Translator: Adelina Bordea Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
How wrong, how wrong, how wrong people eat.
I don't know if you've noticed it.
We dietists and nutritionists had to be invented --
And this happened because things started getting quite bad --
in order to calm what was happening.
Actually, mankind has been all the time eating what it was at hand, right?
Hunters, gatherers, then we started farming, raising animals
in order to kill and eat them.
But actually, regardless of some deficiency diseases, people was still
guided by thirst, hunger, and ate whatever it was around, and they were good.
But things went wrong because human beings started killing themselves.
I don't mean killing each other, which we've always done pretty well.
Now we've started killing ourselves.
To such an extent that, in the last 20 or 30 years
most of the deaths in the world
specially, in recent times, are early and preventable deaths.
That's why I say people is killing themselves
by eating, by drinking, by smoking, and in car accidents.
It sounds shocking, but people are killing themselves after all.
What we should ask is: why do we keep eating this way
knowing that it's killing us?
That's really what I want to address in this talk
because what we've been told about what "healthy eating" is,
is not truly accurate.
The reason is very simple.
We have several tenets in nutrition, some believes that somehow
perpetuate and explain that we should eat in a specific way.
For example, tomorrow I'll get up and I cook rice with vegetables
and a bit of shellfish, and you say: What is he doing?
A nutritionist eating rice in the morning?
But if instead of rice boiled in a pan, is puffed rice,
I put it in a mug, I pour some milk and I put chocolate on it,
it would be completely normal, isn't it?
Then, let's say that we've been taught about diet
through very peculiar glasses and we can only see a bit of the information.
We see a very biased sector.
The problem is that if, when we are living our daily life, those glasses tell us
what is healthy and it's not really true.
Some people think that dietist-nutritionist's work is
to tell people what they should eat.
Precisely, I try to prove that it's just the opposite.
So I take off those glasses from people to show that, hey, maybe
you don't have to eat as you've been told and you should get out of the Matrix.
And maybe, it's just about eating whatever you want
if and when it's healthy, isn't it?
Obviously.
This is very difficult because that apparent freedom to eat whatever we want
is not so real because we actually eat what they taught us to.
We grow up in a culture, we've been raised and this impregnates some invisible ideas,
like those myths, like those tenets.
Somehow, they're invisible thoughts
sometimes very difficult to be noticed, they're not always palpable
and they tell us what "we have" to eat.
Some time ago, it was very useful to identify some acting ways,
such as racism, sexism or any kind of abuse or slavery,
so I propose you to name this invisible context
that oppresses us and makes us eat what is supposedly keeps us healthy
and refer to it in that same way during the whole talk.
We'll call it "dietarchy", OK?
The healthy eating model that tells us what to eat.
That means, it puts us in a bubble and tells us
"eat this or that way," which are a series of invisible thoughts
that are there day after day.
People who think "eating healthy is expensive"
or "I bet eating healthy must take a lot of time."
Everything you drink due to the advertising that is not controlled
generally by the governments, the bad formulation of the food
we find in the supermarkets and the main problem,
the environment that surrounds us.
The human being has a fixation and it is that we love the surrounding environment.
It usually eats whatever is nearby, no matter of the information it has.
That's why you haven't eaten fruit today. Because in your context was none.
If there were fruits at the auditorium's exit
people would have eaten fruit.
And everyone knows fruit is healthy.
But eating behavior and health behavior
goes much further than information. It depends on the context.
Dietarchy, among many other things, also modulates people's context.
That's why we drink with no consideration when we're at a party.
That's why we go to a birthday party and eat cake.
Maybe, without even considering we may not feel like eating cake.
Our diet doesn't follow logical nor scientific criteria.
That's why we've ended this way.
Otherwise, there would be no explanation why other countries have directly
recommended their population to eat food that is not healthy.
A very easy example is: do you really think the basis of human nutrition
are cereals for breakfast and flour bags?
Probably not.
