So, I was fascinated to learn over the weekend that scientists have developed a miracle drug that could do all this for me?! Isn’t Big Pharma just wonderful?
Well, not quite as this magic pill costs £220 a month per patient and with Type 2 on the rampage in the UK, with at least 4.5 million affected, the cost to the public purse could be in the region of 12 BILLION a year.
Isn’t big Pharma wonderful and guess who gets all this dosh? Yes, Big Pharma!
I have a “slightly” radical idea for our government. How about changing the dietary guidelines, stop treating type 2 diabetes as if it is a chronic disease and start promoting real food made from scratch, rather than the processed muck that is literally killing millions around the world.
The main culprit of course is the crack cocaine of food which is sugar. Highly addictive and of no nutritional value so we need more than a soft unenforceable sugar tax to cut its usage.
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A useful start would be for the Conservatives never to repeat the money grabbing antics of their Manchester Party conference last year when they were sponsored by sugar company, Tate and Lyle! The stinking hypocrisy of the then Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt preaching about childhood obesity whilst wearing a lanyard with Tate and Lyle written all over it is beyond words.
If sugar and sugary drinks like Coke are so bad for the nation’s children the solution is simple ban it in the UK completely. Or at least put the same health warnings including graphic photos as they did with tobacco, all over the product.
Because that is the point I and many others believe that the sugar/glucose/corn oil scandal will prove to be much bigger than the tobacco scandal ever was.
Everybody knows sugar is terrible for you and the root cause of obesity, type 2 and many Doctors and Scientists now believe it is linked with cancers, heart attack and strokes.
So, our politicians need to stop waffling, wake up and smell the coffee, say no to sugar and get moving to ban all sugary drinks immediately.
Of course, a sugar tax is a useful tool but too often it is seen by the population as the nanny state intervening and controlling our lives so this is why we need a massive education promotion put in place at the same time as any tax or ban.
We need to bring back real domestic science or cooking lessons into schools, we need public information films and we need to immediately ban any advertising by sugar or junk food firms of our major sports.
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It is a national disgrace that Mars and McDonald’s sponsor the FA and the England football teams. It is also disgusting that one of our greatest ever football players, Gary Lineker, is a junk food pusher with his Walkers crisp adverts.
These sporting stars should be pushing the line of the danger of sugar and processed food rather than funnelling cash into their own pockets from these Big food companies.
Similarly, the myth of calories in calories out needs to be shown up for the propaganda it is. As the South African marathon runner and Professor, Tim Noakes says, “you cannot out run a bad diet.”
The similarities with tobacco and cigarette advertising in the fifties and sixties are incredible when you stop to think about it. Remember they promoted fags as healthy glamourous and good for you too!
The dietary advice given out by the NHS and most developed countries health regimes need changing immediately too.
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They are based on flawed, dare I say it corrupt science, from the Seventies which demonised animal fats, meat and full fat diary and cheese and instead replaced it with grains, breads, cereals and corn oil along with highly manufactured and processed foods like margarine.
Is it any wonder that to this day that the most powerful political lobbying groups are Big Pharma and Big Food especially the Corn lobby in the USA?
Jacques Peretti in his brilliant documentary series, “The Men who made us Fat” illustrates how the corn lobby and soft drink manufacturers, with the aid of Nixon’s Government created obesity forty years ago. The tragedy is this has now become a global phenomenon and Politicians are still refusing to confront it.
As this propaganda myth of high animal fat being bad for your health grew the food industry responded by producing all kinds of low-fat foods and we the public quite happily lapped it up, not realising that in the majority of cases low fat was shorthand for high sugar.
So, the idea of the “balanced plate” was developed from this flawed science. Then twenty years later diabetics like me were advised that a third of the plate should be starchy carbs. That processed vegetable and corn oils were better than butter and that a white jacket potato was much healthier for me then one stuffed full of cheese and butter.
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Now, with my new-found knowledge, I realise I would have been better off just eating the cheese and butter! Potatoes and indeed rice, of all kinds, and of course pasta spike your blood sugar like nothing else, you may as well just pour the deadly white stuff straight down your throat from the packet.
If you think I am being hysterical using the term Big Food just take a glance at this report from Oxfam in 2014 that illustrates clearly that 10 companies control all the food we eat.
I am a firm believer in eating a low carb, high fat diet (LCHF). So, for the last 12 months I have not touched, pasta, rice, bread, cereals or any vegetable that grows under the ground apart from onions. I have eaten a fry up of bacon, sausage 2 fried eggs in butter most mornings and things like blue cheese salad for lunch. In the evening I have had steak or fish with mushrooms and usually wash it all down with a large glass of red wine. Snacks have included pork scratchings for the fat and salt intake.
People are amazed at my weight loss and of course I have reversed all of my illnesses and I am now off all meds. I have never felt better and many of my friends reckon I look 20 years younger and do you know what? It was simple, so simple in fact that I have set up a website to help other fatties like myself and I have called it www.simpleasfat.com
What unites us is that we have taken back control of our lives and destinies by ignoring health guidelines and investigating our own illnesses via the internet. What also unites us is a belief that too much sugar in the Western diet has led to all of these chronic diseases. The so called LCHF way of living is now gaining traction with top cardiologists like Dr Aseem Malhotra advocating this style of living. He is not alone as top medical experts like Dr David Unwin, Professor Tim Noakes and Sarah Hallberg are also fully behind these dietary changes. It is even gaining popularity with Hollywood stars like Halle Berry, and the Kardashians.
And why not, after all, it is only saying eat real food, ignore things with a label on them and cook from scratch like your mum use to!
That should be music to our ears and to the ears of Governments around the world. The only problem being of course is there isn’t as much profit in this for Big Food and Big Pharma and quite simply these two are not giving up their market share without a fight.
However, if people can lose weight and reverse these chronic diseases you would think that the NHS would be queuing up to adopt these methods especially as many agree with Professor Tim Noakes that this sort of diet could literally save the NHS. No there are no words or an amount of money missing from that statement he actually means it could literally save the entire NHS!
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So why aren’t our government not getting behind this?
Could it be that individual Politicians have vested interests in Big Food, Big Pharma and Sugar?
After my journey, these past 12 months, I don’t think we can trust our policymakers to put public health before profits and I agree with Professor Tim Noakes who in an article in the South African Times in 2017 stated that the present dietary guidelines used worldwide would be “remembered in history as a Genocide.”
It is crystal clear to me that Tate and Lyle sponsoring the Tory conference was just the tip of a very big, sugary iceberg.
The views and opinions expressed by Jon Gaunt are those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
