part0023

After reading this book you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed or shocked and I don’t blame you. When it comes to good health and how to achieve it, we have often been misinformed or tricked into believing certain foods are good for us when scientific evidence now reveals this just isn’t true. In some cases, the new information simply hasn’t filtered out to the people who so desperately need it. Instead it remains effectively hidden in academic or scientific documents that are largely incomprehensible to anyone without a PhD. In other cases, this lack of new, more relevant information has been suppressed or dismissed by vested interests keen to maintain the status quo and excessive profits – often at the expense of our physical and mental health.

We have also been let down by our governments who have failed to provide doctors with accurate information about the medicines they prescribe – including transparent access to all the clinical trial data around those medications. Governments have also systematically failed to tackle the inappropriate power and influence exercised by ‘big food’ and ‘big pharma’ on government policy.

But as the old saying goes, ‘You can’t make the same mistake twice. The second time you make it, it’s not a mistake, it’s a choice.’ So with this in mind . . .

Forget what you’ve been told as fact. We need to stop listening to experts and assuming everything they say is 100 per cent correct – even when they have letters after their name and wear a white coat. And that goes for this book too. Don’t just accept what I am saying is fact either – investigate it for yourself. Go online – we have access to more scientific research now than at any point in human history. Start trusting yourself and your own body. Be a rebel – gloriously stand out and take your health back once and for all.

I’ve been where you may be right now – whether you are currently struggling with your weight, mental health or both. I remember a time when just getting through the day was all I could manage; I remember wondering, ‘Is this it? Is this seriously the best I can hope for?’ It can be exhausting and demoralising and I would often reach for foods to comfort me through my pain. It took me years to realise that even the so-called healthy food I was eating was contributing to my pain!

If you are overweight, chances are you have tried numerous diets and your failure to make any lasting change just amplified your apathy and distress. If you’re currently overweight – it’s not your fault. You’ve been fighting the wrong battles based on calories and fat content instead of micronutrients and good quality. Just shift your focus and experience the results for yourself.

If you are currently on antidepressants you may have been too scared to come off these addictive drugs. Besides, the blandness of life on the drugs is better than the hell off them – right? But it doesn’t have to be this way. Again, shift your focus to micronutrients and food quality – when you do you will start to feel and look better. And when you start to feel better you will find the strength to wean yourself off the drugs once and for all. I know it’s possible – I did it, and if I can so can you.

This book is about so much more than just our individual health.

It is a call to action.

It is a rallying cry for all of us to be better parents, better partners and better people – to become conscious again. We simply must stop sleepwalking through our day, especially in terms of what we buy and what we eat.

We need to educate ourselves and our loved ones. We need to pull back the façade of big business and expensive, slick marketing and see the food we eat through new eyes and question exactly what it is we are putting in our shopping trolleys. Next time you go food shopping ask yourself – what drew me to the product? Why did I pick it up? What’s in the product? How many ingredients does it have? How many can I pronounce? We need to wake up, take responsibility and understand the connection between what we eat, how we feel, how we look and what’s going on in the world as a result of our purchase.

Of course we all need our little treats and I’m certainly not going to stop enjoying my glass of wine or dark chocolate ginger biscuits! But for mealtime grocery shopping we must start looking beyond the label and trusting the facts and our own intuition as to what is good for us and what is making us mad and fat. Hopefully the information I’ve shared in this book will help.

We also need to start thinking in terms of balance. My granddad smoked cigarettes and drank whisky but my granny’s nutrient-rich cooking, the daily preventative medicine routine, and a steady supply of fresh vegetables from the allotment ensured his diet was jam-packed with micronutrients which helped to mitigate the negative effect of his unhealthy habits. If we’ve enjoyed the Friday night ‘blowout’ of takeaway food, chocolate cake and a bucketload of wine, it makes sense to move more on Saturday to shake off the cobwebs of a hangover and burn off a few of those excess calories. It also makes sense to consider topping up on the micronutrients that were missing from Friday’s choices to ensure we counteract any ‘Big 4’ deficiencies or inflammation caused by our splurge. Remember the car analogy from chapter 6 and get into the habit of monitoring your micronutrient intake and not just the amount of fat, calories and carbohydrates you consume. In an ideal world retailers and food manufacturers would state the amount of vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids on the nutrition guidelines of packaging but they won’t do this unless our governments force them to. That’s extremely unlikely because big food corporations don’t want to tell you how nutritionally devoid their products really are and unfortunately our politicians are often ineffective given the power big business has over them. So, we need to do this for ourselves.

