The Health Delusion: How to Achieve Exceptional Health in the 21st Century

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Text © Glen Matten and Aidan Goggins, 2012

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise be copied for public or private use, other than for ‘fair use’ as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.

The information given in this book should not be treated as a substitute for professional medical advice; always consult a medical practitioner. Any use of information in this book is at the reader’s discretion and risk. Neither the authors nor the publisher can be held responsible for any loss, claim or damage arising out of the use, or misuse, or the suggestions made or the failure to take medical advice.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-84850-686-2 in print

ISBN 978-1-8485-0884-2 in Mobipocket format

ISBN 978-1-84850-885-9 in ePub format

Interior images: p.49 © Aidan Goggins; Glen Matten photograph © Ross Harvey Photography

To Olly and future generations to come.

Glen

To my parents, who didn’t need years of higher education to realize we need to get back into balance.

Aidan

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1: Science Fiction

Part I: Antioxidant Allure

Chapter 2: Fool’s Gold

Chapter 3: Plant Protection

Chapter 4: Selenium: A Missing Puzzle Piece

Part II: Sun Supplement

Chapter 5: ‘D’-ficient Bones

Chapter 6: ‘D’-ficient Body

Chapter 7: ‘D’-livered

Part III: Diet Discrepancies

Chapter 8: Fad Diets: A Pact with the Devil?

Chapter 9: The Age of the Sloth

Chapter 10: The Skinny on Fat

Part IV: Animal Attacks

Chapter 11: What’s the Matter with Milk?

Chapter 12: What’s the Beef with Meat?

Chapter 13: Can Plant-based Diets Provide It All?

Part V: Generation Gains

Chapter 14: You Are What Your Mother Ate

Chapter 15: Nourishing the Next Generation

Part VI: Failing Fats

Chapter 16: A Big Fat Mistake

Chapter 17: Brain Drain

Part VII: Pill Plight

Chapter 18: Prescription Junkies

Chapter 19: Coalition Forces

Twenty-first Century Health

Conclusion

References

Index

About the Authors

Join the Hay House Family

FOREWORD

I first met Aidan Goggins and Glen Matten when they became students on the Nutritional Medicine MSc degree course that we run at the University of Surrey. We set up the course in 1998 because we perceived a great desire on the part of the public to know how to use nutrition to benefit health, yet recognized the fact that doctors receive virtually no training that equips them to give such advice. Since that time, we have taught many doctors and other health professionals how to use the peer-reviewed literature on nutrition and health to give a strong evidence base for their recommendations to patients and to those who want to optimize their own health and that of their families.

Aidan and Glen were both excellent students and wholeheartedly adopted our evidence-based approach, which has no time for anecdote or flaky science. Their desire to pass on to the public what they have learned, and to expose the fallacies and misconceptions that exist in nutrition and health, have spurred them on to write The Health Delusion. I wholeheartedly endorse their efforts and hope that this book will contribute to a fuller understanding of how nutritional information based on good science can be used to optimize health and reduce risk, both for this generation and the next.

Margaret P. Rayman, BSc, DPhil (Oxon), RPHNutr

Professor of Nutritional Medicine

University of Surrey

November 2011

INTRODUCTION

‘I believe that if you show people the problems and you

show them the solutions they will be moved to act.’

BILL GATES, FOUNDER OF MICROSOFT, AUTHOR AND

PHILANTHROPIST (B. 1955)

The Health Delusion couldn’t be more straightforward. It has one simple aim: to bring you better health. After all, good health is something that we’ve all come to expect in today’s high-tech society, and who would argue with that? Unless, that is, we place this most valuable of things in the wrong hands. As we’ll see, that’s when it can all go badly awry. The end result is that the messages we receive are tainted and flawed and, rather than promoting our health, they end up detracting from it. So, before we rush headlong into helping you achieve our most simple of goals – the best possible health for you and your family – we’ve got to ask some pretty big questions. And that’s where our story begins.

The first question we need to answer is, where has it all gone wrong? The advancements of the last century happened at breakneck speed, catapulting us into an age of breathtaking technology. The world we live in today would have been all but unimaginable just a few generations ago. Things once deemed impossible are now part and parcel of our everyday lives. The shackles that have held mankind back since time immemorial have been thrown off, and the possibilities of what we can now achieve appear limitless. We’re not just talking about space travel or the cyber age, but medicine too. Health problems that were previously considered life threatening are now little more than minor irritants. Our lifespan is greater than it has ever been and continues to increase. When it comes to our health, we are fortunate indeed to live in this golden age of medical progress.

