Not Just Sugar

Breakfast - Delicious

The problem is bigger than sugar in the diet. All of the vegetable based foods we eat have a little carbohydrate in them. Grains are especially high in energy and despite all you've been told, relatively low in nutrition value. Grains are low cost, sources of calories. If you want to buy calories rather than nutrition grains are clearly the obvious best source.

Grain based foods are profitable. Take corn, the cheapest food on the planet, convert it into crunchy flakes, add some sugar and sell it for ten times what it costs to produce. There are hundreds of versions of that model, sold as bread, muffins, buns, biscuits, cakes, pasta, pastries, the sort of thing most people eat all the time. So much so that people can't imagine living without ANY of those foods.

For 30 years I ate a non-cooked breakfast. Muesli (sometimes with honey), low-fat yoghurt and fruit, with added low-fat milk. Occasionally supplemented by toast, margarine and peanut butter. This breakfast has a Heart Foundation good health "tick." Sadly, it's not healthy.

Visceral fat causes organ malfunction

Today, none of that content is part of my breakfast. My aim at breakfast is not to stimulate the production of insulin. Instead, I want to effectively continue my overnight fast, and also to eat well. The basis of breakfast is fatty meat and eggs. Vegetables are a desirable addition, avocado, tomatoes, mushrooms, kale, silver beet, or even lettuce. Offal meats or seafoods are a welcome addition.

If I eat any food at all with higher carbohydrate content, during the day, it's likely to be at dinner, in the evening. The only problem I have is at business meetings, morning or afternoon teas. Typically no real food is ever provided. Sometimes you can't even get real butter. This is disgraceful, but that's what's easy to do, and it's become what people expect. Obesity isn't in the person, it's in our whole society, in the way we all think. In what we all accept as "normal."

So we get fat, by making wrong dietary choices, sometimes because we seem to have no option. The most damaging fatness is invisible. Visceral fat; that is the fat created by your liver that collects inside and around your internal organs. As this fat builds up your organs find it more and more difficult to be efficient. Fatty liver has no symptoms until it gets quite serious, but that's 20 years after the problem began. We don't know how many people at age 50 have nor-alcoholic fatty liver disease, because we never test for it, but maybe almost everyone. Dr Tim Noakes tells us that it's probably the most under-diagnosed problem in medicine.

On the basis of current statistics, young people today will live shorter lives than their parents. They are fat 20 years earlier than their parents, and huge numbers are diabetic. This is entirely unnecessary. But to make effective change, our whole society has to develop quite different ideas about what a healthy diet looks like.

John Stephen Veitch