The headlines mentioned above and hundreds of others like them arose because of the publication of research titled “Red Meat Consumption and Mortality Results From 2 Prospective Cohort Studies” Frank B. Hu, MD et al, in the Archives of Internal Medicine. This newly published study is in fact, based on data from two older studies: the “Nurses’ Health Study” and the “Health Professional’s Follow-up Study”.

The controversial suggestion of this recent study is that a single daily serving of unprocessed red meat was associated with a 13% increased risk of death and a single daily serving of processed red meat was associated with a 20% increased risk of death. Again terrifying information if this were actual scientific fact rather than just hypothesis.

The diet data used to create this hypothesis was self reported (problematic in itself) by participants, by way of Food Frequency questionnaires filled out (only) once every four years between the 1980s and 2006. Research carried out in this manner is actually an “observational study”, observational studies can only suggest hypotheses they cannot “prove” anything.

Only double or triple-blinded randomized controlled trials (RCT) can actually prove causation. So the BBC’s headline “Red meat increases death, cancer and heart risk, says study” is inaccurate, there is a small but critical word missing, the word “may”. A hypothesis is a long way from fact, it is only the first step up the ladder of scientific enquiry, and a hypothesis has to be repeatedly proven through RCTs to become fact.

There are real and great dangers from assuming anything from observational studies as history bears witness. Researchers have previously made very serious errors when assuming too much about observational study data, including when data previously mined from the Nurses’ Health Study (yes the same one as used in the red meat research above). In 1991, the New England Journal of Medicine published an observational study that stated, “Current estrogen use is associated with a reduction in the incidence of coronary heart disease as well as in mortality from cardiovascular disease” this was used to back the claim that hormone replacement therapy and women taking estrogen decreased their risk of heart disease by 50%.

When the results of real RCTs were published on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) a few years later it was discovered that the reverse was true and HRT increased the risk of heart disease by 29%. Taking observational studies seriously and reporting them as fact may well damage the health of the public.

Furthermore there were many variables within the research that also showed a correlation with death rates (activity levels, alcohol intake, BMI and many others), and yet these were not factored out of the equation to isolate red meat as the determining risk factor.

Other variables also went unaccounted for, for some reason the “unprocessed meat” category included pork sandwiches, hamburgers and lamb curries. How hamburger meat can be passed off as unprocessed meat is incredulous. And as the study didn’t track refined grains that would be included in sandwiches and hamburger buns, it is scientifically impossible to claim that it is the red meat in isolation that correlates with risk of death, it is just as possible to suggest  that the unaccounted for refined grains were the real risk factor hidden within the statistics.

To demonstrate the lack of value in drawing any significant conclusions from the research in question we would point you to research carried out at the Harvard School Of Public Health and published in Circulation in 2010 titled, “Red and processed meat consumption and risk of incident coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes mellitus: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” Micha R, Wallace SK, Mozaffarian D. which although it is a meta-analysis that included the data of observational trials, at least also included data from genuine randomized trials too and found that red meat consumption was NOT associated with coronary heart disease or diabetes mellitus- the opposite hypothesis from that presented on March 12th.

The March 12th media storm over the red meat study was poorly and even dangerously reported even by some of the most respected international news outlets. The authors of The ONE Diet continue to wholeheartedly endorse the regular consumption of grass fed red meat for all its well known and established health benefits as detailed in The ONE Diet. The authors of The ONE Diet do not endorse or recommend the consumption of processed meat of any type due to the poor quality meat and chemical additives used to produce industrial processed meat.

Georges Philips and Simon Shawcross, co-authors of The ONE Diet were recently interviewed by Jimmy Moore on The Livin’ Low Carb Show. This is an informative and entertaining interview that details the philosophy behind The ONE Diet.

You can listen to the interview for free now by clicking here.

BPA leaches into consumer foods and liquids from plastic food storage containers, tableware, water bottles and from the internal coating of food cans. When inside the human body, BPA acts as a strong synthetic estrogen (a female sex hormone) and even low doses may cause increased fat storage in humans, due to BPA’s effect on the pancreas. The pancreas is the organ that produces insulin when we eat to help shuttle the energy derived from our food, into our cells for storage.