But there’s a snag. Scratch away at this shiny veneer of health in the twenty-first century and what do we see? Sure, we’re living longer, but can we honestly say that we’re living healthier? Despite all the mind-bending advancements of modern medicine, a stark fact remains: if you are a healthy adult in today’s society, you’re in the minority. Does that really sound like the definition of a healthy society to you?

Don’t just take our word for it – the statistics speak for themselves. More than one in three people has cardiovascular disease, one in six has high cholesterol and an incredible six in every ten has raised blood pressure. One in ten has diabetes and almost another four out of those ten are on the verge of getting it. If you see two women over 50, one of them is going to have an osteoporotic fracture. If all that isn’t bad enough, two out of every five people will be diagnosed with cancer at some stage in their lives. These are devastating maladies that blight the quality of our lives and contribute to our premature demise. Does this unprecedented level of chronic illness and human suffering seem compatible with a high-tech golden age of medicine? We don’t think so.

Let’s get one thing clear: the crippling burden of chronic disease isn’t a failure of modern medicine. Medicine has set out its stall, and that’s to look after those who need it. It prevents the progression of disease and postpones death, and it’s pretty good at it, too. To ‘qualify’ for medicine, we must first develop the ailments, the maladies, the symptoms and the risk factors. And this is where medicine belongs, as the last resort. As you’ll see, all too often we place our faith in pharmaceutical drugs to solve our health problems, blissfully unaware of the true causes of ill health.

Worse still, we’ll show you how the drug companies’ attempts to medicate great swathes of society have mostly been an astounding failure. Instead of increasing our wellbeing, all they usually end up doing is leading us down a slippery slope of deteriorating health and drug dependence.

Here’s the thing. It’s this space, the bit between being healthy and the early development of disease, where the big problem lies. As for the answer, well, that can be found a little closer to home – in fact, for most, a little too close to home for comfort. Boil it down to basics and what we find is that our modern diet and lifestyle have become monumentally out of sync with what the body requires to stay fit, healthy and free of disease. Yet there’s something that just doesn’t stack up with all this, which brings us on to another of our big questions: how can our diet and lifestyle be to blame when we’re so health obsessed?

With the mass of celebrity diets, health gurus, self-help books, glossy health magazines, wonder foods and supplements, surely we should be brimming with health? When it comes to conquering disease who needs more information than that to stay in tiptop health?

Yet, bizarrely, despite the endless procession of new-fangled diets, bestselling diet books and a thriving diet industry, we’re more obese than ever before. What’s that all about? And just in case you hadn’t noticed, when it comes to obesity, things are rapidly getting a whole lot worse. Then we have a global supplement and ‘antioxidant-added’ food industry worth billions, not to mention the burgeoning array of so-called ‘superfoods’. But have they put so much as a dent in the rising burden of chronic disease? Not in the slightest.

Sure, there are the common explanations, such as when it comes to health there’s this great divide in the population. On one side there’s the ‘fast-food’ generation, who are consuming nutritionally depleted and calorie-overloaded foods. On the other are those people who care about their health, munch down their ‘superfoods’, swallow their daily dose of vitamin pills and have the ‘know-how’ and discipline to diet, if they need to lose weight. We’re not denying that socio-economic factors have a big part to play in health inequalities, but the problem is that the numbers just don’t stack up. Right now, more than 50% of the population is taking at least one ‘health’ supplement daily¹,². That’s before we start talking about the vitamins that the food industry adds to our everyday foods by the crateful. And the number of people who are overeating is actually far less than the numbers who are overweight.

None of this makes any sense at all, until you start to ask the big questions. As you’ll see, we get some big answers that will make you think twice before buying another pot of vitamin pills or falling for the next celebrity-endorsed diet. So hang on in there, as we’re about to expose the diet industry for what it really is: a fraud. Research shows that, rather than curtailing the obesity epidemic, it’s fuelling it. As for the vitamins that so many people pop every day with due diligence, well, they could be promoting the very diseases people think they’re being protected from.

