The internet is going to be the thing that finally helps the little people gather enough momentum to challenge this unfounded public health advice. I know you’ve found the wonderful Gary Taubes – have you read “The Great Cholesterol Con” by Dr Malcolm Kendrick? This is the most witty and searingly logical assassination of the fat/heart/cholesterol myth that I have ever read. I almost cried laughing at some points – but it is also life threateningly serious. I’ve only got into this area of health advice because it explains why we changed our UK and US advice in the early 1980′s (and, of course, obesity has increased 6 fold since). All routes lead back to Ancel Keys…

Good night!
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The chant of “Five-A-Day” is being currently being rammed down our throats from every direction (newspapers, blogs, magazines, doctors, nutritionists, dieticians, nurses, social workers, greengrocers, and every man and woman in the street).

It has taken just five years for people to parrot this phrase as though it is the Eleventh Commandment.

Apparently you MUST eat five portions of fruit and veg every single day, or a terrible death will befall you. It is also supposed to guard against obesity and diabetes, like some kind of talisman or rabbit’s foot, I suppose.

Well, I guess eating five portions of broccoli and the like won’t do much harm, but corn, fruit juice, canned peaches and dried raisins? Next they’ll be saying that Pepsi and chocolate qualify, being as they originate from things that grow in the ground.

The UK government has created a healthy eating website to tackle the terrible epidemic of obesity and diabetes that we are experiencing in the UK.

http://www.5aday.nhs.uk/topTips/default.html

On the page about eating fats, it begins: “We all know that fat is bad for us”.

What kind of statement is that for the government to make? No facts, no proof, just this “everybody knows” hearsay! It reminds me of “everybody knows” that if your ears burn, someone is talking about you. Cite the research that proves either myth? There isn’t any.

Diabetes is a condition in which the body cannot correctly process high-glycaemic (high-sugar) carbohydrates. The most sugary are: sugar, fruit juice, fruit, white flour, parsnips, potatoes. The website informs people that dried fruits, canned fruit and fruit juices are among the “Five-a-Day”. These contain such highly-concentrated forms of sugar you might as well just give your kids a bucket of Silver Spoon and a ladle and be done with it.

The website advises us to add pineapple and sweetcorn to pizza. As if eating pizza isn’t bad enough (it is little more than a massive glycaemic load of nutritionally-empty refined white flour) they want us to add another grain AND some sugary fruit to it. Yes, sweetcorn is *a grain*, not a vegetable; despite this Green Giant has printed the legend “One of your five-a-day” on every can label. If corn is classed as a vegetable, then we must also allow cornflakes and cornbread into the fold. Presumably, if you toast cornbread and spread it thickly with jam, that is two of “your five-a-day”? Parsnips get the government’s approval, even though they are one of the highest glycaemic foods there are, higher even than potatoes. Oh, and tinned baked beans also count. Beans are pulses, not vegetables (and the tomato sauce they float in contains sugar). The public are clearly confused. They do not know what is a vegetable and what is not. A street-survey recently showed that over 50% of people believed that potatoes and pasta were included in “Five-a-Day”, yet they are tubers and grains.

The tragedy of the Five-a-Day Religion is that it is going to lead, inevitably, to more children getting more obese and getting diabetes. This is because, as we all know, it is difficult to persuade children to eat green veggies. Busy parents find it easier to discharge their parental duty by giving them cartons of fruit juice, packets of (maybe chocolate) raisins and lots of grapes. In other words, sugar, sugar….. and* more sugar*!

On the NHS website, one mother featured as an example to us all explains that she sprinkles raisins on her children’s breakfast cereal to make sure they get “one of their Five-a-Day”! This is utter madness — she’s merely increasing their *sugar* consumption! The cereal itself is little more than a sugar-fest, plus the child doubtless sprinkles sugar straight from the bowl, then Mum tops it up with even more sugar. Raisins contain a far more concentrated dose of sugar than any fresh fruit. The website also applauds a father for giving his children banana pancakes for breakfast instead of the nasty, cholesterol-bombs we call eggs. White flour, the second highest-sugar fruit (after grapes) and sugar. The identical ingredients, in fact, as make a Banoffee pie. A father feeding his children Banoffee pie for breakfast would be hauled over the coals, but take those *same *ingredients and make them into pancakes and hey presto, he’s practically the government’s Hero Dad of the Year.

The editorial on the site suggests: “For extra sweetness, chop fruit onto your cereal or stir it into desserts”. Why should we be giving children EXTRA sweetness in something that is already sugary? This will encourage them to develop a sweet tooth and expect breakfast (and every meal) to taste like a bowl of sugar. When it doesn’t, they won’t eat it.

I see sugar-addiction, tooth decay, obesity and diabetes in these children’s futures, yet the whole point of the darned campaign is to reverse the massive increase in diabetes and obesity. The Hero Dad may well be condemning his children to a life of heart disease, amputations and blindness. Yet if he smacks them when they are out-of-control (during a sugar-induced high perhaps) social workers step in.

The “Five a Day” campaign started in California in 1991 when local politicians got together with local fruit and vegetable farmers to promote their products. It was a public/private partnership. Thus vegetable and fruit industry funded and directed the govt campaign. Growers in other states lobbied the senate to have the campaign increased to include all the United States and from there it spread around the world.

Here were their reasons for five rather than any other number:

“5 servings allowed for a daily mix of items… and therefore seemed *likely to include* choices associated with reduced cancer risk…”

“Likely to include” is the key phrase. They are assuming that everyone will eat a good mix of, say spinach, carrots, broccoli, tomatoes and an apple. But what is happening in practice is people are having 1. fruit juice; 2. banana; 3. sweetcorn; 4. a bag of raisins; and 5. a bag of chips (because they think potatoes are a vegetable).

