements industries. And just like desperate gamblers, we keep coming back to them, despite abundant proof that it will fail just as it did last time.

About this book

This book lays out the evidence against sugar and seed oils, and provides practical and effective advice on how to avoid eating them. The first part of this book gives the facts about the things we're urged to do every minute of our waking lives. It tells us why diets will not make us thin, why exercise makes us hungrier rather than lighter and why supplements are just a very effective way to flush your hard-earned dosh away. The second part of the book presents the evidence against the real culprits of chronic disease: sugar and seed oils. And the third part translates that evidence into practical advice on how to live in a society where almost every man-made food is filled to the brim with sugar and seed oils.

The first two parts do occasionally dive deeply into the evidence. I try to translate it into language even I could understand, but it does get hairy at times, so stick with me – it's worth it. In this book I attack most of the basic assumptions we make about our health. I don't do that lightly. It's important that the evidence be presented in full for two reasons. First, vested interests and their handmaidens will attack what I say repeatedly, so I must present the evidence clearly and unequivocally. Secondly, I don't expect you to trust me any more than I trust the folks selling us fructose, seed oils, statins and weight-loss programs. You must be able to jump past my interpretation and go straight to the source (if you want to). The comprehensive 'Notes' section at the back of this book gives details of the original scientific papers and books from which the information in this book is drawn.

Commercial forces have provided us with the most perfectly destructive combination of chronically dangerous chemicals I could imagine. And those same commercial forces have worked to ensure we do nothing effective about changing that. This book exists because I desperately hope that with a little knowledge we can all vote with our feet and change the rules of the game before the game kills us.

Strap yourself in – let's do this thing.

ISBN: 9780670076024
ISBN-10: 0670076023
Audience: General
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 272
Published: 22nd February 2012
Dimensions (cm): 23.0 x 15.4
Weight (kg): 23.0