But more of that soon enough. There’s still another burning issue to tackle – the contagion of nutritional nonsense delivered to you courtesy of the media and self-proclaimed nutrition ‘experts’. Even when we aspire to good health and are desperate for the answers, the reality is we often get fed bad advice. You can’t open a magazine, read a newspaper, watch TV, or listen to the radio without being bombarded with health messages. It’s just about mandatory that topping the bestseller book chart is the next great ‘breakthrough’ on how you can ‘revolutionize’ your health. At best, most of it is unhelpful, and at worst, it endangers your health. As we’ll see, the media has a track record of misreporting the science, and most nutrition ‘experts’ fare little better. That we so often use this information as the basis for the important decisions we make about our health is, to us, scary stuff.

If the media and the nutrition gurus can’t generally be trusted for advice, then where do we turn? If we want sensible, unbiased information, surely we can rely on our governments and health agencies to provide advice that is rational, scientific and based on the very latest research from the academic world. Well, we’re sorry to say that’s hardly the case. As you’ll soon see, we have population-wide deficiencies of nutrients that are essential to our health and prevent many of the most prolific diseases of the modern world. But, not only are governments doing little to address this, they insist on clinging to their antiquated recommendations. By failing to act, they become part of the problem, too. Even when it comes to securing the health of future generations, we’re being let down by policy-makers who shy away from giving the advice that you and your children deserve. In fact, even the enshrined ‘well-balanced’ diet is pretty bogus, and you’d think they’d at least be able to get that right. Yet it barely reflects the kind of diet that research now clearly shows we should be eating to foster long-term health and resistance to disease.

It’s not hard to see that this is one big mess that desperately needs sorting out. As we delve deeper into the fallacies and delusions, you’ll soon start to see how those bewildering health statistics we posed earlier have managed to come about. But we want to be clear about one thing: we’re not just here to criticize and dwell on the negatives. Ours is a positive message that we want all to hear.

This brings us to where the idea for this book came from in the first place. In the field of health science, compelling research is published all the time. It’s not always easy to interpret and can often be tricky to piece together and see the ‘bigger picture’. But one thing hit us hard. So much of the really important stuff being uncovered by research simply gets lost in the ‘black hole’ of academia. We’re talking about information that could really transform your health and make a big difference to whether you stay well or succumb to disease. It either gets buried or is ‘lost in translation’. By that we mean, you do get to hear about it, but through the filter of the media, the self-proclaimed health gurus or the food and supplements industry, and the message is horribly distorted by the time it reaches you.

We think this is a travesty and more than anything else, this book sets out to take the compelling and exciting knowledge gleaned from academic research and share it with you in its unadulterated form. The truth is that so many of the answers to the modern-day epidemics of chronic disease are already within our grasp. What if you didn’t have to wait for miracle medical breakthroughs to cure heart disease, cancer, diabetes and the rest, but could halt them in their tracks right now? What if taking action today would ensure good health for you and your family, and for generations to come? What if you had the blueprint for healthy living and truly preventive medicine? Wouldn’t that be evidence that we are truly living in a golden age?

The information you need is right here at your fingertips. If you want good health, it’s yours for the taking. And that is exactly what The Health Delusion is all about. A modern-day guide to true health, fit for the twenty-first century.

For a full listing of unabridged references and abstracts, as well as discussion and the latest up-to-date research on all the topics covered in the book, visit us at www.thehealthdelusion.com

CHAPTER 1

SCIENCE FICTION

‘Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain

to others what it personally does not understand.’

LORD NORTHCLIFFE, NEWSPAPER AND PUBLISHING MAGNATE (1865–1922)

OVERVIEW

Whichever way we turn, we’re bombarded with information about how to eat healthier diets and lead healthier lives.

Much of our diet, nutrition and health information comes via the media and self-proclaimed nutrition experts, yet all too often their messages are flawed.

We show you how to wise up to their ways by understanding some basics about how research is conducted and what it really tells us.

Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to see beyond the headlines and extravagant claims and make more informed judgments about your health.

When it comes to our health, the media wields enormous influence over what we think. They tell us what’s good, what’s bad, what’s right and wrong, what we should and shouldn’t eat. When you think about it, that’s quite some responsibility. It’s certainly something we took pretty seriously as we were writing this book. But do you really think that a sense of philanthropic duty is the driving force behind most of the health ‘news’ stories that you read? Who are we kidding? It’s all about sales, of course, and all too often that means the science plays second fiddle. Who wants boring old science getting in the way of a sensation-making headline?

