Zoë & Dr Peter Brukner discuss the power of nutrition in health and sports

Bio

PETER BRUKNER OAM, MBBS, D Sc(honoris causa), FACSEP, FASMF, FACSM, FFSEM

Peter Brukner OAM is a specialist sports and exercise physician who is the founding partner of Olympic Park Sports Medicine Centre in Melbourne and Professor of Sports Medicine at LaTrobe University. A founding Executive Member of the Australasian College of Sports Physicians, he served two terms as President and played a key role in establishing sports medicine as a medical specialty in Australia.

Peter is the co-author of the widely used text book Clinical Sports Medicine, now in its 6^th edition, and has been team physician for professional football clubs as well as national athletics, swimming, soccer and men’s hockey teams including Olympic and Commonwealth Games. Peter was the Socceroos Team Doctor at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and subsequently became Head of Sports Medicine and Sports Science at Liverpool Football Club. He then served as Australian cricket team doctor from 2012-17, and as a consultant to the Melbourne Football Club during their premiership year in 2021.

Peter is the co-founder of the public health campaign SugarByHalf and is committed to the challenge of improving the nation’s health with improved diet and increased physical activity. His best selling book A Fat Lot of Good was published in 2018. Peter is also the Founder and Chair of Defeat Diabetes, an app- and web-based program, aimed at improving diabetes control through diet. His latest book The Diabetes Plan was published in March 2023.

In 2022 Peter was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by La Trobe University and delivered the inaugural Peter Brukner Distinguished Lecture. He was recently awarded the 2023 Outstanding Contribution to Victorian Sport Award.

Show notes

Peter and I first met for lunch in April 2016 – with Dr Karim Khan – his co-author for Clinical Sports Medicine, which is the ‘bible’ for sports medicine. We then met at the Public Health Collaboration (PHC) conferences in 2017 (Manchester), 2018 (London) and 2019 (London again) and then Covid halted such events. We’ve met at conferences further afield too – notably Denver.

Peter came to stay with us in Wales in July 2019 (Dr Nina Teicholz was with us at the same time, so we had a multi-continent low carb gathering). He then super kindly gave my cricket-mad brother tickets to the England vs Australia world cup cricket match on July 11^th, 2019, at Edgbaston. England won by 8 wickets, so he was probably better off not going anyway!

I opened by asking how, when and why Peter got into the diet and health field and I had the best reply to that question ever – a complete chronology starting 12 years ago when Peter thought his health was OK, but it wasn’t. A mutual friend of ours, Professor Tim Noakes, had just started saying low fat high carb is all wrong – it should be the other way round. Peter thought Tim was mad but took his own bloods, tried low carb high fat for himself and the podcast details his astounding results.

Peter shared a few anecdotes of other conditions that have been alleviated with a Keto diet – in national team level athletes and lay people. As a doctor, he considers the LCHF diet to be the most powerful weapon he has in his toolkit.

Peter explained how SugarByHalf started and also Defeat Diabetes. He had some very positive news to share about recent developments with Diabetes Australia and how this has helped to give credibility to the low carb option for diabetes in his country.

We explored the obstacles that we have both faced during our years of working in this field and how frustrating it is that we have these battles when the solution to diabetes (a condition of carbohydrate intolerance) is so obvious.

Australia has hosted a parliamentary inquiry into diet and diabetes recently. Peter gave evidence to the committee and met with the members during the process. The report has been disappointing to say the least. As for the future, we both think that individuals will continue to take control of their own heath, but this is frustratingly slow when top down changes to dietary guidelines could transform health, weight and diabetes so much more effectively. If only…

Transcript

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by an advanced AI tool. It may contain errors, so please do not use any part as actual quotations. There is also an ‘in-play’ transcript in the video player, just click the appropriate button to switch view.

Zoë Harcombe (00:00)
So I’m absolutely delighted this morning to be speaking to Dr. Peter Brukner. And I always like to open these podcasts by explaining how I know the person, if I know the person, and I know you. I’m thrilled to call you a friend, not just someone we’re chatting to this morning. I had a look back, we actually first connected back in April, 2016, and you emailed me, you were over in London because you were working on your clinical sports medicine Bible.

Peter Brukner (00:01)
Right.

Zoë Harcombe (00:29)
which you’re updating again at the moment to make the sixth edition. And you emailed me and you said you were over in London working on it with your co-author, Professor Dr. Karim Khan, and would I like lunch? And I remember sort of running downstairs to my husband going, my goodness, you’re never going to guess who’s just got in touch. Because to me, you’re a legend in this world. You’ve managed the Australian cricket team, you’ve managed, you’ve been the physician doctor for professional.

sports teams at sort of premiership as well as national level. You’ve worked with Olympians, you’re author of number of books. I don’t know how many presentations you’ve done. You can tell us that in a minute. But you really are a legend in this world. So I was so excited at meeting you. And since then, we’ve met at the Public Health Collaboration Conference in 2017 in Manchester, in 2018 in London, in 2019 in London, and then of course COVID hit.

Peter Brukner (01:04)
you

Zoë Harcombe (01:26)
We’ve also bumped into each other at conferences further afield. So we’re very much in this space together. So delighted to be talking this morning. The first and obvious question is why, when and how did you get into this whole diet and health arena?

Peter Brukner (01:43)
Well, firstly, thank you very much for those kind words and thank you for having me, Zoë. It’s a real pleasure. I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while. Look, I mean, as you said, my life’s been sports medicine. I mean, if you told me 12 years ago that I’d be sitting here talking to you about nutrition and diabetes, I’d have just laughed at you, really. I had zero interest in that area other than…

nutrition from a sports performance point of view, but really had no particular interest. But I guess everything changed 12 years ago. I was living in Liverpool, looking after the Liverpool Football Club, looking after 25 extraordinary, highly paid pampered footballers and having a great time. I loved Liverpool. And probably, look, if you’d asked me then, you’d say, how are you? How’s your health? How are you going?

said, yeah, I’m pretty good. I just turned 60. I felt fine. I thought I was eating a good diet, good low fat diet, following the guidelines. And I exercised regularly. My blood sugar was fine. Yeah, thanks for asking, but I’m good. The reality was I probably wasn’t quite as good as I thought I was. For a start, I had a family history of type 2 diabetes.

Zoë Harcombe (03:08)
Okay.

Peter Brukner (03:08)
My father developed diabetes at the same age I was, at 60. And I’d seen what happened to him and I didn’t want to go down that track. It wasn’t pretty. Secondly, I was quite overweight, obese. I’d, you know, like many middle-aged men and I considered 60 middle-aged, I used to think it was old, but now I think it’s middle-aged. I, you know, I’d probably put on a pound a year, half a kilogram a year for 30 years.