Do you think it's a good recommendation to say "hurrah for wine"
and "consume beer in moderation, bacon in moderation,
cold meat in moderation, sweets in moderation, buns in moderation"?
It could be one of the perspectives, but is the human being so different
that a country like Spain recommends something completely different
than Australia?
Is the metabolism different?
No, maybe they've decided, through their policies
not to promote unhealthy food.
When someone is going to give a public health message
is a very good idea to have few conflicts of interests
with those things they give the message about.
And I mean this.
Because if you're giving a message in the media
about health or diet
and it comes up that people sponsor your congress
it's probable you'll end up telling lies
to the population like "you can drink light sodas every day."
Or if you're maybe working with a pharmaceutical company
or with the biscuits industry, you'll maybe end up saying
you have to take Omega 3 supplements
or maybe that kids have to eat cookies every day
and this is obviously not true.
It's scientifically false, like other statements that are made every day
and they are very, very deep inside our culture.
Everyone has heard this:
"Dairy products are essential, you have to eat bread every day,
wine is good for your hearth, beer helps to rehydrate."
These are four issues that are objectively false.
Because the scientific data tells us that all four are objectively false.
At this point, if my thesis about the dietarchy was true
someone for sure must have started
to ask in a defensive way: "What is he saying?
We won't be able to eat anything. Why I cannot have dairy products?
Why I cannot have wine? From time to time it cannot be bad."
I didn't say the opposite. I've just read four sentences that say
dairy products are essential, we have to eat bread every day,
wine is good for your heart and beer rehydrates.
The bad thing of when a dietarchy's idea is put in our minds
is that we start accepting it despite
scientific data, despite common sense
or despite our own experience.
Do you know anyone who lives without needing oxygen?
See? Oxygen is essential for the human being.
Dairy products are not essential for the human being.
It's common sense. I just needed 20 seconds
and it can easily be seen, with no major scientific study.
And also, the worst of all is that we ignore the experience.
Everybody has experienced alcohol. Or at least a lot of people.
But if you repeat a hundred times "beer hydrates"
there's people that, despite they feel dehydrated when they drink alcohol
will accept this as a true thing.
"But beer hydrates." That's a lie.
If beer hydrated, university students would wake up quite hydrated
on Sunday morning. And they don't.
They wake up with a dry mouth.
(Applause)
Beside installing ideas in the system, dietarchy perpetuates and defends them.
This is why we react in such an energetic way.
When a scientific disseminator, a doctor appears in the media
and tells truths like "dairy products are not essential,
Harward does not recommend eating more than two servings of dairy a day,"
it's not justified for you to have to take juice, cookies and milk for breakfast.
People fight back and ask:
"Why I cannot have four servings of dairies?
Why I cannot have milk every day?
Who says I cannot have juice?
Well, I'm not lying to you, I'm telling you the truth.
Maybe, you should be a bit skeptical and ask yourself
who put those false ideas in your mind.
It makes no sense having cereals, juice and milk for breakfast every day.
It makes no sense, but we've accepted these ideas.
Perhaps we should show that skepticism to those who installed the virus on us
and not to those who want to shake us up the foundation of our beliefs.
That's the real problem: that unscientific thoughts have been installed on us
thoughts that aren't supported by scientific evidences
but which we've believed as right. Why?
Because they were in the invisible things
that have been part of our food culture.
I'm going to show you how it was installed
one of the programs of dietarchy
and how recently it's starting to be uninstalled
with a case in point.
It's the recent case we've been through with the sugar
that you'll know that 10 or 15 years ago went completely unnoticed,
there wasn't much talk about sugar,
but now it's become public enemy number one.
Is sugar essential?
Of course not. We can go back to the oxygen test.
If sugar was essential, humankind would not have been able to survive
until we discovered the sugar cane or sugar beet.
In any case, we could discuss if beyond indispensable,
was necessary, not sugar, but glucose.
Glucose is a compound, a molecule that's in the carbohydrates.
It's one of the carbohydrates, but it can be taken from many sources.
