Dr John McKenna Can You Trust What You Are Eating? Part 1 of 2

Tonight I'm going to talk. I have a science degree and a medical degree, and I write books as you might have noticed. I'm not here to speak in any of those capacities. I'm here to speak as a concerned parent. I have four children, and some of the things that are going on in this society really concern me very greatly. If they come up with the statement that by 2050 half of us are going to be obese and the other half are going to be overweight, there's something fundamentally wrong in this society. I'm going to try and explain to give you the power to do something about it. That's the purpose of this talk: to help you understand what the dynamics, the biochemical dynamics, are. I'm going to make it as simple as possible, as jargon-free as possible. If I do say something you don't understand, feel free to stop me and ask me to explain it. I'll be happy to do so. I also want you to understand the politics behind this whole nutritional debate. I spent many years working in Africa, dealing with nutritional deficiencies and starvation. In 2002, I came back to the UK, based in West Sussex, and I was shocked by how many overweight adults and children there were. That triggered my book, because I wanted to know what had gone fundamentally wrong in Western society. The purpose of this talk is to explain some of the nutritional issues being debated today. Again, if there's something you want me to stop or explain, feel free.

Before we start, I need a few volunteers. I know Pradeep, you're always good at volunteering, and Holly, you love to volunteer as well. I need three volunteers. So, Indian videos like to volunteer? Okay, we have three volunteers. It's just to explain something to you in as simple language as I can, and it's easy to demonstrate with people.

No conflicts of interest at the bottom of that slide. This is a really critical area. Any speaker that speaks to you, the first thing I would say is: don't trust anything that anybody has to say, including me, unless you're satisfied that it sits right with you and you have researched enough to be comfortable accepting the truth. The reason I say that is because at the core of a lot of nutritional issues in Western society are conflicts of interest. I'm going to go into that in a bit of detail. When you're reading a research article on nutrition, the first thing I look at is who has sponsored it, who paid for it. If it's public money, like the NIH in the United States, I'll read the article. If it's sponsored by a private company like Coca-Cola or Pepsi Cola, I'm not going to read the article, no matter how interesting it seems, because there's a lot of misinformation being directed at people.

One of the things that has surprised me is that I do a little bit of work. I retired a couple of years ago because of health problems. I picked up a little virus in Africa—nothing more than a little bit of DNA, a little bit of genetic material with a protein coat—yet it wreaks havoc on people, and it wreaked havoc on me to some extent. I'm a lot stronger now, so I'm seeing a few patients. These are some of the patients I've seen: a six-year-old boy with frequent bouts of diarrhea, which is not uncommon in Africa but is less common here. Jamie was a 29-year-old pilot with Ryanair, the world's favorite airline. It's a bit difficult if you have diarrhea problems and you're flying a long flight. Ryanair doesn't really fly long flights, they tend to fly short flights. A 16-year-old boy at school in Northern Ireland had to leave school because sometimes he didn't get to the toilet in time. That's extremely embarrassing for a young teenager. He quit school and came to see me, desperate. If I had told him to eat grass and stones, he would have done so. A number of 20-year-olds came to me with similar symptoms: bloating, wind, diarrhea being the predominant symptoms. None of them had blood or mucus in the stool. All had been investigated by their GP and a gastroenterologist, and all investigations were normal. I did gut function tests on them, and all showed inflammation in the small intestine—leaky gut syndrome. The minute they went off gluten, their symptoms abated. That's too many patients over a very young age group, one case after the next. This has to do with wheat, with what they have done with wheat. They haven't genetically modified it, although there is genetically modified wheat in India. Monsanto has an affiliate in India, and I think India is the only country that grows genetically modified wheat for commercial purposes. If I use the words 'genetic modification' and 'genetic manipulation,' I should explain them. Genetic modification is where you take a gene from a bacterium or a virus and inject it into the plant, altering the genetic composition. That's GMO. Genetic manipulation means hybridization, where you cross one species of wheat with another, ending up with a new plant. You keep doing that, and 95% of the DNA is maintained, with 5% new for the next generation. If you do that repeatedly, generation after generation, you end up with quite a different plant. I'm going to talk about that in a few moments.