You know, just slowly getting thicker and thicker around the waist and my kids are sort of, you know, starting to poke me in the belly and saying, you know, come on, dad. And I’d shrug my shoulders and say, well, you know, I’m, you know, I’m eating the right diet and I’m exercising, you know, it’s not my fault. So I was, you know, I was obese. And I had some metabolic issues as well. I had a high insulin level, I had a high triglyceride levels. My cholesterol was okay, but my triglycerides were quite high. And I’d had a fatty liver.

Zoë Harcombe (03:37)
Okay.

Thank

Peter Brukner (04:06)
for 10 years at least. mean, you know, get your regular blood tests every couple of years, comes back, you know, consistent with fatty liver. I didn’t really understand, you know, what a fatty liver was. I figured I was on a low fat diet, you know, like a typical doctor, I just ignored it and figured it’d go away. it didn’t. And every time I had a blood test, it came back the same. you know, I mean, in retrospect, I was clearly pre-diabetic, but I didn’t realize it at the time. So around that time,

Zoë Harcombe (04:31)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Brukner (04:35)
I, our mutual friend, Tim Noakes most of your listeners would, would know about, I’m sure. So Tim and I are actually old friends. we go back a long way because we’ve both been in the sports medicine, sports science world. yeah, Tim and I used to be the sort of, you know, guest speakers at these, you know, American conferences. And we’d, you know, we’d sit in the corner and talk about cricket and rugby while they talked about all those other silly sports and so on. So we’re, we’re good mates from that, from a long way back.

Zoë Harcombe (04:39)
Mm-hmm.

I’m

Peter Brukner (05:03)
And he’s someone whose brain I had admired enormously. He’s such a smart guy. And he’d a few of the basic tenets of sports science in the past and always been proven right. So when he came out in 2012 and started to say, hey, I think we’ve got this wrong. I think it might be sugar and carbohydrates that are problem, not fats.

I, my initial response was, come on, Tim, now you’ve really lost the plot this time. I mean, this is a step too far. You know, we couldn’t possibly have had this wrong for the last, you know, 50 years and so on. But then I remembered, well, hang on, he’s been right before, you know, I better look into this. So I thought I need to do a bit of a bit of reading. So I bought Gary Taubes book, Good Calories, Bad Calories and, and

That book just blew me away. To this day, I still remember vividly reading it. It wasn’t so much the fats versus carbs argument, which was very interesting, but the politics, the history and the politics and how the low fat movement had won out over the low carb movement back in the 50s and 60s and 70s, which I’d always assumed was due to science and evidence. But of course, as we know, was due to…

money and power and politics, and we shouldn’t be surprised. And yeah, that really just blew me away. And I remember, still remember one night sitting on the edge of my bed, I had this lovely apartment in Liverpool overlooking the Mersey River and looking out over the river and thinking, I think you might be right. I think we might’ve had this diet then. No, no, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. We couldn’t have had it wrong for 50 years. The whole of Western society has basically been on this low-fat diet.

Zoë Harcombe (06:24)
Thanks

Peter Brukner (06:51)
And here it is saying that there’s actually no evidence to support it. In fact, there’s a fair bit of evidence against it. And I found it quite disturbing. I really felt quite agitated by it all. so being a bit OCD, as we probably both are, I dived into every book and article I could possibly find over the next couple of months and just got totally into it.

Zoë Harcombe (07:06)
by

Peter Brukner (07:15)
So then I thought, and the more I read, the more, you know, I thought, yeah, I really sort of started to believe in this. And I thought, well, now I’m a scientist, so I need to some research. But also as a scientist, I know that a research with an N equals one is a waste of time, except when the one is you. So, you know, then it becomes important. I decided it was time for an N equals one experiment on myself. on day one, I got all my bloods done, weighed myself.

Zoë Harcombe (07:32)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (07:44)
And then I went on to a low carb, healthy fat diet. So I stopped eating anything with sugar, all processed foods really, all starches, rice, pasta, grain, bread, cereal, potato, all those, which had been pretty much a staple of my diet. So stopped eating all of that, fruit juice, anything in a packet really. And then I went back to eating, probably the way that my…

parents and grandparents that eat just real food, meat and fish and non-starchy vegetables, eggs and all that cholesterol. my God, cholesterol and cream and butter. my God, such a fat, all those things that have been told not to eat for 30 years and so on. And some nuts and the only fruit I had was berries. So I embarked on that, I decided I’d do it for three months.

Zoë Harcombe (08:23)
and

Peter Brukner (08:42)
Three month trial, blood’s at the start, blood’s at the end, see what happened. So what happened? Well, the first thing that happened was I stopped being hungry. So instead of having my cereal at eight o’clock in the morning and then getting to 10.30 and looking, my God, is it lunchtime yet? I’d have my bacon and eggs and avocado or whatever for breakfast and I wouldn’t be hungry again all day. So I went from eating three meals and three snacks a day to eating two meals a day, which is what I do to this day, two meals a day.

Zoë Harcombe (08:50)
Hmm.

Peter Brukner (09:11)
And then I started to lose weight and you think, yeah, the first week it’s just fluid or it’s just, you know, that’s a bit easy and kept on losing weight. But a whole lot of other things started happening. You know, I started to feel more energetic. I felt my was concentrating better. My exercise capacity improved, my sleep improved, my snoring decreased. You know, that was a popular move, happy wife, happy life. And, you know, I just felt a whole lot better. And then the weight just kept coming off.

Zoë Harcombe (09:38)
Hmm.

Peter Brukner (09:40)
And the more fat I ate, the more fat I lost. It was just totally counterintuitive. So at end of the 13 weeks, I’d lost 13 kilograms in 13 weeks. I’d eaten as much as I wanted to eat. I was never hungry. And I couldn’t believe it. I remember sort of almost feeling guilty. think, it’s supposed to be really hard to These people are really struggling to lose weight. And I’ve had a great time losing weight.

Zoë Harcombe (09:50)
Wow, wow.

Peter Brukner (10:09)
because I was eating really well. was just eating really healthy food and so on. And so that was great. And so then I got my bloods done and basically everything went back to normal. My insulin went back to normal. My fatty liver that I’d had for 10 years completely disappeared. So every blood test I’d had for 10 years was abnormal. And all of a sudden it was low normal, absolutely normal. I couldn’t believe it. mean, in three months.

It might’ve been less than three months. I only did the blood test after three months. The interesting thing was that when I get my bloods done at the end of three months, my triglycerides hadn’t come down and I was devastated. Everything I’d read, thought, know, that cholesterol, that triglycerides were a serious risk factor and that, you know, that they would come down. And I remember thinking, no, you know what? Couldn’t understand it. Anyway, the more I read, I thought, maybe I’m just mobilizing, you know, lots of fat and so on.

Zoë Harcombe (11:01)
Thank

Thank

Peter Brukner (11:07)
I repeated it three months later and my triglycerides had come right down, which was quite interesting. They were back to normal, then basically halved. They had gone from two to one. Really, as a result of my three months of pretty strict low carb, probably ketogenic, but didn’t measure it, but I would have been pretty low carb, I lost 13 kilograms. I’d resolved all my metabolic issues. I felt great.