Studies show that up to 90% of people in developed nations now have enough BPA in their blood to cause the pancreas to release almost double the amount of insulin than under normal circumstances. This excess release of insulin causes more glucose to be stored as body fat. Overtime the situation worsens with BPA becoming a risk factor for obesity, type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders in humans. Canada declared BPA a toxic substance in 2010.

Our top tips for avoiding BPA and other plastic toxins in food:

• Minimize your use of canned foods

• Consumer plastics usually display a recycle code with a single number between 1- 7.

Do your best to avoid plastics with the code numbers below:

Recycle code 3 (plastics) – typically found on clear food packaging and bottles used to contain cooking oil.

Recycle code 6 (polystyrene) – found on disposable cups, plates and pre-packed meat trays.

Recycle code 7 (other plastics) - often used for water bottles and baby bottles.

• Avoid microwaving food and drink in plastic containers.

•  For storage and heating of food and liquids, use Pyrex, glass or stainless steel whenever possible.

• Some plastic based storage containers, bags, wraps, water bottles and baby bottles are BPA free and are promoted as such, seek these out if you are going to use plastics.

• Whenever possible buy fresher foods that are not pre-packed. For example, buy meat, fish and cheese from their respective counters at the supermarket, or from a butcher, cheese seller or fishmonger. In addition, buy loose fresh fruit and vegetables rather than those packed in plastics.

At the same time the modern world makes many of us far more conscious of our appearance in ways that previous generations are unlikely to have experienced to the degree we do now. The celebrity culture that permeates our world holds up people who look “beautiful” (maybe) as aspirational models regardless of the fact they may be psychological train wrecks whose egos need to be continually propped up.The women are often painfully skinny and sculpted by the surgeons knife, even before the tricks of lighting, make up and photoshop are utilised to present an image of so called perfection that the rest of us inherently compare ourselves to. The men that adorn the covers of health and fitness magazines have body-fat percentages that are so low as to be unobtainable by 90% of the population with muscles that have been artificially swollen by steroids and prohormones. These select men and women are used to make the rest of us feel somehow inadequate, a feeling of inadequacy that is manipulated more often than not to sell us something- the something that we believe (usually subconsciously) may make us whole and happy as individuals.

We all want on some level to take care of ourselves and look good, to look and feel our best. It is an error is to look outside ourselves in the first place and  compare ourselves to another- either we will view ourselves as superior, inferior or equal to and a direct competitor of the person we are judging ourselves against. This mindset does us no favors.

You are a unique individual, with a unique genetic code, a complete one-off and this is to be celebrated and enjoyed. We are offering a diet book, a book which we believe will enable you to look and feel your best and do this whilst reinforcing and boosting your health. Weight loss if that is a goal for you, is rarely painless, changes to eating patterns and lifestyle usually need to be made to ensure success, we are not offering a miracle, there is no pill that is going to make you look like the next supermodel, movie star, athlete……………… (enter icon of your choice).

What you can do is become the best version of yourself possible with your genetics and your psychological drive (the goal has to be of greater value to you than the instant hit of gorging yourself continually on the next pack of cookies). Perfection is not a worthy goal as perfection doesn’t exist, you may well, from time to time eat some foods which aren’t in your best interest or have an extra glass of wine or two. We are humans not machines, we are people not photos on the cover of a magazine, we are individuals not superheroes on celluloid. Enjoy the ride and make sure you are the one in the driving seat.

Those who fail in their weight loss resolutions tend to have one of the following issues; they adopt the wrong diet plan, they are duped by the “miracle” weight loss industry, they over rely on exercise, or they approach weight loss with a mindset designed to fail.

With such a vast array of diets to choose from, some would-be dieters minimize their chances of success by simply selecting an ineffective or unrealistic diet. Others may fall prey to the charlatans of the “miracle weight loss industry”, who sell all manner of supplements and “fat-burning” pills, promising quick overnight weight loss and that “fabulous figure”.