This refers to my own family, to my daughter. Children never listen to their parents, so she ended up with certain problems: skin problems, a rash, tummy problems, cramps, and lethargy. I suggested a gut function test, but she said no, that's nonsense. She went to her GP, who discovered she was anemic and put her on iron tablets. She thought that solved the problem, but it got worse. She woke up in the middle of the night with gripping pains in her tummy. Eventually, she listened to her father and decided to experiment with gluten. Lo and behold, her symptoms disappeared. Now she pays a bit more attention to what I say. The reason for this is my own experience as well. When I was growing up in the countryside in Northern Ireland, wheat was this high off the ground, a tall plant that used to wave magically in the wind. I now live in County Wexford, and I can see the wheat they're growing. 99% of the commercial wheat grown in the world today is what they call dwarf wheat, about a foot off the ground. That's a massive change in the plant. The reason for that change is because the head of the plant is about 70% starch and 10 to 15% protein. They've increased the yield on this plant, so you're getting almost 10 times the yield compared to the wheat I grew up with. The starch content has increased massively, and the protein content—the gluten content—has increased massively as well. As a consequence, the head of the plant is too heavy. If you have a long stalk, it falls over, making it difficult for the farmer to harvest. So they worked to find a stronger, shorter stalk. The guy who designed this stock, or genetically manipulated the plant to get a shorter stock, won the Nobel Prize and the Congressional Gold Medal in the United States. He deserves his accolades because he did an amazing thing: getting up to 10 times more yield from a plant means you can feed more people. I'm not arguing with him or his agenda. He did a wonderful job. Unfortunately, this was all done without any human trials on wheat. Today, we have an epidemic of cases like I've just described, and many more. People who could tolerate the old wheat, like me, can't tolerate the modern wheat. The reason is the gluten content is too high. Agriculturalists and some doctors have come to this conclusion that it's actually affecting people adversely. People just forgot to do clinical trials. Gluten is an irritant, particularly for the Celtic races. If you're Celtic, you're more likely to have a problem with gluten, either celiac disease or gluten intolerance or sensitivity. Celiac disease has increased fourfold in my lifetime. That's incredible. Only 10% of celiacs are ever diagnosed, so that's a phenomenal increase.

People often look at wheat and say gluten is causing the problem. As you're going to see in a moment, the starch is also causing a problem. If you look on your computer when you get home, Google 'glycemic index.' The glycemic index is how high a food will raise your blood sugar level. Wheat, including whole wheat, has a number of 72 attached to it. Sucrose, or table sugar, has a number of 59. So wheat raises your blood sugar level higher than sugar. That's extraordinary. In the context of the foods we're eating, it plays a critical role in the whole equation, because you're being advised by your government to eat more wheat, more starch. The main starch in Western society is wheat. Starch is a long chain of glucose molecules, so starch is really glucose. When you eat wheat, your blood sugar level goes up. The body doesn't like too high or too low; it likes balance. The pancreas pumps out insulin to bring your blood sugar level down. Insulin is like an usher, showing you to your seat. It ushers glucose out of the bloodstream, but unfortunately, it ushers everything else out at the same time: fat out of the bloodstream into the cells, and amino acids for protein out of the bloodstream into the cells. That's significant when we come to talk about obesity later on.