Zoë Harcombe (11:25)
Thank

Peter Brukner (11:37)
There was one drawback though. I needed a new wardrobe. So all my clothes were ridiculously out there. But I figured that was a small price to pay for that. I guess, you know, when that happens, you know, it’s sort of a life changing experience, really. And the more I read about it, the more I realized that I was clearly pre-diabetic, know, fatty liver and high triglycerides and high insulin. Classic, you know, classic pre-diabetes really.

Zoë Harcombe (11:39)
I’m sorry.

Peter Brukner (12:03)
I felt as I dodged a bullet for a start, I had no doubt I would have been diabetic within a couple of years probably. But I just felt really good and I felt great and energetic and I felt my brain was functioning better and so on. So guess you have one of two choices. You can either sort of go into your little hole and just keep quiet, be happy and healthy and so on. Or you can get out and start talking about it.

Zoë Harcombe (12:29)
Mm.

Peter Brukner (12:30)
And to be honest, didn’t have much choice because people had come up to you and said, my God, what have you done? You look different and you look so much better. I didn’t realize I looked that bad, to be honest. anyway, apparently I did. yeah, so I started to talk about it a bit and write about it. then I came back to Australia and I found there was a little community of low carb people here and low carb down under and so on.

Zoë Harcombe (12:33)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (12:58)
I got involved with that and continued to sort of read and talk to people about it and talk to friends and colleagues and convince them to try it and so on. So it was very exciting. And at that stage I was looking after the Australian cricket team, which sort of happened just around the time I started, I lost all my weight. And I had another sort of, you know,

guess a light bulb moment with the cricket team. So we were touring in India and one of our players had had a lot of problems in the previous two years with his knee and to the point we’d had to stop playing and it had really severe knee pain that no one could work out what was wrong. He had scans, he’d had arthroscopies, all that sort of stuff. But eventually he saw a rheumatologist who told him he had

a what’s called a seronegative arthritis, which is a type of rheumatoid arthritis, a very inflammatory arthritis. Put him on some pretty powerful drugs, they helped a little bit, put him on an even more powerful, very expensive drug. And so when I met him, he was injecting himself with this drug every fortnight, and he was able to sort of train and play, but not to full capacity, he wasn’t able to train fully. The coaches thought he was a bit lazy, but he just, know, his knee couldn’t cope with it.

Zoë Harcombe (14:14)
of

Peter Brukner (14:24)
He was in the squad, he hadn’t got back into the team. And so we were on tour. So he came to me and said that he’d like to lose a little bit of weight. And it’s amazing how many elite sports people are actually a little bit overweight. And I never really understood that. And I sort of started to understand it when I realized that they were just having massive amounts of carbohydrates and so on.

Zoë Harcombe (14:40)
Yeah.

Carb loading

Peter Brukner (14:50)
Anyway, he said he wanted to lose a little bit of weight because he’d seen what I’d done and I happy to help. So he went pretty strictly low carb. Now, India is not the easiest place to go low carb. But no rice, no naan, all those other things. The good thing about athletes is they’re very disciplined. Anyway, he went strict low carb. Anyway, he grabbed me three weeks later and he said, I forgot to have my injection last week.

Zoë Harcombe (15:07)
Mm.

Peter Brukner (15:20)
You know, I said, what do you mean? said, well, I haven’t had any knee pain, you know, so I didn’t get that reminder. And I’ve just realized now it’s three weeks. You know, what do think I should do? Do think I should have my injection? And I pretended, well, I that’s exactly what I expected, you know, of course, having no idea. know, I thought, no, no, you know, I sort of, why don’t you wait and see, see what happens. Anyway, to cut a long story short, no more injections, no more, no more tablets. He’s

Now that’s 12 years ago. He’s been low carb ever since. He’s been off all his medication. And this is 12 years later. Last year, he was the world test cricketer of the year. And it’s made a massive difference to him. And I guess that was a real light bulb moment for me because it made me realize the impact of nutrition on inflammation. And I had no idea.

Zoë Harcombe (16:03)
Wow.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (16:18)
talked about that, I’d never read anything, never heard anything. And it just blew me away. mean, when you see something like that, my God, you know, he was spending like $10,000 a year on this medication, you know, and still not, you know, 100%. So, so they got me very interested in the whole, in a role of nutrition in chronic disease, be it arthritis or be it, you know, neurological diseases, diabetes, cardiac, cardiovascular disease, and so on. you know, I just, I just kept finding out interesting things.

you know, hearing amazing things. You know, I remember I was in the coffee line at university one day. I have a university position here. And a lady came up to me said, Dr. Brukner I said, yeah, yeah. And she said, I enjoyed your lecture the other day. said, thank you. It’s nice, you know. And she said, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about. I thought, God, you know, what do I do? What am I saying? I said something in the lecture or, know, anyway. She said,

Zoë Harcombe (17:14)
I’m sorry.

Peter Brukner (17:18)
My husband and I are massive cricket fans and because of you, we changed our diet. said, that’s great. And she said, and, my husband’s been bipolar all his life and I just, just want to say he’s now off all his medication and you’ve changed our life. And I just want to say, thank you. And I thought, Whoa, you know, here’s another light bulb moment, know, bipolar disease, nutrition, you know, hang on. I’ve never heard anything about that. And again, you know, I think this, as you would know, there’s,

been quite a lot of interest the last few years now in nutritional psychiatry and the role of… So that was another thing that sort of just got me going and got me interested and so on. So all these sort of things were happening that making me just realize and dive into certain areas. And so I thought, well, what can I do? What can I do to really have an impact? So the first thing we did was we started a charity called Sugar by Half. And I figured, well,

Zoë Harcombe (17:49)
Thank

Thank

Peter Brukner (18:18)
Let’s start with the

simple things. Everyone agrees on sugar. Even the dietitians agree on sugar. Let’s keep it safe there. We started a charity and with the aim, as it says, of reducing the amount of added sugar by a half. The average Australian is probably the same in Britain. It probably has 16, 18 teaspoons of added sugar a day. That’s sugar in addition to

Zoë Harcombe (18:32)
Thank

Wow.

Peter Brukner (18:47)
the sugar that’s in fruit and dairy and so on. And the World Health Organization suggests that six is probably, below six is ideal. So my maths was never that strong, but that’s about half. I figured, because I think it’s always nice to have a catchy title and an aim, rather than say, reduce sugar. Well, let’s go sugar by half. Let’s try and cut it by half. So we started that charity about six or seven years ago, probably.

