Or how the food industry demonised animal products to sell more cereal.
This is Dr John Harvey Kellogg, the cornflakes guy. Devout vegetarian and Seventh Day Adventist.
His influence on dietary rule books and guidelines that were adopted by many governments and health departments across the globe cannot be underestimated and almost certainly started the war on animal and saturated fats and meat consumption that can still be heard echoing through GP clinics and cardiology consulting rooms today.
Cut down red meat, only eat lean meat (if any) eat your 5 fruit and veg a day and don’t forget the healthy grains and cereals.
Coincidentally at the same time Dr Kellogg was preaching a vegetarian/vegan diet and that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, was around the time that obesity, diabetes and a whole host of serious inflammatory diseases took hold across the globe.
Despite study after study after study that shows animal fat doesn’t make you fat, read meat doesn’t give you bowel cancer, LDL cholesterol in eggs doesn’t clog your arteries, the 100 year old vegetarian biased rule book is still closely protected by dietary guideline associations around the globe. It’s become the accepted norm even though it recommends the opposite of what I did by turning the food pyramid on it’s head.
Ditching the sugar, grains, starchy vegetables and seed oils in favour of plenty of red meat, bacon, butter, eggs and dairy has shown time and time again that the opposite of conventional dietary guidelines results in much better health outcomes.
You only have to search through low carb, lchf and even the more extreme carnivore twitter communities to see the long term results people are getting.
Many experience what I did. Fast fat loss, reversal of type 2 diabetes, normalisation of hypertension (blood pressure), less inflammation, better skin, elimination of brain fog. The list goes on and on.
The truth is, the low fat, high carbohydrate diet guidelines were never based in science or even fact. They were an ideology pushing cereals and grains. Remind me what Dr Kellogg sold again.
The food and pharmaceutical industry have driven the dietary guidelines for decades. They implore you to buy the stuff that makes you fat and sick and then buy the pills to treat the symptoms (never the cause).
Where did the low fat advice come from?
It all started with the Temperance movement, the SDA church and their mission to turn the world vegetarian. Ellen G White leader of the church held views that temperance, abstinence from meat and animal products should be the basis for social, health and religious reform and that would quell the lustful thoughts she deemed were rampant at the time. Cornflakes were essentially invented in an attempt to stop masturbation.
Between 1848 and 1914 she had over 2000 “visions” regarding the evils of alcohol, tobacco and animal products, insisting grains, fruits and vegetables were the only things God intended us to eat. The statement that red meat gives you cancer was the product of one of these visions in the 1860s. Ellen White’s writings form much of the teachings of the current SDA church which reaches deep into many medical establishments and research organisations.
They seem to work very hard to prove the visions of Ellen G White to be fact.
Her work was taken over by Lenna Frances Cooper another SDA church member and lifelong vegetarian who wrote textbooks on dietetics that were adopted by many dietary associations around the world. As an ex military dietician, her work was held in much higher regard that they might have been if her ideology was more widely understood.
The American Dietetic Association vegetarian position was established and reviewed by 9 people in the mid 1980’s. 8 of the panel were vegetarian, 5 were also 7th day adventists. The only non vego on the panel had strong links to the processed food industry.
While Kelloggs is now a publicly owned company, Sanitarium here in Australia is the largest breakfast cereal manufacturer, a massive company which is fully owned by the 7th Day Adventist church and subsequently because of their status pays no tax.
So what happened to the meat?
In the 1940’s meat and dairy were front and centre of dietary guidelines. This continued until the mid 1960’s when grains and bread started to gain prominence.
By 1992 the food pyramid we know today emerged with grains and cereals making up the bulk of the recommendations followed by fruit and veg, with meat and dairy being placed in the pointy end of the pyramid (ie eat less)
What everyone assumes is highly researched health advice has it’s roots in the visions of a woman with the view that the world should be vegetarian and the world’s medical and dietary authorities whether knowingly or not have bought the lie lock stock and two smoking barrels.
Now I’m not a nutritionist, or a doctor but I know what worked for me.
It’s not this:
Image Source: Copyright © 2008. For more information about The Healthy Eating Pyramid, please see The Nutrition Source, Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, www.thenutritionsource.org, and Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, by Walter C. Willett, M.D., and Patrick J. Skerrett (2005), Free Press/Simon & Schuster Inc.”
The healthy fats like soy and corn are typically rancid by the time you get them, full of mold spores and hyper inflammatory. Forget the whole grains, fruit, starchy veg and seeds. It’s only when you get up into fish and poultry that us carb dodgers start to get interested.
The Dairy layer is all good as is the pinnacle of red meat and butter. I fully agree that the right hand side of the top triangle (excluding the salt) should be avoided at all costs.
So there you have it, the real reason we’re told to eat up our cornflakes and stop eating meat.
No thanks.
Take care.
P.S. I found out about this stuff after watching a video by Belinda Fettke on the Low Carb Down Under Youtube channel. I was pretty stunned. Look it up, it’s worth a watch (apart from the singing)
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