WEBVTT

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How would you feel if I was to tell you

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that nutrition science
has come such a long way

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that in my hand I have
some pretty special pills.

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You’re never going to have to eat again,

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You won't be eating any meals,

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all you need to do
is take one of these pills

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breakfast, lunch, and dinner
for the rest of your life

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and it's going to give you
the perfect balance of protein,

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carbohydrates, and fat.

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It is going to give you
the number of calories or kilojoules

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that you need to stay at exactly
the perfect weight for your body.

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It's going to give you
all of the antioxidants

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and what we call phytochemicals

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which just means plants nutrients,
plant chemicals

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that are good for us.

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All in this amazing little pills.

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Isn’t science amazing?

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How would you feel?

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(Booing)

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“Boo!” Yes.
That's what I was hoping for.

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I hope you are feeling,
“God, that would be awful!"

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"How disappointing!”

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I hope there are some memories
coming into your mind right now.

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They certainly are in mine.

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I remember my mom’s awesome lasagna

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that she always used to make

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when we’d used to appear
as millions of people

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and she had twenty mouths to feed

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and she would whip up this lasagna.

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I remember my grandmother
used to make this extraordinary

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gingerbread cake

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that my mother could never replicate
despite being the better cook.

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I remember the pancakes
that the grandmother of a family friend

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always made us whenever us kids
appeared at their house.

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I remember being a teenager
doing exchanges with a student in France

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and we had bowls of hot chocolate
with white bread

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yes, white baguette with butter and jam

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and we dipped it into our hot chocolates.

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I remember the amazing paellas
that we used to have as a family

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in Spain on our family holidays.

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The point is food is much much more
than a bit of nutrients.

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You’d be pleased to know
that science is not nearly at this point.

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Thank goodness,

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because food is more
than the nutrients that it contains.

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Food is part of who we are.

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Food is part of our culture.

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It is part of our upbringing.

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It’s part of how we negotiate
and interact with each other.

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Just think about, those of you
in the room with a partner,

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what did you do on your first dates?

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I'm willing to bet that you
went for dinner at some point.

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What do we do when we're celebrating?

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Apart from popping open the champagne,
we probably have some celebratory cake

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or we have some food.

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What do we do at Christmas and New Year?
What do we do at funerals?

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Food is always involved.

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I’ve traveled to some pretty
remote places in the world

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and it’s the same everywhere you go,

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whether you're in the most
modern urbanized city

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or whether you're in some village
in the middle of Africa somewhere;

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people want to share food with you.

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The sharing of food
is the sense of friendship,

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a sense of who we are as human beings.

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And here's my concern,

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is that ...

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and I'm a Nutrition Scientist,
I’ve devoted my career to the space;

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my concern is that nutrition
is destroying some of those things.

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But here's the problem,

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because we do have quite literally
a big problem.

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Here in Australia,

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and unfortunately
in most of the rest of the world,

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certainly all of the developed world,


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and, fastly catching us up,
the developing world,

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it is now the norm in Australia to be fat.

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Now that's not an aesthetic problem.

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I'm not here to talk about body image,
that's a whole other talk.

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But that problem coaches us in
a whole number of chronic health diseases.

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We know that diabetes is on the rise.

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Type 2 diabetes is now the fastest-growing
chronic disease in this country

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and 280 of us are diagnosed
every single day.

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Every 12 minutes an Australian dies
of cardiovascular disease.

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Ladies, one in three of us
will develop cancer

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and guys, I'm sorry, one in two of you
will develop cancer before you're 85.

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Now, while much of that
can't be prevented,

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we do know that diet, and lifestyle

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but diet is intricately involved in all
of those chronic diseases.

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If we were to change the way that we eat,

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we could dramatically
reduce those numbers;

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we could dramatically reduce
the early death that is in this country

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and dramatically improve
the quality of life

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for so many people.

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So, why is it that it’s so hard to do?

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If you've ever tried to follow a diet,

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isn’t that an awful word?

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I hate calling myself a dietitian
because that word “diet” is in there.

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But diet really just means
the way that we eat

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and what we are eating.

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It’s really hard to change
the way that we do

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and part of that is because
of how ingrained the way that we eat is

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in the way that we live today.

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So, how you’ve been brought up to eat

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will always have a dramatic influence
on the way that you’re eating today

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and the way that your future children

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and the next generation comes through.

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But I also feel that part of the problem
is the amount of confusion.

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I was involved in a recent survey

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where we asked people about
how they felt about healthy eating

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whether they were confused by it.