It needs to be clear that successful weight loss is 90% about what you eat and only 10% about any exercise you may do. However, during January over-eager individuals populate the gym and pound the streets, desperately trying to fit a years’ worth of exercise into a single month, in order to lose weight.

Very few of those people are still exercising regularly after a month or two, due to physical burnout and lack of results. Sadly, these peoples’ focus is misplaced. You simply cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. The average person would have to run 35 miles to burn off a single pound of body fat.

In this interview Simon Shawcross gives advice and tips for starting The ONE Diet to ensuring that your New Years resolution to lose weight happens.

JIMMY MOORE, THE MAN WHO CHANGED…                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

It’s rare to find a diet and health “guru” who is so honest and thoughtful in the weight loss industry today.  And yet here is Jimmy Moore the man who transformed himself from a weighty 410 pounds to a much more healthy 230 pounds in the space of a single year and since then has spent eight years helping others to do the same. If there is anyone who can appreciate the nutritional and psychological challenges that we face when losing weight it is Jimmy.

When someone loses that much weight in such a short period of time it tends to attract other people’s attention, and rightly so. In 2011 when so many are suffering from health issues caused by the typical modern diet on the one hand and are left confused by a bewildering variety of “miracle” methods to lose weight on the other, we need individuals who have succeeded to help light the path forward, to show us it can be done.

When looking to lose weight in many ways the odds are stacked against us. We face a continual blitz of sophisticated marketing designed to make us want more of the cheap-to-manufacture, high-profit-margin, refined/ processed foods that are swelling us up and sucking the life out of us at the same time. We face confusing, contradictory and incorrect nutritional guidelines promoted by government “health” agencies and impressively named nutritional organizations, that are little more than a front for (and more often than not often funded by) the mega-food corporations (the companies behind most of the products on our supermarket shelves like Nestle, Kellog and Kraft). These mega-corps also happen to fund much of the nutritional “research” that you will read about in your daily paper/ major internet news outlet.

On a personal level, we also face our own psychological issues about our weight and our ability to lose it, about our personal power to take control of our health. We need to be prepared and equipped with practical tools to change or refine these subconscious beliefs. We also need individuals like Jimmy Moore who have overcome all of these challenges and who act as beacons to remind us of what can be achieved with the right information and the right mindset.

Here is an excerpt from Jimmy Moore’s review of  The ONE Diet:

“…Weight loss is a very difficult and many times incredibly emotional experience for people. It’s not just a matter of eating less and exercising more while mustering up enough willpower to resist the urge to eat. This goes so much deeper than that and THE ONE DIET authors Georges Philips and Simon Shawcross dive head first into this topic to help open the eyes of those who may not realize calories aren’t the whole picture…”

To read the rest of Jimmy’s insightful review go to this amazon.com page.

Jimmy’s story is inspirational and he provides a wealth of excellent information so take a moment to benefit from the fantastic resources he provides here.

Have just read this article by Rob Lyons over at City A.M. and we wanted to tease the best out of it.

ROB writes:

BIG Food is widely regarded as the polar opposite of good food. Big food companies, we are told by campaigners and celebrity chefs, produce poor quality, waistline-busting, environment-wrecking, small-farmer-bankrupting products. The supermarkets allegedly destroy communities to sell rubbish to zombified shoppers. Industrial agriculture gives us nutrient-lite, flavourless, chemical-soaked food produced in a shockingly wasteful manner. Fast-food restaurants produce bland, homogenised, artery-clogging, street-littering meals.

These ideas get repeated so often that even among people who are generally in favour of the free market and big business they have a certain purchase. But I think this litany of misery bears little relationship to reality.

WE say:

The majority of “food” sold by Big Food companies is usually the polar opposite of good food (see: the cereal aisle, the shelf dedicated to pasta, the chips and snacks aisle, the confectionary aisle, the bakery section, the soda aisle, GM produce, and the frozen and chilled ready meal selections). At a conservative estimate, 70% of a typical supermarket’s floor space is dedicated to ”poor quality, waistline-busting… products.”