Time and time again Western governments have dished out bad dietary advice, often steered by big food or pharmaceutical companies looking to boost profits. Even today, Britain’s health authorities are considering whether to allow processed foods to carry the official 5-a-day logo, an emblem which is currently restricted to foods which are 100 per cent fruit or vegetable. So many shoppers and busy mums rely on the five-a-day logo to guide them on buying healthy products and our kids are also taught about the benefits of five-a-day in school. Adding this logo to processed food makes no sense and is misleading to consumers. Most processed food contains ingredients that usually have not been living for months, and those often inferior ingredients are then pulverised, modified, cooked at high temperatures during manufacture and mixed with a whole bunch of additives, preservatives and other chemicals. The end result is a product stripped of what little micronutrients were present at the start of production and completely unrecognisable to the fruits and vegetables we would expect behind the ‘healthy’ five-a-day message. Oh, and guess who is sitting on the ‘external reference group’ advising the Department of Health on the change to five-a-day criteria? Yep, you guessed it – representatives from food processing manufacturers and non-government organisations sponsored by ‘big food’. Once again, the British government is on the cusp of making yet another food policy decision based on guidance coming from corporations trying to either ‘game the system’ or processed food manufacturers with a financial interest in regulatory change.

This bad advice has left so many of us struggling under the weight of the mad fat epidemic with pharmaceutical companies all too ready to step in with their products to manage our symptoms. America now has the highest obesity rate in the world and it’s also number one for prescription drug use. A study conducted by the famous Mayo Clinic found that 7 out of every 10 Americans took at least one prescription drug – that’s 70 per cent of the population! More than half of the population take two prescription medications, and 20 per cent are on at least five prescription medications! And Britain isn’t far behind, with almost 50 per cent of Brits taking prescription drugs. This is far from normal and an unacceptable statistic for countries listed as among the wealthiest in the world.

In economic terms, we may be rich and powerful but when it comes to our health the West often ranks lower than developing nations. In parts of Glasgow where I live the life expectancy is now lower than some Third World countries; in fact, the World Health Organization has even created a term for this health problem, calling it ‘The Glasgow Effect’. Cigarettes and alcohol play a big part in ‘The Glasgow Effect’ but diet has also been identified as a driving factor, with poverty cited as the main overarching cause. The average life expectancy for a man living in the east end of Glasgow is now just 63, far less than the ‘three score and ten’ most of us expect as a bare minimum, and 20 years short of my grandparents’ lifespan. And although it is easy to point the finger at poverty – deprivation has been an issue in Glasgow for generations and it didn’t stop my grandparents from living to a ripe old age. Just like Americans, twenty-first-century Glaswegians no longer consume enough micronutrients in their food and this is why so many of us are sick, fat and taking antidepressants to manage the symptoms of our dwindling mental health.

American author, food writer and professor at UC Berkeley Michael Pollan famously wrote in one of his books ‘Better to pay the grocer than the doctor’ and this makes perfect sense. If we don’t get enough vitamins, minerals, amino acids, protein and omega-3 fatty acids in our diet then it is only a matter a time before we get sick and need to visit the doctor. But the good news is we don’t have to pay more to eat well if we get educated and understand the true quality of food we consume. Poverty is always rolled out as an excuse for folk eating a poor diet, but unless you are living in a famine-stricken country in Africa it absolutely doesn’t have to be the case. My grandparents got by on a shoestring budget yet ate wholesome, nutrient-rich food every day. And as evidenced by the experiment with my friend – cooking from scratch with good-quality ingredients can actually save you money.

We may believe that it’s more expensive to buy better-quality, traditionally produced or organic food, but most Brits and Americans waste around 40 per cent of the food we buy anyway. A little meal planning could easily cancel out any additional cost. And even if you are strapped for cash at the end of the month before payday, a pot of hearty home-made soup and crusty bread is more cost effective and far better for you than picking up packets of ‘low-fat’ noodles, pasta mixes or other heavily processed food as a cheap meal solution. Instinctively we all know this – right? Most of us do understand what is good for us yet so often we continue to make the same mistakes because we fall for the clever marketing in supermarkets and bad advice from our governments. I certainly did until I realised the impact it was having on my waistline and mental health.