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87% of people said that
they were completely confused

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by what on earth is healthy eating.

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That’s coming from
some of the media sensationalism

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that we have around this area.

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And don’t get me wrong,
I’m involved in the media

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and I love that people are so passionate
about this area,

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but unfortunately, it ends up in some
things being slightly skewed and bent

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and what was the truth kind of gets bent
out of all proportion.

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So, let’s take butter as an example.

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Did you see the Times magazine
not so long ago

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where it had "butter"
in the front cover and said:

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"There’s hope.
The scientists have got it all wrong".

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And suddenly my Facebook page
and other people’s

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were going crazy saying:

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“Yes! Burgers and bacon and everything
are all back on the menu!”.

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That wasn’t what the research
showed at all.

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The research actually showed that,
hang on a minute,

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if we replace saturated fat
with a bunch of refined carbohydrates

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we are in just as bad a state,
possibly even worse.

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That’s actually what the research showed.

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Did the research say:

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“Hey, saturated fats
are actually really good for us”?

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No, they didn't.

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It questions, yes,
the relationship between

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saturated fat and cardiovascular disease

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but that’s one aspect
of saturated fats in our body.

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It certainly didn’t show us that, "Hey,
eating saturated fat reduces your risk".

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No, it didn’t say that,
but that’s the media reporting.

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So that’s just one example
out of many that are showing us

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how we’re actually
causing more confusion.

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So, let’s take a little trip back
through my lifetime,

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because essentially the thing
that I want to remind you about

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is that we haven’t really got fat
until the last 50 or so years.

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I’m not that old

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but really is just those last few decades

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that we are starting to have
this really major problem.

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So, here’s what I’ve seen happen.

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When I was a teenager, mom and I
first got interested in trying to diet,

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became aware of my body and thinking,

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“I've got to be skinnier".

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Skinny equals beauty

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unfortunately in this country
and in the UK where I grew up.

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And here’s what happened:

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mom and I embarked
on a whole bunch of diets.

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We did the Cambridge diet,

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which was all shakes and pills and so on.

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We were both ill by about day 3 in bed,

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so we decided: "Ok,
maybe that’s not the way to go".

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Then we tried something else
called the Scarsdale diet,

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that involved eating
a dry piece of wholemeal toast

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in the morning with an orange,

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I ate that breakfast
for I don’t know how many weeks.

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I couldn’t do it today.

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Tuna sandwiches I still struggle with

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‘cause we had tuna sandwiches
every lunchtime,

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a piece a fruit, a low-fat yogurt, so on.

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We tried everything

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and finally
we settled on the low-fat diet,

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and of course that was the era
of the low-fat way of eating.

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I remember eating
an entire French baguette

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because it was fat free,
so guess what?

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In here, license to eat.

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And that’s exactly what we see.

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So, the low-fat era took off,
and what happened?

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Food companies responded
to our need for low fat

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by giving us a whole bunch
of low-fat food.

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Unfortunately,
it was full of refined starch,

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lots of added sugars, additives
and preservatives,

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and whatever else, flavors galore

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to try and make the food taste
even remotely good.

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Psychologically, we all had
that license to eat.

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“Oh, it’s fat free,
therefore, calorie free,

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I can eat as much as I like”.

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That’s the way that we interpreted it

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and we continued to get fatter.

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So then, suddenly
the finger of blame went:

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“Hang on a minute, we’ve got it all wrong,

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it’s not fat, it’s carbs!

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It’s carbs that are to blame.

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Go back to eating lots of fat.
Let’s focus on the carbs".

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And that’s kinda where
we are at the moment.

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So, I went shopping, and normally

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you’d expect a little shopping basket
to be full of food.

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Here there’s not very much food,
but this is what people are eating.

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So, now we’ve got a whole bunch
of products here.

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This one says "Raw protein".

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So, we are fixated
with the problem is carbs.

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This is raw protein and in the ingredients

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says it’s got brown rice syrup
and brown rice protein.

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How do you reckon
they got it out of brown rice?

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Yet this is called the raw bar.

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We’ve got "Think thin".
Cookies and cream.

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We’ve got high-protein, low-carb bars
in chocolate flavor.

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You know what we want:
our cake and eat it,

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we really do.

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And things that make it sound like:

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“Eat this and I’ll get you burning fat”.

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All of those bars in here
have more than a thousand kilojoules

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but you know what we are scared of?

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(Laughter)

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God forbid you eat a banana.