Zoë Harcombe (18:53)
Thank

I’m to

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (19:16)
And look, it’s been, you know, it’s been puddling along pretty, pretty nicely. And one area that we’ve got into that’s been the main area is we’ve teamed up with a group in Australia that produce school lessons. they, they make, that they, to be delivered online and, or delivered in the classroom by a, by a teacher, you know, who, who delivers this lesson. And, and these people are very clever. They, they initially started doing, doing it for climate change.

and they’ve added sort of sugar into that as well, nutrition into it as well. And, you know, it’s not just about sugar, you know, it’s math lessons or English lessons or that brings in, you know, some sort of form of that. And, you know, they’ve been really popular and I think they’ve had an impact and, know, we’ve certainly had some good feedback from teachers and from kids and it’s very interesting, you know.

Zoë Harcombe (19:44)
Hmm.

Thank you.

Peter Brukner (20:08)
Kids come home and they can actually convince their families to change the way they eat. It’s very interesting. you know, I caught up with one of the teachers, contacted me and said, look out, you know, our school captain, you know, says that he’s gone home and changed the whole way his family eat. you know, so I caught up with him and had a chat and yeah, sure enough he had. So that’s been active for a few years now. Then I got approached to write a book. You know, we all have to write books, don’t we?

Zoë Harcombe (20:12)
Yeah.

I’m sorry.

Peter Brukner (20:38)
But to be honest, my initial reaction was, look, really, the last thing the World needs is another diet book. But they convinced me that there weren’t many by doctors and none by Australian doctors. So I said, okay. And it was very interesting. wrote the whole book, it’s called A Fat Lot of Good, and it’s been really successful. But I wrote it in three weeks. So obviously, I had it all in my brain, what I wanted to say.

Zoë Harcombe (20:58)
That looked good, yeah.

Wow.

Peter Brukner (21:06)
blurted it all out and wrote it really quickly and so on. that was great. That was on the bestseller list for three months and it’s still selling quite well now. It’s been good. And a lot of people say that they found it useful. then all this time, I guess I was writing stuff and doing blogs and speaking at conferences and as you said, the Public Health Collaboration Conference in London and conferences in the States and different places.

but the elephant in the room has always been type two diabetes, really, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s the most underrated, you know, medical condition in the world, I think, you know, I think it’s a bigger single health issue, certainly in this country and, and probably in yours, you know, and, and it never gets much airplay, know, people, you know, don’t, seem to pay a huge amount of attention to type two diabetes. my theory is it’s cause people don’t die of type two diabetes. sounds very

Zoë Harcombe (21:54)
Thank

Peter Brukner (22:06)
for his and what doesn’t admit. People die of all the complications of type 2 diabetes. As we know, type 2 diabetes is the most common cause of blindness, the most common cause of amputations, of kidney disease, of dialysis, of kidney transplants, of cardiovascular disease, of dementia, Alzheimer’s, all these sorts of things, which are the things people die of. They don’t die of the type 2 diabetes. So it sort of gets forgotten a bit and everyone focuses on those things.

Zoë Harcombe (22:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Peter Brukner (22:36)
I was aware that there were some very good programs. Diabetes.co.uk is a terrific program and obviously the VIRTA program in the US. And I sort of kept waiting for someone to produce a program here in Australia and eventually gave up and realized I’d probably have to do it myself. So that was my COVID project. so I got together with Paul Mason, who again, many of your listeners would have seen his videos and so on.

Zoë Harcombe (22:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Peter Brukner (23:05)
and a dietician, Nicole Moore, and we put together this program. It’s not that dissimilar to diabetes.co.uk. It’s just a whole bunch of sort of lessons and videos and articles and meal plans and recipes and a very active Facebook group and all those sort of issues. And you pay an annual subscription. So that’s been really, we can talk a bit more about that later, but that’s been good. And I put out a book.

in relation to that called the diabetes plan, which was a similar, not that dissimilar to the fat lot of good, but just focused particularly on diabetes. that’s really where I’m at now. I guess I’ve sort of pivoted that wonderful COVID word pivoted away out of sports medicine to a large extent and into nutrition more. still do some sports medicine, but I

finished working with professional teams a couple of years ago. I finished with the Australian cricket team in 2017, just before they had their little sandpaper gate problem. Clearly that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there. And then I did a little bit of work with professional football here in Australia. But now I just largely look after an amateur team that I’ve been involved with for years. And just that’s my hobby.

Zoë Harcombe (24:14)
In the World Cup.

Peter Brukner (24:28)
But, and so I don’t see a lot of sports medicine patients, but I have a university position as a professional sports medicine. And what I’ve done at the university is try and mix my two interests, my sports medicine and my nutrition. So we have one PhD student at the moment doing a study on the effect of an anti-inflammatory diet or a carb diet on a knee osteoarthritis, for instance. We have a research interest in that area. So a few things like that. I’m trying to…

get the sports medicine world interested in nutrition and vice versa and so on. So, then a lot of my time now is spent in public health and promoting diet and trying to promote defeat diabetes. yeah, so that was a very long-winded answer, wasn’t it? I’m sorry about that, but that’s my story.

Zoë Harcombe (25:05)
Okay.

That was brilliant. That was brilliant. I was going to ask

you and you kind of got into it when you gave the story about the arthritis and the knee. When you discovered all of this, did you find you just couldn’t resist any team that you were working with? Like, right, everyone, you’ve got to go keto, your stamina is going to get better, your weight is going to get better. Or did you sort of hold back and…

Peter Brukner (25:30)
Well, it was a bit tricky because

I often have a dietitian, know, and didn’t usually agree with what I said. So I sort of kept it pretty low key, but the guys would come to me largely, you know, and ask me about diet. And a lot of the cricketers followed it and benefited from it and so on. yeah, it was a…

Zoë Harcombe (25:39)
yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (26:00)
I didn’t push it too hard, but I didn’t hold back when they asked me and so on. yeah, look, I think when you know something works and when you see how well it works and so on, it’s very hard not to, I try not to ram it down people’s throats. Whenever I go out to dinner, my wife says, now we’re not talking about nutrition. said, no, no, no, within five minutes somebody’s asked me about it and she just rolls her eyes. mean, here we go again. But I do find myself talking about it a lot too.

Zoë Harcombe (26:20)
You

haha

Peter Brukner (26:30)
to my patients, my athletes, just to people who want to talk about it. Last night I gave a talk at one of the very exclusive men’s club in Melbourne that I’m not a member of, I will never be a member of, they asked me to, and there was so much interest. mean, they were just, yeah, it was a panel of three people and I think I got every question bar one. I felt a bit embarrassed the other people didn’t get the questions.

Zoë Harcombe (26:34)
Yeah.

You

Peter Brukner (26:59)
There’s just a lot of interest in it. when you tell your story, it resonates with people and they want to know about it, I think. yeah, I try not ram it down people’s throat, but there’s nothing worse than that. if somebody asks me, well, I’m not going to hold back.

Zoë Harcombe (27:06)
Yeah.