With this new wheat, the farmers are very happy because it's short and easy to harvest. The seed producers are obviously very happy. The chemical companies are delighted, particularly Monsanto, because they've now got a brand of wheat that is Roundup-ready. They've genetically manipulated the plant so it tolerates Roundup, so you can spray as much as you like. Chemical companies love that because it's more profit. Politicians are very happy because people have more food. The FAO and the European Food Safety Authority are also very happy. So we're all happy. However, celiac patients are definitely not happy. The patients I just mentioned were also not happy. IBS patients are not happy. Overweight patients are bearing the brunt of this new wheat. Many doctors, like Dr. Murray at the Mayo Clinic, are also not happy. He puts it down to the agricultural changes that have taken place in my lifetime. A lady asked me at a talk once when I was born. Being vague, I said after the war. She asked which war—the First World War? I'm trying to keep this talk as non-academic as possible, for the general public. But if there are some of you from nutritional colleges here, the work of Dr. Fasano is particularly interesting. Alessio Fasano at the University of Maryland has done a lot of work on why gluten is an irritant in the gut, why it stimulates inflammation, and why it triggers the immune system. He's also done work with autism. I used to treat a lot of autistic children, and I'm not left in any doubt about the effect of gluten on them. Gluten is broken down in the stomach to peptides, which are smaller proteins. The peptides are supposed to be broken down to amino acids in the small intestine, but in autistic children, they leak across the gut wall, head straight for the brain, attach to morphine receptors, and disturb brain chemistry. That pathway has been well worked out at the University of Sunderland as well. There's a very obvious link with leaky gut, as described in the case histories I mentioned earlier.

Some people don't realize they have celiac disease. Sometimes they have no symptoms, sometimes just a skin rash, sometimes just fatigue. I presume most of you are Irish—this is Dublin, isn't it? Just checking. It's worth your while. The old way of diagnosing celiac disease was a gastroscope, taking a biopsy of the small intestine. If the villi are flattened, that's celiac disease. There are two blood tests that can be done. Next time you go to your GP, ask for a tTG—tissue transglutaminase antibodies. It's an easy thing. If it's positive, avoid gluten. You're probably going to avoid gluten by the end of this talk, so you'll have nothing left to eat. In fact, any talk I give in the future, be wary of sitting in the front seat. People say if you sit close to me for long enough, you'll be put on a diet. So better sit back a little bit in future.

Does it apply to spelt? No. Spelt has a tiny amount of gluten compared to wheat. The amount of gluten in modern wheat is phenomenal. The most high-profile case that had a problem with gluten was Novak Djokovic. My son was training to be a professional tennis player in Spain. I knew a lot of the Spanish tennis players, and I knew the story with Novak Djokovic because Juan Carlos Ferrero used to play with him and was friends with him. Novak was obviously out of breath, finding it difficult to catch his breath. Eventually, he went to his doctor, Dr. De Tes Solomon, and decided to take gluten out of his diet. Within months, his game improved tremendously, and he became number one in the world. He attributes it to the removal of gluten. Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray—all the top tennis players don't like wheat, and that has to do with modern wheat as well.

I'm going to stop talking about wheat and talk about sugar. If anyone has a quick question about wheat, we'll come back to it. Actually, I'm coming back to it now. But if something specifically... yes, please.

I wouldn't give it to a celiac because celiac is a disease you must take very seriously. Celiacs end up malnourished, can't absorb correctly, and their risk of cancer increases. So I wouldn't play around with celiac disease. I wouldn't give them any gluten whatsoever, and I'd be very strict about cooking utensils and work surfaces. If it's just minor symptoms associated with gluten sensitivity, then spelt is fine. Oats don't have gluten. In the old days, we used to say stay away from wheat, rye, oats, and barley because manufacturers of oats also manufacture those other cereals, so there's cross-contamination. But you can now get gluten-free oats that are certified not contaminated. Celiacs should be able to tolerate that. In fact, the Celiac Society recommends oats, so it should be fine.