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It's carbs.

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It’s going to go straight to the belly.

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That’s the situation we are in.

00:10:04.739 --> 00:10:05.839
We’ve got cookie.

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You know, we really wanna have
the chocolate, the sugary,

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the cakes, the biscuits,
so we’ve got this kind of thing

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"naturally good".

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It’s free of pretty much everything.

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But you know what’s in it?

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Basically rice, butter and sugar.

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Just happens to be gluten-free flour.

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This is the situation we are in

00:10:22.954 --> 00:10:24.724
where people are completely confused,

00:10:24.724 --> 00:10:26.574
and the food industry keeps responding

00:10:26.574 --> 00:10:28.574
by giving us more and more of what?

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That's a basket, apart from my banana,

00:10:31.657 --> 00:10:34.067
of processed food.

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I live in Bondi, and I went
into one of the local whole foods cafes,

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it’s honestly called Whole Foods,
that’s on its banner.

00:10:42.514 --> 00:10:44.964
They serve these
amazing green smoothies

00:10:44.964 --> 00:10:47.984
and I asked for the green smoothie
without the protein powder.

00:10:47.984 --> 00:10:50.134
She looked and recognized
who I was and said:

00:10:50.134 --> 00:10:52.354
“Why are you not having
the protein powder?"

00:10:52.354 --> 00:10:55.924
"Is this not a good protein powder?
Should we have a better protein powder?”

00:10:55.924 --> 00:10:58.351
And I said, “Because I don’t eat
processed food,

00:10:58.351 --> 00:11:00.041
or try not to eat too much of it".

00:11:00.041 --> 00:11:03.801
and the dawning on her face
was like, "Oh!"

00:11:03.801 --> 00:11:06.081
I could see she had never considered

00:11:06.081 --> 00:11:10.371
that this green pea protein powder
was actually a processed food.

00:11:11.127 --> 00:11:13.537
So, why is it that we are
kind of recognizing

00:11:13.537 --> 00:11:15.647
processed carbs are not
all that good for us,

00:11:15.647 --> 00:11:19.487
we’ve certainly recognized
processed fat, trans fat

00:11:19.487 --> 00:11:20.887
are not good for us,

00:11:21.430 --> 00:11:23.250
but now we’re doing it with protein.

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We’re processing the life out of that

00:11:25.130 --> 00:11:27.610
and thinking that’s going to be
all our answers.

00:11:29.464 --> 00:11:31.674
So when we look worldwide at the moment

00:11:31.674 --> 00:11:35.054
we’ve got a number of different
nutritional thinkings.

00:11:35.054 --> 00:11:41.017
We’ve got a very low-fat approach,
that’s practically vegan,

00:11:41.017 --> 00:11:43.217
from Doctor Dean Ornish
over in the States.

00:11:43.217 --> 00:11:44.797
He’s got lots of great research,

00:11:44.797 --> 00:11:48.467
he’s shown some amazing studies
and published some amazing results.

00:11:48.467 --> 00:11:52.244
We’ve got doctor Loren Cordain,
who’s the kinda father of the paleo diet

00:11:52.244 --> 00:11:54.204
I'm sure there’s some people in the room

00:11:54.204 --> 00:11:56.544
who might have tried or at least heard,

00:11:56.544 --> 00:11:59.058
it’s the most googled diet at the moment,
it’s paleo.

00:11:59.058 --> 00:12:02.708
That same Kathy, by the way,
that serves the green smoothies,

00:12:02.708 --> 00:12:07.538
now serves paleo banana bread,
paleo brownies, paleo protein powder.

00:12:08.031 --> 00:12:10.311
Where is paleo man eating any of that?

00:12:10.451 --> 00:12:12.851
But we can’t see how ridiculous
that is, can we?

00:12:13.174 --> 00:12:18.904
We’ve got the very low-carb approaches,
started of course by Doctor Atkinson,

00:12:19.162 --> 00:12:22.052
now incorporated by a whole bunch
of other different people,

00:12:22.052 --> 00:12:24.283
still really popular
in the fitness industry.

00:12:24.493 --> 00:12:28.593
We’ve got the South Beach Diet
and the low GI diet.

00:12:30.408 --> 00:12:33.168
And then we’ve got traditional diets
around the world

00:12:33.168 --> 00:12:34.818
like the Mediterranean diet,

00:12:34.818 --> 00:12:36.578
which is actually pretty high in fat,

00:12:36.578 --> 00:12:39.758
but it’s fats from really good stuff,
like extra virgin olive oil,

00:12:39.758 --> 00:12:41.568
avocados and nuts and seeds.