The relationship between ‘big food’ and ‘big pharma’ is a marriage made in hell and our governments are fanning the flames with their laissez-faire approach to food and medicine. This toxic triangle is a dance between directors of food and drug companies working hard to serve their shareholders, and politicians being steered by corporations or, worse, are in their back pocket.

We have put our trust in a system which is geared towards profit growth rather than safeguarding the health of Western nations. And the result is the mad fat epidemic. Our increased reliance on antidepressants and antibiotics to cope with the fallout from ‘big food’ is further compounding the problem by lining the pockets of ‘big pharma’ – creating an endless cycle of despair for millions of Western women. And of course these medications are dumbing us down, making it all the more difficult for us to lose weight and think straight so we can finally put an end to this madness! The only way we can escape is to take back control of our own health by providing our body and brain with the vital nutrients they need to function properly. It really is down to us to heal ourselves – nobody else is going to do it for us.

Your time is now – right now. The past is the past, today is a new day and you can change your future by reclaiming your power as the wild and wonderful woman you are. You can heal yourself and help to reverse the tide of ill health by eating the ‘right food’, supporting the ‘good guys’ growing food in your community, and by using your purse power to demand better-quality, safe and nutritious food from supermarkets. What we all must realise is that we drive the market by the choices we make when buying food. If we stop buying crap food then it will no longer be profitable for ‘big food’ to make it and they will be forced to change their ways. While it may appear we are powerless to effect change nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Big food’ needs our money to drive their profits, and once we stop handing over our hard-earned cash they will soon get the message and adapt accordingly. We are already seeing signs of this in the US with some of the big meat processors committing to using less antibiotics in livestock production and McDonald’s in Canada promising to sell ‘sustainable beef’. These guys didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly develop a conscience. They were driven to change because consumers demanded that change. We control the market by the choices we make and we must never lose sight of that.

Women hold a huge amount of influence. We influence our children and we usually decide what our family eats. Most of us do the weekly grocery shopping and the majority of the cooking so we hold the key to health and well-being – not just for us, but for our family too. We all have an important role in this world but we need to step up and take responsibility. If we just take the time to get educated and become mindful of what we eat, how we live and what we buy, we won’t just be able to regain our health but seize new opportunities that could radically improve our lives.

Remember; keep your eye on the prize – a healthy body and a sane mind. Use that goal to drive you forward. Start to visualise all the things you may be able to achieve once you feel better. See it clearly in your mind’s eye. Some of us might imagine having a hot bikini body so we can strip off during summer without always reaching for the beach towel to cover up our lumps and bumps. That’s fine if you use it as a positive incentive. But what about the real life-enhancing things you could do once you have more get-up-and-go and can think clearly? Maybe take that evening class you previously didn’t have the energy for. Go for a promotion at work – employers are more likely to hire someone who looks great, feels great and thinks straight. Or get a new, better job – especially if your boss is part of the ‘clutter’ we discussed in chapter 10. Even the simple things like spending real quality time with your friends and family – connecting with them in a more meaningful way instead of being wrapped up in your own head, immersed in your own problems. How would your relationships change if you finally had the capacity to really be there for your loved ones? Think of the self-respect you will feel for knowing that you healed yourself, not someone in a white coat ushering you out the door with another prescription. Consider how proud you will feel when you become the role model who inspires others to heal themselves too, when people respond more positively to the ‘new you’ – or the ‘old you’ that just got lost for a while.

At the 2009 peace conference in Vancouver the Dalai Lama announced ‘The world will be saved by the Western woman’ and I couldn’t agree more. His comment and this book are a call to action to all of us girls in the West. In the West we often have more freedom and greater equality than many women in other parts of the world. So let’s use our freedom to reverse the tide of ill health sweeping across Western nations and put an end to the damage being caused by ‘big food’ and ‘big pharma’.

Just as our grannies kept the home fires burning during two world wars and the Great Depression, let’s join hands across the Atlantic and beyond and embrace the call to action together. Let’s stand up as the powerful women we are, take back control of our minds and bodies, and kick this mad fat epidemic into touch. And once we do that for ourselves, let’s share our knowledge and wisdom with others, just as our grannies passed their insights down to us. We really are what we eat. If we change what we eat we can change ourselves. And if we do that we might just change the world!