A bit of fun. I need my three volunteers, please. Come over here. You're volunteer one. You're fructose, and you're glucose. See if you can... you see that? Fructose and glucose come together, not too close, and wheat just a wee bit further away. Thank you. The purpose of this exercise is to show you what's happening in the body. Sucrose, or table sugar—I'll use the word 'sugar'—is made up of two sugars, like Laurel and Hardy. One's no good without the other. The two sugars are fructose and glucose. When you swallow your sugar, the body splits the two sugars and they separate. If we take the front row as the liver, the next row as another organ like the heart, and the next row as the brain, the rest of you are all cells in the body. Glucose can go to any cell in the body and be utilized as energy. It's an important source of energy. If you want a quick fix of energy, eat glucose. Nothing wrong with that. Glucose is a good chap. Fructose, on the other hand, is the bad guy. Fructose goes to the liver. It doesn't really go to the rest of the body. When fructose goes to the liver, it has a similar effect to alcohol. It's metabolized to fat. Most of it will be metabolized to fat via a process called de novo lipogenesis—new formation of fat. That's what happens when you take fructose. Fructose in small amounts, like in fruit or honey, is no problem. Table sugar is no problem either. But when fructose and glucose are combined, if you take glucose by itself, the body handles it very well. When it links up with fructose, you're in trouble because glucose facilitates the damage that fructose does. Glucose facilitates the absorption of fructose in the gut. Also, glucose raises insulin levels, but fructose doesn't affect insulin. So if you make fat here and raise insulin levels, that insulin pushes the fat into the cells of the body. That's the error that happens in obesity and overweight. You push too much fat into the cells, they become dysfunctional, and you develop insulin resistance. Where does wheat come into this? Wheat is a long chain of glucose molecules. The starch in wheat is a particular form that is easily and quickly absorbed. If you absorb a lot of glucose, you pump insulin levels up, and all the fat you make is stored. The government is advising you to eat lots of wheat. At the bottom of the food pyramid are carbohydrates—eight to ten servings a day. That's a lot. When I came back to England, I looked at people's shopping trolleys. They don't like me looking. It's all pizza, pasta, pies, bread—starchy stuff. You're being told to take starch, it's good. Well, it's not so good. The truth is, it's causing a lot of harm. Thank you very much, volunteers.

Glucose is harmless, fructose is harmful. I was taught this at university in Dublin in the early 70s. We were taught that fructose is lipogenic—it produces fat in the body. It isn't like we didn't know. The reason we were taught that is because a professor at the University of London, John Yudkin, wrote a marvelous book called 'Pure, White and Deadly.' He did a massive amount of research on fructose and glucose. At the end of the book, he calls for a ban on fructose. Today, doctors are announcing that fructose is poison, that it should be labeled as a poison by the FDA and the FSA. In small quantities, it's not a problem. But something happened in the United States in the mid-70s. Let's blame it on President Nixon. In 1974, Nixon wanted to produce cheap food as cheap as possible. He called food chemists together and asked them to find out how to do this. They decided to remove or replace most of the fat in food with sugar, but a particular sugar called high fructose corn syrup. It's labeled as fructose glucose, corn syrup, or inverted sugar. That was dangerous because once you up the fructose content of the diet, all McDonald's hamburgers, hot dogs, everything except the tea and maybe the chicken nuggets, have high fructose corn syrup. Even some gluten-free products have it. You've got to read labels and avoid this stuff as much as possible. Glucose leads to insulin, raises insulin levels. Insulin pushes glucose into the cells, but it also pushes fat into cells. If you up the blood glucose level with lots of starch, you're encouraging the deposition of fat, provided you're eating sugar at the same time. If you eat fructose at the same time, you make sure that fat is deposited in organs. That's where the problems start. President Nixon reduced sugar, increased sugar, and the obesity crisis began. The USDA, the Department of Agriculture, decided to produce a food pyramid. The USDA represents farmers and food producers. Why is someone representing food producers telling us what to eat? That's not right. It should be the Surgeon General's office or the FSA. But I don't believe in telling people what to eat. My mother wasn't told what to eat, my grandmother wasn't, and I wasn't. People somehow knew what to eat.

John Yudkin conducted experiments with fructose on a number of animal species and impoverished students at the University of London. He discovered that the effects are very similar to alcohol, obviously without the brain effects like staggering and slurred speech. But fructose has a lot of the other effects: the beer belly, deposition of fat in the liver and other organs. Fructose will quickly deplete your energy. Nature did not intend you to eat much fructose, so there are no controls on the pathway where fructose is broken down. Your stored energy, ATP, gets depleted the more fructose you use. With glucose, there are checks and balances on that pathway. John Yudkin described metabolic syndrome back in the 50s and 60s, long before we ever heard the term. He also suggested that fructose can generate the production of estrogen in the body and lead to estrogen cancers like breast cancer and endometrial cancer. That's sugar in a nutshell. The level of sugar in the diet is frighteningly high. The government's response is to put a tax on it. That doesn't make sense. To me, what Coca-Cola have done is actually a good thing. Coca-Cola was advised by top investors to reduce their level of sugar and substitute with stevia, which they have done. That was at the behest of investors, not governments or the WHO. Food manufacturers don't listen to these bodies, but they do listen to investors. When I mention companies like Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, or Mars, I'm not doing so in a critical manner. I'm not here to criticize or judge anyone. I mean them no harm. I'm trying not to build up bad karma for my future lives.