00:12:42.353 --> 00:12:45.193
Really solid evidence
behind that kind of a diet.

00:12:45.193 --> 00:12:48.252
We’ve got a very contrasting diet,
but they have

00:12:48.252 --> 00:12:50.882
some of the longest living people
in the world in Japan:

00:12:50.882 --> 00:12:51.762
the Japanese diet.

00:12:51.762 --> 00:12:54.012
The Okinawans have
more people that live to 100

00:12:54.056 --> 00:12:55.726
than anyone else in the world.

00:12:55.793 --> 00:13:01.073
So that diet has been studied extensively
to see, can we learn anything from this?

00:13:01.073 --> 00:13:03.183
and it's very low fat.

00:13:05.086 --> 00:13:08.966
So why did our low-fat thing not work
and theirs does?

00:13:08.966 --> 00:13:11.976
Because when we look
at all those different approaches

00:13:11.976 --> 00:13:14.526
they have some commonalities,

00:13:14.526 --> 00:13:18.156
and that commonality is
that they’re based on real food,

00:13:18.156 --> 00:13:19.962
on whole foods.

00:13:20.131 --> 00:13:22.621
And the state that we are at
in nutrition research -

00:13:22.621 --> 00:13:25.191
and I need to remind you
that nutrition research,

00:13:25.191 --> 00:13:28.911
or nutrition as a science,
is still a very very young science.

00:13:29.251 --> 00:13:32.541
We only discovered vitamins and minerals
last century.

00:13:32.541 --> 00:13:35.381
We have so much more
to understand and to know,

00:13:35.381 --> 00:13:39.431
so it’s a fascinating science to get into
and to study and to read about.

00:13:39.755 --> 00:13:41.745
But there’s so much we need to know.

00:13:41.955 --> 00:13:44.975
But there are,
despite the apparent confusion,

00:13:44.975 --> 00:13:48.285
there are some very clear messages
coming out of this science.

00:13:48.754 --> 00:13:52.334
that is that there are some foundations
that we can all employ,

00:13:52.454 --> 00:13:58.271
the most important one of those
is that it is about eating more plants.

00:13:58.271 --> 00:14:01.635
We absolutely must eat more plant food.
That’s the first thing.

00:14:02.729 --> 00:14:06.579
But the other interesting thing about
looking at these traditional diets

00:14:06.579 --> 00:14:08.429
that seem to be so healthy

00:14:08.429 --> 00:14:12.271
is about the attitudes
to food in those places

00:14:12.981 --> 00:14:14.661
I’m going to give you three words

00:14:14.661 --> 00:14:18.441
and I just want you to think about
which one of these is the odd one out:

00:14:18.481 --> 00:14:22.026
bread, pasta and butter.

00:14:22.836 --> 00:14:24.556
Which one is the odd one out?

00:14:25.975 --> 00:14:26.955
Butter. Why?

00:14:26.955 --> 00:14:29.655
Because bread and pasta are carbs.

00:14:30.583 --> 00:14:33.193
This question comes from
a real psychology study

00:14:33.193 --> 00:14:35.333
that was published a few years ago.

00:14:35.333 --> 00:14:37.513
More than a decade ago
now actually I think.

00:14:37.809 --> 00:14:39.989
And they looked at the different cultures,

00:14:39.989 --> 00:14:41.479
and they had the Americans,

00:14:41.479 --> 00:14:43.819
the Belgians with the French,

00:14:43.819 --> 00:14:45.459
and the Japanese.

00:14:45.742 --> 00:14:48.392
The French answered that question
by saying,

00:14:48.612 --> 00:14:51.822
“Pasta is the odd one out,
‘cause bread and butter go together”.

00:14:53.118 --> 00:14:56.538
The Americans answered that question
just as some people here did

00:14:56.538 --> 00:14:59.618
by saying: "Bread and pasta go together
‘cause they are carbs”.

00:15:00.324 --> 00:15:02.724
Who has the bigger problem with food?

00:15:02.804 --> 00:15:06.624
That study showed that the Americans
were much more concerned and worried

00:15:06.624 --> 00:15:08.154
about the foods that they buy,

00:15:08.154 --> 00:15:12.094
they were much more likely to buy
the foods that are in my shopping basket.

