part0010

I adored my granny and I would see her regularly throughout my young life. She was a typical strong, no-nonsense Glaswegian woman who lived in Possilpark. At the time Possilpark was not just one of the poorest places in Glasgow but the whole of the UK. It was, however, also a thriving working-class community built around the Clyde steel industry. It was the women who held the community together, especially after the First World War. If the husbands and sons did return from the war they were understandably changed by their experiences. And in those days there was no counselling or appreciation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and there were certainly no support groups. Before the NHS was created in 1947 everyone had to pay to go to the doctor so women like my granny just didn’t go. They couldn’t afford it. Instead they focused on how to keep the doctor at bay with a few inexpensive supplements. I still remember standing in the kitchen each morning to receive one teaspoon of cod liver oil and if I had an upset tummy I’d also get one teaspoon of Milk of Magnesia. I couldn’t decide which was worse – the fish oil that I’d burp back up throughout the day or the unpleasant chalky texture to the Milk of Magnesia. But we had it every morning without fail – old-school preventative medicine Glasgow-style.

The medicine cabinet in my granny’s house contained:

Life was tough. Granny would cook with the fruit and vegetables my granddad had grown in the allotment or what was available locally. She made her own bread and the meat would often come from the local farmer. Every year a few families in the neighbourhood would club together and buy a whole cow, butcher it themselves and distribute the meat between the families. But these were not lifestyle choices – they came down to necessity.

They didn’t have a lot of money but they were incredibly healthy and both my grandparents lived until they were well into their eighties – despite my granddad’s 40- 60-a-day Capstan full-strength cigarette habit and his penchant for whisky.

Granny died when I was in my early teens. I still remember the grief and the huge hole she left in my life. But it took me years to realise that my regular intake of Milk of Magnesia, cod liver oil and home-made food had kept me healthy. Without it, my physical and mental health soon started to decline. As I deteriorated, I put it down to being a teenager, exam stress and strained relationships with other family members. What I now realise is that the micronutrients in my granny’s preventative medicine routine and her wholesome, nutrient-rich home cooking was what saved me from the mental and physical health issues that were to become part of my daily life. And I was not alone…

Today we are slap bang in the middle of the ‘mad fat epidemic’. One in four Western women is taking antidepressants. In Europe 38 per cent of people have a diagnosable mental illness. And one in three Western women are obese despite government healthy eating guidelines and a plethora of diet books published each year teaching us how to lose weight and stay healthy – many of which you and I probably own.

Population data now shows that obesity rates and diagnosis of mental illness began rising in the mid-1980s and have been rising steadily ever since. So what the hell happened in the 80s?

Changes to food production following the Second World War were really having an impact by the 1980s. Small, family-owned, traditionally run farms made way for industrial farming (whether they wanted to or not). It’s worth pointing out here that when it comes to farming, the ‘good guys’ are the remaining small, traditionally run, often family-owned farms that put quality and animal welfare above quantity. If you still have some ‘good guys’ in your community support them, otherwise all we’ll have left are the ‘bad guys’. The ‘bad guys’ are the large-scale commercial farms, often owned by conglomerates where quantity is king – regardless of the quality or animal welfare.

An over-reliance on pesticides and engineered animal feed used by the ‘bad guys’ started to alter the body fat composition and chemistry of these mass-produced animals. Chicken, by far the most popular meat in the Western diet, is now produced twice as fast as it was 30 years ago. This is achieved by feeding chickens a high-fat diet but high fat in means high fat out. As a result the fat content in chicken, ironically often assumed to be a low-fat alternative to red meat, has increased from 2 per cent to 22 per cent in just 30 years. This has also altered the balance of vital fatty acids in chicken, which means you are almost certainly eating too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3 – especially if chicken is a large part of your diet. The right balance of omega-3 to omega-6 is essential for optimum brain function and the ratio should be 1:3 but people eating a Western diet now consume around 1:16, leading to inflammation and mental dysfunction. Again my granny didn’t eat mass-produced chicken that arrived in plastic trays from the supermarket. My granddad would get his chicken from the local farmer. This imbalance in fatty acids doesn’t occur when chickens are raised naturally (or organically) on a diet of plant matter, insects and other small bugs and grubs. In those days the farmer’s chickens were let out of their ‘hen house’ in the morning and would spend the day scratching through the farmyard and hedgerows, happily laying their eggs with bright yellow yolks.

Mass production has also depleted the nutrient content of crops. If land is used over and over again to grow the same crop without crop rotation or giving the land a rest then there are fewer minerals in the soil, which means there are fewer nutrients in industrially farmed cereals, fruits and vegetables. If the nutrients are not in the soil, they won’t be in the plants that are grown in the soil and we won’t get the nutrients when we eat those plants. To facilitate this endless growing cycle the land is usually treated with chemical fertilisers but most commercial fertilisers only contain three active ingredients, typically nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, not the 50 or so minerals that plants need for optimum health and maximum nutritional value.