Yeah, they’re going to do

it. I’ve got to share a little story actually, because we used your, I love the little saying sugar by half. I just thought that’s really clever. So Andy’s dad was diagnosed with pre-diabetes and he’s got a really sweet tooth. And Andy just said to him, okay, so we know this guy in Australia and you’re big rugby as well as football and cricket and all the rest of it. So that kind of got dad hooked in. And Andy said, just half all the sugar that you’re having, you know, you’re having a few cups of coffee a day. You’re having a couple of teaspoons of sugar. Just go for one.

and you have a couple of biscuits in the morning, just go for one. And he just found that so easy to do. And then it was like, well, maybe half it again. And he’s now at the point, he’s not having a biscuit in the morning and he’s not having sugar in his drinks anymore. He’s lost over a stone. He’s no longer in any kind of diabetes, pre-diabetes range. And he doesn’t feel he’s had some sort of terrible thing that he’s had to follow.

He’s just found it unbelievably easy. And what it’s done is it’s made him think, why do I even have one biscuit? Do I need a biscuit? It’s just kind of changed his mindset of, that’s just what I do, should that be just what I do? Or should I just halve it or stop it or do something else? And he will then find he has yogurt and berries for dessert rather than something he’s picked up at the supermarket, which quite frankly is full of a lot of other nasties as well. It’s not just the sugar. So I mean, he’s…

It was just so simple in an older person just to say, no, you don’t have to count anything. It’s just really, really easy. So I thought I’d share that with you. So when we used to see each other, particularly at the Public Health Collaboration Conference, you did one of the most popular presentations, which was sort of state of the union, state of the universe, state of anything. And you did a sort of hours roundup of, OK, here’s where we’re at. Are we making any progress?

Peter Brukner (28:41)
Yeah.

Right, well, it’s great to hear,

you

Zoë Harcombe (29:06)
Is the world still completely wedded to the low fat, high carb, any glimmers of sort of optimism? And I know you won’t have done this scientifically because you really used to put a lot of effort into making that presentation. But do you have a sort of feel at the moment for maybe where things are in Australia or maybe where things are in the sports world or a bit wider? Where do you think things are at at the moment?

Peter Brukner (29:32)
Yeah, look, it’s an interesting question, because there are certainly days and times when I think, you know, I’m just bashing my head against a brick wall here and getting nowhere. And then, you know, then you get an email from someone saying, you I just want to say thank you, you’ve changed my life. You know, okay, well, I’ll keep going for another week and another week.

Zoë Harcombe (29:39)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (29:53)
I mean, it’s a little bit hard to gauge because, we’re in the sort of the low carb world and, we talk to colleagues and, you know, we think everyone’s, you know, into low carb, but the reality is obviously they’re not. Look, I think, you know, we’re making progress. I mean, I think, you know, there’s certainly compared to when we, you know, we first sort of met, I think, you know, a lot more people are aware of it. I think a lot of younger people in particular are eating better.

Zoë Harcombe (29:57)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (30:22)
but, there’s an awfully long way to go and there are, there are some huge roadblocks and sadly, I have to say that one of the major roadblocks is my profession is the medical profession. You know, they just, very best way to describe it. I guess they’re very conservative. They’re very wedded to what they’re taught in medical school. And then, you know, they believe that for the rest of their life. And, and they also are not very knowledgeable about nutrition.

Zoë Harcombe (30:34)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (30:51)
I mean, as a medical student, I didn’t get a single lecture that I can remember. Maybe through it, but I think I could. I had a single lecture on nutrition. so doctors know nothing about nutrition. So they tend to sort of to hand over, know, I’ll just go and see the dietician. I’ll just follow the guidelines. The guidelines are a huge impediment. We can come back to that in a minute. so there are lots. so doctors and dieticians, dieticians are the same.

Zoë Harcombe (30:52)
Yeah.

No, you didn’t.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (31:20)
And look, I get it. I understand if you’ve been spruiking one particular sort of school of thought for your whole career, low fat, low fat, low fat, it’s very hard to of suddenly, this Waco sports medicine guy comes along and says, you’re wrong. What would he know? Fair comment. So they’re very reluctant to change and to embrace that. Again, some of the younger ones, the students and the younger ones are, they’re

You’re too scared to say anything because the big bosses are a wedded to it And we still have, in hospitals, we have horrendous diet, food served up in hospitals. And it’s all recommended by the dieticians and so on. So they’re a major impediment as well. Obviously the food industry is incredibly powerful, very clever.

Zoë Harcombe (31:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (32:17)
brilliant at marketing, have a lot of money to spend. And, you know, they don’t want things to change. They’re very happy the way things are, thank you very much. And, they pay lip service to being concerned about health, but with due respect to them, I mean, they have zero interest in health. They’re just interested in profit. And, you know, they’ve worked out that putting cheap, sugary foods together.

Zoë Harcombe (32:38)
Yeah, yep, it’s not their job.

Peter Brukner (32:46)
highly processed and honestly, we shouldn’t even call them food. It’s sort of chemical concoctions dressed up to look and smell and taste like food. And they can do it very cheaply. They market it brilliantly and it’s very easy to cook, easy to heat up and so on. So they’re a huge impediment. And then obviously the pharmaceutical industry as well, who’ve basically the medical.

Zoë Harcombe (32:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (33:15)
professionals being captured really by the pharmaceutical industry. mean, they’re so clever that the medical profession hasn’t even worked it out yet that they’re being captured. really, mean, all the research is funded by them, all education, all that. All our knowledge comes through that pharmaceutical industry. And they obviously know they’re not interested in diet. So it’s very hard to get any research funding for diet because the pharmaceutical industry is the main funder of research.

Zoë Harcombe (33:18)
sketch.

Yep.

Peter Brukner (33:43)
The second one is government. Well, you know, either fund something that’s against the dietary guidelines. So almost impossible to get good research funding. So there are a lot of barriers. So that’s all the negatives. Despite that, you know, I think there is some positives out there. Certainly there is more awareness. I think, you know, there’s a real awareness now that ultra processed food is not

Zoë Harcombe (33:47)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (34:12)
not a good idea that people want to get back to real food and so on. So in Australia, one example that I can give you is we have our overall organization is called Diabetes Australia, which is a sort of semi-government body that runs public health issues and funds a lot of the diabetes programs and things. And when I started on that,

Zoë Harcombe (34:28)
Thank

Peter Brukner (34:42)
to defeat diabetes, I thought, well, I should go and talk to them and tell them what I’m doing and I’m sure they’ll love to hear what I’m doing and so on. So their previous CEO was an ex-pharmacist and he was very negative about diet and we sort of came to blows really verbally anyway. It’s fair to say our two meetings did not end well. so I sort of shrugged my shoulders and thought, well.

they’re not gonna be any use to us. And then about 18 months ago, I got a phone call from the new CEO. And she said, look, I’m coming to Melbourne, I’d love to catch up, can we meet for breakfast? And I thought, well, that’s interesting. So we met for breakfast and she ordered bacon and eggs and I thought, well, that’s a good start.