Now we're going to talk about sugar substitutes. Sugar became a big issue in the 1980s, and there was the development of artificial sweeteners. We had diet drinks and Coca-Cola Zero. Everybody thought this was wonderful—zero calories, no guilt, no worry about sugar or putting on weight. It strikes me as strange that my mother knew sugar would increase the pounds, my grandmother knew it, my sisters knew it. It was common knowledge. But somehow, the sugar content of the diet kept increasing and has reached alarming proportions. The FSA and the FDA are now advising, many years later, 40 years into the obesity epidemic, that we should cut down on sugar. But they're saying nothing about starch. Research was done in the 1990s and early 2000s in Italy at a Cancer Research Center. They discovered the first study that looked at the effect of aspartame on the lifetime of a rat. Most studies had been done over a couple of weeks, but this was long-term. They discovered an increased risk of blood cancers—leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. A long-term human study was done, and the results came out at the end of 2012 at Harvard Medical School. The lead researcher, Dr. Sean Hammer, was alarmed by the results. She set up an interview with a television station, but Harvard Medical School is sponsored by Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, and major food companies. The interview was pulled, and her words were changed to say this could be due to chance. That study was funded by public money, the NIH, and was done over 20 years involving 49,000 men and 77,000 women. It showed that there was indeed a risk associated with blood cancers. We knew this back in the mid-70s when the FDA got an application from the company that makes aspartame, G.D. Searle. The CEO of G.D. Searle was Donald Rumsfeld. Three times the FDA refused to approve it because of the cancer risk. They also referred the company to the Attorney General's Office for scientific fraud because they had manipulated the data. In 1980, Ronald Reagan came to power. One of his first maneuvers was to fire the FDA Commissioner and put in a man named Dr. Hayes, who quickly approved aspartame for use in liquids. Today, aspartame is in many vitamins, lip sips, over-the-counter medicines, medications, vitamin tablets, drinks, and foods. You're consuming it thinking it's safe. I've asked the EFSA many times, and I keep getting the same answer: 'We're reviewing it.' That's simply not good enough. You're not being protected. Aspartame also has an effect on pilots. If pilots grab a soft drink like Coca-Cola Zero and a packet of crisps before a flight, it interferes with their vision. It is now recommended that all pilots avoid anything with aspartame.

Various scandals: President Nixon's scandal of taking fat out of food. Why would you want to take fat out of food? There was a suspicion that it was implicated in heart disease. If you think about it logically, you don't need to be a scientist to understand that fat couldn't simply be implicated in heart disease. In 1900, heart disease was rare. By the 1950s, it was an epidemic. Animal fat decreased during rationing in the Second World War. Unless you were a farmer, animal fat was rare. So it couldn't possibly be implicated in heart disease. But what did increase in the diet was sugar and white flour—the two deadly poisons in Western society. If any of you are involved with nutrition, there's a book you really have to read: 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration' by Weston A. Price. Dr. Price was a dentist in the early 1900s in Cleveland, Ohio. He was so worried about the amount of dental decay that he wanted to know what in the Western diet was causing the problem. His nephew worked for National Geographic, so he knew where to find isolated communities. He went to the high valleys in the Swiss Alps, the Outer Hebrides, and other remote communities. In the Loetschental Valley in Switzerland, three sides of the valley were high mountains, only accessible by a difficult road blocked during winter. The rate of dental caries was 0.3—practically zero. There was a total absence of TB, which was rampant in Europe at the time. They had beautifully formed wider jaws and dental arches. These people were extraordinarily healthy, eating a very restricted diet of rye, milk, and cheese from cows and goats. The book goes from community to community, repeating the same story. It's worth reading because it validates the message. White sugar and white flour are bad news.