Take wheat for example, it is genetically and biologically less nutritious than the wheat my granny used to make a loaf of bread at the weekend. Studies show that modern wheat has 19– 28 per cent lower levels of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium than wheat in 1968.

Plus, of course, pesticide residues are often present on crops after harvesting and a cocktail of chemicals are frequently used to clean and preserve fruits and vegetables during processing before being packaged and sent to supermarkets.

This is very different from my granny’s day. My granddad had his own veggie patch at the community allotment that supplied us with most of our vegetables. If stocks were running low then granny might buy some carrots at the local greengrocer – they were not washed, uniform and wrapped in plastic. They were loose, covered in dirt and came in all shapes and sizes.

And to top it all off in the 1990s genetically modified (GM) crops entered the food supply chain. While these foods have been approved for human consumption by government agencies, many studies now show the bacterium genetically inserted into crops as an insecticide can colonise the bacteria living in the human digestive tract – killing the good bacteria which modulate serotonin levels in the gut. GM food is ubiquitous in North America and widely used in processed foods and animal feed in the UK (more on that later). I can just imagine what my granny would have said about GM food!

Obviously, the changes to food production also started to change our diet. The cost of food started to drop dramatically in the 1980s, and I’ll explain why in the next chapter. Technology and innovation also brought us the convenience of the microwave. The traditional range that my granny used to make her delicious pea and ham soup, hearty casseroles and yummy home-made bread and biscuits, as well as keeping the kitchen cosy in winter, was replaced by smaller electric ovens or a short zap in the microwave. Microwave ownership rapidly spread across Britain and the US as did new products to put in them. The first chilled ready meals started to appear in supermarkets. These quick ‘heat and eat’ processed meals became popular with time-poor women struggling to juggle home and work commitments. But these new food products also contained highly processed ingredients and lacked nutritional value. They also contained new additives and preservatives which were not previously part of our diet. Today we eat, on average, 4kg of these food additives every year.

These new ingredients were included for a variety of reasons but mainly to prolong the shelf life of the product and to make the processed food taste better. The most common flavour enhancer is monosodium glutamate (MSG) and it can be found in all sorts of products including Chinese food, canned vegetables, soups and processed meat. In 1960 we consumed just 12g a year of this artificial flavour enhancer. By 2000 the average person consumed 500g of MSG – that’s a 4000 per cent increase in the space of just four decades. MSG may make your beef and black bean sauce tastier but it’s an excitotoxin – meaning it causes your brain cells to become overexcited and fire uncontrollably, leading to cell death. MSG is therefore a neurotoxin which kills brain cells in the hypothalamus.

You might be thinking, ‘OK, but we’ve got billions of brain cells so killing off a few with a tasty smoked sausage or convenient bowl of tomato soup every now and again isn’t going to make me mad or fat!’ On its own, probably not – but cumulatively, together with all the other changes to our diet, and our physical and mental health soon begins to deteriorate. The reason MSG is so dangerous, especially for mental health, is that the hypothalamus plays an important role in linking the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland and has a profound impact on regulating metabolism and mood – both essential when we want to avoid being fat or mad!

Oh, and if you think you can check the product labelling for MSG so you can avoid it – good luck! MSG has over 40 other names so that food manufacturers can disguise when it’s being added to their products. My granny and millions like her never ate ready meals because they simply didn’t exist. And frankly even if they did she wouldn’t have been able to afford them. So she didn’t have to worry about additives and preservatives and whether she recognised 40 different names for MSG – none of which she would have been able to pronounce!

In my granny’s day a chocolate biscuit was for special occasions only. I still remember ferreting around her house looking for the secret stash of Jaffa cakes – usually to be found in the spin dryer! Today we don’t need to hunt for our sugar fix or wait for special occasions – we consume 44kg of sugar every year. That’s about the weight of an average 12-year-old child – in sugar!

We eat one-third less vegetables and two-thirds less fish (the main source of omega-3) than we did 50 years ago. Organ meat, such as liver and kidneys, are loaded with vitamins and minerals and has the highest concentration of naturally occurring vitamin D of any food group, but organ meats have massively fallen out of fashion. Most British and North American offal is currently exported to mainland Europe and Far Eastern countries as consumers in anglicised nations now prefer steaks, ground beef and chicken breasts.

The staple diet of meat and two vegetables my grandparents routinely enjoyed have been replaced by quick, convenient but often nutritionally devoid pizza, pasta and processed meats. Pickled and fermented vegetables that are high in probiotics have all but disappeared from our dinner tables – ask a kid today what piccalilli is and they’ll probably think it is a circus in London! And yet pre and probiotics are essential for brain health as they keep the gut healthy and good bacteria helps produce serotonin in the gut.

