How They Convinced Us to Fear Meat
⚠️ Disclaimer: This article forms part of scientific dialogue and, among other things, presents non‑mainstream views and approaches regarding nutrition.
Its content is provided for information purposes only and does not in any way replace medical diagnosis, advice or treatment. Readers who wish to change their diet or their medication are strongly advised to do so only in cooperation with their attending physician and/or another appropriately qualified health professional.
The Great Low-Fat Foods Scam
The Epidemic and the Convergence of Events
The number of adults with diabetes in the United States has more than doubled over the last 20 years. There is a grim warning for Australians with type 2 diabetes. A new analysis of medical data from around the world shows that up to 1.3 billion people could be living with diabetes by 2050.
This raises the question of how we reached this point and what it would mean if this were not accidental. Forty years ago, someone who was obese or had type 2 diabetes was an exception. The program explains how seemingly unrelated events conspired to create today’s epidemic of obesity and diabetes. It analyses how various “players” – such as corporations, government agencies and other organisations – created the health crisis we are now experiencing. It is also noted that there is hope for people suffering from type 2 diabetes, obesity or both, but more than this.
Religious Influence: Ellen G. White and Kellogg
This is the fanatical religious figure Ellen G. White, who was born on 26 November 1827. From the age of 16 and for the next 20 years, Ellen had experiences that included “visions from God”. During one of these visions it was revealed to her how important it is for each person to take responsibility for their own health. The vision also showed that a central aspect of health was a vegetarian diet.
Ellen wrote hundreds of books, some of them specifically on the importance of proper nutrition, and co-founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Her writings and the Adventist Church have been decisive in promoting the message of a plant-based diet, even to this day.
John Harvey Kellogg was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and Ellen G. White was instrumental in his decision to attend medical school in 1876. That same year Kellogg was placed in charge of a resort that promoted the Adventist health principles, the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan.
Kellogg was a fan of bland food. Together with Ellen G. White, he believed that bland food was a way to minimise excitement, stimulation and masturbation. As a result, much of Kellogg’s later work focused on developing these bland, meat-free foods.
In 1877 he created granola.
In 1894 he developed corn flakes.
At that point we see the beginnings of the ultra-processed food industry: foods that are cheap to produce, refined, quickly digested and that cause a rapid rise in blood sugar and insulin, driving up sugar consumption and the onset of type 2 diabetes.
The Demonisation of Fat: Ancel Keys
This is Ancel Keys, who in the 1950s launched a study on coronary heart disease funded by the US Public Health Service. His “Seven Countries Study” showed that countries with higher saturated-fat intake were associated with higher levels of heart disease.
There were two problems with this study:
Ancel Keys collected data from 22 countries but chose to publish only the data from seven, conveniently excluding countries (such as Brazil) that would have spoiled the results. A country with high consumption of saturated fat and low rates of heart disease would have contradicted the intended finding that higher saturated-fat intake leads to heart disease. The graph looks very different when all 22 countries are included.
The study had enormous influence on public health policy. Once it was published in 1970, there was a huge global push to limit saturated-fat intake. This greatly benefited companies like Kellogg’s, whose business was based on ultra-processed, bland, low-saturated-fat foods.
With saturated fat demonised, the era of low-fat, high-sugar, ultra-processed foods had arrived.
The Involvement of the Sugar Industry and Harvard
By now there were many direct and indirect links between the various “players”.
In the 1960s three Harvard researchers were paid to produce research claiming that there were serious flaws in any studies that implicated sugar in health problems, and that fat was in fact the culprit. The major issue was that the funding came from the sugar industry, the Sugar Research Foundation. An even bigger problem was that the research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and was therefore taken very seriously. As a result, this corrupted science continues to shape the public perception of fat versus sugar.
In Summary
Ellen G. White and the Adventists promote a plant-based, bland diet.
John Harvey Kellogg produces bland foods that are highly processed carbohydrates, essentially sugar.
Ancel Keys convinces the public and policy-makers that saturated fat causes coronary heart disease.
The sugar industry pays Harvard researchers to say that sugar is good and fat is bad.