Because of these scandals—taking fat out of the diet, adding high fructose sugar, and allowing sweeteners—you start to lose your faith in the food safety authorities and the authorities in general. A professor from the University of Liverpool got up and walked out of a nutritional advisory committee because the chair and a number of representatives were from food companies. He said, 'The fox is in charge of the henhouse.' Professor James, head of the International Obesity Task Force, wrote a report for Tessa Jowell when she was Minister for Health in the UK, pointing the finger at children's food. She quickly shelved it. Six years later, he was asked by the WHO to write a report. He wrote pretty much the same report. The WHO wanted to advise people to cut sugar out of the diet. The CEOs of Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, etc., rang the Secretary for Health in the US administration under George Bush and said, 'Get on a plane to Geneva and stop this agenda.' Immediately, it was taken off the agenda because they threatened to pull the money that was paying the WHO. It's always about money. That's a crime against humanity. This is what's going on in the Western world today. If by 2050 half of us are going to be obese and the other half overweight, that's the prediction. Professor James predicts deaths will happen sooner. We're all going to have fatty livers, type 2 diabetes, heart disease. We're edging closer to the edge of the cliff, and we're going to fall off because people are not allowed to speak the truth. The nutritional adviser to the British government is a man called Professor MacDonald of the University of Nottingham. He has openly admitted a conflict of interest: Mars gave him a huge honorarium to do research. He's advising the British government. All these advisors to governments around the world are being sponsored by food companies. The British Nutrition Foundation is supposed to issue objective statements. The head of the British Nutrition Foundation was a former CEO of Tate & Lyle, a sugar company. That's scandalous. Not only is the fox in charge of the henhouse, Dracula's in charge of the blood bank. It's ridiculous. It's actually sad.

I've also started to lose faith in medical research. There's a huge scandal in the United States where a Senate committee is investigating a number of doctors who have used children as guinea pigs for clinical trials on drugs that haven't been approved. Dr. Biederman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, received 1.6 million dollars from pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Schatzberg at Stanford Medical School, also a professor of psychiatry, has been accused of having six million dollars worth of shares in a pharmaceutical company called Concept Therapeutics. It's public knowledge. An article in JAMA in 2008, 'Industry-Sponsored Medical Research: A Broken System,' is destroying the medical profession. The marriage between Western medicine and pharmaceutical companies is discrediting another institution in our society. The Catholic Church has been discredited, bankers have been discredited, politicians have been discredited. Now, some of the top medical people in the world are being discredited. The structures in your society are collapsing. This is where you have to take control and empower yourself. If nobody in this room buys Coca-Cola Zero, the shares in Coca-Cola will drop, and big investors will shift their money. 66% of medical schools in the United States have shares in pharmaceutical companies. That's crazy. When I did medicine, the only modality of treatment I was taught was drugs. Nobody ever mentioned nutrition or probiotics. I did microbiology and then medicine, spent almost 10 years in university, and never heard the word 'probiotic.' I dealt with bad bacteria; we never heard about the good guys. Something has to change.

The food pyramid has three basic statements that are incorrect. In my book, I've turned the food pyramid upside down. The primitive people that Dr. Price visited, the Fulani in West Africa, the Masai in East Africa, the Inuit and Sami people in northern Scandinavia—it's too cold to grow cereals or fruit and veg. They live on reindeer, caribou, moose, fat, and protein. Those are the two basic requirements for the physical body. If you want to survive and be happy, eat fat and lots of protein. You can live quite happily without cereals, as these people have proven. To tell people to eat more cereals and starch in the face of an epidemic is ludicrous. You should be telling people to eat less starch, particularly avoiding gluten, and reducing animal fat? There is simply no basis for reducing animal fat. It's been proven scientifically that animal fat does not cause heart disease. In 2014, we can make that statement definitively. Common sense would have told you that. If we had reduced fat in the diet, heart disease would be close to zero. Deaths from heart disease have improved, but that's due to medical care, not diet. I'll repeat: stay away from modern wheat. It has the potential, in combination with sugar, to increase weight that is very hard to shift.