When my granny wanted a bacon sandwich she knew where the bacon came from, she baked her own bread and slathered it in lashings of butter. Today we have no idea where the bacon comes from – we hope it wasn’t reared in one of those awful metal crates but don’t really give it much thought as it crisps up under the grill. Even if we decide to fry our bacon it almost certainly isn’t in lard and the butter on our sandwich has been replaced by low-fat spread. Vegetable oils have replaced saturated fats for cooking. You might be wondering, ‘But, surely that’s good – right?’ No, not really because soybean, sunflower, corn and canola oils contain very high amounts of omega-6 fatty acids. Studies show that our body fat stores of linoleic acid (the most common omega-6 fat) have increased by over 300 per cent in the past 50 years. The coconut oil and animal fats used to cook our popcorn at the movies and fish ’n’ chips from the local chippie have now been replaced with chemically modified vegetable oils.

Again, you may be tempted to think this isn’t a problem and are wondering why I’m getting my ‘knickers in a twist’ as we say in Scotland. The reason is simple. These new ‘healthier’ oils and spreads were not designed because the companies wanted to make us healthier – they were created because these massive food giants had huge quantities of waste by-product from their primary business that they needed to deal with. They could either get rid of it, which is time consuming and costly, or they could convert it into another product and sell that to us too. Back those products with millions in advertising to convince us they are healthy and voilà – billions more in revenue.

Take corn as an example; in the US alone they grow something in the region of 333 million tonnes of corn a year. Not only is there an oversupply of corn but its production creates a massive amount of waste product – the stalk of the corn. Thirty-three million tonnes of corn creates A LOT of useless corn stalks to get rid of. In traditional farming, certainly for barley production, the waste stalks are bailed up as straw and used as bedding for the animals in winter. But for massive agri-food businesses that’s time consuming and there is no money in it. So they have found multiple ways to make additional products, not only from the corn itself but from the waste by-product too. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is an artificial sweetener made from a highly secret process using the corn stalk. HFCS is used in all sorts of products including soft drinks and yet it has been linked to a wide range of diseases and disorders.

Research is now proving that my granny’s use of fats and oils was the healthy approach. Everyone knows what’s in butter – milk, a little salt and very little else. Do you know how some of those vegetable, corn or soy oils are made? No – only the scientists in secret laboratories know that. And yet often these products are marketed as ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’. Can we really call a product that is literally resurrected from a waste by-product with zero nutritional value and turned into something else through chemical alchemy natural? No.

We were first warned about our fat intake in the 1970s and again in the 1980s and yet an Anglo-American study concluded that no such advice would have been made based on modern-day clinical trials (which are themselves flawed as I’ll soon explain). The study published in online journal Open Heart concluded, ‘It seems incomprehensible that dietary advice was introduced to 220 million Americans and 56 million UK citizens, given the contrary results from a small number of unhealthy men.’ No wonder none of us are losing weight on a low-fat diet!

Obviously, I’m not advocating you start adding butter to everything and going ballistic on the chips but between false data and corporations hijacking the narrative so we will buy their ‘Frankenfood’ it’s not really very surprising that so many of us are mad or fat!

In addition to the food production and dietary changes, a new generation of antidepressants hit the market in the 1980s and 1990s, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). SSRIs such as Prozac (fluoxetine), Paxil and Seroxat (paroxetine) and Zoloft (sertraline) all contain high amounts of either fluoride or chlorine, both of which, along with bromine, are what I call ‘bad halogens’ (more on them in chapter 5). Bad halogens are neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors which displace iodine in the body leading to thyroid dysfunction. Plus these bad halogens are now ubiquitous in our life – they can be in our drinking water, our food, the furniture in our homes, the personal care products we use as well as medicine such as antidepressants.

Let me ask you – what do you consider an acceptable number of side effects for a drug? Ten? Fifty maybe – so long as it works. What about 2,000? How would you feel about medicine if it had 2,000 side effects? The number of listed side effects associated with taking antidepressants is staggering:

Weight gain is also a common side effect for SSRIs – causing food cravings, especially for carbohydrates and sugars. SSRIs also impact metabolism. Unsurprisingly, the rise in antidepressant prescriptions is mirrored by the rise in obesity rates. Between 1990 and 2010 there has been a 400 per cent increase in people taking happy pills and antidepressant use and obesity has been intrinsically linked ever since. Of course, the two are inextricably linked. Sure, some people genuinely don’t mind being a bit overweight but I’ve yet to meet anyone who enjoyed being depressed. If on top of being depressed you pile on weight that’s absolutely not going to help you feel better about yourself!

