With the click of a mouse, I just muted the last conventional dietician I was following on Twitter. In a strange way, this was troubling, as social media has created all kinds of micro-bubbles where we go to have our own views reinforced and opposing views derided. Not only is this bad for society, where we must learn to co-exist with people who see the world differently to us, but, on a personal level, we are now locked into a box from which we never learn anything new or confront any challenging ideas.
By any metric, however, it is clear that dietetics is a failed discipline. Australians are fatter and sicker than ever before and have become a human version of Pottengers cats, subsisting on a diet of almost exclusively highly processed food and, in the process, developing a broad cohort of the diseases of modern civilisation - diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, infertility (to name but a few).
We are surrounded by the big bad three of Big Food - sugar, grain and industrial seed oil. Virtually every processed or packaged food in Australia contains these ingredients and the average cafe meal - and Aussies eat a lot of cafe meals - consists almost entirely of sugar, grain and industrial seed oil prepared in a variety of different forms but essentially the same. Processed food is too prevalent, too cheap, too heavily marketed and too addictive regardless of what dieticians posit.
Human evolutionary biology has been hijacked by big food. Our modern DNA is little if at all changed from that of hunter-gatherers, and if you were a hunter-gatherer, the best thing you could do to ensure your survival and ability to produce off-spring was overeat and gain fat while food was plentiful. This was required to see people through lean times. Enter the modern world where there is never a lean time and "food" is engineered to NOT meet our dietary needs while producing the release of hormones and neuroreceptors which cause us to eat more and more of those "foods."
Conventional dieticians, however, have some kind of magic screen around them whereby they ignore these facts and preach the concept of moderation denying that food addiction exists. If moderation worked, we would not be getting fatter and sicker, and Big Food would not be raking in billions of dollars in profit.
Avoiding junk food (anything made from sugar, grain and industrial seed oil) is exceedingly difficult in the current Australian environment. In practice, this means never eating in a cafe or restaurant, cooking every meal at home, scrutinising every food label (did you know that vegetable stock in Australia has added sugar) and being subjected to a barrage of advertisement meant to send you scurrying for the newest flavour of Tim Tam. In some small towns, it is virtually impossible to buy unprocessed food in the local grocery store.
Instead of giving people permission to eat sugar, grains and industrial seed oils in moderation, dieticians need to be empowering people to say NO to all of the above; to recognise that, for many humans, it is exceedingly difficult to moderate our intake of highly processed foods and abstinence is a better, and ultimately more successful concept. After all, no-one ever developed a nutritional deficiency from eating a real food diet.
Big Food has rigged the system to produce failure at every turn for those who try to abstain from processed foods. Dieticians who decry food addiction, preach moderation and claim that "all foods can fit" are simply spouting industry nonsense and failing the people they are supposed to be helping. But then again, what should we expect from a discipline that has spent literally decades failing so egregiously and spectacularly?
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