Many shoppers have been zombified by the bite of 24-7 advertising, appealing packaging and a general lack of good quality information about nutrition. Of course it is ultimately up to us as individuals to educate ourselves and decide how we eat and where we spend our food pounds or dollars. Just as the big corporations have an inalienable right to produce and market poor quality “foods”, consumers have the absolute right to ignore their products.

ROB writes:

If we rolled back 100 years, we would see a very different picture. Around 11 per cent of the UK workforce was in agriculture. Machinery was limited, artificial fertilisers were non-existent, pesticides were primitive. Everything was organic back then. It was also a lot more expensive and a lot less efficient in its use of both land and labour. Food was locally produced for the most part, too. Such developments as modern refrigeration, rapid transport and sophisticated logistics were still a long way off.

When the food arrived in town, it had to be bought by housewives going into one shop at a time – the butcher, the baker and the greengrocer – an almost daily chore. Food couldn’t be stored all that well at home, so it needed to be cooked pretty much immediately, although poorer households’ cooking facilities often amounted to an overworked frying pan on a feeble stove. Many people lived on a dull diet of bread and potatoes which wiped out a sizeable chunk of their incomes.

If a committee had sat down back then to work out some kind of idealised food system for the future, what would they have envisaged? First and foremost, they would have wanted a plentiful supply of food that wasn’t constantly at the mercy of the next bad harvest. They would have wanted that food to be nutritious and substantially cheaper, so that families could spend their money on more interesting things instead. That said, wouldn’t it be great if new foods could be brought in from around the world, to get away from the same old meat-and-three-veg?

WE say:

With the exception of GM crops and perhaps an over-reliance on pesticides and chemical fertilizers we agree that many of the advancements at an agricultural, distribution and storage level have benefited humankind tremendously. From a health and weight loss perspective bread is best ditched from everyone’s diet, however meat, three veg and potatoes are a pretty good starting point for a healthy diet for many people (the ability to purchase more exotic produce is certainly a bonus of the modern age).

Not having to shop everyday is a plus for many, although it is also great to see the free market and growing demand enabling niche businesses to thrive again with specialist butchers and fruit and veg vendors catering to those who care and have the income to purchase better quality products.

ROB writes:

Without central planning, we got the lot. Food shortages in the UK are unheard of. Where food took up around 30 per cent of household incomes even in the mid-1930s, in recent years it has fallen to around 10 per cent. Food-related deficiency disease is also a thing of the past. Government surveys find that the average family gets plenty of protein, energy, vitamins and minerals. In fact, if there is any cause for concern, it is about people eating too much, not too little.

WE say:

Government surveys are not a good place to learn anything of value particularly in the sphere of nutrition (or any other subject, come to think of it). As for food related deficiency disease being a thing of the past that is questionable and ties in to the point that a major cause for concern is that people are eating too much.

We now live in the fattest era of humanity with the likelihood of that situation continuing to worsen. The modern “fuel” most of us live off is causing metabolic derangement, obesity, diabetes and heart disease at unprecedented levels. The modern food related deficiency disease may well be obesity.

Although modern agriculture has provided us with some good whole foods at cheaper prices and greater convenience (e.g. meat, fish, eggs, animal fats, vegetables and fruits), modern Big Food Corporations have focused primarily on supplying and putting their marketing dollar behind cheap to manufacture, nutrient poor, often highly processed and refined fake “foods and ingredients” (primarily based on and made from: gluten cereal grains in all their forms, vegetable oils, hydrogenated fats, sugars and chemically altered sweeteners). From a profit making point of view this makes absolute sense, take the cheapest ingredients with the longest possible shelf life and greatest price mark up potential, put them in lurid packaging and advertise, advertise, advertise.

These ingredients and foods drive obesity through their high calorie density, addictive properties and by the fact that they do not provide the micronutrients the human body requires, stimulating further appetite as the body desperately seeks the nutrients it needs never getting them and continually siphoning off the excess calories into the only place it can- body fat. These “foods” make the perfect business if your focus is profit without ethics, Big Food has adopted the crack dealer business model with great success.

The way to de-zombify ourselves is to take responsibility. We ultimately have the choice as to what we eat, let’s take the benefits of readily available whole foods and leave Big Food’s junk on the shelf.