Zoë Harcombe (35:33)
Whoa, okay.

Peter Brukner (35:37)
And their opening line was, you know, what can we

do to help you? Well, you know, when I got myself up off the floor, you know, you know, so she clearly had been given a mandate to sort of bring, you know, bring diabetes Australia into the, you know, into the 21st century and so on. And, and so we started discussions with them. Interestingly, she said that the thing they get asked about most is diet and they don’t have anything to offer.

Zoë Harcombe (35:41)
Wow.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (36:05)
And I thought, well, we can fix that. so to cut a long story short, we’ve now just recently announced a partnership with Diabetes Australia and Defeat Diabetes, which is quite unheard of really. you know, they’re not saying that everyone should be on a low carb diet, but what they’re saying is that, you know, a low carb diet is an acceptable way to manage diabetes.

Zoë Harcombe (36:07)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (36:33)
your chances of putting diabetes into remission and so on. that’s really big step forward. And it doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a really big step forward. And interestingly, it’s been quite interesting because we’ve got more subscriptions out of it and all that sort of stuff, which is nice, but it’s sort of opened doors. It’s sort of given us credibility all of a sudden that, you’re endorsed by Diabetes Australia. okay then. Well, you must be okay. so…

Different organizations have started talking to us and, you know, private health funds and area, GP areas and things like that. So that’s been a really important turning point, we believe. So, you know, that was great. On the other hand, you know, we had a parliamentary inquiry into diabetes recently and we all made submissions. I made a submission and I actually went round and met with most of the parliamentarians on the committee.

was a committee of 10 of which five were doctors, the only five doctors in the house of reps in Australia. And I met with them, they were all really positive about diet and the role of they all got it, you And then they invited me to appear in front of them at a hearing, which I did, and I got a really good reception. And then the report came out a couple of months ago and it was really disappointing. It just didn’t really address the issues. And I thought,

What a missed opportunity. They talked very vaguely about dietary guidelines being updated, but didn’t make any recommendations or anything like that. So that was really frustrating. So it just shows you how difficult it is to get change. And there’s a review going on at the moment of the Australian dietary guidelines. It’s been going for a couple of years. It’s going to go for another couple of years. They didn’t…

Zoë Harcombe (38:00)
Mm.

Thank

Okay.

Peter Brukner (38:26)
put anyone on the committee that was at all interested in low carb or anything like that, despite one of our people being promised a gig. And I’m not that optimistic about what’s going to come from it. What we’re trying to point out to them is that the current Australian dietary guidelines, and I think this is the case elsewhere as well, are not designed for people with chronic disease. They’re designed for the healthy Australian. Now, there are very few healthy Australians.

Zoë Harcombe (38:42)
Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Brukner (38:56)
And, you know, they don’t, they deliberately, you know, they proudly say, no, you know, these are not for, you know, for people with chronic disease and so on. Well, where are the guidelines for people with chronic disease? I mean, we know they should be the same, whether you have chronic disease or you haven’t. But so I’m not that optimistic that they’re really going to tackle the hard issues. And it’s dominated by dietitians and yeah, we’ll see.

Zoë Harcombe (39:10)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Peter Brukner (39:23)
We’ll keep at it and we’ll keep making submissions to them and so on. it’s just a real battle. It’s just harder than it should be. You know, it’s something that’s so obvious to most of us. And, know, I just feel that improving diet, you know, is a single biggest thing we can do to improve health. I we all want to eat, you know, be healthier, have a healthier nation. mean, Australia is,

Zoë Harcombe (39:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (39:51)
We should be one of the healthiest nations in the world. We’ve got a great climate. We’re a wealthy country. We’ve got lots of fresh food. I mean, we can exercise and we’re one of the fattest countries in the world. And it’s just wrong. yeah, state of the nation, 50-50, good and bad. Could try harder. Exactly. exactly. Well, we’re trying hard, but we’re just not getting as…

Zoë Harcombe (39:53)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Could try harder, it sounds like on that school report, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Peter Brukner (40:21)
I guess we were all a bit naive. We all thought, well, you know, it’s so obvious that it’ll all happen. It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid. you know, just, yeah, it’s bizarre how, you you talk to doctors and diabetes educators and dieticians and you say, well, what’s diabetes? know, diabetes is a disease of carbohydrate intolerance. So what diet are you recommending? High carbohydrate. Why?

Zoë Harcombe (40:25)
It’s so obvious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Brukner (40:51)
Well, you know, can just take more medication, you know, you just take more insulin, take more, I mean, if they just don’t get it, you know, it’s just so obvious. And yet there’s just this cognitive dissonance that they, you know, just refuse. They just don’t want to believe it. And, and that’s enormously frustrating. So I’m sure you can gather my sense of frustration and so on, as I said, small victories, we’re making progress. we’ll get there in the end, you know, it took

Zoë Harcombe (40:55)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (41:20)
took 30 years to convince the world that the tobacco was bad and the tobacco industry was preventing understanding of what was really going on. It’ll probably take 30 years to overcome the influence of the food industry and that’ll just have to become so obvious that no one can deny it. But yeah, we’ll keep bashing away.

Zoë Harcombe (41:38)
Hmm.

Yeah, I mean, that’s very much shared and we share this when we meet at conferences because we’ll have Mariella from Israel and Nina from the US and Tim Noakes from South Africa and you and Gary and Paul and Belinda from Aussie and me and Malcolm and Aseem from the UK and you’ve beautifully listed the obstacles to progress, which is of course the big food industry that doesn’t want anything to change the pharmaceutical industry who’s quite happy if the cricketer takes his steroids and

doesn’t change his diet. And then also this profession that just doesn’t seem to want to come out and say, do you know what, we got it wrong. And it takes real character to say, like you did and like Tim did and like I did and Nina did, Nina and I were vegetarian for 20 years. It takes real character to come out and say, do you know what, I believe that, but I actually now look at the evidence and I think I was wrong. And I don’t know, I mean, those powerful vested interests are not going to…

give up their hold on this. I wonder if it’s going to be legislation. I wonder if, like the tobacco industry, it got to the point where people were saying, do you know what, you knew that smoking caused lung cancer and you carried on promoting it as a healthy thing. And here’s the line in the sand where I can show that you knew. And from that point on, you’re culpable. And I wonder if it is going to be a massive lawsuit that

You, the setters of the dietary guidelines and the promoters of the low-fat diet and you, the Australian Dietetic Association carried on promoting this when you knew it was going to stimulate obesity and diabetes rather than walk me away from diabetes. I can’t see what else is gonna change these big powers. think it’s gotta be the law at some level.

Peter Brukner (43:23)
Yeah, I think you’re right. heard someone make a good comment. said there’s two elements to it, educate and legislate. And they’re both important. But I think you’re right. think legislation is, it’s interesting just the controversy about the sugar taxes around the world. I mean, know you have one in the UK and I think it hasn’t solved all the problems and so on, but it’s had an impact.