You can take it from sugar, bad choice, and you can take it
from fruits, veggies, vegetables, legumes, cereals, roots...
When that food that you want to install assumes that,
the fact it isn't healthy and it's been discovered,
there's a need to start avoiding the topic.
And there's when the reasoning starts:
"Yes, I must be unhealthy, but the fault is yours
because you aren't choosing well.
You had too much sugar today.
You could have brought a banana from home."
When the surroundings is predisposed
to consume unhealthy food, it's very hard;
the "it's your fault, you're not doing anything" reasoning
or the "it's others' foods with more calories fault
like cooking oil.
There's a reflection to be made here, and that is that we cannot evaluate a food
just because it contains sugar or not or that sugar itself is bad.
Food needs to be evaluated as a whole and, in this case,
ultra-processed foods, that often have sugar in them,
have one thing in common and it's that they change our behavior.
They're tasty and they create us, in some way, dependency.
You cannot usually have eating enough sweet foods.
So they blame us telling us "you've eaten too much cereals.
I said 25 grammes, not pouring for 25 seconds."
OK, it's just that you're selling it in a format that lets people to have too much.
Or that reasoning that many time's been said:
"excess of everything is bad."
Well no, not everything.
And things in the same excess are not as damaging.
We're still waiting for someone with diabetes type 2
because he had too many Brussels sprouts.
And that's not happening.
So we play with foods that can create a high dependency
and we demand people to consume them in moderation.
That's quite tricky.
It's like "smoke just one cigarette and that's it."
This is not going to happen.
If, in addition, these foods that use this argument
get normalized around us, in your institutions,
in the public health, we find them in hospitals,
in the mass catering, in our kindergartens
and in the scholar menus, people end up accepting them.
Why? Because it is completely normalized.
For example, if labelling facilitates that a food can evade, somehow,
its content of sugar, it's going to use it.
That's the cocoa powder effect,
that I call brown painted sugar.
Cocoa powder contains from 78 to 80 percent of sugar.
But they sell it to us as high in zinc, high in vitamins breakfast.
It's like me telling you:
"OK, your car is broken, but I've bought you a pine air freshener."
It's completely useless.
Drinking cocoa powder because it has zinc or magnesium in it
is irrelevant because 78 percent you're taking is sugar.
It's one of the strategies that any food
that wants to distract us.
All this information wouldn't be harmful
if there was none who transmits and repeats it.
perpetuating it in society.
And in this sense it is very well documented,
both scientifically and journalistically,
what web of influence has the sugar industry woven
in academics, in scientists, in institutions,
so that it can spread and settle into the dietarchy.
That's why it took us so long to start uninstalling it from our system.
It's not because now we've discovered sugar is...
No, we knew that from long ago. But now the situation is so obvious
the situation was so bad there was no other choice
than starting acting.
And the virus of the system
has started to unhook, little by little.
The change is starting and that change has been thanks
to the awareness from the last three, four years.
Wrapping up, science is the best way
a wonderful way to understand the world.
It's the best tool the human being has invented
to understand what surrounds us.
The problem? Around the scientific studies there are variables
that don't rely on the scientific method,
there are variables that depend on the human being
and there we find the sponsoring of the studies
or the communication of these scientific studies.
I'm going to show you a fact which I think is quite illustrative
of what happens in science.
This study wanted to see the results of the studies
that had been made about consumption of soft drinks and whether or not
they cause overweight and obesity.
The result was the following: if the study is sponsored
by the sugar industry, what the study says is
"No, it doesn't cause overweight."
Meanwhile, those studies that are independent, that are public
tell us instead "yes, the consumption of sugary soft drinks
is in fact linked to overweight and obesity."
Look how serious it is that the results of studies sometimes
are so dependent on the people that are sponsoring.
That's why dietists had to be invented.
That's why now, more than ever, we need responsible health workers
who cannot remain neutral before all the lies
they're telling us to say of how we have to eat
when there's no scientific data for that.
We need health professions who dare to uncover the lies
that are hurting right now our public health.
Thank you.
(Applause)