00:15:13.572 --> 00:15:15.832
They didn’t place much priority,

00:15:15.832 --> 00:15:19.302
and they certainly
didn’t place much pleasure in food,

00:15:19.518 --> 00:15:20.878
whereas the French do.

00:15:20.878 --> 00:15:21.928
When I was a student,

00:15:21.928 --> 00:15:24.618
I spent a summer waitressing
in a restaurant in Paris.

00:15:24.717 --> 00:15:26.367
And it was in a business area

00:15:26.367 --> 00:15:29.037
and what would happen
when all the local business people

00:15:29.037 --> 00:15:30.397
would come to the restaurant

00:15:30.397 --> 00:15:33.277
for a sit-down lunch with a knife and fork

00:15:33.277 --> 00:15:35.817
converse and chat over the table

00:15:35.927 --> 00:15:37.977
and then go back to work in the afternoon?

00:15:37.977 --> 00:15:39.257
What happens in Sydney?

00:15:39.257 --> 00:15:41.457
You’re lucky if you grab a sandwich
on the way.

00:15:41.457 --> 00:15:43.077
People are eating in the street,

00:15:43.077 --> 00:15:46.027
something my mother always told me
it was really rude to do.

00:15:46.027 --> 00:15:49.677
Everything is grabbing on the run.
Everything is on the run. Rush rush rush.

00:15:49.677 --> 00:15:51.187
We don’t give any priority,

00:15:51.187 --> 00:15:53.367
and we don’t give any respect
to food anymore.

00:15:54.560 --> 00:15:57.560
You know, when I was at school,
I’m not particularly religious,

00:15:57.560 --> 00:16:00.520
but at school we had to say grace
before we ate our lunch.

00:16:00.520 --> 00:16:03.210
The whole school had to sit down
at our tables,

00:16:03.210 --> 00:16:05.160
and we all chanted the grace,

00:16:05.170 --> 00:16:07.080
and then everyone could start to eat.

00:16:08.485 --> 00:16:11.175
Something nice about that kind of respect,

00:16:11.175 --> 00:16:14.135
'cause at the end of the day
what we have to recognise is that

00:16:14.135 --> 00:16:17.175
we are really lucky that we have a choice.

00:16:17.175 --> 00:16:21.845
We can choose to follow low carb,
or low fat, or paleo.

00:16:21.845 --> 00:16:23.505
We have that choice.

00:16:24.326 --> 00:16:25.766
But where I want to leave you

00:16:25.766 --> 00:16:28.796
is by saying if we're really
going to get some change,

00:16:28.796 --> 00:16:31.966
and changing those awful statistics
that are hitting Australia,

00:16:31.966 --> 00:16:33.335
I need you help.

00:16:33.792 --> 00:16:35.842
We need to lose the diet wars.

00:16:35.842 --> 00:16:37.682
We need to give up on the promises

00:16:37.682 --> 00:16:40.372
that the quick fix is in the pills,
potions, and shakes,

00:16:40.372 --> 00:16:42.232
and everything’s going to do it for us

00:16:42.232 --> 00:16:44.322
without us putting in any effort ourselves

00:16:44.322 --> 00:16:47.042
and we’ve got to go back
to eating real food.

00:16:47.614 --> 00:16:50.293
And you can choose your ultimate diet.

00:16:50.293 --> 00:16:53.203
As long as you have those
core whole food foundations

00:16:53.203 --> 00:16:54.513
with lots of plant food,

00:16:54.513 --> 00:16:56.313
whether or not you choose to add meat

00:16:56.313 --> 00:16:58.443
or other animal products into it,

00:16:58.443 --> 00:17:01.123
then you can make it
individualized to you.

00:17:01.483 --> 00:17:03.123
And above all,

00:17:03.560 --> 00:17:06.160
we absolutely must eat with joy.

00:17:06.447 --> 00:17:09.037
We have to take pleasure
in what we are doing

00:17:09.037 --> 00:17:12.367
because otherwise you're not going to
do it for the long term.

00:17:12.367 --> 00:17:15.317
It’s only when you change
for the long term,

00:17:15.317 --> 00:17:18.037
you change the way your thought
processes work,

00:17:18.037 --> 00:17:22.156
that’s the only way that
we’re actually going to get real change.

00:17:22.156 --> 00:17:23.796
And I hope you’ll agree with me,

00:17:23.796 --> 00:17:25.846
that that is an idea worth spreading.

00:17:26.234 --> 00:17:27.454
Thank you.

00:17:27.454 --> 00:17:31.764
(Applause)