Zoë Harcombe (43:31)
Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (43:51)
But we can’t get to the space with it in Australia. The sugar industry is too powerful. The food industry is too powerful. It’s very hard to overcome them because they’ve got so much money and so much influence over politicians and so on. We’ve got to get smarter. We’ve got to spend more time lobbying and talking to politicians and so on. But who pays us when we do that? We’ve got to do it in our spare time.

Zoë Harcombe (44:02)
Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, Yeah.

Peter Brukner (44:18)
I said, I went around the country speaking to all these people on the parliamentary inquiry because I thought, well, I could really have an influence here. Well, I clearly didn’t. I wasted my time and money, but it’s hard. We have very powerful enemies. You don’t want to make it sound like a war, but it sort of is in a way. It’s just so frustrating.

Zoë Harcombe (44:25)
Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Brukner (44:46)
I’m an idealist, I guess. You like to think that everyone actually wants what’s best for people and what’s best for people’s health and so on. But that’s not the case, unfortunately. Money comes before everything. Yeah, it’s tough. What we really need, I reckon, is a prime minister or someone who develops type 2 diabetes and gets cured, puts it into remission with a low-carb diet, and suddenly the light bulb goes on and things happen.

Zoë Harcombe (44:56)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Peter Brukner (45:15)
We sadly, mean, this you know, shouldn’t be the case, but we need high profile people, celebrities, know, influencers, you know, that horrible words, you know, I mean, that’s the way the world works these days, you know, and we, you know, it’s no point us writing letters to the newspaper or, know, doing all, you know, fashion, things like that. You know, I mean, you’ve got to get out there and, and play the game and, and we need, you know, we need people who are prepared to sort of, you know, get out in public and speak about it and talk about their own experiences.

Zoë Harcombe (45:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (45:45)
and talk about and convince others. So I think it’s got to be a ground up, a ground swell up sort of from below. that ground swell is getting bigger and bigger, certainly. And eventually, you’d hope that we’ll have enough influence. So if every person who benefits from a low carb sort of approach, get someone else and they get someone else and eventually we get there, but it’s a slow, way to go.

Zoë Harcombe (45:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’ve spoken about that at conferences as well, actually. You’ve got this sort of pyramid and at the top you’ve got the dietary guidelines and if only they would change those. Everything then just happens below. And then at the bottom you’ve got this bottom-up revolution of, Peter, you’re looking fantastic. What did you do? And then you tell them and then they tell someone else and then they try it. I mean, the obvious, I was thinking then about the prime ministers, the obvious one who was just so obviously diabetic or pre-diabetic. was obviously Boris Johnson.

Peter Brukner (46:25)
Yeah.

us.

Zoë Harcombe (46:41)
And then of course during Covid

we found that people who had metabolic illness were having a worse outcome than those who didn’t. And of course he didn’t have a great time of it. But I mean he just was so unhealthy as a Prime Minister. But he turned out to be a bit of a disaster in all respects. So we should probably move on from him.

Peter Brukner (46:56)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, little aspects. Yeah, yeah.

Zoë Harcombe (47:03)
So your programming,

Peter Brukner (47:04)
Yeah.

Zoë Harcombe (47:04)
obviously the defeat diabetes and the fact that you’ve got this recognition now from this marvelous new CEO who’s more open-minded. How’s that now working in Aussie? Can somebody go into their doctor in Australia and be prescribed your program or do they sign up to it online? Okay.

Peter Brukner (47:18)
Yeah.

They can? Yeah,

all of the above. Yeah. Yeah. So they can sign up online, just defeatdiabetes.com.au. You can get a 14 day free trial and then you can sign up and you get access to everything. So the majority of our subscribers have come that way. They’ve heard about it and we’ve had various publicity and things like that. What’s happening now more and more is that we’re getting GPs in particular.

Zoë Harcombe (47:49)
in.

Peter Brukner (47:49)
but

also diabetes educators and others as health coaches and so on who are recommending it or describing it or saying to people, you go and do this thing. Because really for the average GP, A, they don’t have the knowledge, B, they don’t have the time to talk to someone about that diet. So they need a tool if you like, and this is a tool for

them and they say, know, go away, have a read of this, come back with any questions or, you know, we’ll check your bloods in three months and all that sort of stuff. that’s more and more that’s happening. we’ve just done a research study looking at the efficacy of a hundred patients who were put on this program by their GP and then followed up by their GP. And we’re about to publish that in the next, or submitted it for publication. And when that comes out, hopefully we’ll get some good publicity for that.

Zoë Harcombe (48:35)
Lovely.

Peter Brukner (48:41)
and promote the program even more. But it’s very hard to promote these programs. Social media now has become so restrictive in what you’re allowed to say. Facebook said, you can’t say defeat diabetes because you can’t defeat diabetes. Well, hang on a minute. How do you Facebook know so much about it? so on. So it’s become really difficult. So we get increasing numbers every week. But then whenever we get

Zoë Harcombe (48:51)
Yep. Yep.

wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Brukner (49:11)
some media, know, there’ll be something come out and there’ll be an article in a newspaper or whatever. And we get a massive spike in subscriptions and it goes back to sort of, know, trickle, trickle, trickle. then, you know, we’re hoping when this research study comes out that, you know, the results are so impressive that they’ll, you know, it’ll get quite a lot of publicity and so on. So we’re hopeful that will give us a bit of a boost. yeah, so it’s…

Zoë Harcombe (49:31)
Thank you.

Peter Brukner (49:38)
look, it’s pretty cheap and I think I worked out it’s basically it’s a cappuccino or fortnight as far as cost. you know, it’s not too expensive and people get great results. we have, you know, over half the people on the program put their diabetes into a non-diabetic sort of state, you know, so they will start off with their bloods over a certain level of the diabetic level and then within three months they’re below that level.

Zoë Harcombe (49:59)
Wow.

Peter Brukner (50:05)
It’s very, very effective. as is the diabetes.co.uk program and the VIRTA programs. we know these things work. mean, every country has shown that if you reduce carbohydrate intake and reduce processed foods and so on, you have enormous health benefits. mean, it’s so obvious, captain obvious as they say. But yeah, so we’re battling away and we’ll get there. We’ll get there.

Zoë Harcombe (50:13)
Yeah.

Yep.

Hey, but, brilliant.

I was going to say, of course, you know, in the UK, the trials that we do over here come from Newcastle University and Professor Roy Taylor, and Roy Taylor is determined to put people on a maximum of 800 calories a day, coming in the form of liquid.

soups and shakes that are provided by a company that he or at least some other people working on the program have got some conflicts with and that’s the thing that gets pushed in the UK so it’s just relentless the soups and shakes diet for putting diabetes into remission they’re starving

Peter Brukner (50:45)
Shake Sam.

and I’ll…

That’s crazy. mean, yes, it’s effective.