No proof/evidence/science is ever cited to back up the oft-repeated claim that any vegetable or fruit “is associated with” reduced cancer risk. Cancer is however proved to be associated with low cholesterol. Considerable evidence argued against the diet-breast hypothesis. In urban Copenhagen, breast cancer rates were four times higher than in rural Denmark but fat consumption was 50 percent lower. Large population studies in Framingham, Honolulu, Evans County, Georgia; Puerto Rico; and Malmo, Sweden, had all reported low cholesterol levels associated with higher cancer rates. Since low cholesterol is allegedly the product of low-fat diets, it was difficult to reconcile this evidence with the hypothesis that high-fat diets cause cancer.
A study just published has added further evidence suggesting that carbohydrate foods can increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer. In this study, more than 61,000 women were followed for over a 17-year period. Overall, higher GL diets were associated with an increased risk of breast cancer (though higher carbohydrate and higher GI diets were not).
The researchers went on to look at the relationship between carb intake and different types of breast cancer. Breast cancer is usually ‘hormone dependent’ (hormones can trigger and drive the development of the tumour), and can express receptors to the hormones such as oestrogen and/or progesterone. The researchers found that cancers that express oestrogen receptors but no progesterone receptors had strong links with carbohydrate intake.
High carbohydrate, high GI and high GL diets were associated with an increased risk of this sort of breast cancer of 33, 44 and 81 per cent respectively. The authors conclude that their findings suggest that a high carbohydrate intake and diets with high glycaemic index and glycaemic load may increase the risk of developing oestrogen positive/progesterone negative breast cancer.
Breast cancer risk has been linked to higher levels of the hormone insulin for more about this). When insulin levels go up, so can the levels of related substances known as ‘insulin-like growth factors’, and these have also been implicated in the development of breast cancer.
Conventional nutritional advice has encouraged us all to eschew fat and embrace the high-carb ideal. The problem is, that this may well be contributing to our disease burden, including with regard to breast cancer risk. A better diet, I suggest, would be one which is lower in carb. This diet might be more in keeping with the diet we evolved on. Meat, fish, eggs, nuts, fruit and vegetables (other than the potato) should form the core foods in the diet, I think. Interestingly, diets with higher animal foods in them have been linked with a reduced risk of breast cancer (see here)
Any real link here may not be due so much to some particular nutritional goodies animal foods have to offer. It might have more to do with the fact that the more such foods are eaten, the less tendency there is to fill up on carbs that have disastrous consequences for health.

And why five portions? Which clinical studies show that, say, three servings won’t do just as well? None. When asked, promoters of the campaign said it was because: “The number 5 was memorable” They just picked a number out of the hat. That’s good science – not!

The “Five a day” figure is just a catchphrase, not set in stone as so many reporters and lobbyists seem to think. The Greek government advises people to eat two portions of fruit and veg a week (not a day!) and yet are their bodies not comprised of the same components as ours?

The rationale of five or more servings every day is supposedly to reduce the incidence of cancer and other chronic diseases. In fact, every clinical experiment that has been carried out has failed to prove any link between vegetable or fruit consumption and protection from any illness or disease whatsoever. The governments and NHS websites are very large, but there isn’t even one page that lists any scientific studies or clinical experiments on real people to back up their claims.

Helena Wojtczak

Also…

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2009) — Doctors have known for decades that too much carbohydrate-laden foods like white bread and corn flakes can be detrimental to cardiac health. In a landmark study, new research from Tel Aviv University now shows exactly how these high carb foods increase the risk for heart problems.
“Looking inside” the arteries of students eating a variety of foods, Dr. Michael Shechter of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine and the Heart Institute of Sheba Medical Center — with collaboration of the Endocrinology Institute — visualized exactly what happens inside the body when the wrong foods for a healthy heart are eaten. He found that foods with a high glycemic index distended brachial arteries for several hours.
Elasticity of arteries anywhere in the body can be a measure of heart health. But when aggravated over time, a sudden expansion of the artery wall can cause a number of negative health effects, including reduced elasticity, which can cause heart disease or sudden death.
Using a clinical and research technique pioneered by his laboratory in Israel, Dr. Shechter was able to visualize what happens inside our arteries before, during and after eating high carb foods. It is a first in medical history. The results were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
“It’s very hard to predict heart disease,” says Dr. Shechter, a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. “But doctors know that high glycemic foods rapidly increase blood sugar. Those who binge on these foods have a greater chance of sudden death from heart attack. Our research connects the dots, showing the link between diet and what’s happening in real time in the arteries.”
Like the uncomfortable medical warnings on packets of cigarettes, this new research could lead to a whole new way to show patients the effects of a poor diet on our body.
Using 56 healthy volunteers, the researchers looked at four groups. One group ate a cornflake mush mixed with milk, a second a pure sugar mixture, the third bran flakes, while the last group was given a placebo (water). Over four weeks, Dr. Shechter applied his method of “brachial reactive testing” to each group. The test uses a cuff on the arm, like those used to measure blood pressure, which can visualize arterial function in real time.
The results were dramatic. Before any of the patients ate, arterial function was essentially the same. After eating, except for the placebo group, all had reduced functioning.
All roads lead to the endothelium
Enormous peaks indicating arterial stress were found in the high glycemic index groups: the cornflakes and sugar group. “We knew high glycemic foods were bad for the heart. Now we have a mechanism that shows how,” says Dr. Shechter. “Foods like cornflakes, white bread, french fries, and sweetened soda all put undue stress on our arteries. We’ve explained for the first time how high glycemic carbs can affect the progression of heart disease.” During the consumption of foods high in sugar, there appears to be a temporary and sudden dysfunction in the endothelial walls of the arteries.