The Impact of President Nixon and Corn
In the early 1970s President Richard Nixon was facing rising food prices and inflation. His Secretary of Agriculture tried to stabilise prices by encouraging the production of commodity crops, one of which was corn. Nixon introduced generous subsidies for corn production, leading to a massive oversupply.
This oversupply was convenient because food manufacturers were looking for a cheap alternative to cane sugar. Corn’s versatility meant it could be processed into high-fructose corn syrup. As a result, sugar consumption rose dramatically in this form. This was acceptable because Ancel Keys had already convinced the public that the problem was saturated fat, not sugar, and the sugar industry/Harvard had made it clear that sugar was not the issue.
The Link to Dietetics and “Big Food”
In 1917 the American Dietetic Association (ADA) was founded by Lenna Frances Cooper and Lulu Graves. The ADA is responsible for much of the dietary advice that reaches the public through mass media and doctors. One of the founders, Lenna Frances Cooper, was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and brought with her its teachings on a plant-based diet. In addition, Adventist institutions such as the Battle Creek Sanitarium and later Loma Linda University provided much of the training for dietitians.
“Big Food” followed the path laid out by Kellogg and other pioneers. Ultra-processed foods were cheap to produce, offered good profit margins and fit perfectly with the low-fat model promoted by Ancel Keys and the Harvard researchers.
To support all this, it had to be made clear to the public that fat is bad and sugar is good – and this is where calories came in.
Calories as a Unit of Measurement
In the early 1800s Nicolas Clément introduced the term “calorie” to measure thermal energy in relation to steam engines. Later in the same century, the food industry realised that calories could serve as a useful measurement for food. This gave consumers an easy way to compare different foods with one another and to understand differences in energy content. Since saturated fat typically contains more measurable energy, this worked very well for a food industry that promoted low-fat products.
It is argued that calories are a ridiculous way to measure and compare foods.
Measuring calories involves burning a sample of food and measuring the change in temperature.
This is an unacceptable way to compare foods, because the body does not burn foods in an explosion; it extracts nutrients from them.
Believing that calories are a valid measurement is equivalent to believing that 100 calories of chocolate are the same as 100 calories of salad or 100 calories of steak.
Chocolate has almost no nutritional value and likely causes a large rise in blood sugar.
Comparing foods on the basis of calories is like assessing their nutritional value by their length or colour.
Nevertheless, this system works well for “Big Food” because it makes it easy for consumers to compare products and believe they are making the right choice. It helped “Big Food” teach consumers to treat ultra-processed foods in the same way as whole foods: everything is equal, just count the calories.
“Big Pharma”
This brings us to “Big Pharma”. The pharmaceutical industry has produced drugs that prolong and save lives, such as antibiotics, and every year more and more medications are developed.
The problem is that these drugs are developed to treat symptoms. “High cholesterol? We have a pill for that. High blood pressure? We have a pill for that. Chronically elevated blood sugar? We have all the drugs for that.”
When a problem arises, the patient goes to the doctor and, instead of examining the problem and trying to address its root cause, the doctor prescribes a drug for the symptom. The result is that the patient becomes sicker and sicker because the real underlying cause is never addressed. Why tackle chronically elevated blood sugar when someone can continue to eat their favourite carbohydrates and simply inject insulin to balance things out?
The Conclusion and the Hope
Putting all these pieces of the puzzle together leads to the same outcome: more obesity, more diabetes, more fatty liver disease and more young people falling seriously ill at ever earlier ages. We have been misled for decades, so it is no surprise that we are seeing more type 2 diabetes, more obesity and more chronic diseases.
However, something can be done. The narrator shares his personal experience, stating that he was able to stop 100% of his diabetes medications. His A1C dropped to 5.7 (right at the threshold of prediabetes) within six months, coming down from 9.8. The case of another person, Dave, is also mentioned: his A1C dropped to 4.5, while the previous August it had been 12.6, leaving his doctor baffled. This person with type 2 diabetes no longer takes diabetes medications because his blood sugar is under control – in other words, his diabetes has essentially gone.
The message is that it is time to take control of your health.
This text is an adaptation of a video from the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@zerocarb
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