I mean, it’s effective, sure. Great. A, it shakes. It’s 800 calories a day. I really, I defy anyone to stay on that for too long. eventually, you want to eat. I I like eating. I don’t know about you, but I actually want to eat. I want to enjoy my eating. so, yeah, I could go on an 800 calorie a day diet, but I mean, I’d be

Zoë Harcombe (51:11)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I do as well, yeah.

Peter Brukner (51:28)
I’d be hungry and angry and it’s just not sustainable. I think that’s why the low carbohydrate approach is so successful because you’re not hungry because carbs are the things that make you hungry and fats and proteins feed you up. It’s got that massive advantage. Yes, low calorie diet will do it. Low fat, low calorie, you’ll lose weight, but it’s just not sustainable and you’re miserable.

Zoë Harcombe (51:29)
Yeah, hangry, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (51:58)
Yeah, I mean, my idea of dinner is not having a shake. know, my idea is going out and having a nice steak with some, you know, some nice green veg and, yeah, I’m just thinking about it. Anyway.

Zoë Harcombe (52:02)
you

Thanks.

Andy’s…

Andy’s lamb on the patio in rare good weather in Wales because you did come to stay with us once.

Peter Brukner (52:17)
Indeed,

indeed. Yes, I was fortunate enough to spend a few days with Zoë and Andy and I don’t think I’ve eaten that well for her for long time. was wonderful.

Zoë Harcombe (52:27)
Well, we had Nina as well, I remember. don’t know why it just sort of both of you said, let’s stay and it’s like, right, let’s have a party. Let’s just, just stay at the same time. Just, just touching back on one of the things when you said that somebody approached you about the bipolar and you said, obviously, you know, lot more of that has come out recently, particularly with the work that Dr. Georgia Ede has done. Did you then go and look into that any further or was it just kind of, this diet helps with everything?

Peter Brukner (52:29)
I did, I did. Yeah.

Yep.

Well, you know, it’s interesting. mean, more and more things that you read about, you talk to people. It sounds sort of bizarre to say it works for everything. It’s magic. it does work for most chronic disease. I’ve put people with Parkinson’s on it. I’ve put Alzheimer’s people on it, bipolar, depressed people, bowel issues, lot of irritable bowel issues, liver issues.

Zoë Harcombe (53:04)
Yeah.

does.

Peter Brukner (53:22)
I have to sort stop myself sometimes because really every chronic disease, if we look at chronic diseases, they’re basically due to some combination of insulin resistance, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and abnormal microbiome. What’s the one thing that improves all four of those components? It’s a low carbohydrate, healthy fat diet.

Zoë Harcombe (53:45)
Yeah.

Peter Brukner (53:51)
quite remarkable. And look, it doesn’t help absolutely everyone. I’ve certainly had people with, know, chronic disease, probably hasn’t made a huge difference to you, by gosh, it’s, it’s certainly the most effective thing as a doctor. It’s certainly the most effective thing that I’ve had, you know, weapon that I’ve had in my hands to help people with chronic disease, you know, all the drugs, all the prescription pads, you know, I mean, none of them, they just keep things at bay, you know, they,

Zoë Harcombe (54:08)
was fun.

Yeah.

Peter Brukner (54:19)
they sort of reduce the symptoms, but they don’t solve the problem. Whereas, you know, the dietary approach actually gets to the heart of the problem and improves it. but if only, you know, only we could convince enough people of that.

Zoë Harcombe (54:21)
Yeah.

Yeah, do you ever go off piste Do you ever get tempted and fancy a croissant or a few beers or something or just?

Peter Brukner (54:38)
yeah, well, you know, one of my boys has been living in Paris and you know, I have a croissant. It’s that French paradox, isn’t it? know, somehow when you eat a croissant in Paris, it doesn’t seem to be too bad. no, well, the French have the lowest rate of heart disease in Europe. And it’s known as the French paradox. And I think, you know, it’s probably because they have all that nice butter and, you know, cream and things like that. yeah, no, look, I’m not, you know, I’m not a sort of a…

Zoë Harcombe (54:50)
doesn’t count. I like that. Absolutely.

Peter Brukner (55:09)
absolutely, know, warrior that, you know, if I go out to dinner, you know, and I go to someone’s house for dinner and I refuse to eat, you know, I I eat what I’m given and, know, but, you know, 95 % of the time when I’m at home and then, you know, I have a choice. I’m pretty, pretty good with my diet. I like, know, the odd, you know, the odd creme brulee or, you know, something like that, you know, once in a blue moon. It’s fun, you know, so now I’m not.

Zoë Harcombe (55:36)
right.

Peter Brukner (55:37)
I’m not too nasty, but you know, can enjoy and I enjoy my food. You know, I really enjoy eating, you know, and, and, know, that’s unfortunate. One of the people had this perception that, if you’re on a diet, you you, you know, you’ve got to eat lettuce leaves a day. That’s, that’s about all. But you know, we can, the great advantage of this way of eating is that you can eat really well and still, and still be healthy. That’s, that’s a bonus to me.

Zoë Harcombe (55:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brilliant. So it’s evening your time, it’s very early over here. I’m very conscious of getting you back to your lovely family. Is there anything we haven’t covered? Anything you wanted to say that I haven’t given you the chance to say?

Peter Brukner (56:08)
This is Srot.

Nah, nah, that’s fine.

gosh,

no, no, no, just to keep up the good work. I I’d love getting your newsletter every Monday and it pops into my mailbox about 10 o’clock at night, you know, and I shouldn’t do this, but I sort of lie in bed and read it on my phone. They say you shouldn’t do that. That’s not good for your sleep. But anyway, I still sleep. yeah, that’s my Monday night activity.

Zoë Harcombe (56:32)
Ha

Peter Brukner (56:40)
So keep that, keep that going. That’s a, it’s a wonderful, you know, contribution that, that you make. And yeah, thank you for having me. It’s been, it’s been a pleasure. can’t believe it’s been an hour. I’ve got to stop talking so much, but anyway, it’s I’m sorry.

Zoë Harcombe (56:51)
It’s been brilliant. I knew on this one I wasn’t going to need to ask too many questions. There’s ones I did. No, no, no, those

brilliant. The ones I did recently on the Myers-Briggs and personality type. So you know when you’ve got someone with a preference for introversion, it’s sort of like ask a question. It’s like, I’ve done that now. And then ask another question. I just knew with you. Just point the microphone and off we go. So it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Peter Brukner (57:04)
yes, yeah.

You

Yeah, dude.

Zoë Harcombe (57:18)
Lucky you heading into spring as we’re heading into autumn. It’s freezing and horrible already. So yeah, enjoy

Peter Brukner (57:19)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, dear. I’m sorry.

Zoë Harcombe (57:26)
the spring as some and hopefully see you at conference real soon.

Peter Brukner (57:30)
Look forward to it. Thanks, Zoë

Zoë Harcombe (57:31)
Brilliant, thanks so much.