When it comes to research – especially the parts we’re interested in, namely food, diet and nutrients – there’s a snag. The thing is, these matters are rarely, if ever, clear-cut. Let’s say there are findings from some new research that suggest a component of our diet is good for our health. Now academics and scientists are generally a pretty cautious bunch – they respect the limitations of their work and don’t stretch their conclusions beyond their actual findings. Not that you’ll think this when you hear about it in the media. News headlines are in your face and hard hitting. Fluffy uncertainties just won’t cut it. An attention-grabbing headline is mandatory; relevance to the research is optional. Throw in a few random quotes from experts – as the author Peter McWilliams stated, the problem with ‘experts’ is you can always find one ‘who will say something hopelessly hopeless about anything’ – and boom! You’ve got the formula for some seriously media-friendly scientific sex appeal, or as we prefer to call it, ‘textual garbage’.

The reality is that a lot of the very good research into diet and health ends up lost in translation. Somewhere between its publication in a respected scientific journal and the moment it enters our brains via the media, the message gets a tweak here, a twist there and a dash of sensationalism thrown in for good measure, which leaves us floundering in a sea of half-truths and misinformation. Most of it should come with the warning: ‘does nothing like it says in the print’. Don’t get us wrong: we’re not just talking about newspapers and magazines here, the problem runs much deeper. Even the so-called nutrition ‘experts’, the health gurus who sell books by the millions, are implicated. We’re saturated in health misinformation.

Quite frankly, we’re sick of this contagion of nutritional nonsense. So, before we launch headlong into the rest of the book, we want to take a step back and give you a rough guide to how research is actually conducted, what it all means and what to watch out for when the media deliver their less-than-perfect messages. Get your head around these next few pages and you’ll probably be able to make more sense of nutritional research than most of our cherished health ‘gurus’.

Rule #1: Humans are different from cells in a test tube

At the very basic level, researchers use in-vitro testing, in which they isolate cells or tissues of interest and study them outside a living organism in a kind of ‘chemical soup’. This allows substances of interest (for example, a vitamin or a component of food) to be added to the soup to see what happens. So they might, for example, add vitamin C to some cancer cells and observe its effect. We’re stating the obvious now when we say that what happens here is NOT the same as what happens inside human beings.

First, the substance is added directly to the cells, so they are often exposed to concentrations far higher than would normally be seen in the body. Second, humans are highly complex organisms, with intricately interwoven systems of almost infinite processes and reactions. What goes on within a few cells in a test tube or Petri dish is a far cry from what would happen in the body. This type of research is an important part of science, but scientists know its place in the pecking order – as an indispensable starting point of scientific research. It can give us valuable clues about how stuff works deep inside us, what we might call the mechanisms, before going on to be more rigorously tested in animals, and ultimately, humans. But that’s all it is, a starting point.

Rule #2: Humans are different from animals

The next logical step usually involves animal testing. Studying the effects of a dietary component in a living organism, not just a bunch of cells, is a big step closer to what might happen in humans. Mice are often used, due to convenience, consistency, a short lifespan, fast reproduction rates and a closely shared genome and biology to humans. In fact, some pretty amazing stuff has been shown in mice. We can manipulate a hormone and extend life by as much as 30%¹. We can increase muscle mass by 60% in two weeks². And we have shown that certain mice can even regrow damaged tissues and organs³,⁴.

So, can we achieve all of that in humans? The answer is a big ‘no’ (unless you happen to believe the X-Men are real). Animal testing might be a move up from test tubes in the credibility ratings, but it’s still a long stretch from what happens in humans. You’d be pretty foolish to make a lot of wild claims based on animal studies alone.

To prove that, all we need to do is take a look at pharmaceutical drugs. Vast sums of money (we’re talking hundreds of millions) are spent trying to get a single drug to market. But the success rate is low. Of all the drugs that pass in-vitro and animal testing to make it into human testing, only 11% will prove to be safe and effective enough to hit the shelves⁵. For cancer drugs the rate of success is only 5%⁵. In 2003, the President of Research and Development at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, John La Mattina, stated that ‘only one in 25 early candidates survives to become a prescribed medicine’. You don’t need to be a betting person to see these are seriously slim odds.

Strip it down and we can say that this sort of pre-clinical testing never, ever, constitutes evidence that a substance is safe and effective. These are research tools to try and find the best candidates to improve our health, which can then be rigorously tested for efficacy in humans. Alas, the media and our nutrition gurus don’t appear to care too much for this. Taking research carried out in labs and extrapolating the results to humans sounds like a lot more fun.