Today antidepressants are the most common prescription drug in the US. And almost 800,000 Scots take antidepressants – over 518,000 are women. The highest antidepressant usage in Scotland is in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde area – where diet is notoriously poor. Historically this is also where the sugar came off the boats from the Caribbean and it is still where almost all the Scottish sugar refineries are located today. These two factors are not a coincidence and we’ll discuss the negative effect sugar has on the brain in chapter 6.

What makes all this even worse is that the explosion of antidepressant use is based on erroneous data. For example, Prozac worked for some people but only when it was administered with a tranquilliser so that they did not attempt suicide. However that piece of information, which you could argue was pretty crucial, was omitted from the clinical trial data. You don’t have to be Einstein to realise that it could have been the tranquilliser not the drug that was having the positive effect but that was simply ignored and Prozac is now one of the most prescribed drugs on the planet – making billions for the manufacturer.

Plus SSRI drugs were developed on the premise that depression is caused by a serotonin imbalance in the brain but there is no medical test to prove this. Antidepressants do nothing to solve the root problem of mental illness and a growing body of evidence now shows that depression is a biological disorder caused by micronutrient deficiencies in the diet. While serotonin is a key neurotransmitter in the brain, 90 per cent of serotonin is synthesised in the gut and therefore very susceptible to what we eat (because it ends up in the gut).

Some 60 per cent of Western women go on a diet every year. For many this is a soul-destroying few months that doesn’t even work. And it doesn’t work because often the dieter is eating low-fat or low-calorie ready meals – a market worth £2 billion in the UK alone. Time-pressed women who don’t have time for breakfast are reaching instead for the ‘healthy’ low-fat cereal breakfast bar – many of which are endorsed by popular slimming or cereal brands. It doesn’t matter that a skinny girl in a red dress is advertising it – eating a chocolate-coated granola bar loaded with sugar is NOT going to help you lose weight or feel energised.

Just think about this for a moment…in 2014, the global market for weight loss products was valued at over $586 billion. If those products worked then we would all be happily skipping around in little red dresses and yet we are not. Why? Because those companies don’t really want us to get slim and healthy otherwise it’s goodbye $586 billion – what they want is to sell us hope so we will continue to buy them and keep their massive profits rolling in. So ask yourself, do these companies really want to help us lose weight and feel better or are they simply happy to sell us the illusion?

The low-fat, low-salt, low-cholesterol diets promoted by Western governments mean that more and more women are buying foods high in carbohydrates and new ‘healthy eating’ products. But, when manufacturers remove fat from processed foods it is substituted with chemically modified additives – refined sugars, starches (which turn to sugar in the body) and other synthetic ingredients which mimic the effects of fat during manufacture. Also, more and more artificial flavour enhancers and preservatives with unpronounceable names are added to counteract the lack of salt – which authorities are now telling us is bad for us too.

Clever supermarket food marketing often encourages us to buy the wrong foods packaged as the right foods and this is contributing to the mad fat epidemic. These foods are making us fat and foggy while pretending to make us thin and energetic. Even if you buy fresh fruit and vegetables and are genuinely eating the ‘right food’ the mass production of many of our key food groups has led to a radical reduction in micronutrients. Today we simply don’t consume enough vitamins and minerals for optimum brain health.

Take magnesium, for example, it is essential for mental health and good sleep and yet statistics now show that 80 per cent of people eating a Western diet are chronically deficient in magnesium. Depending on the demographic group studied, anywhere between 40 and 60 per cent of the population are deficient in vitamin D. Between 1971 and 2001 iodine consumption in the US dropped by 50 per cent. Most schoolgirls and pregnant women in the UK are iodine deficient and yet even a mild deficiency in iodine impairs mental function. Thirty per cent of us do not consume enough vitamin C. Forty-four per cent of us are deficient in vitamin A. Our bodies may be fat but our brains are starved of vital nutrients! And it is a lack of these micronutrients that is the real root cause of depression and ill health.

Instead of nutrient-rich food we are eating way too much sugar and food additives that are harming our brain. Genetic modification of food and junk food is killing off the good bacteria in our gut which helps to modulate serotonin levels. We are also eating too much omega-6 and not enough omega-3. Add the bad halogens and we have created a ‘perfect storm’ of contributing factors that are having a devastating impact on our physical and mental health.

I often wonder what my granny and her friends in the tenement buildings of Possilpark would have made of the pickle we’ve created for ourselves. They were poor and yet ironically their lack of money was instrumental in keeping them incredibly healthy. My granny and her friends didn’t have the plethora of choice and convenience foods we have today. And before you panic, I’m not advocating a move back to the ‘good old days’. You don’t need to be rich, you don’t need a private chef or have your meals delivered to your door, and you don’t need to visit the gym seven days a week. What you need to do is get educated about the food you’re eating and open your eyes to what’s really going on.